The LCDs built for projection systems are most often small reflective or transmissive panels lit up by a powerful arc lamp source. A number of lenses magnifies the reflected or transmitted image and displays it on a screen. In front-projection systems the LCD is located on the same area of the screen as the viewer, although in rear-projection systems the screen is lit from behind. Projectors of greater expense and performance sometimes be found with three discrete LCD panels, creating separate red, green, and blue images that combine to create a coloured picture on the screen.

The increase in demand for film displays has granted a special emphasis on the switching speed of liquid crystals. This has demanded the manufacture of devices using smectic liquid crystals, some of which emit a speedier electro-optical response than nematic liquid crystals. The surface-stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal (SSFLC) display is at this point the most developed smectic device. Inside it the liquid crystal molecules are cast in layers perpendicular to the substrate planes, which are separated by one or two micrometres, and throughout the layers the molecules are on a tilt, as demonstrated in the figure. The host liquid crystal has optically active molecules, and a subtle consequence of the optical activity and the shape of the molecules is the appearance of a permanent charge separation, or ferroelectric dipole, likeable to the ferromagnetic dipole of a magnet. The direction of this dipole is perpendicular to the tilt direction of the molecules and through the plane of the layers. So, there is a permanent charge separation over the liquid crystal layer in the SSFLC, and its sign is directly partnered to the tilt direction of the molecules. An applied voltage of the corresponding sign can reverse the direction of this dipole in tens of microseconds and by doing so reverse the tilt direction of the molecules. The consequential change in optical properties can cause a change from light to dark when one or more polarizers are utilised.

SSFLC devices have been publicized for bigger passive-matrix displays, but their cost and complex detail has stopped them from having any significant effect on the market. Small transmissive and reflective active-matrix SSFLC displays, however, display some probability for use as elements in projection systems or as viewfinders in digital cameras. Their immediate reacting allows them to be used in time-sequential colour systems, in which costly colour filters are replaced with a coloured backlight that flashes red, green, and blue in rapid succession (approximately 100 cycles a second). For example, the liquid crystal may be switched to a transmissive state in the red and green periods but then to a nontransmissive state during the blue period, displaying the end result that the eye sees an average of red and green light, or the colour yellow.

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