Sunlight Readable and Ultralow Power Displays

Display Technologies vs Blanview

Toppan’s Blanview technology successfully overcomes drawbacks that Transmissive and Transflective-type TFT-LCDs have respectively.

• Good display readability in outdoors/bright environments

• Keeping low power consumption in any ambient luminance conditions

• High image quality in indoors/dark environments on the same level as Transmissive

• Less display performance variation between indoor and outdoor conditions

The above shows how each display technology (Transmissive, Transflective and Blanview) handles the light to create images.
Line weight of each arrow indicates its light intensity level.

Transmissive with high light transmittance can utilize backlight efficiently for good display quality; on the other hand, it has little functionality to make use of incident light from outside. Transmissive eventually is not possible to secure good display visibility in outdoor bright situations, unless increasing backlight (= power consumption increase).

Transflective can reflect more incident light with a large size reflection area (reflective electrode), but meanwhile, its backlight use efficiency rather decreases due to a smaller size of transmission area. Transflective requires to consume lots of power in darker environment.

Blanview succeeds in taking an ideal balance between a reflection of incoming light and high backlight usage efficiency. Toppan realized this unique characteristics by a combination of i) high aperture ratio pixel design and manufacturing technology, ii) optical design optimization (optical films, color filter, etc), and iii) reflective layer layout to the locations where not block a backlight light path. This unique technology enables us to take a “hybrid use” of backlight and incident light from outside. Blanview succeeded in not only ensuring superior display readability in any situations, but also decreasing total power consumption. For more specific Blanview technology advantages, please see pictures and performance data below.


The left display is Blanview; the right display is general transmissive TFT-LCD.

Displays are placed at where the sunlight hits to the display surface and both LCDs are tuned to have same brightness level. With this side-by-side comparison, we can confirm that Blanview can create higher contrast crisp image.
This chart shows backlight power consumption required to secure enough display readability with transmissive LCD, transflective LCD and Blanview LCD respectively.

Transmissive requires lots of power in bright circumstances. Transflective is possible to reduce the power greatly in bright circumstances, but meanwhile it requires more power to secure enough readability in dark circumstances.
Blanview can acquire high display visibility along with low power consumption in any circumstances, from dark to bright circumstances. We can say that Blanview is most suitable display technology to a product used in “sometimes outdoor, sometimes indoor” for a long period.