Hey everyone,
With great pleasure I inform you that my job didn’t kill me. But it was close. Was working on a huge project and didn’t have time for animation like at all. Now it’s done and I finally have some time for my hobby.
Anyway, my sufferings aside, I did a schematic of IPS (in-plane switching) panel for a manual I was writing for the project and since it’s a public knowledge, I can safely share it with you. IPS panel is one of the most commonly used panels (glass that forms picture) in LCDs. Here’s a schematic:
So basically, if there’s no electrical current, light travels through back polarizer and liquid crystals unaffected and then gets cut off by the front polarizer - it acts like your typical sunglasses, blocking polarized (reflected) light. If current is applied to TFT cell, then liquid crystals inside them turn and alter the characteristics of light (polarization) and now some light passes through the front polarizer (more current, more light gets past).
Because the more light passes with more current, we can control intensity (brightness) of the cell (how much light passes), so now we slap some color filters on each cell (red, green, blue), make sure we can vary electrical current for each TFT cell and boom, we can form image.
Hopefully that was educational. I’ll get back to you with something more interesting when I finish my current cartoon (Spy vs Spy short).
Source file (public domain):
LiquidCrystallEn.sif (568.5 KB)