Transmittance Scaling for Reducing Power Dissipation of a Backlit TFT-LCD

This chapter presents transmittance scaling; a technique aimed at conserving power in a transmissive TFT-LCD with a cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) backlight by reducing the backlight illumination while compensating for the luminance loss. This goal is accomplished by adjusting the transmittance function of the TFT-LCD panel while meeting an upper bound on a contrast distortion metric. Experimental results show that an average of 3.7X power saving can be achieved for still images with a mere 10% contrast distortion.