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.
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.
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.
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...