[1] Reportedly discovered in 1975, several companies pursued the development of FLCD technologies, notably Canon and Central Research Laboratories (CRL), along with others including Seiko, Sharp, Mitsubishi and GEC.
Canon and CRL pursued different technological approaches with regard to the switching of display cells, these providing the individual pixels or subpixels, and the production of intermediate pixel intensities between full transparency and full opacity, these differing approaches being adopted by other companies seeking to develop FLCD products.
[2] By 1985, Seiko had already demonstrated a colour FLCD panel able to display a 10-inch diagonal still image with a resolution of 640 x 400.
Today, the FLCD is used in reflective microdisplays based on Liquid Crystal on Silicon technology.
These microdisplays find applications in 3D head mounted displays (HMDs), image insertion in surgical microscopes, and electronic viewfinders where direct-view LCDs fail to provide more than 600 ppi resolution.