Projection TVs and data displays are producing increasingly beautiful images. Precisely how
these remarkable improvements in performance have been achieved is a mystery to many.
I would imagine that this statement holds true within the technical community and even to
some extent within that part of it which has a working knowledge of liquid crystal display
effects, TFTs and single crystal silicon transistor backplane technology.
This latest offering from the Wiley-SID Series in Display Technology demystifies the
subject. It explains polarization engineering, an extremely complex topic, with elegance and
clarity from basic theory and fundamentals to worked examples of commercially available
systems.
All of the bulk optical materials and, in systems with three LCDs, of the order of 21
optical surfaces per colour must be optimised for performance in terms of polarisation and
reflectivity. The challenge of designing projection systems which simultaneously deliver
high luminous efficiency, high contrast and low volume at acceptable cost are formidable.
Nothing but a comprehensive and holistic treatment of every element of a projection system
is sufficient to achieve the levels of performance now being realised and that is exactly
what this book provides. An entire chapter is devoted to an important optical element only
recently developed. This is the essentially lossless retarder stack filter, which can rotate the
plane of polarisation of certain wavelength bands and leave others unchanged. A detailed
discussion is also presented of on- and off-normal compensation of LCD cells, which will
be of value to engineers involved in the development of projection and direct view displays
alike.