Liquid Crystal Displays, up close and personal

Macbook LCD pixels at high magnification.

I had shot the LCD on my laptop (above) to see what the pixels look like. As expected, each pixel on your and my display are composed of three components, a red, a green and a blue, which together make white (when all are on), black (when all are off) and every color in between (at least to the human eye). You can also see how dirty my screen is. Gotta clean that.

To my surprise, the components that make up each pixel are vertical rectangles, as you can see. I don't know much about LCD pixel configurations, but I was also intrigued by the way each pixel component appeared to be comprised of a long piece and a short piece. This could simply be a visual affect of some sort of circuit overlay that makes them appear to be two pieces. They also have very real little shapes, with an angled corner. Interesting.

Curious, I took some shots of other LCDs around. Below is a closeup of the display on the back of a pocket digital snapshot camera. You can see the pixels are smaller, and more square, though they still appear to be segmented in some way. You can also see that the designers of this display below weren't as concerned with the "squareness" of the visual pixel created by the combination of the three colored components. The red, green, and blue together make a long rectangular pixel rather than a square one. Also in this example, there is evidence of some visual distortion due to the anti-glare coating on the screen, which was not present on the laptop example above.

Canon Elph pocket camera LCD at high magnification.

In the next example below, I've shot the pixels of our LCD TV, which you can see are much larger (detail isn't as important on a TV since you sit further away) sending much brighter light out to the viewers than the smaller pixels do. You can also see that the these big honkin' pixel elements are "divided" in halves, though again this could be a visual effect of having some sort of circuit overlaid on the pixels.

Also, the anti-glare coating distortion is much more prominent on this example than on the previous one. The distortion looks oddly similar to compression artifacts or distortion induced from extreme up-sampling of an image (which this is not). But I assure you, this was absolutely in focus, and you are seeing the image as untainted by post-processing as possible. All three of these LCD pixel images are the same aspect ratio and crop factor, meaning they haven't been changed in size relative to eachother in any way.

Now I expect all three of my readers will be squinting at every display around them for the next few days, trying to see what's in there.

Sharp Aquos LCD television pixels at high magnification.

Send me your suggestions for something tiny that you'd like to see big.

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