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by charcircuit 340 days ago
>The fact that they ever made it out of the research lab and into our homes is astonishing to me.

What is astonishing about LCDs? I don't mean to diminish the difficulty of scaling up the process, but if you think of early LCD displays they don't seem farfetched to be shipped to consumers.
1 comments
YZF 340 days ago
One random example is that your eyes are extremely sensitive to the tiniest defect or variation. So making a large display that looks good and is uniform is very challenging. Not to mention scaling up all the various processes like the photolithography and working with very large and thin glass panels.

It's all engineering but it's surprisingly hard to move things from the lab to manufacturing at scale. Years and years and lots of problem solving. Some efforts/approaches fail and you never hear of them.

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charcircuit 340 days ago
You are moving the goal posts from it being a consumer product to requiring it to be large, good, and uniform. Yes, there was engineering work to make such a consumer product, but it is something I would expect there to have been line of sight for.
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YZF 340 days ago
I was just giving one example.

The first LCD products I remember were things like 7 segment digital watches and calculators where the LCD was passive and the "pixels" were large. I am not super familiar with how that went from lab to consumer product but I imagine even there it was non-trivial.

It took a long time to progress to modern LCD displays. It took years to get from small black and white displays, to small color, to larger and larger displays. Productizing this stuff includes building machines, factories, ASICs, and figuring out a lot of technology as you go along.

Some interesting history here: https://www.varjukass.ee/Kooli_asjad/Ylikool/telekom/displei...

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charcircuit 340 days ago
I'm not saying that it wasn't nontrivial, but that it wasn't surprising that it was able to happen.
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