IPS display

IPS display

Go through the specifications of latest mobiles and smartphones, you will frequently come across a term called IPS display. Everybody knows about TFT display and have heard long back about these and most of embedded people do tend to use this display in their regular projects. TFT (Thin-Film transistor) is nothing but a LCD display which has been in use from long time. TFT LCD use Active matrix LCD and Passive matrix LCD for display. There have been several disadvantages of these displays like:

1. Slow response time
2. Low quality color reproduction
3. Can see a ripple across screen when you touch
4. Viewing angle dependence.

To overcome above disadvantages, a new version of TFT has been developed and they called it IPS display (In-Plane switching). This was developed by Hitachi in 1990's. The main difference from the previous display versions is the arrangement of liquid crystals. In IPS display, liquid crystals move in plane (parallel) with the panel plane where as in previous versions they used to move at angles. This helped improve the viewing angles from the user point of view. The previous displays used TN field effect (Twisted Nuematic) and were using only 6-bit color where as IPS displays use 8-bit color. Apple used this IPS display in their IPAD and has been a biggest marketer for these kind of displays.

Did you anytime see a fast moving video in older version of displays? Sometimes you could see a ghost image because of inability of pixels to switch color briskly. This has been addressed in IPS displays and you won't find this lag in IPS displays.

The following are the improvements in this IPS displays compared to previous display technologies:

1. Faster response times (No ghosting effects)
2. Can view comfortable from wide angles. Almost from a parallel view also.
3. Excellent color quality
4. No ripple on the screen
5. Blur-free view of fast paced videos

But why doesn't we see these kind of displays in low end mobiles/tablets? The reasons for this are clear, it's a new technology and manufacturing (inturn panel costs) costs are high. Even from the power consumption point of view IPS consumes more.

Post a Comment

0 Comments