Film patterned retarder for stereoscopic three-dimensional display using ink-jet printing method.

We propose a film patterned retarder (FPR) for stereoscopic three-dimensional display with polarization glasses using ink-jet printing method. Conventional FPR process requires coating of photo-alignment and then UV exposure using wire-grid mask, which is very expensive and difficult. The proposed novel fabrication method utilizes a plastic substrate made of polyether sulfone and an alignment layer, poly (4, 4' - (9, 9 -fluorenyl) diphenylene cyclobutanyltetracarboximide) (9FDA/CBDA) in which the former and the latter aligns reactive mesogen along and perpendicular to the rubbing direction, respectively. The ink-jet printing of 9FDA/CBDA line by line allows fabricating the cost effective FPR which can be widely applied for 3D display applications.

A high transmittance color liquid crystal display mode with controllable color gamut and transparency.

In this paper, we propose a color transparent liquid crystal (LC) mode that can control the properties of the color gamut and transparency in a single panel. To achieve high transmittance in the transparent LC mode, a reactive mesogen (RM) with embedded color dichroic dyes was applied instead of a color filter. Basically, the LC mode applied a 3-terminal electrode structure to switch between the transparent LC mode and the conventional color LC mode. Depending on the direction of the applied voltage, we can operate both the color mode and the transparent mode in a single panel, and modulate the transparency and color purity of the cell through appropriate voltage control. In the experiments, we confirmed that the transmittance and the color gamut of the cell were 39.4% and 2% in the transparent LC mode and 14.9% and 34% in the color LC mode, respectively. Modulation of the color gamut and transparency between each LC mode are also demonstrated in the paper.

Optical approach to improve the γ curve in a vertical-alignment liquid-crystal cell.

In this Letter, we propose an optical configuration of a four-domain vertical-alignment (VA) liquid-crystal (LC) cell, which can improve the γ-curve distortion by using a pair of patterned A plates, without any change in cell structure. In order to find the optimal parameter value of the patterned A film, we calculated the polarization difference between the normal direction and the all-viewing direction as functions of the optical axes and the retardation (Δnd) under the voltage applied state. Based on the calculated results, the proposed LC cell showed an improvement in γ-curve distortion of more than 80% in each oblique viewing angle compared to a conventional wide-view VA LC cell, without any loss of optical performance in the dark state.