What Is The Difference between CRT, LED, AMOLED, LCD, Plasma and Retina Display?

_{(image credit: Wikimedia Commons)}

Cathode Ray Tube (CRT): is a display technology where a scanning electron beam is used to excite colored phosphors that are coated onto the inside of a glass screen. This all occurs inside a large tube where the air has been evacuated to create a vacuum. This is now considered to be some old technology and is the earliest display technology for television.

Plasma Displays (Link): in this technology a gas inside each pixel is made to glow. This type of display still has some fans but is now considered to be outdated due to the difficulty in producing the displays, their heavier weight and the higher power consumption (think Energy Star).

Liquid Crystal Display (LCD): This is currently the most common display technology for televisions and there are many subtypes of LCD displays. In this type of display three different colors of LCD pixels (red, green, and blue) are made more or less opaque in order to let through light that is being created by a back light behind the screen.

Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED): In this display technology each pixel is made of individual LED pixels that don't need a back light. "Organic" refers to the materials used to produce the pixels. "Active Matrix" refers to how the pixels are arranged on the display (AMOLED pixels are stripes so they can appear to wander much farther than LCDs and when they die the whole stripe can go dead). There is also just OLED display technolgy as well.

Retina Display (link): This is not a technical term, it is an Apple marketing buzzword for a display that has pixels that are so small that you really can not see if you are holding the screen at normal viewing distances (well that's what they claim). Basically your vision has a certain maximum resolution and when the screen display resolution becomes higher than that the pixels disappear. This is less important for TVs because for big screens people tend to sit farther away.

Further Viewing

Slow Mo Guys on How TV Pixels Work

Further Reading

LED LCD vs. OLED vs. plasma
OLED vs LED LCD: Which is the best display technology?
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