Equivalent retarder approach to reflective liquid crystal displays

Reflective liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are studied using the Jones 2×2 matrix method. The reflective LCD effectively behaves as a single retardation layer. Conditions on the retardation and optical axis orientation of this equivalent retarder in order to obtain high brightness and high contrast are derived and applied to twisted nematic layers without and with a compensating waveplate. The optimization of the display performance by numerical calculations is greatly simplified by analytical results relating the parameters of the liquid crystal, incident polarization, and compensator.