Toshiba and Matsushita to mass produce 5-inch LCD displays

Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology announced plans to initiate mass-production of high-resolution, highly reflective monochrome 5" LCD displays for usage in electronic books, electronic dictionaries or office automation equipment.

The 5-inch display features a 640 x 480 pixels resolution. It has a 12:1 contrast ratio and a response time of 20ms. The power consumption ranges from 4mW for binary representation to 20mW for 16-level grayscale representation.

Demand for electronic dictionaries has been growing due to their ability to easily and conveniently retrieve a wealth of information. In fact, sales of electronic dictionaries in the Japanese market reached 2.5 million units in fiscal year 2005, up 8.7 percent over the previous year.1 There is also a growing demand for advanced models that feature entries accompanied by photos and illustrations.

Concurrently, the sales of multifunctional office automation equipment (which incorporate not only copying functions but also printer, scanner, facsimile and other functions) recorded worldwide sales of 4.2 million units in FY2005, an 8.8% increase over the previous year.*1 Demand is now shifting towards models which offer an easily readable and simple operating panel for multiple function control.



In order to meet such needs, TMD has developed a TFT LCD that ensures high-contrast images by incorporating a high-resolution VGA display, with 16-level grayscale, and advanced optical performance. The newly developed TFT LCD adopts a new, highly efficient reflective surface and internal reflection technology to maximize such optical performance, providing clear and crisp images, and is able to display small, well-defined characters easily. In addition, the new product has completely eliminated the need for a backlight thanks to the highly reflective optical performance, and thus enables a low power system design, one of the essential requirements for electronic dictionaries and ensures longer battery-powered operation. Furthermore, the new product provides faster display image rewriting compared to other reflective type display technologies, thus enabling displays which are more easily legible even during fast scrolling of texts or during video clips in electronic dictionaries or books.

With the above-mentioned advantageous features, the new product provides natural-looking representation of photos and paper-like images. In addition, with its high resolution it enables the viewing of a variety of functions even on a compact-size operating panel.