the vast majority of today's laptops are using LCD technology on the displays LCD is liquid crystal displays there's a backlight that's on your LCD display that is shining through liquid crystals color filters and other components to finally show you the messages and the graphics on your screen the advantages of using an LCD on a laptop computer are that it is lightweight which is especially helpful for a mobile device it's relatively low power so we're gonna have as much battery available as possible and relatively inexpensive so it keeps down the overall cost of the laptop if
your job requires you to match colors or have a very good color representation on the screen you may find some challenges with LCDs because there is a back light that is shining through it becomes very difficult to get a true black on the screen we also have to be concerned about this backlight if we lose the backlight because of a problem with the LCD or the fluorescent lights that are used to shine through the laptop screen then suddenly the screen will go black then we have to replace the entire screen or different components of the
backlight just to have that laptop working again one way to get around some of these problems with color representation are to use a different type of laptop display called OLED the stands for organic light-emitting diode and OLED is an organic component that lights up when you provide it with an electric current these are usually very thin and very light screens it doesn't require that you have a glass to protect it on the front and because it's lighting itself it doesn't require a backlight that means you have very good color representation especially with true blacks when
there's simply no color you don't provide any electric current and everything stays black unfortunately OLED czar still not very popular on a laptop platform we have organic materials that tend to degrade over time and there are problems with decayed images still being displayed on these OLED screens these OLED displays are also more costly and they use more of your battery which are not a great combination for a laptop device a very important part of your laptop display that you don't even see are the antennas that are inside the screen they're usually multiple antennas there's a
Wi-Fi main auxilary connections bluetooth cellular type connections and they all wrap around the top of your laptop screen that's because when you open your laptop screen that's the highest point so by putting them into and around that laptop screen we're able to get them as high in the air as possible on this laptop there's a mini PCI Express interface that's available to install an eight-oh 2.11 card you can see the wires are here and those wires are wrapping around this lower part of the laptop and they go up into the display itself and they go
up high into the display to be able to get the best signal possible we rely more and more on video communication these days and so the webcams are being installed onto the laptops themselves you can find the video capture or real-time video transmissions are available with a camera that's right at the top of the display these usually have both audio and video capabilities and you'll need to make sure you install the correct driver for that Hardware depending on what operating system you're using if you look closely you can see the microphones that are installed at
the top of this system there's a left and a right microphone these are useful if you're on a webcam and you don't have another microphone available they're not high quality you wouldn't use this to be able to create online content but it's perfect for doing video conferencing here's a closer shot of this webcam with the audio microphone connections on the left and right side it's integrated into the screen itself and doesn't take any additional space on your laptop we mentioned earlier that these LCD displays on our laptops have a backlight that is behind the screen
and there are usually two different types of back lights that you'll find on a laptop one of these is an LED backlight that's on the LCD display sometimes we refer to these displays as LED displays what we're really saying is that it's an LCD display that is being backlit with LEDs they usually are LEDs that are placed around the edges of the screen or it's making a matrix as you see here and providing the backlight using these LEDs because these LEDs are using the same DC voltage that's available in your laptop it doesn't have to
do any type of voltage conversion to be able to power these LED backlights most of your newer laptops will be using those LED backlights but some of your older systems may be using C CFLs these are cold cathode fluorescent lamps these use higher voltage need more power to be able to provide that fluorescent backlight and they're a little bit thicker than the LEDs these back lights are obviously important we wouldn't be able to see the screen unless we have a backlight that's going through the LCD and finally we're able to see it with our eyes
some laptops will have inverters inside of them that will invert from DC into AC these are primarily used for those see CFL fluorescent back lights that are in older laptops if your LED or CCFL back lights stop working then the screen will look dark but if you look very carefully perhaps use a flashlight you can still see that there's information on the screen it's just not being lit from your backlight this means that you'll need to replace either the inverters on these older laptops or you may need to replace the entire display to be able
to have that backlight working again some laptop displays allow you to write directly on the display because the display itself is a digitizer you would use a pin like device like this stylus to be able to touch the screen and draw on it as if it was a piece of paper this is becoming more common on laptops and tablet computers or in hybrid computers like this one that I have a keyboard that looks very similar to a laptop but as a screen that's very similar to a tablet and then I can use this stylus to
be able to draw on the screen or use my keyboard both at the same time if you prefer not to use a stylus you could use a laptop screen that has direct touchpad support so you can touch the screen and input information into that device these are usually two Isis that have an option for a keyboard or it can use it individually as a single tablet component so that you can input in whichever way makes sense for you you
