New Coating Material Can Improve Viewing Angle In TN Film Based Monitor

TN film panel is not my favorite type of TFT LCD monitor; colorshifts are terrible, viewing angles are the among the narrowest and covers small range of color gamut. In fact, i despise it but the manufacturer loves it; materials are less costly to fabricate and the pixel response time is fast and sufficiently to avoid the shadow-trail and ghosting artifacts. Sadly, the whole range of newly announced 16:9 monitors are all TN film based monitors with inferior hardware. The days where an affordable Dell manufactured with IPS panel like 2005 and 2007 series monitors are long gone. But there's hope; new coating material has found a new angle to improve and optimize the off-putting viewing angles.

The new costing material, developed by Toray Industry, is designed to optimize and cut down the process of retarder inside the LCD panel. A process or a component of attaching film onto a glass substrate to reduce stress variation caused by film expansion and contraction especially in large panel manufacturing process.

The company reported use of an alignment film few microns to achieve viewing angle properties equal to or higher than those of the existing retarders used in VA LCD panels. Same result is said to be consistent and can be utilized on TN based panels as well. Toray has plans to commercialize its coating process by 2010.