custom capacitive touch panel.What is the difference between a TFT screen and a LCD screen? In the field of computer monitors, televisions and smartphone displays, we can often hear many nouns-LCD screen, “TFT screen”, IPS screen, VA screen, TN screen, OLED screen, AMOLED screen, SuperAMOLED screen, MINI LED and so on. These names often dazzle us.

Despite the wide variety of names and types, this term is flamboyant. In fact, there are only two major camps in the display market: LCD (commonly known as liquid crystal display) and OLED (commonly known as organic light emitting diode display). These two materials are essentially different. LCD screen needs LED lamp bead backlight layer + liquid crystal layer + filter board to display color content normally, while OLED screen only needs one layer of luminous substrate layer to complete the work of self-luminous and color display.

In fact, all the other nicknames belong to a technology branch or technology name within these two major technology frameworks, which only refers to some different technical characteristics, not a new category. These screens are distributed according to the different technologies:

LCD camp includes: TFT screen, STN screen, VA screen, TN screen, IPS screen, MINI LCD screen and so on.

OLED camp includes: AMOLED,Super AMOLED,E4/5, Zhou Dongyu screen, drill screen and so on. Although there are many names, but they all belong to the category of OLED screen, there is no difference in nature, but there is a certain difference in the display effect.

Having said that, let’s go back to the question in the title-“the difference between TFT and LCD screens”. Seeing this, you must have a clear understanding of this problem. The so-called “TFT screen” on the market is essentially a LCD screen, and TFT is actually a driver technology applied to the LCD screen, the full name is membrane transistor liquid crystal technology. The LCD screen using this technology is also known as TFT-LCD screen (the following can be divided into TFT-TN screen and TFT-VA screen according to different display modes. TFT-IPS screen, etc.), also known as true color screen, corresponding to the STN LCD screen, and the latter is almost extinct on the market, at present, all LCD screens on the market are using TFT technology.

The reason why the TFT screen will be popular, to put it bluntly, is a means for panel manufacturers or display / mobile phone production to promote their own products, because in the early days of the emergence of TFT screens, there are still many screens using STN technology on the market, so TFT screens are so popular. Nowadays, with the popularity of TFT technology, it is rare to see that mobile phone, TV or panel manufacturer promote the use of TFT technology on their screens.

Of course, there are also technical subdivisions under TFT technology, which can be divided into three major categories:

1. A-Si is amorphous silicon technology.

2. IGZO indium gallium zinc oxide technology.

3. LTPS is low temperature polysilicon technology.

At present, the more nouns we can see on the market should be VA,IPS and TN screen, these three nouns actually refer to three different display technologies. (the following figure shows IPS,VA and TN from left to right).

Among them, IPS screen and VA screen belong to the same grade. At present, most non-curved screen displays on the market use TFT-IPS screen, also known as hard screen. It has the best color range, the best viewing angle range and moderate response speed of the three screen technologies. More than 90% of the IPs screens seen in the smartphone market are mainly TFT-IPS screens.

While VA screen is a product between IPS screen and TN screen, the feature of VA screen is that it can be bent, so almost 90% of curved screen displays (non-mobile phones) on the market are VA panels. The biggest feature of VA panel is that it has higher contrast and is not easy to leak light, but the biggest disadvantage is that the corresponding speed is relatively slow, so it is not suitable to be used as a game screen, especially an electronic competition screen that requires high-frequency words.

And TN screen is the earliest use of a LCD screen, its advantage is that it has a very fast response speed, almost can reach 1ms, so there are many professional electronic competition screens will use TN material, but the biggest problem of TN material is poor visual angle, color is not rich enough, not suitable for ordinary display.