POLARIZING MEMBER AND LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAY DEVICE

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a liquid crystal display device in which coloring in all directions of oblique viewing angles can be uniformly suppressed while good visibility characteristics in the perpendicular direction is maintained and in which excellent display quality is obtained by disposing a cholesteric liquid crystal layer, a 1/4 wavelength plate and an optical rotatory layer so that the polarizing plane of linearly polarized light passing through the cholesteric liquid crystal layer and 1/4 wavelength layer is rotated by the optical rotatory layer. SOLUTION: The polarizing member has a cholesteric liquid crystal layer 1, a 1/4 wavelength plate 2 and an optically rotatory layer 3. The cholesteric liquid crystal layer 1 separates the incident natural light into reflected light and transmitted light consisting of circularly polarized light to obtain the transmitted light consisting of either the clockwise or counterclockwise circularly polarized light. The cholesteric liquid crystal layer 1 may be formed as a structure of two or more layers by combining layers having different reflection wavelength. The 1/4 wavelength plate 2 converts the circularly polarized light created by the cholesteric liquid crystal layer 1 into linearly polarized light so that the light is hardly absorbed by an absorption type polarizing plate. The optically rotatory layer controls the polarizing plane of the linearly polarized light exiting from the 1/4 wavelength plate 2.