Wood over LCD monitor

Question

I've seen projects on Instructables and elsewhere where people have placed wood veneer over LEDs to create clocks, and other devices, or they might drill thicker wood down so that the LED has only veneer thickness of wood in front of it. Can this be done with an LCD monitor? If it can, how thin would the wood have to be to allow the LCD to show through suitable without the wood looking 'wrong' when the device is switched off?

Answer 1

Probably not.

LED technology is a single point of super bright light (some of which is visible to humans) which diffuses nicely. LEDs emit light.

LCD is not a technology that typically emits light. LCDs reflect light, and it is this contrast between a separate light source and the segments reflecting the light or not that give us the intelligence. They certainly don't emit bright points of light. Any lighting in an LCD application is usually a separate back- or side-light, which will already be very diffuse.

So, at best, you'd be trying to cast the shadow of the display segments onto the back of a veneer.

You can experiment and see but my assertion is that it will not work very well. Maybe one of those super back-lit displays meant for searing eyeballs whilst watching television sports might work? But instead of a wood veneer you could incorporate some sort of (polarizing or not) bezel that is meant to make LCDs pretty.

This is also the same for e-ink displays.

Answer 2

Can this be done with an LCD monitor?

That'll depends on the monitor and what results you expect.

It's worth thinking about how the effect works. I see it as a version of the theatrical scrim effect, where a fabric (scrim) with a very open weave is suspended in front of a scene. When the scene behind it is dark and the scrim is lit from the front, the audience only sees the scrim; when the front lighting is decreased and the scene behind the scrim is lit, the scrim becomes nearly transparent, and the audience sees through it. Another version of the same effect is the practice of painting window screens for privacy in city settings; people passing on the street during the day see only the painting, while people inside the house can see outside just fine. This is what you're trying to accomplish: you want enough transmission that when the screen is lit, that's what you see, but when it's dark, you only see the wood.

I'd start by looking at the screen to see how bright you can make it. You'll also need to consider the light in the room; you'll get better results in a dark room. Paper is close enough to wood that it makes a good substitute for testing. For example, I can make my screen bright enough that I can just read it through one sheet of standard copy paper, and I can barely see the image through two sheets; in a darker room, I could probably see that there is an image through three sheets. That tells me that if I'm going to use wood veneer, it'll probably have to be around 0.1-0.2 mm thick.

There might be some tricks you could use to increase light transmission through the veneer, like using a laser to drill a zillion tiny holes in it. For example, some Apple products have LED lights that are visible through what appears to be solid aluminum, and of course the trick is that the aluminum actually has an array of tiny holes that let the light pass.

You also need to consider that paper or veneer will diffuse any light that passes through, creating a big reduction in detail. If you just want to do a clock with big numbers, you can probably get it to work; if you want to read small text, it's probably not going to work.

An alternative you could consider is another lighting trick called Pepper's ghost. The idea is that you place a transparent screen (glass or plexiglas) angled downward in front of a background, and then project an image onto the screen from below. In your case, you'd put a layer of wood on the back wall of a box, your LCD screen on the bottom of the box, and a piece of glass angled from the top front edge of the box to the bottom rear edge. When the screen is lit, you'll see it reflected on the glass in front of the wood; when it's not lit, you'll just see the wood. The same concept is used in heads up displays, haunted houses, some old arcade video games, and teleprompters.

If your goal is just to make a computer screen look like a piece of wood when it's not being used, your best bet might be to just install a screensaver with an image of wood grain.

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Additional ideas:

• Transparent wood has gotten a lot of attention in the last two years. The process involves bleaching the opaque pigments out of ordinary wood, and then impregnating the wood with a clear resin. Most of the examples you see in articles show pieces of wood that have been bleached completely, but it stands to reason that you might be able to use the same process to remove only some of the pigment and thereby increase the material's light transmission while still keeping some of the look of wood grain when there's no light behind it.

• A simple, practical solution would be to simply cover the monitor with some kind of wood panel when not in use. If you can build the monitor into a table or cabinet, you could have a motorized panel that slides into place. Or you could make a tambour panel that bends around the top or side of the monitor and rolls up behind it.