An extremely simplified retrospective of display technologies, roughly in order of absurdity.
Micro-LED/LED Billboard
You address a pixel on a grid, which represents an RGB triad of LEDs. A red and blue LED have a electric arc created inside them. The Blue LED is given slightly less power to create a darker blue. These colors combine, creating a fuchsia pixel.
Everything about this, except for the size, is reasonable.
OLED
You address a pixel on a grid, which represents an RGB triad of OLEDs. A red and blue OLED have a electric ran through them, causing them to emit light. The Blue OLED is given slightly less power to create a darker blue. These colors combine, creating a fuchsia pixel.
The Blue OLED dies a little.
Plasma TV
You address a pixel on a grid, which represents an RGB triad of gas cells. A red and blue cell have a electric arc created inside them, causing the neon gas and mercury gas inside to turn into a plasma. This plasma emits UV photons, which hit colored phosphors, converting it into visible, colored light. The Blue cell is given slightly less power to create a darker blue. These colors combine, creating a fuchsia pixel.
A little it of the gas escapes, dimming the picture.
Digital Rear Projection.
You address a pixel on a grid, which represents a mirror on a chip covered in millions of mirrors. A light strobes multiple times through a color wheel, spins at 3600 rpm. The mirrors around the selected mirror flex away to deflect light away from the color wheel, creating black. The selected mirror stays still while the wheel is on red, flexes away for half of blue, and stays flexed away for Green, creating a fuchsia pixel.
The bulb dies and the color wheel explodes, destroying the television.
LCD
You address a pixel on a grid, which represents an RGB triad of liquid crystal cells. In front of these cells are Red, Blue, and Green color filters. A bright white backlight of vertically polarized light shines in from the back of the screen. The selected triad receive a charge, causing the cells to rotate, which rotates the polarity of the light. This lines up with a horizontal polarizer, blocking out all light and creating black. A full charge is given to the selected triad's red cell, and a partial one to it's blue cell. Green is blocked, creating a fuchsia pixel.
The rest of the light slams against the vertical polarizer. Your black levels are terrible. Your viewing angles are terrible. Eventually the crystals in a cell decides it likes the position it's in and you can't stop noticing it.
LED
You address a pixel on a grid, which represents an RGB triad of liquid crystal cells. In front of these cells are Red, Blue, and Green color filters. One of thousands of vertically polarized light shines in from the back of the screen. The selected triad receive a charge, causing the cells to rotate, which rotates the polarity of the light. This lines up with a horizontal polarizer, blocking out all light and creating black. A full charge is given to the selected triad's red cell, and a partial one to it's blue cell, creating a fuchsia pixel.
The polarizer does some shit different I barely understand, so at least your viewing angle is better. Your fuchsia pixel has a weird halo around it. You realize the LED TV is just an LCD TV, but with more stuff.
QLED
Okay what if the backlight was blue, and their were phosphors in the forms of red and green quantam dots??? somehow???? and this colored light is mixed with the other light and oh my fucking god why are we trying to keep LCD tech going so long I'm so tired. This creates a fuchsia pixel.
You don't know what the sales rep is saying, you just buy the TV.
CRT
You address nothing. Your signal is analog, a small blip in the middle of a long string of nothing. Your intentions are merely a suggestion. An RGB triad of Electron Guns are triggered at just the right time, a full charge given to red, and a partial one to blue. A yoke made up of magnets is used to direct these electron beams across the screen. These electron partially get blocked by some kind of barrier (a shadowmask of Aperture Grille or a whatever), but are angled so that each gun perfectly lines up with a.... grid -- Honeycomb? Something else?? Look all these TVs were different -- of colored phosphors, which light up, creating a fuchsia pixel.
A little bit of gas escapes and 20 years later you put it up for free on craigslist, waiting for a smash player to show up to carry it out for you.
SED
You address a pixel on a grid, which represents a triad of nanoscale electron emitters that can shoot electrons into a gap in which a high-voltage electrical field accelerates them into a screen coated with red, green and blue phosphors. Because the emitters rely on quantum tunneling, they are either completely on or completely off, so a low voltage (~10s of volts) is applied to the row of pixels you want to target, and also to the red and blue subpixels for the column you want to target, activating only those subpixels where the active row and columns cross. By pulsing the blue signal on and off rapidly, the blue subpixel appears dimmer than the red subpixel, creating a fuchsia pixel.
This was a neat idea that delivered CRT-like response time and contrast in a flatscreen package, but was not further developed because OLED displays turned out to be good enough and more economical
this is why I yearn for electroluminescent displays. sure, we've had them in stuff like car dashes forever, but I mean grid-based, full color, fast response EL. maybe with color-by-blue. the patents on a form of these (TDEL) died recently, maybe we can finally see someone build one??
