• Question: whots in a laptop and how does a laptop screen work how does it do pictures

    Asked by damien2011 to Edd on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi damien! 🙂

      I don’t know much about this but the basic idea is that the screen is made up of thousands of tiny little crystals with light devices behind them (this is known as an LCD – liquid crystal display). By changing the colour and brightness of the light that is sent through the crystal different colours can be formed. The devices would each form a single dot (a pixel) on the screen. Lots of these pixels are then used to create a picture.

      A screen with a higher resolution (more pixels) can produce a more detailed image – but it requires more devices to create the light pixels. Hence higher resolution screens are more expensive.

      There is a really good tutorial guide here:
      http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/laptops/index.html
      and more info on LCDs here:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display

      The rest of the laptop is very similar to a normal computer – there is a hard disk, keyboard, processor, computer memory etc.

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