Eco-friendliness and low carbon footprint are enduring pursuits for modern display technologies. In the quest for ultra-high energy efficiency, color filters have long stood as an insurmountable bottleneck. While color filters enable rich color reproduction, they block around 70% of incident light, making it difficult to continuously improve screen transmittance and reduce overall power consumption.

Developed to tackle this industry pain point, TCL CSOT’s Field Sequential Color (FSC) technology completely eliminates color filters and adopts high-transmittance pixel design, breaking the traditional transmittance ceiling of LCDs. Combined with TCL CSOT’s self-developed RGB three-color backlight system, intelligent dynamic dimming and proprietary algorithms, the technology delivers an 85-inch high-brightness LCD module with 4000 nits peak brightness and power consumption as low as nearly 400 watts. It leads the global large-format display industry into a new era of ultimate energy conservation and low carbon emissions.

Rethinking Color Rendering: Composing Hues Over Time Instead of Space

The concept of field sequential display is not newly invented; its evolution has been a long pursuit of faster response speed. The field sequential principle was first proposed decades ago, back when the industry transitioned from black-and-white to color televisions.

In conventional LCDs, each pixel consists of adjacent red, green and blue (RGB) color filters — a spatial combination that works like a colorful jigsaw to produce full-color images. By contrast, field sequential color display abandons traditional color filters. Instead, red, green and blue light sources cycle on and off in extremely rapid succession. Leveraging the human eye’s persistence of vision, the brain blends the sequential light pulses into complete colors, which is the core working principle of Field Sequential Color (FSC).

In the early days, this concept remained merely a theoretical vision due to limitations in LED brightness and liquid crystal response speed. Thanks to the maturity of high-speed liquid crystal materials and high-frequency LED driving technologies, FSC is now applicable across product segments ranging from microdisplays to large-size panels, with major breakthroughs achieved on 85-inch giant screens.

At SID 2026, TCL CSOT showcased the world’s lowest-power high-brightness 85-inch field sequential display. Featuring 17% transmittance and 4000 nits peak brightness, it achieves industry-leading low power consumption of approximately 400 watts. This innovation represents not only a revolution in display architecture, but also a qualitative leap in light energy utilization efficiency.

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Synergistic Hardware & Software Breakthroughs: Ultra-Low Power for High-Brightness Products

Perfect field sequential display relies on sophisticated coordination between hardware and software, much like a well-orchestrated symphony. Its core technologies are elaborated as follows:

1. Panel Development: High-Transmittance Design & Material Innovation for Optimized Specifications

Panel Design: Streamlined Structure to Overcome Traditional Optical Limitations

Traditional LCDs suffer severe optical loss caused by color filters (CF), which act as a light-absorbing barrier and block roughly 70% of backlight during transmission. By completely removing the CF layer, FSC technology greatly simplifies panel structure and dramatically boosts light utilization.

With color filters eliminated and pixel layout re-optimized, TCL CSOT’s 85-inch low-power high-brightness FSC display reaches a transmittance of 17%, slashing optical loss and laying a solid foundation for high-brightness and high-efficiency performance.

Material & Process Innovation: Ultra-Fast Response LC & Narrow Cell Gap for Fluid Dynamic Visuals

Field sequential display requires liquid crystal molecules to reorient within an extremely short timeframe to match the rapid switching of RGB backlights. TCL CSOT has optimized both materials and manufacturing processes:

Material upgrade: Low-viscosity liquid crystal material is adopted to minimize resistance for molecular movement, ensuring instant response during each field switching and completely eliminating the rainbow effect caused by response lag.

Process optimization: The liquid crystal cell gap is narrowed to shorten the travel path of liquid crystal molecules and further accelerate response speed.

Through in-depth R&D on materials and processes, the field sequential panel developed by TCL CSOT achieves an average Gray-to-Gray (GTG) response time of ≤ 2 ms, enabling fast sequential switching of red, green and blue frames at the hardware level.

2. Backlight Matching: RGB LED Light Sources for Full-Color Visuals via Time Division

The backlight is the heart of field sequential display, directly determining picture brightness, contrast and color performance. TCL CSOT integrates a highly compact RGB three-primary-color Mini LED backlight system for FSC technology. Each color channel is independently controlled to deliver accurate color reproduction and precise brightness adjustment.

To achieve seamless synchronization between backlight and liquid crystal driving, TCL CSOT has developed a proprietary backlight scanning control algorithm. It regulates the lighting timing of RGB LEDs with microsecond-level precision, aligning backlight switching perfectly with liquid crystal response. This high-accuracy timing control effectively prevents color crosstalk and brightness fluctuation during frame transitions, ensuring pure and stable visuals for every frame.

Powered by the integrated RGB Mini LED backlight and in-house scanning algorithm, the FSC solution achieves dual advantages of 4000 nits high brightness and wide color gamut (NTSC > 116%), delivering robust technical support for high-end commercial and professional display applications.

3. Color Breakup Compensation Algorithm: Eliminate Rainbow Artifacts for Purer Visuals

Color breakup — visible red-green-blue rainbow trailing when the eye moves rapidly — is a common challenge for field sequential displays. Since colors are synthesized by human vision in FSC systems, image processing also faces higher requirements.

To address this issue, TCL CSOT has developed a Color Breakup Compensation (CBC) algorithm based on gamut segmentation:

Precise gamut compression: The wide gamut coverage of 116% NTSC is segmented in the color space, and color mapping relationships are established. Input RGB signals are converted into complete chromaticity coordinates to define optimal segmentation boundaries and determine the brightness ratio for each backlight field.

Adaptive regional brightness control: The brightness of each backlight field is adjusted dynamically across different screen zones according to local color intensity. LED output is precisely tuned to match image content and reduce light waste.

Accurate liquid crystal transmittance calculation: A simplified light diffusion model is built to simulate backlight propagation inside the panel. Based on the correlation between brightness and transmittance, the required transmittance of liquid crystal for each field is calculated, enabling coordinated operation of backlight and liquid crystal to restore original image quality.

The full-link compensation spanning backlight and liquid crystal effectively suppresses color breakup and significantly enhances the viewing experience of field sequential displays.

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85-Inch High-Brightness Low-Power Digital Signage Debuts at SID 2026

TCL CSOT’s 85-inch high-brightness field sequential display features 17% transmittance, 4000 nits peak brightness and ultra-low power consumption of around 400 watts. Leveraging the inherent structural advantages of FSC technology, it directly targets the high power consumption pain point of outdoor digital signage, delivering disruptive improvements in energy efficiency.

Energy Saving & Emission Reduction: Setting a New Benchmark for Green Displays

Without color filters blocking light, the backlight can reach ideal brightness at lower power output, translating to lower energy consumption and less heat generation. For displays operating around the clock, this means substantial operational cost savings.

At the same 4000 nits brightness level, the FSC display consumes only around 400 watts for video playback, merely 50% of the power draw of traditional LCD commercial signage in the same size. Taking an 85-inch outdoor advertising display as an example, TCL CSOT’s FSC signage can save approximately 1,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity per unit annually, equivalent to cutting nearly 1 ton of carbon dioxide emissions. It truly enables green, low-carbon and sustainable operation.

Field sequential display technology is more than a display innovation; it represents an industrial revolution centered on energy conservation and environmental protection. By simplifying panel structure and reengineering optical paths to remove redundant color filter layers, FSC maximizes light utilization efficiency and truly “returns light to colors”.

Against the industry trend where commercial displays pursue higher brightness, lower power consumption and longer service life, FSC stands out as a key technical direction for future displays thanks to its natural physical advantages. It not only provides high-efficiency and sustainable product solutions for the industry, but also drives the global display sector toward low-carbon transformation, injecting strong momentum into worldwide sustainable development.