The Crazy World of Liquid Crystal Display
Monday, September 8, 2008 // 5:53 PM
Ever read something that you needed to understand, but just could not?
Story of my life. At least, today it was.
Sitting down in computer class, we got back to doing our latest project: research in groups on certain computer components and software. Each group was assigned a group last class and we began working on it. My group received the LCD monitor as our research topic, which seemed easy enough. However, I honestly really had a headache while researching for this complex subject.
I'd always known what a monitor was. Simple enough, it was a part of the computer that was attached to the computer so that we can see the information and carry out the work we're doing. It was the LCD part that was mind bottling to me.
To start it off, LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display, which sounds all nice and dandy but is amazingly difficult to grasp hold of what it meant. Through my research, numerous of difficult & strange words were being thrown to me. It seemed impossible to learn and I had never been very patient. Still I knew that this was something I needed to do, so my group and I decided to split the vast topic up and try to understand it separately so we can better grasp our topic and then teach it to each other. I realized maybe what I needed to do in order to understand LCD monitors is to figure out what their purpose is. This piece of technology was basically still doing the same thing as a regular monitor: helping us process information and visualize the data.
So if that's the case, then I just needed to figure out how LCD monitors worked to help us visualize and compute. Basically, liquid crystal displays worked by blocking light. It's made up of two pieces of polarized glass (which I have looked up but still yet fully grasped the meaning), and the pieces of glass have liquid crystal material between them. How it functions is that the backlight creates light that passes through the first piece of polarized glass while electrical currents cause the liquid crystal particles to move. The controlled amount of movement allow various levels of light to pass through to the second glass, thus becoming what you see in an LCD monitor.
Once I had put it in my own words and wrapped my mind around it, I realized that it wasn't all that bad at all. In fact, it was quite satisfying and refreshing once I completely understood the complex terms. Still, I have a lot more research to do so hopefully all will go well and I will be able to create a fantastic poster that will thoroughly explain LCD monitors to the fellow grade nines.
That's all for now,
Serena
Labels: LCD Monitors