Bernard J. Lechner (25 January 1932 – 11 April 2014) was an electronics engineer and formerly vice president, RCA Laboratories, where he worked for 30 years covering various aspects of television and information display technologies.

Then, he studied electrical engineering at the Columbia University in New York City, interrupted by two years service for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the US and Germany.

Lechner was first to apply a sample-and-hold technique to this type of display by connecting a capacitor in parallel with each LCD pixel and controlling its charge through a field-effect transistor.

At a press conference at RCA Headquarters in New York, a demonstration of such an LC matrix display with 36 pixels, using discrete components, took place in 1968 and showed the feasibility of the concept for TV panels.

In this capacity he was a member of the US delegation to the Comité Consultatif International pour la Radio (CCIR, now ITU-R) in Geneva for a new HDTV standard from 1989 to 1990.

[7] When GE acquired RCA and gave the David Sarnoff Research Center to SRI International in 1987, Lechner took early retirement.

Lechner continued his work as independent consultant serving on standard committees and in related organizations as well as an expert witness in patent cases.

[9] In 2011, he received the IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal for conceiving the principle of active matrix LCDs (AMLCD)[10] Lechner has widely published in the areas of displays and television systems.