Flat-panel display

Flat-panel displays are thin, lightweight, provide better linearity and are capable of higher resolution than typical consumer-grade TVs from earlier eras.

The former requires that pixels be periodically electronically refreshed to retain their state (e.g. liquid-crystal displays (LCD)), and can only show an image when it has power.

This saw some use in military systems as a heads up display and as an oscilloscope monitor, but conventional technologies overtook its development.

By the time the lawsuits were complete, with Aiken's patent applying in the US and Gabor's in the UK, the commercial aspects had long lapsed, and the two became friends.

[5] Around this time,Clive Sinclair came across Gabor's work and began an ultimately unsuccessful decade-long effort to commercialize it.

[13] The first active-matrix addressed electroluminescent display (ELD) was made using TFTs by T. Peter Brody's Thin-Film Devices department at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1968.

A. Asars and G. D. Dixon at Westinghouse Research Laboratories demonstrated the first thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD).

[15][16] Brody and Fang-Chen Luo demonstrated the first flat active-matrix liquid-crystal display (AM LCD) using TFTs in 1974.

Ching W. Tang and Steven Van Slyke at Eastman Kodak built the first practical organic LED (OLED) device in 1987.

[28] Field-effect LCDs are lightweight, compact, portable, cheap, more reliable, and easier on the eyes than CRT screens.

By generating a controlled electric field between electrodes, various segments or pixels of the liquid crystal can be activated, causing changes in their polarizing properties.

LC displays are used in various electronics like watches, calculators, mobile phones, TVs, computer monitors and laptops screens etc.

A plasma display consists of two glass plates separated by a thin gap filled with a gas such as neon.

In an electroluminescent display (ELD), the image is created by applying electrical signals to the plates which make the phosphor glow.

OLEDs are used to create digital displays in devices such as television screens, computer monitors, portable systems such as mobile phones, handheld game consoles and PDAs.

QLED or quantum dot LED is a flat panel display technology introduced by Samsung under this trademark.

Samsung explains on their website that the QLED TV they produce can determine what part of the display needs more or less contrast.

Information on two types of flat-panel display at the Zürich Hauptbahnhof railway station: an orange LED display (top right) and a LCD screen (bottom)
An LCD screen used as an information display for travellers
A large LED display at the Taipei Arena displays commercials and movie trailers .
Amazon's Kindle Keyboard e-reader displaying a page of an e-book. The Kindle's image of the book's text will remain onscreen even if the battery runs out, as it is a static screen technology. Without power, however, the user cannot change to a new page.