Enhancement of Viewing Performance of New Transflective In-Plane Switching Liquid Crystal Displays Using In-Cell Retarder(s)

High-viewing-performance transflective in-plane switching (IPS) liquid crystal displays (LCDs) with in-cell retarders have been developed. Transflective LCDs have pixels with transmissive and reflective display portions; the transmissive display portion is designed to have the same structure as the transmissive IPS-LCDs, and the reflective display portion is formed by patterning the in-cell retarder. The latter is designed to give a normally close mode characteristic, which has a brightness–voltage (B–V) curve similar to that of the former. The reflective display portions, which work as quarter-wave plates at dark states, can be classified into five structures according to the number of in-cell retarder(s) and the stacking order of the liquid crystal layer. In this study, on the basis of the five possible structures, the viewing performances of the transflective IPS-LCDs are investigated by simulation, and suitable solutions are also discussed.