will lcd monitors burn in made in china

Responsible for performing installations and repairs (motors, starters, fuses, electrical power to machine etc.) for industrial equipment and machines in order to support the achievement of Nelson-Miller’s business goals and objectives:

• Perform highly diversified duties to install and maintain electrical apparatus on production machines and any other facility equipment (Screen Print, Punch Press, Steel Rule Die, Automated Machines, Turret, Laser Cutting Machines, etc.).

• Provide electrical emergency/unscheduled diagnostics, repairs of production equipment during production and performs scheduled electrical maintenance repairs of production equipment during machine service.

Responsible for performing installations and repairs (motors, starters, fuses, electrical power to machine etc.) for industrial equipment and machines in order to support the achievement of Nelson-Miller’s business goals and objectives:

• Perform highly diversified duties to install and maintain electrical apparatus on production machines and any other facility equipment (Screen Print, Punch Press, Steel Rule Die, Automated Machines, Turret, Laser Cutting Machines, etc.).

• Provide electrical emergency/unscheduled diagnostics, repairs of production equipment during production and performs scheduled electrical maintenance repairs of production equipment during machine service.

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Image burn-in, also referenced as screen burn-in or ghost image, is a permanent discoloration of sections on an electronic display caused by increasing, non-uniform use of the screen.

The term burn-in dates back to when old monitors using phosphor compounds that emit light to produce images lost their luminance due to severe usage in specific display areas.

Chances are you"ve encountered image burn-in and image retention before, but you didn"t know which one you were seeing. They both have the same visual effects, so it"s easy to mistake them for each other, but there"s one key difference:

Most of the time, these guides explain how image retention works and how you can speed up its recovery process. We want to clear up any confusion you might have about image burn-in and image retention on LCD and OLED displays.

Image retention, also known as ghosting or image persistence, is the temporary effect of images remaining visible on LCDs or OLEDs for a short period, usually a few seconds.

If the images fade away after a short time, you are dealing with temporary image retention. If the images stay permanently, you are dealing with image burn-in.

Image retention doesn"t require any intervention from the user to make it go away – it"ll do that by itself. Retention will often occur before burn-in does on newer display technology like our

using a screen saver, cycling various graphics on the screen to exercise the pixels, and powering off the display whenever possible will help clear the image retention on your display.

These are the same tricks you"ll see advertised as a "cure" for image burn-in, but don"t be fooled. There"s no fix for burn-in, only ways to prolong it from happening.

Before you assume your screen has burn-in damage, try these tips and wait to see if it"s just image retention. Image retention is a harmless and common occurrence on many screens.

Image burn-in is caused by screen pixels that stay activated in a static position for long periods of time.Think of a TV in a lobby or waiting area that"s always playing the same news channel. The news channel footer and logo get burned into the screen permanently, even when you change the channel.

When LCD or OLED pixels stay activated in a static position, they"ll eventually become "stuck" in that position. When this happens, you"ll notice a faded, stubborn image that persists on the screen.

After showing a static image for long periods of time, the crystals in a liquid crystal display become weaker to move, and have more difficulty turning from the fully "ON" position to the fully "OFF" position

When pixels fail to activate or deactivate entirely, it results in faded images that won"t clear from the screen. This is common in applications using character LCDs where the alphanumeric characters are updated less frequently.

OLEDs are unique because they don"t need a backlight to light up. Each pixel on the display is a self-illuminating LED, so they generate their own light. However, the pixels inevitably lose their brightness over time. The longer an OLED pixel is illuminated, the dimmer it will appear next to lesser-used pixels.

If a static image stays on an OLED display long enough, the pixels will leave a shadow behind the previous image, even when the display shows something completely different.

Remember: There"s no way to remove or reduce burn-in after it occurs. If a stubborn image persists for extended periods or after restarting your display, you"re likely dealing with image burn-in.

Even the most advanced displays will experience burn-in at some point, but there are some simple actions you can take to extend your screen"s lifespan before burn-in occurs. With the proper practices, you can get years of outstanding performance from your display without any burn-in effects.

If a power cycle isn"t an option, you can use the display ON/OFF command to turn off the display. Alternatively, you can put the display into sleep mode while retaining the display data in RAM.

A screensaver is a good alternative if you can"t turn your display off. For displays that don"t need to be ON at all times, it"s helpful to let the screen rest when not in use.

Get those pixels moving! The longer a pixel stays activated in a static position, the closer it gets to being burned in. You can exercise your screen"s pixels with scrolling text, moving images, or changing colors.

For an OLED display, decreasing the contrast will lower the brightness and reduce the rate of image burn. More illumination (brightness) requires more current, which reduces OLED pixel lifespans.

For a LCD display, lowering the contrast will put less stress on the liquid crystals and will help to reduce the rate of pixels becoming weak, or sticking.

Remember that image burn-in is not reversible and can not be fixed once it happens. Whether it is a scrolling effect, rotating pixels, using a screensaver, or turning off the screen when not in use, it"s essential to establish image burn-in preventive measures to help extend the lifespan of your display.

E-waste, or electronic waste, consists of everything from scrapped TVs, refrigerators and air conditioners to that old desktop computer that may be collecting dust in your closet.

Many of these gadgets were initially manufactured in China. Through a strange twist of global economics, much of this electronic junk returns to China to die.

“According to United Nations data, about 70% of electronic waste globally generated ended up in China,” said Ma Tianjie, a spokesman for the Beijing office of Greenpeace.

“Much of [the e-waste] comes through illegal channels because under United Nations conventions, there is a specific ban on electronic waste being transferred from developed countries like the United States to countries like China and Vietnam.”

For the past decade, the southeastern town of Guiyu, nestled in China’s main manufacturing zone, has been a major hub for the disposal of e-waste. Hundreds of thousands of people here have become experts at dismantling the world’s electronic junk.

On seemingly every street, laborers sit on the pavement outside workshops ripping out the guts of household appliances with hammers and drills. The roads in Guiyu are lined with bundles of plastic, wires, cables and other garbage. Different components are separated based on their value and potential for re-sale. On one street sits a pile of green and gold circuit boards. On another, the metal cases of desktop computers.

At times, it looks like workers are reaping some giant plastic harvest, especially when women stand on roadsides raking ankle-deep “fields” of plastic chips.

In one workshop, men sliced open sacks of these plastic chips, which they then poured into large vats of fluid. They then used shovels and their bare hands to stir this synthetic stew.

“We sell this plastic to Foxconn,” one of the workers said, referring to a Taiwanese company that manufactures products for many global electronics companies, including Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

This may be one of the world’s largest informal recycling operations for electronic waste. In one family-run garage, workers seemed to specialize in sorting plastic from old televisions and cars into different baskets. “If this plastic cup has a hole in it, you throw it away,” said a man who ran the operation, pointing to a pink plastic mug. “We take it and re-sell it.”

But recycling in Guiyu is dirty, dangerous work. “When recycling is done properly, it’s a good thing for the environment,” said Ma, the Greenpeace spokesman in Beijing.

“But when recycling is done in primitive ways like we have seen in China with the electronic waste, it is hugely devastating for the local environment.”

According to the April 2013 U.N. report “E-Waste in China,” Guiyu suffered an “environmental calamity” as a result of the wide-scale e-waste disposal industry in the area.

Much of the toxic pollution comes from burning circuit boards, plastic and copper wires, or washing them with hydrochloric acid to recover valuable metals like copper and steel. In doing so, workshops contaminate workers and the environment with toxic heavy metals like lead, beryllium and cadmium, while also releasing hydrocarbon ashes into the air, water and soil, the report said.

Studies by the Shantou University Medical College revealed that many children tested in Guiyu had higher than average levels of lead in their blood, which can stunt the development of the brain and central nervous system.

Piles of technological scrap had been dumped in a muddy field just outside of town. There, water buffalo grazed and soaked themselves in ponds surrounded by piles of electronic components with labels like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Epson and Dell.

“Releases of mercury can occur during the dismantling of equipment such as flat screen displays,” wrote Greenpeace, in a report titled “Toxic Tech.” “Incineration or landfilling can also result in releases of mercury to the environment…that can bioaccumulate and biomagnify to high levels in food chains, particularly in fish.”

Most of the workers in Guiyu involved in the e-waste business are migrants from destitute regions of China and poorly educated. Many of them downplayed the potential damage the industry could cause to their health.

“Of course it isn’t healthy,” said Lu, a woman who was rapidly sorting plastic shards from devices like computer keyboards, remote controls and even computer mice. She and her colleagues burned plastic using lighters and blow-torches to identify different kinds of material.

Several migrants said that while the work is tough, it allows them more freedom than working on factory lines where young children are not permitted to enter the premises and working hours are stringent.

Despite the environmental degradation and toxic fumes permeating the air, many in Guiyu said that conditions have improved dramatically over the years.

“I remember in 2007, when I first came here, there was a flood of trash,” said Wong, a 20-year-old man who ferried bundles of electronic waste around on a motorcycle with a trailer attached to it.

“Before people were washing metals, burning things and it severely damaged people’s lungs,” Wong added. “But now, compared to before, the [authorities] have cracked down pretty hard.”

A group of farmers who had migrated from neighboring Guangxi province to cultivate rice in Guiyu told CNN they did not dare drink the local well water.

“It may not sound nice, but we don’t dare eat the rice that we farm because it’s planted here with all the pollution,” Zhou said, pointing at water-logged rice paddy next to him.

Asked who did eat the harvested rice, Zhou answered: “How should I know? A lot of it is sold off … they don’t dare label the rice from here as ‘grown in Guiyu.’ They’ll write that its rice from some other place.”

Not that surprising considering that the latest food scandal to hit the country earlier this month is cadmium-laced rice. Officials in Guangzhou city, roughly 400 kilometers away from Guiyu, found high rates of cadmium in rice and rice products. According to the city’s Food and Drug Administration samples pulled from a local restaurant, food seller and two university canteens showed high levels of cadmium in rice and rice noodles. Officials did not specify how the contaminated rice entered the city’s food supply.

“Why are they stopping the garbage from reaching us?” asked one man who ran a plastic sorting workshop. “Of course it’s hurting our business,” he added.

The Chinese government had some success regulating e-waste disposal with a “Home Appliance Old for New Rebate Program,” which was tested from 2009 to 2011.

Even if Chinese authorities succeed in limiting smuggled supplies of foreign garbage, the U.N. warns that the country is rapidly generating its own supply of e-waste.

“Domestic generation of e-waste has risen rapidly as a result of technological and economic development,” the U.N. reported. It cited statistics showing an exponential surge in sales of TV’s, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and computers in China over a 16-year period.

To avoid a vicious cycle of pollution, resulting from both the manufacture and disposal of appliances, Greenpeace has lobbied for manufacturers to use fewer toxic chemicals in their products.

AMOLED burn-in on screens and displays is permanent. Fortunately, you can slow it down and reduce its visibility by using a few simple tricks, which can also increase battery life.

Each pixel within an Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode (AMOLED) comprises red, green, and blue (and sometimes white) sub-pixels. When they emit light, they decay. Burn-in appears because individual sub-pixels lose brightness at different rates, depending on its color. The most-used light-emitting sub-pixels, such as for navigation and status icons, wear out first, leading to uneven light production.

So the more you use the device, the more visible its burn-in. And the longer you display the same image, the more that image"s outline will persist on the display.

It doesn"t help that many user-interface buttons are white. For an AMOLED panel to produce white light, the display switches on three different sub-pixels in proximity to one another. Each sub-pixel produces a different color: red, blue, and green. Together they appear white to the human eye. However, each of the three colors wears out at different rates, depending on the manufacturer.

For the AMOLED on most smartphones, red sub-pixels are the most durable, followed by green. Blue decays the fastest. When you see burn-in, it"s often caused by a weakening blue sub-pixel. All "fixes" aim at addressing the failing blue sub-pixel. Remember, there are also tools available to fix dead pixels.

Everyone with an OLED display has some burn-in. But often, it"s not fully visible unless you display a solid color at maximum brightness. The Android operating system has access to many apps that detect burn-in damage. The best of these is Screen Test.

Screen Test is ultra-simple: install and run the app. Touching the screen shifts between colors and patterns. If you see a persistent image impression or blotchy coloration, you have burn-in.

For my AMOLED phone, I"ve taken every precaution against screen burn-in. Even so, the display is still a little blotchy after over a year of use. Fortunately, there are no indications of burn-in where the navigation buttons are.

Android 10"s dark mode finally allows for Android system menus and apps to appear dark in color. It will turn Chrome"s user interface black, as well as the Settings menu, navigation bar, and notifications shade.

Android made it possible to get rid of the navigation bar in Android 10. Once enabled, gestures allow navigation by swiping your finger on the screen. You can enable Gesture mode by doing the following:

Some might notice that the stock wallpapers in Android aren"t usually suited for OLED screens. OLED screens consume very little energy when displaying the color black, and they do not burn-in when displaying black. Unfortunately, older Android versions don"t include a solid black wallpaper option.

Fortunately, the free app Colors, from developer Tim Clark, allows users to change their wallpaper to a solid color. Just install and run the app, then choose a solid black background as the new wallpaper.

Using black wallpaper will improve the battery performance of your device, so this one is a win-win. However, if you have Android 8.0 or newer, you might already have solid colors available as a wallpaper.

If you don"t have Android 10 or newer, the default Android Launcher isn"t OLED friendly. In Android 5.0, it forces the App Drawer wallpaper to white (the worst color for OLED screens). One of the best launchers for darker colors is Nova Launcher. Not only is it more responsive, it offers better customization options.

Minma Icon Pack changes your bright, screen-damaging icons into a darker, OLED-friendly palette. Over 300 icons are available, which cover the default icons as well as many others.

Firefox Mobile is infinitely customizable. While they, unfortunately, removed many of their browser"s mobile add-ons, you can still turn entire webpages black. And, on top of that, Firefox includes a dark theme.

I recommend installing an add-on. The easiest-to-use add-on is Dark Reader. Dark Reader does more than just change the color of Firefox"s user interface; Dark Reader can change webpages" to black backgrounds with red text, reducing eye strain and burn-in while also improving battery life.

Android"s dark-themed virtual keyboard options can reduce burn-in (and improve battery life). The best of these is SwiftKey, which allows users to change the color of their keyboards. The best SwiftKey theme I"ve seen so far is the Pumpkin theme. If you turn on Android"s dark theme, it automatically turns the keyboard black. In this case, you can simply use the default keyboard.

There are a few other burn-in repair tools, but I don"t recommend them since they either require root access and/or can increase screen damage. However, for reference, you can read about them below and why using them is a bad idea. They fall into two categories:

I do not recommend using this option unless your screen is already trashed. It will cause additional damage but may reduce the appearance of already existing on-screen burn. Inverting colors simply reverses the colors displayed on your screen. Whites become blacks and vice-versa.

If you use the phone with the colors inverted for extended periods of time, it will burn-in the areas surrounding the burned-in navigation bar, reducing its visibility.

Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) introduced the Invert colors option to help the visually impaired. It"s not at all designed to combat burn-in and remains experimental. To invert colors, take the following steps:

Several tools claim to reduce the appearance of burn-in by attempting to age the entirety of your OLED panel. These screen burn-in tools flash red, green, and blue (or other) colors on your screen.

The reason is pretty simple: AMOLED burn-in occurs as a natural part of an organic LED"s life cycle. Therefore, tools that claim to fix AMOLED burn-in will cause uniform damage across all AMOLED pixels thus potentially worsening its image quality.

None of these methods will stop the inevitable and slow destruction of your device"s screen. However, using all the recommended options in this article will dramatically decrease the rate at which it decays. That said, some of the oldest AMOLED phones have very little burn-in. The decay of organic LEDs is almost entirely aesthetic, particularly on newer phones.

U.S. President Joe Biden holds a semiconductor during his remarks before signing an executive order on the economy at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 24, 2021.Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images

In the summer of 2020, massive wildfires erupted in California and Oregon. Forest fires are a yearly occurrence in the region. Yet amid devastation and chaos, the thousands of firefighters battling the flames quickly noticed that something was different from other years. Controlled burning, a crucial tool to prevent wildfires, had not taken place during the spring. Something else was amiss: There were no drones available to monitor how quickly the flames were spreading. If firefighters had known why there had been no controlled burns and why drones were missing, they would probably have been surprised. It had nothing to do with forests, environmental policies, or perennial budget cuts. It was all about China.

The previous year, the Trump administration had ordered U.S. government agencies to stop using more than 800 drones that previously helped to monitor fires and to conduct controlled burns across the country. The drones worked perfectly well, but they were made by DJI, a Chinese company. Using unmanned aircraft from DJI is nothing special: The firm supplies more than 70 percent of the world’s civilian drones. However, the administration worried that the drones might covertly send sensitive information to China, allowing Beijing to see exactly what the drones could see.

DJI had vigorously denied these claims and taken steps to relocate production to the United States. Staff from the U.S. Interior Department had warned that halting controlled burning would likely result in catastrophic wildfires. Yet the administration had chosen to ignore these warnings and to go even further with its China-proofing strategy: Washington also halted the acquisition of 17 high-tech systems, called Ignis, which help to start controlled fires. The technology was American. Several years earlier, the U.S. government had added Ignis to a top list of “Made in America” innovations. However, there was a catch: The Ignis systems include Chinese-made components. For the administration, this was too much of a risk to take.

With drones grounded and Ignis systems missing, the U.S. Office of Wildland Fire was able to carry out only a quarter of the controlled-burning operations that it had arranged to undertake in 2020. The backup plan would have been to use aircraft manned by firefighters, but this option was quickly abandoned: It imperiled human lives when there was a risk-free alternative.

The lack of drones was a tangible illustration of the ripple effects of the U.S.-China conflict. It came with catastrophic consequences. It is unlikely that using drones would have prevented the fires, which were due to an unusual combination of strong winds and extreme heat. However, perhaps it could have helped to lower the death toll (nearly 40 people died) and to reduce the scope of the damage (which reached $19 billion in California alone). Was mitigation of unsubstantiated risks that China may use the drones to spy on U.S. soil worth such a high price? For Washington, the answer was apparently a clear yes.

The new FLIR C360 Muve gas detector is seen on a DJI Matrice 210 drone during a demonstration at the Los Angeles Fire Department ahead of DJI"s AirWorks conference in Los Angeles.

The new FLIR C360 Muve gas detector is seen on a DJI Matrice 210 drone during a demonstration at the Los Angeles Fire Department ahead of DJI’s AirWorks conference in Los Angeles on Sept. 23, 2019. ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

Washington’s concerns around China’s technological rise—and the industrial espionage and cybertheft that go with it—date back to the early 2000s. They came to the fore in 2018, when the U.S. trade representative issued a lengthy report summarizing China’s perceived offenses against the United States. The document highlighted Washington’s realization that the Chinese economy is not market-driven, but fully state-led. According to the U.S. government, China’s economic strategy focuses on attracting foreign firms, stealing their technology, and indigenizing it before forcing the companies out of the Chinese market. In the view of U.S. policymakers, this process involves only a few, well-documented steps.

First, the Chinese government forces global companies that want to gain access to China’s market to form joint ventures with Chinese firms. These local companies have one single objective: siphoning the technological secrets of their foreign counterparts. This is a well-known issue; as the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive put it, “Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage.” (To be fair, the United States is probably not far behind.) Alternatively, China may also force Western firms to sell their know-how to their Chinese partners at ridiculously low prices.

Once Beijing has gathered the technology it is looking for, Chinese companies replicate it. This is the famous moment when foreign businesses realize that a factory closely resembling their own has just opened down the road. Strangely, the Chinese plant happens to manufacture exact replicas of the Western products. Washington believes that Beijing eventually plans to kick foreign companies out of China. This makes sense, in theory: Once Chinese companies have gotten hold of foreign technology, Beijing may see little reason to let competing foreign firms remain in its domestic market.

These unfair practices are widely acknowledged, but they form only one aspect of U.S. concerns toward China. In recent years, the U.S. government has also become increasingly worried that letting Chinese technological companies operate on U.S. soil or having U.S. government agencies use Chinese-made technology puts national security at risk. This was the reasoning behind the grounding of the controlled-burning drones on the West Coast. The issue is far from limited to drones, however. The argument goes that all of China’s high-tech companies have ties to the Chinese state and may be compelled to secretly gather data on their Western consumers.

On paper, these concerns appear valid. Although there are no public records of such an occurrence, China’s national security law may force Chinese companies that operate in the United States to collect information on American citizens or businesses and to send these data back to Beijing. Chinese firms have no choice but to cooperate with Beijing; according to China’s regulations, the companies have no right to appeal such requests. Many U.S. firms already take these issues seriously. Technological supplies to Google and Facebook, for instance, have to be China-proof.

From this perspective, Chinese-made cellphone towers installed near government buildings, such as federal offices or military bases, pose an especially acute threat. This is the crux of the debate around Beijing’s participation to the global rollout of 5G telecommunications networks. Defense hawks believe that China could use the infrastructure to spy on sensitive installations. China’s backers are quick to point out that these concerns are both theoretical and unsubstantiated. However, there are precedents: On two separate occasions, China was accused of spying on the Ethiopian headquarters of the African Union. Beijing and the Chinese companies that are suspected of having been involved have denied the accusations, which the African Union has also—albeit inexplicably—downplayed.

The U.S. security establishment’s worst-case scenario looks even more worrying. Some experts fear that installing Chinese-made telecommunications equipment on U.S. soil may enable Beijing to pull the plug on America’s phone or Internet networks. Most analysts believe that this is not really feasible. At any rate, this sounds unlikely: China’s growth would tank if the U.S. economy crashed. If China took such an extreme step, Beijing’s long-term ability to convince countries to install Chinese telecommunications equipment would also suffer. However, if the United States and China became embroiled in a direct military conflict, for instance over Taiwan, Beijing would have nothing to lose.

Nowadays, the bipartisan view in Washington’s corridors of power is that China is rolling out a revamped version of economic imperialism, just like Great Britain in the 19th century or Japan after World War II. To retain its role as the world’s sole superpower, Washington believes that it has to stop Beijing in its tracks. Some Americans go as far as seeing the U.S.-China clash as a generational one, on a par with conflicts against the former Soviet Union or Islamist terror. The reality may be less dramatic. The conflict between the United States and China is one for economic dominance between an incumbent economic superpower and its rising challenger.

In this economic war, the United States is unsurprisingly keen to put all forms of economic coercion to good use. The Trump administration imposed tariffs on $360 billion of U.S. imports from China; President Joe Biden has made it clear he is not lifting these. The United States has also sanctioned Chinese individuals linked to human-rights abuses against both the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. In the financial sphere, U.S. lawmakers are pondering whether to delist more than $1 trillion worth of shares of Chinese companies on U.S. stock exchanges. Congress is also considering barring the Thrift Savings Plan, which manages the pensions of millions of federal government employees, from investing in Chinese companies.

The Chinese economy, however, has grown far too big for Washington to sanction Beijing with its usual toolkit. The United States has probably explored all the potential trade tools—mainly tariffs—that it can use against China. Financial sanctions appear highly unlikely; targeting the world’s second-largest economy with financial sanctions would almost certainly backfire. The United States needs something else to advance its interests against China. Washington has therefore focused its efforts on the technology sector.

A worker handles copper lead frames at Renesas Electronics, a semiconductor manufacturer, in Beijing on May 14, 2020.NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP via Getty Images

In 2016, the Chinese leadership announced that it planned to spend $150 billion over 10 years to develop a Chinese semiconductor industry. The U.S.-China conflict had not started in earnest by then, but Beijing’s announcement raised alarm bells across the U.S. defense establishment. Experts warned that China’s plan to beef up its presence in the semiconductor sector put U.S. national security at risk: In a few decades, Chinese firms could become able to manufacture microchips more advanced than the United States’. As a result, China’s missiles, lasers, or air defense systems could become the most sophisticated in the world.

Semiconductors are the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese economy. Beijing buys more than $300 billion of foreign-made semiconductors every year, making computer chips China’s largest import, far above oil. This reflects the fact that Chinese factories import 85 percent of the microchips they need to build electronic goods.34 Most of these semiconductors are manufactured using U.S. technology. For Washington, this makes export controls a seemingly ideal tool to deprive Beijing of U.S. innovation and know-how. Such restrictions function in a similar fashion to financial sanctions: They seek to curb adversaries’ access to U.S.-made staples—the greenback for financial sanctions or computer chip technology for export controls—that have become so crucial that few countries can do without them.

Washington knows that it has a massive trump card to play in the semiconductor sector: Virtually every microchip around the world has some link to the United States, be it because it was designed with U.S.-made software, produced using U.S.-made equipment, or inspected with U.S.-made tools. This is not surprising: The United States is the birthplace of the semiconductor industry. The sector was born in the 1950s to meet the growing tech needs of the U.S. military as it started to confront the former Soviet Union. Around 70 years later, U.S. microchip firms have a market capitalization of around $1 trillion. Simply put, the United States dominates the field.

U.S. firms manufacture only around 10 percent of the computer chips sold across the world. The world’s leading microchip foundries (as semiconductor assembly lines are called) are located in Asia, mainly in Taiwan and South Korea. However, a handful of U.S. companies control all of the higher, upstream echelons of the supply chain. Given the United States’ dominance over the microchip sector, Washington knows that measures curbing China’s access to U.S. semiconductor technology have every chance to deal a blow to Beijing’s technological ambitions.

In 2018, Congress started to put this strategy into practice, quietly adopting a flurry of regulations meant to cut China’s access to U.S. know-how. In May 2019, the Trump administration started to impose export controls on Huawei, China’s telecommunications giant, sending shockwaves through the global technology sector. Washington took these restrictions a step further in May 2020, when the administration announced that it was barring all microchip manufacturers from forging chips for Huawei, anywhere across the world, if they used U.S. technology. Three months later, the Commerce Department further tightened the rules to ban all microchip sales to Huawei. In the remainder of the year, the administration broadened the restrictions to target dozens of other Chinese firms; these included SMIC, China’s largest maker of microchips.

These measures appeared severe at the time, but they were only the first steps. In October, the Biden administration dealt an even more severe blow to China’s technological sector: Instead of targeting only high-profile Chinese firms, Washington clamped down on all exports of advanced microchips and semiconductor-making tools to China. U.S. citizens were also warned that without explicit (and unlikely) U.S. government approval, they are breaking U.S. law if they choose to work for Chinese technology firms.

In many ways, these measures closely resemble financial sanctions. The difference is that instead of targeting global companies using the dollar, Washington is applying coercive measures to firms using U.S. technology, no matter whether these firms are American or foreign. Like financial sanctions, these export regulations seek to force countries and companies to choose sides between the United States and the sanctioned country—in this case China. The United States is betting that the world’s largest microchip producers, such as South Korea’s Samsung or Taiwan’s MediaTek and TSMC, will side with it and stop working with Chinese companies. Alternatively, these foreign firms could maintain ties to China, but this would come at a high price: Using U.S. technology to design or manufacture microchips for Chinese firms has become impossible. Continuing to serve the Chinese market now entails rebuilding entire, U.S.-proof manufacturing lines for Chinese customers at a cost of several billion dollars.

The global ripple effects of export controls against Chinese technological firms have proved colossal, probably even more than the Commerce Department expected. Huawei had to stop production at a number of its facilities, as many of them relied on U.S.-made equipment. Faced with high levels of uncertainty, SMIC slashed spending and investment plans. Outside China, the managers of microchip foundries frantically started to check whether their equipment used U.S. technology. If this was the case, working with dozens of firms from China, the world’s largest importer of semiconductors, had become illegal.

In some rare instances, the production lines of global tech firms did not rely on U.S. technology. In theory, this shielded these companies from U.S. measures. However, Washington intended to see to it that all Western companies ditched their contracts with Beijing—a lesson the Netherlands’ ASML, which builds machines capable of carving out microchips, learned the hard way. The U.S. administration pressed the Dutch government hard to ensure that it would forbid ASML from working with Chinese companies. The Netherlands eventually gave in to U.S. pressure and revoked ASML’s export license to China.

For Beijing, this was a sure sign of problems to come: The Dutch firm is the only company in the world that masters the extreme ultraviolet technology that SMIC needs to manufacture highly advanced chips. For the Dutch company, this development was bad news, too. The equipment cost more than $20 billion to develop, and the fast-growing Chinese market was one of the most promising. ASML’s CEO later hinted that the company was looking at making its supply chains fully U.S.-proof.

Export controls against Huawei were not meant to have a domestic impact, but they also had ripple effects on U.S. soil. Rural cellphone and Internet providers had long understood that they were in trouble. The cheap Huawei gear they had bought to connect remote and sparsely populated places to the Internet abruptly stopped receiving crucial software updates or replacement parts from U.S. firms. This was a death sentence: Without these updates and spare parts, Huawei cellphone towers and Internet networks will, over time, simply stop working.

On the other side of the Pacific, Beijing knows that Washington’s new export measures will pose a host of new problems to address. For the Chinese leadership, semiconductors are especially important in two areas: the manufacturing of cellphones and the roll-out of 5G networks on Chinese soil. The United States does not seem intent on curbing China’s ability to manufacture cheap, basic cellphones, as these do not pose a security threat to the United States; the White House has extended export licenses to a number of U.S. and foreign companies so they can continue to deal with Huawei for such unsophisticated products.

However, Washington appears keen to apply export controls to their fullest extent when it comes to highly advanced, ultrasmall chips. For China, this will be a major headache in the coming years. High-tech microchips are a crucial component of much-touted 5G telecommunications networks. Washington’s willingness to restrict Beijing’s access to advanced semiconductors will likely hamper China’s development of 5G infrastructure. The Chinese leadership will probably be able to prioritize the roll-out of 5G in a few high-profile cities and regions. However, the rest of the country will probably have to wait for longer than expected to get access to the innovations that fifth-generation networks enable, such as self-driven vehicles or smart electric grids.

Such ripple effects, both in China and the United States, are likely to be only the tip of the iceberg. The consequences of export controls restricting China’s access to U.S. technology will be witnessed only over several decades. Innovation tends to come with long-term industrial investments that involve meticulously arranged supply chains and manufacturing processes. U.S. export controls will alter these plans.

The world’s leading microchip manufacturers, including Taiwan’s TSMC (which controls around half of the global production capacity) and South Korea’s Samsung (which specializes in the most advanced microchips), are already redesigning their global supply chains with U.S. export controls in mind. TSMC plans to open a giant, $12 billion foundry in Arizona by 2024; the U.S.-subsidized plant will probably only serve the U.S. market, while other TSMC factories will continue to do business with Chinese firms. Samsung’s latest projects also reflect this new reality: The South Korean firm plans to build two foundries in the coming years, one in Texas for $17 billion and another one in Xian, in central China, for $15 billion.

Even if U.S.-China tensions were to recede, which appears highly unlikely, the long-term nature of such massive investment programs means that the effects of export controls will prove both long-lasting and hard to unwind. The Sino-American conflict over technology will take place across several decades, probably well beyond 2050. Export controls look set to form the bulk of Washington’s arsenal to defend U.S. interests, especially in the technological sector. The measures illustrate the growing shift toward an environment where technological leadership is the main driver of political influence and economic power, as well as a crucial determinant of military might.

The first electronic television was invented by Philco Taylor Farnsworth from Utah in 1927 but even by 1946 only 0.5% of U.S. households owned a TV set. By 1954, 55.7% of households had them, and by 1962, 90% did. During this time a staggering number of U.S.-based brands popped up to meet the insatiable demand of consumers who wanted to watch Lucille Ball, Steve Allen, and Gunsmoke. And the manufacturing was done in the United States.

In 1995, the last original U.S.-based manufacturer, Zenith, ceased to exist as an American-based brand then it was sold to South Korea’s LG Electronics. Every one of the the great Amercan brands you know–RCA, General Electric, Westinghouse, Sharp–were in name only, a nameplate to stick on a foreign-made brand in hopes that unsuspecting consumers wouldn’t notice or care.

Today, there are only a handful of TV brands left outside of China: Samsung and LG (South Korea), Sony (Japan), Philips (EU) and Vizio (US). A company in China had attempted to acquire Vizio in 2016, but that deal never happened so as of now they’re still a US company (they recently had their long-awaited IPO).

Pretty much every other brand you’ve heard of: TCL, HiSense, Seiki, Insignia are 100% based in China. Just recently, Japanese electronics giant Panasonic announced that they were outsourcing their TV production to TCL. And many recognizable brands like Toshiba, Sharp, Westinghouse have also been subsumed by China-based companies.

First, years of taking notes from manufacturing other countries’ products allowed China companies to mimic their technology to achieve a product that may not be equal to offerings from LG, Samsung, or Sony, but are “good enough”.

Second, the CCP then subsidizes these companies so that they can offer comparable models at highly discounted prices to their competitors. The CCP is playing the long game: they’ve know that once they’ve cornered the market they’ll be able to charge whatever they want. It’s precisely the same kind of anti-competitive behavior that the U.S. Government has broken up when it happens within its borders, but is powerless to do anything about when a state does it.

And of course, it’s American consumers who ultimately make it happen when they rush to Walmart or Amazon and buy the cheap China brand to save a few dollars. This takes money away from companies that do real innovation and funnels it to allow the CCP to gradually take over the entire industry.

Here’s where it gets complicated. As we’ve seen in posts for other kinds of products, you simply can’t find a TV where 100% of the components are made outside of China. For example, LG Electronics (who builds TVs) sources its WOLED panels from LG Display, who had produced their panels in South Korea but is shifting production to Guangzhou, China. So regardless of what TV you buy, a portion of it is going to prop up the CCP.

But you can stem the bleeding. For one thing, if you buy from the big non-China brands: Samsung, LG, Sony, Philips and Vizio, at least you can support some non-China employees, such as their product development, marketing, or administrative departments.

And ideally, you’ll want to find a company that at the very least assembles their products outside of China, even if many or most of the parts are made in China. This is where the large form factor of the TV helps. A manufacturer in China could assemble a 65″ or 75″ TV and ship it 7,000 miles away, but at that size and weight it’s probably more cost effective to build a plant that’s closer to their target market and hire locals to assemble the product. So at least there’s some benefit to the local economy.

Manufacturers tend to be coy about where their parts come from and where their products are assembled. If you read what their PR departments post as a response to Amazon questions a typical responses is something vague like “our TVs are built all over the world”, so we don’t know if 99% of a TV was made in China and the other 1% was divvied up between other countries.

A little Internet sleuthing helps, however. As of 2021, Samsung has recently ceased TV production in China. Sony TVs intended for the North American market are assembled in Mexico. LG TVs are also produced in Mexico for the North American market and in Poland for the European market. Vizio does maintain manufacturing facilities in Taiwan and Mexico, so there’s a decent chance your North American-based set was made there.

The only way to tell for sure is to visit your local electronics store and see for yourself what the “Made in” or “Assembled in” label says on the particular unit you’re looking for. You can also search for “China” or “Made in” in Amazon reviews to see if anyone reported widespread sales of China-made units to the US.

LG took home the “best TV” prize at CES 2021 with this model. The C1 is the next-generation of the 2020 CX model that made just about every consumer electronics publication’s “best of” list for 2020. The C1 comes in 48″, 55″, 65″, 77″ sizes and a brand new 83″ model.

LG’s lineup can be a confusing mess of alphabet soup, but all you need to remember is that there are three ranges of LG OLEDs for 2021: The A1 sits at the low end (sacrificing things like refresh rate for price) while the G1 sits at the high end (adding some bells and whistles like an art gallery-worthy design). But the C1 is by most accounts the one to get as it manages to offer exceptional performance at a reasonable price.

LG also offers LCD sets, but OLED is the way to you. OLED is made up of organic material, so pixels “light up” themselves as opposed to traditional LED screens which are lit by a backlight. The results are much blacker blacks, much more accurate and vivid colors, and a near-infinite contrast ratio. It features Dolby Vision IQ and Dolby Atmos sound, a 120Hz refresh rate for gaming, and an α9 Gen4 AI Processor 4K chip to optimize content in real time.

If you’re a Sony fan, their top-of-the-line A90J series is certainly worth a look too. It sits at a premium price point that puts it outside the range of most consumers, but if you can afford it, more power to you!

Sony’s TV lineup also consists of OLED and LED models. While their OLED models are excellent TVs, especially for home theater setups, most reviewers give the overall OLED edge to LG.

However, there may be reasons you’re in the market for an ordinary LED panel. The most common reason has to to with screen burn-in. There is no more helpless feeling than paying thousands of dollars for a new OLED TV or smartphone, and then after accidentally leaving it on having images burned into it. With traditional LED TVs, that’s never aa concern–you can leave it on the same channel as long as you like or use it as a computer monitor.

Not surprisingly, Sony has squeezed a lot out of the TV. It achieves a high contrast ratio and decent blacks without OLED. Its fast response time, HDMI 2.1 ports, and 120Hz refresh rate make it very good for gaming.

The X90J replaces the X900H from 2020. Some say that the Samsung QN90A series is also a great choice, but Sony’s price point certainly makes it more appealing.

This is the top of the line TV from Samsung. Its quantum dot technology allows for a full range of vivid colors even at high brightness levels where OLED starts to falter. It also introduces a new backlighting technology using Quantum Mini LEDs that are 1/40th the height of conventional LEDs and which can be packed together in tight spaces, allowing for stunning brightness and contrast and deeper blacks that rival or surpass OLEDs, all without burn-in.

Many call this TV the very best TV you can buy right now anywhere. The price tag is a whopping $5000, but if you have that kind of disposable income, you will definitely get what you pay for.

I tend to focus on the US market mostly, but for those of you visiting from Europe, Paul in the comments below brought up Cello TVs. I never heard of this brand before but the more I learn about them the more I’m impressed. They manufacture all of their TVs in County Durham in the North East of England.

Cello has an impressively low price point (alas, it would be cost-prohibitive to ship them across the Atlantic Ocean, so we can’t find them here in the US). Their reviews on Amazon are consistently high (sadly, it looks like China trolls are on Amazon UK upvoting every negative comment to get them to rise to the top, but focus on the overall ratings). If you need a basic TV at a great price that supports communities and the economy in the UK, you should definitely get one of these.

Glass substrate with ITO electrodes. The shapes of these electrodes will determine the shapes that will appear when the LCD is switched ON. Vertical ridges etched on the surface are smooth.

A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directlybacklight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome.seven-segment displays, as in a digital clock, are all good examples of devices with these displays. They use the same basic technology, except that arbitrary images are made from a matrix of small pixels, while other displays have larger elements. LCDs can either be normally on (positive) or off (negative), depending on the polarizer arrangement. For example, a character positive LCD with a backlight will have black lettering on a background that is the color of the backlight, and a character negative LCD will have a black background with the letters being of the same color as the backlight. Optical filters are added to white on blue LCDs to give them their characteristic appearance.

LCDs are used in a wide range of applications, including LCD televisions, computer monitors, instrument panels, aircraft cockpit displays, and indoor and outdoor signage. Small LCD screens are common in LCD projectors and portable consumer devices such as digital cameras, watches, digital clocks, calculators, and mobile telephones, including smartphones. LCD screens are also used on consumer electronics products such as DVD players, video game devices and clocks. LCD screens have replaced heavy, bulky cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays in nearly all applications. LCD screens are available in a wider range of screen sizes than CRT and plasma displays, with LCD screens available in sizes ranging from tiny digital watches to very large television receivers. LCDs are slowly being replaced by OLEDs, which can be easily made into different shapes, and have a lower response time, wider color gamut, virtually infinite color contrast and viewing angles, lower weight for a given display size and a slimmer profile (because OLEDs use a single glass or plastic panel whereas LCDs use two glass panels; the thickness of the panels increases with size but the increase is more noticeable on LCDs) and potentially lower power consumption (as the display is only "on" where needed and there is no backlight). OLEDs, however, are more expensive for a given display size due to the very expensive electroluminescent materials or phosphors that they use. Also due to the use of phosphors, OLEDs suffer from screen burn-in and there is currently no way to recycle OLED displays, whereas LCD panels can be recycled, although the technology required to recycle LCDs is not yet widespread. Attempts to maintain the competitiveness of LCDs are quantum dot displays, marketed as SUHD, QLED or Triluminos, which are displays with blue LED backlighting and a Quantum-dot enhancement film (QDEF) that converts part of the blue light into red and green, offering similar performance to an OLED display at a lower price, but the quantum dot layer that gives these displays their characteristics can not yet be recycled.

Since LCD screens do not use phosphors, they rarely suffer image burn-in when a static image is displayed on a screen for a long time, e.g., the table frame for an airline flight schedule on an indoor sign. LCDs are, however, susceptible to image persistence.battery-powered electronic equipment more efficiently than a CRT can be. By 2008, annual sales of televisions with LCD screens exceeded sales of CRT units worldwide, and the CRT became obsolete for most purposes.

Each pixel of an LCD typically consists of a layer of molecules aligned between two transparent electrodes, often made of Indium-Tin oxide (ITO) and two polarizing filters (parallel and perpendicular polarizers), the axes of transmission of which are (in most of the cases) perpendicular to each other. Without the liquid crystal between the polarizing filters, light passing through the first filter would be blocked by the second (crossed) polarizer. Before an electric field is applied, the orientation of the liquid-crystal molecules is determined by the alignment at the surfaces of electrodes. In a twisted nematic (TN) device, the surface alignment directions at the two electrodes are perpendicular to each other, and so the molecules arrange themselves in a helical structure, or twist. This induces the rotation of the polarization of the incident light, and the device appears gray. If the applied voltage is large enough, the liquid crystal molecules in the center of the layer are almost completely untwisted and the polarization of the incident light is not rotated as it passes through the liquid crystal layer. This light will then be mainly polarized perpendicular to the second filter, and thus be blocked and the pixel will appear black. By controlling the voltage applied across the liquid crystal layer in each pixel, light can be allowed to pass through in varying amounts thus constituting different levels of gray.

The chemical formula of the liquid crystals used in LCDs may vary. Formulas may be patented.Sharp Corporation. The patent that covered that specific mixture expired.

Most color LCD systems use the same technique, with color filters used to generate red, green, and blue subpixels. The LCD color filters are made with a photolithography process on large glass sheets that are later glued with other glass sheets containing a TFT array, spacers and liquid crystal, creating several color LCDs that are then cut from one another and laminated with polarizer sheets. Red, green, blue and black photoresists (resists) are used. All resists contain a finely ground powdered pigment, with particles being just 40 nanometers across. The black resist is the first to be applied; this will create a black grid (known in the industry as a black matrix) that will separate red, green and blue subpixels from one another, increasing contrast ratios and preventing light from leaking from one subpixel onto other surrounding subpixels.Super-twisted nematic LCD, where the variable twist between tighter-spaced plates causes a varying double refraction birefringence, thus changing the hue.

LCD in a Texas Instruments calculator with top polarizer removed from device and placed on top, such that the top and bottom polarizers are perpendicular. As a result, the colors are inverted.

The optical effect of a TN device in the voltage-on state is far less dependent on variations in the device thickness than that in the voltage-off state. Because of this, TN displays with low information content and no backlighting are usually operated between crossed polarizers such that they appear bright with no voltage (the eye is much more sensitive to variations in the dark state than the bright state). As most of 2010-era LCDs are used in television sets, monitors and smartphones, they have high-resolution matrix arrays of pixels to display arbitrary images using backlighting with a dark background. When no image is displayed, different arrangements are used. For this purpose, TN LCDs are operated between parallel polarizers, whereas IPS LCDs feature crossed polarizers. In many applications IPS LCDs have replaced TN LCDs, particularly in smartphones. Both the liquid crystal material and the alignment layer material contain ionic compounds. If an electric field of one particular polarity is applied for a long period of time, this ionic material is attracted to the surfaces and degrades the device performance. This is avoided either by applying an alternating current or by reversing the polarity of the electric field as the device is addressed (the response of the liquid crystal layer is identical, regardless of the polarity of the applied field).

Displays for a small number of individual digits or fixed symbols (as in digital watches and pocket calculators) can be implemented with independent electrodes for each segment.alphanumeric or variable graphics displays are usually implemented with pixels arranged as a matrix consisting of electrically connected rows on one side of the LC layer and columns on the other side, which makes it possible to address each pixel at the intersections. The general method of matrix addressing consists of sequentially addressing one side of the matrix, for example by selecting the rows one-by-one and applying the picture information on the other side at the columns row-by-row. For details on the various matrix addressing schemes see passive-matrix and active-matrix addressed LCDs.

LCDs, along with OLED displays, are manufactured in cleanrooms borrowing techniques from semiconductor manufacturing and using large sheets of glass whose size has increased over time. Several displays are manufactured at the same time, and then cut from the sheet of glass, also known as the mother glass or LCD glass substrate. The increase in size allows more displays or larger displays to be made, just like with increasing wafer sizes in semiconductor manufacturing. The glass sizes are as follows:

Until Gen 8, manufacturers would not agree on a single mother glass size and as a result, different manufacturers would use slightly different glass sizes for the same generation. Some manufacturers have adopted Gen 8.6 mother glass sheets which are only slightly larger than Gen 8.5, allowing for more 50 and 58 inch LCDs to be made per mother glass, specially 58 inch LCDs, in which case 6 can be produced on a Gen 8.6 mother glass vs only 3 on a Gen 8.5 mother glass, significantly reducing waste.AGC Inc., Corning Inc., and Nippon Electric Glass.

The origins and the complex history of liquid-crystal displays from the perspective of an insider during the early days were described by Joseph A. Castellano in Liquid Gold: The Story of Liquid Crystal Displays and the Creation of an Industry.IEEE History Center.Peter J. Wild, can be found at the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

In 1888,Friedrich Reinitzer (1858–1927) discovered the liquid crystalline nature of cholesterol extracted from carrots (that is, two melting points and generation of colors) and published his findings at a meeting of the Vienna Chemical Society on May 3, 1888 (F. Reinitzer: Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Cholesterins, Monatshefte für Chemie (Wien) 9, 421–441 (1888)).Otto Lehmann published his work "Flüssige Kristalle" (Liquid Crystals). In 1911, Charles Mauguin first experimented with liquid crystals confined between plates in thin layers.

In 1922, Georges Friedel described the structure and properties of liquid crystals and classified them in three types (nematics, smectics and cholesterics). In 1927, Vsevolod Frederiks devised the electrically switched light valve, called the Fréedericksz transition, the essential effect of all LCD technology. In 1936, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph company patented the first practical application of the technology, "The Liquid Crystal Light Valve". In 1962, the first major English language publication Molecular Structure and Properties of Liquid Crystals was published by Dr. George W. Gray.RCA found that liquid crystals had some interesting electro-optic characteristics and he realized an electro-optical effect by generating stripe-patterns in a thin layer of liquid crystal material by the application of a voltage. This effect is based on an electro-hydrodynamic instability forming what are now called "Williams domains" inside the liquid crystal.

The MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) was invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959, and presented in 1960.Paul K. Weimer at RCA developed the thin-film transistor (TFT) in 1962.

In 1964, George H. Heilmeier, then working at the RCA laboratories on the effect discovered by Williams achieved the switching of colors by field-induced realignment of dichroic dyes in a homeotropically oriented liquid crystal. Practical problems with this new electro-optical effect made Heilmeier continue to work on scattering effects in liquid crystals and finally the achievement of the first operational liquid-crystal display based on what he called the George H. Heilmeier was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of FameIEEE Milestone.

In the late 1960s, pioneering work on liquid crystals was undertaken by the UK"s Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern, England. The team at RRE supported ongoing work by George William Gray and his team at the Univers