What would happen if a television or monitor screen gets all its backlights, reflective layers, diffuser layers, polarizer layers removed ?

Is this it ?

 

If all of those parts of the display are removed, it is very likely that it will not be usable again, because they are all portions of a system that must have all of them working together. So it will be like a V8 engine without connecting rods. Except not heavy enough to be a good anchor. And why would anyone ever do that??

 

What would happen if a television or monitor screen gets all its backlights, reflective layers, diffuser layers, polarizer layers removed ?

Is this it ?

View attachment 332984

LCDs and OLEDs are very different things. An OLED display emits light. It has the reverse of the LCDs problem—there can’t be any dark areas on the display without having it backed with something dark. The darkest pixels on an OLED are off, while on a LCD they are on.

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In the LCD case, the polarizer is integral. Without it the LCD would not block light and so wouldn’t produce an image. In fact, there have been spaces where the polarizer of an LCD was removed so the viewer would have to wear polarizing glasses to see it. (very poor security though probably effective in cases where it wasn’t anticipated by those who might want to bypass it.)

But the backlight is there because the LCD is mounted in a dark box. In the reverse of the OLED, the brightest areas are the ones that are off. You can think of the LCD as being subtractive and the OLED as additive.

The various layers associated with backlighting could be removed without preventing operation but the brightest area on the screen would be the ambient light. In the case of non-backlit, retroreflective LCDs, a reflector causes ambient light passing through to reflect back and light the display. There are generally not useful except in bright light.

an example of a real application for a transparent LCD, it goes on a car windshield with a suction cup​

Contrast would be poor and in the depicted application I can see no advantage at all. It is possible that you might want to do an overlay on something in which case you could take advantage of this “backless” idea.

 

Actually, I did strip a fair- sized TV a couple of years ago. Because I was wanting to see just what it was inside. The biggest part of that learning experience was seeing just how many connections are actually involved. Consider that EVERY pixel must include two connections to the X-Y matrix, at least. And more connections if it is a multi-color pixel. This means that there is a whole lot of fast decoding going on at the edge of the screen. It also explains why the larger screens are so very expensive: It requires a large machine to print all of that with the required accuracy. And my guess is that the production yield is not as good.