Abstract
Conventional liquid crystal displays, which are based upon twisted nematic materials, suffer from several problems: their polarizers limit their viewing angles and make them sensitive to humidity, they are fairly slow, and they do not lend themselves readily to multicolor displays. A new dichroic dye LCD overcomes these problems because it operates on an absorption, rather than a polarization, principle. The new display essentially, is a light valve. It is opaque in the off state, appearing black when exposed to incident light. With an applied field, the LCD becomes transmitting, showing the color (or colors) of the reflector. The paper discusses in detail the performance of dichroic displays with respect to automotive requirements.