A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z _
| LCD | Liquid Crystal Display. A display that consists of two polarising transparent panels and a liquid crystal surface sandwiched in between. Voltage is applied to certain areas, causing the crystal to turn dark. A light source behind the panel transmits through transparent crystals and is mostly blocked by dark crystals. Among its major features are its lightweight construction, its portability, and its ability to be produced in much larger screen sizes than are practical for the construction of CRT display technology. Its low electrical power consumption enables it to be used in battery-powered electronic equipment such as watches and clocks. |
| Letterboxing | The practice of transferring video content shot in a widescreen aspect ratio (eg 16:9) to standard-width video format (eg 4:3) while preserving the original aspect ratio. The resulting image has mattes (black bars) above and below it. |
| Lossless Audio | Describes an audio codec which is considered lossless – meaning that the exact original data is able to be reconstructed from the compressed data. The latest multi-channel audio codecs are based on lossless compression algorithms with extremely high fidelity, such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. Other Lossless audio codecs include FLAC, WAV and Monkeys Audio. |
| Luminance | Luminance is the photometric measure of the brightness in a video picture. The luminance indicates how much luminous power will be perceived by an eye looking at the surface from a particular angle of view. Luminance is thus an indicator of how bright the surface will appear, eg if luminance is high, the picture is bright and if it is low the picture is dark. |
| LED | A video display which uses Light-Emitting Diodes. LEDs are used as indicator lamps in many devices, and are increasingly used for lighting. LEDs present many advantages over incandescent light sources (eg fluorescent) including lower energy consumption, longer lifetime, improved robustness, smaller size, faster switching, and greater durability and reliability. However, they are relatively expensive and require more precise current and heat management than traditional light sources. |
| LAN | A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a small physical area, like a home, office, or small group of buildings, such as a school, or an airport. The defining characteristics of LANs, in contrast to wide-area networks (WAN)s, include their usually higher data-transfer rates, smaller geographic area, and lack of a need for leased telecommunication lines. |