modern screens are an array of lights of basic colors. what about older ones like the gameboy color one

Question

I used to have a GBA that didn’t have any brightness, I don’t understand how that works, if you turned of the lights you couldn’t see anything. I also don’t get why isn’t it used in modern devices, like using that technology to make a kindle with a colored screen would be cool and useful.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

Only OLED screens are an array of lights, where each pixel is its own light.

Older LCD screens worked more like filters, where each pixel filtered out colors from a backlight or reflector. The original Gameboy and Gameboy Color didn’t have a backlight, and just used a reflective surface to reflect ambient light (similar to what a lot of calculators use). The Gameboy Advance SP was the first one to add an actual backlight.