Liquid-crystal display
![Reflective twisted nematic liquid crystal display.
Polarizing filter film with a vertical axis to polarize light as it enters.Glass substrate with ITO electrodes. The shapes of these electrodes will determine the shapes that will appear when the LCD is turned ON. Vertical ridges etched on the surface are smooth.Twisted nematic liquid crystal.Glass substrate with common electrode film (ITO) with horizontal ridges to line up with the horizontal filter.Polarizing filter film with a horizontal axis to block/pass light.Reflective surface to send light back to viewer. (In a backlit LCD, this layer is replaced with a light source.)](/Images/godic/202501/23/LCD_layers.svg1141.png")
![LCD with top polarizer removed from device and placed on top, such that the top and bottom polarizers are perpendicular.](/Images/godic/202501/23/LCDneg1141.jpg")
![18 parallel CCFLs as backlight for a 42-inch LCD TV](/Images/godic/202501/23/LCD-TV_Backlight_with_CCFL1141.jpg")
![A pink elastomeric connector mating an LCD panel to circuit board traces, shown next to a centimeter-scale ruler. (The conductive and insulating layers in the black stripe are very small, click on the image for more detail.)](/Images/godic/202501/23/Zebra_connector1141.jpg")
A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronic visual display that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly.
LCDs are available to display arbitrary images (as in a general-purpose computer display) or fixed images with low information content, which can be displayed or hidden, such as preset words, digits, and 7-segment displays as in a digital clock. They use the same basic technology, except that arbitrary images are made up of a large number of small pixels, while other displays have larger elements.