Shunichi Kishimoto

A Color Flat Cathode Ray Tube

Recently, rapid advances have been made in flat-panel displays, such as Liquid Crystal Displays, Plasma Displays, Electroluminescent Displays, Vacuum Fluorescent Displays and so on. Applications to flat TV displays have been seriously considered. No flat displays, however, can meet all the necessary requirement for TV displays, especially the color TV displays. Compared to conventional CRT displays, numerous problems still remain in regard to brightness, contrast, cosmetics, resolution, driving power, power consumption, cost performance and reliability.

15.1: A New LC Rear‐Projection Display Based on the “Color‐Grating Method”

We have developed a rear-projection display with a novel color separation system, so called the Color Grating Method, comprised of the diffraction grating and the single-LC panel. This method realizes the higher brightness and well chromaticity compared with the conventional optical engine using single-LC with color filter. Further, we developed a new polarization converter system, using a prism array that consists of several small prisms. A prism array combines both orthogonal polarized light, therefore our optical engine can efficiently utilize a luminosity of a light source. The LC rear-projection display based on these technologies realized the lower costs and light weight, a slim body and good performance.

Development of a color 3D display visible to plural viewers at the same time without special glasses by using a ray-regenerating method

We have newly developed a few kinds of new auto-stereoscopic 3D displays adopting a ray-regenerating method. The method is invented basically at Osaka University in 1997. We adopted this method with LCD. The display has a very simple construction. It consists of LC panel with a very large number of pixels and many small light sources positioned behind the LC panel. We have examined the following new technologies: 1) Optimum design of the optical system. 2) Suitable construction in order to realize very large number of pixels. 3) Highly bright back-light system with optical fiber array to compensate the low lighting efficiency. The 3D displays having wide viewing area and being visible for plural viewers were realized. But the cross-talk images appeared more than we expected. By changing the construction of this system to reduce the diffusing factors of generated rays, the cross-talk images are reduced dramatically. Within the limitation of the pixel numbers of LCD, it is desirable to increase the pinhole numbers to realize the realistic 3D image. This research formed a link in the chain of the national project by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization) in Japan.