Why the LCD monitor concerned the view angle?

If you read the specification of your PC monitor or TV, you will discover one of the terms called "view angle." It means: we assume there is a line that goes through the center of the display perfectly vertically, and another line from the center of the display to your eyes. The angle between these two lines will be the view angle of the monitor.

If you are watching a screen from a position larger than this angle, the content on the monitor will look distorted. The display color will distort and make the image look strange. If you continue moving to a larger angle, you won't see anything from the display.

This is because light always spreads in a single direction (straight line) such as laser. Being at a position over the view angle means you are out of the direction of the light, or the intensity of the light in this direction is too weak to be observed.

In general, this number is still meaningless to most of the population because nobody is watching TV from the side or backside of the screen. Mostly, you are sitting on the couch, and the TV is facing you directly; sitting on the chair, the PC monitor is also facing you directly... If you can't see the content, just adjust the TV/monitor or your chair.

The problem is, there is a situation where the monitor is stationary and the audience also doesn't want to move themselves, which means the view angle will decide how many people can see the content on the screen at the same time. This number will dominate so many things, such as the price of advertising on this screen at this place.

Imagine a commercial center using a monitor with a small view angle; maybe only 40% of the customers can read the messages from the screen, at the same time, other 60% will miss them if they are somewhere out of the angle. This might not be bad for the customers, but it is certainly bad news for the commercial center.

So, how to maximize the view angle and attract more customers? One of the choices is splicing the LED screen to form one huge screen. LED displays naturally have a view angle of over 60°, and combined with their extremely large size, they are enough to cover all the angles from which people can observe the screen.

However, as an LCD manufacturer, we strongly recommend the IPS(In-Plane-Switching) screen LCD display, which has an 89° ultra-wide view angle larger than any other LCD/LED. This ensures that everyone from any direction can see the content on the screen clearly.

I mean, not everyone has a large commercial center and needs a LED screen with a 40 m² scale; it's almost the size of a small apartment. A TV-sized IPS LCD with high brightness over 2500 nits is enough for most retail shops, numbers of LCD like this can cover all the angle people can observe your store, with the higher image performance it may have excellent effects.

And the reason for the IPS wide view angle is related to the image formation of the LCD. We know how LEDs form an image: each of the beads can emit different colors, and multiples of them will form the image together. The problem is that the minimum size of the LED bead is still too large, and there must be an adequate gap distance between beads for connecting and thermal dissipation.

LCDs are different; they actually refract white light into different colors. The "LCD bead" are actually molecules. Of course, each pixel on the LCD screen is further larger than the molecular size, each pixel has many liquid crystal molecules; but whatever the size or the gap, both are further smaller than what the LED has. This gives the LCD a higher resolution than an LED of the same size.

The liquid crystal molecules has the shape like this:

Follow the twist of this molecule, and the color of the light will change. A simple truth is: if the light comes through the blue arrow direction, the light out of the molecule will be reduced much more than in the yellow arrow direction. This is due to the light "walking" a longer distance inside the molecule. By the way, there are multiple layers of this molecule that light needs to pass through.

IPS only twists horizontally(in plane), so the light intensity won't have a big difference after they pass through. You can see almost the same image at a 0° view angle and an 85° view angle, but the cost is that the contrast ratio of IPS will be lower than VA(Vertical-Alignment).

Anyway, the key point of advertising is still "numbers," and the difference between high and low contrast ratios usually can't be noticed by the audience if there is no comparison. It is further smaller than the differences between resolution, I mean, between LED and LCD.