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NEC has produced 12 new products in the past 15 months or so, ranging from 2.7-inch to 15-inch transflective solutions for kiosks, drive-up windows, ATMs, portable medical devices and portable test and measurement instruments.

NEC's super-reflective natural light (SR-NLT) offers a choice of two operating modes depending on the outdoor light environment: the Transmissive Mode, which uses the module's backlight as a light source, and the Reflective Mode, which employs ambient light. Simply turning the backlight on or off changes modes. This type of LCD features a high-level combination of transmissivity in the Transmissive Mode and reflectivity in the Reflective Mode, making it ideal for outdoor light conditions. The Reflective Mode actually uses ambient light as the display's light source instead of the module backlight, saving battery life in PDAs and other mobile terminals and handsets.

"Typically, we use SR in smaller sizes [four inches and smaller]," Dunhouse says. "It's application-based and meant to be used indoors with the backlight on or outdoors with the backlight off. It's primarily aimed at mobile displays."

The company's Super-transmissive (ST) is based on normal transmission to an LCD module, he adds. "You take an amorphous silicon LCD and add enhanced backlight [a proprietary coating] to achieve what behaves like transmissive. The goal is to maintain contrast in any light."

DuPont uses direct bonding for LCD enhancement, which provides both improved outdoor viewing and ruggedization. The technology optically bonds an anti-reflective glass, plastic or touch sensor directly to the front of a flat-panel display.