You might have seen 4K and even 8K displays from various brands. They might fascinate you but their price tag is enough to bring down your excitement levels below zero. But what if someone tells you that a mere software update can triple the display resolution of your LCD screen?

Published in Nature Communications, a new research conducted at the University Of Central Florida might be able to achieve what sounds impossible to our ears.

The LCDs currently available to us have each pixel divided into three subpixels. The subpixels are programmed to display red, green, and blue colors individually which are then combined to get the resulting color for the bigger pixel and eventually on the display.

The researchers have found a way to use those subpixels to display multiple colors (red, green, or blue) by applying varying amounts of voltage. Thus, a smaller pixel could act as a separate individual pixel and we would have a display with a density 3 times higher than the original pixel density.

Debashis Chanda, who is a part of the research, told Digital Trends that their “demonstration of a color display based on a single pixel” is the first of its kind.

“One pixel can tune from red to green to blue, unlike other displays where three pixels are needed, resulting in an unprecedented 200 percent improvement in display resolution.”

According to the research paper, this “is accomplished through a surface morphology-induced, polarization-dependent plasmonic resonance and a combination of bulk and surface liquid crystal effects that manifest at different voltages.”



Their new technology called liquid-crystal plasmonic system is compatible with the existing LCD technology. So, there won’t be a need for creating a completely new hardware.

The researchers are still developing the technology, but they do have the commercial aspect in their mind. A decline in the adoption of LCD displays might be a turndown. But still, there are various possible applications for mobile devices, monitors, and other things where LCDs still find their use.




Fossbytes