The University of Oxford has developed a way to improve LCDs without complex drive techniques.
"Our idea is not limited to one kind of liquid crystal molecule, it can be applied to any liquid crystal molecule," Dr Rakesh Roshan of the university's intellectual property exploitation firm Isis Innovation told Electronics Weekly.
According to Roshan, as liquid crystals pass between stable states in displays, they briefly pass through transient states - some of which have better optical properties than the destination states.
"The non-permanent liquid crystal states can have improved properties leading to televisions, phones and PDAs having a sub-millisecond response time, increased battery life or higher brightness," said Isis. "However, the short lifetime of these states makes them difficult to be studied, and they have not been commercially utilised."
In particular, the University has been working on pi-cell liquid crystals.
"For example, by stabilising the non-permanent state in a pi-cell results in higher intensity dynamic range as compared to the conventionally polymerised devices, lower power consumption, faster response time, and no unwanted recovery into the splay or twist states," said Isis.
In pi-cell operation, the crystal goes from an opaque 'splay' state to a transparent 'high bend' state. On the way, it passes through a transient 'relaxed bend' state that is 1.18 times more transparent than the high bend state, said Roshan.
This extra fifth more light was important enough for Samsung to demonstrated a complex pattern of drive signals that could hold the relaxed bend state at the Society for Information Display conference in 2006.
"Rather than using a smart drive technique, we can do exactly the same thing by a novel polymerisation method," said Roshan.
After treatment, the display naturally switches between the splay and previously transient relaxed bend states
Exactly what happens, Oxford is not saying, but Roshan claims that the technique uses only the UV polymerisation equipment normally available on a TV panel production line, used in a different way.
The display now also operates between 0 (opaque) and 7V.
According to Roshan, this kind of LCD normally has to be operated between 2 and 7V as 0-2V allows light leaking 'recovery' - appearing green in the left hand image.
It is the use of 0V rather than 2V for 'off' that Roshan claims saves energy in use.
The University is in the early stages of applying the same technique to fast switching 'HS' LCD states where speed has been doubled so far, although a 4x improvement is expected. "There are some challenges," said Roshan.