Ortustech

Blanview – OrtusTech’s Unique Display Technology for outdoor applications

low power consumption, sunlight readable

|24 April 2024

Blanview is Toppan’s unique TFT-LCD technology enabling the display to create high contrast and crisp images even in bright circumstances where a sunlight hit to display surface directly.
With leveraging Toppan’s high-quality amorphous silicon (a-Si) technology “HAST” (Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT), which has been fostered in our 40-years-long display expertise, TOPPAN succeeded in generating new type TFT-LCD with a good balance between 2 values – Sunlight Readable and Low Power Consumption.

Transmissive

Transmissive-type is the most common LCD technology that is widely used in many electrical devices. Transmissive can provide clear images in indoor and dark situations, but meanwhile its display readability gets worse in bright outdoor situations. Backlight power increase can improve the display visibility somewhat, but it lead to boost total power consumption; this may be critical impact to battery-driven handheld devices.

Transflective

Transflective-type is suitable LCD technology to outdoor applications. Transflective has pixels divided into 2 areas, Transmission and Reflection area; the reflection area (reflective electrode) takes a role to reflect incident light from outside. This can give a clear display readability as well as low power consumption; however, the panel transmittance (backlight efficiency) becomes rather lower due to a 2-divided pixel structure. As a result, Transflective inherently has a drawback of large power consumption in indoor or dark conditions. Complex pixel structure furthermore cause a problem that a color level changes indoors and outdoors; generally white color tends to gain yellowish outdoors.

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 Toppan 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, 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. Blanview is the most suitable display technology to a product used in “sometimes outdoor, sometimes indoor” for a long period.

Blanview Family Roadmap

An evolution of Blanview technology is going on… with new values and functionalities.

Blanview-“G” series:
Robust packaging design (e.g. anti-6.8G-vibration) and wide temperature durability (e.g. Top: -30 to +85°C, Tst: -40 to +95°C)
Blanview-“F” series:
IPS-FFS-based Blanview. Further upgraded Image quality.
Blanview-“R” series:
Good display visibility without backlight assistance by further light reflectance improvement
In order to providing more suitable display product for customer’s new product development, Toppan’s Blanview family covers a wide variety of standard (off-the-shelf) products; e.g. Display size, Resolution, Interface, Characteristics, Additional functions.

Target Application

Blanview TFT-LCD is most appropriate display to electronic equipment, facilities and devices which may be used in “sometimes outdoor, sometimes indoor”. Low-Power-Consumption advantage will extend a battery life of handheld devices.