Liquid crystal display television

Liquid-crystal-display televisions (LCD TV) are television sets that use liquid-crystal displays to produce images. LCD televisions are thinner and lighter than cathode ray tube (CRTs) of similar display size, and are available in much larger sizes. When manufacturing costs fell, this combination of features made LCDs practical for television receivers.

In 2007, LCD televisions surpassed sales of CRT-based televisions worldwide for the first time, and their sales figures relative to other technologies are accelerating. LCD TVs are quickly displacing the only major competitors in the large-screen market, the plasma display panel and rear-projection television. LCDs are, by far, the most widely produced and sold television display type.

LCDs also have a variety of disadvantages. Other technologies address these weaknesses, including organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), FED and SED, but as of 2014^[update] none of these have entered widespread production for TV displays.

LCD televisions produce a black and colored image by selectively filtering a white light. The light was provided by a series of cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) at the back of the screen. Today, most LCD-TV displays use white or colored LEDs as backlighting instead. Millions of individual LCD shutters, arranged in a grid, open and close to allow a metered amount of the white light through. Each shutter is paired with a colored filter to remove all but the red, green or blue (RGB) portion of the light from the original white source. Each shutter–filter pair forms a single sub-pixel. The sub-pixels are so small that when the display is viewed from even a short distance, the individual colors blend together to produce a single spot of color, a pixel. The shade of color is controlled by changing the relative intensity of the light passing through the sub-pixels.

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