The Difference Between a Touch Screen and an LCD Screen

 Most of the time people don’t know the difference between a touchscreen and a LCD screen. When there are dark black blobs on your screen, it’s not because the display screen is damaged, it is the caused due to the damage in the LCD of your mobile phone whereas when there are cracks on your screen its mainly due to the damaged caused to your touchscreen and as compared to an LCD screen it is easier to fix as you only need to replace the display screen of you mobile phone. 

 

An LCD is the part of a phone that displays the image we see on screen. It is the layer which produces and displays the image, therefore if the LCD panel is damaged you can still use the touchscreen although the panel would have either the aforementioned dark black blobs or the spider web type dark cracks on the display or both it would still function normally. To repair the LCD, a technician would have to pull apart the phone part by part to reach the LCD and assess the damage done which is not required for a touch screen. LCD, which is a liquid crystal display, is widely used in mobile phones as it uses low power and produces good quality images. 

 

The images which are displayed in a LCD are produced through small elements which are called pixels. Pixel is a word everybody is familiar with but what exactly is a pixel? Pixel is made up of a layer of molecules lined up between two transparent electrodes and polarizing filters. There are several types of LCDs, reflective, transmissive and transflective, each has a specific function. A transmissive LCD can produce a clear and good quality image in low light while Reflective screen can produce a very good image in bright light. The transflective screen as the name indicates can produce a good quality image in both conditions, hence it is a mixture of both transmissive and reflective LCD. 

 

Touchscreen is now a part of almost every digital gadget in the 21st century. From mobile phones and laptops to TVs and switch boards, it is now used almost everywhere your eyes fall on. But what exactly is a touchscreen? A touchscreen is basically a device which allows us to directly interact by using our fingers or a stylus. The stylus is a special kind of pen whose tip is covered with a unique coating which allows it to directly interact with the computer. We can use one finger or multiple gestures to interact with a touchscreen device. It doesn’t require a mouse or any alternative device such as a keyboard for navigation. A touchscreen can use several methods to sense our finger, it can use a grid which consists of infrared beams or it can use touch sensitive units to sense our gestures. 

 

With touchscreen, there are several gestures that we can make which would be quite tiresome if we use a mouse or a keyboard like when we double tap the screen while using gallery or while reading a pdf file the screen tends to zoom in and when we double tap again it zooms out similarly we can easily drag different icons and swipe to scroll upwards, downwards even sideways. A touch screen is also referred to as an input device as it takes input directly from the user. The computers require a mouse which makes them hard to use but touchscreen is very simple to use as you are directly interacting with the icons, it is also cost efficient to manufacture touchscreen as it does not require buttons for each icon. 

 

In conclusion it can be said that LCD and Touch Screen have very different functions which makes them different from each other. One deals with production of images and the other deals with receiving the input from the user directly. Although they are different, they are equally important for a digital device. 

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