Touchscreen is a display that can detect your touch. Today everyone know about touchscreen because of ATM machines and Smartphones they use. resistive and capacitive touchscreen are two different types of touchscreen technologies.
How Resistive Touchscreen Works?
Resistive touchscreen works like this.
This type of screen display is made up of two layers separated by a very thin space. Both these layers have a coating (a resistive layer) inside, facing each other. When you touch outer layer, these two layers (coating inside) touch each other. Thus voltage passes between them. Then it is processed as a touch in that place. Anything that creates enough pressure activates this mechanism. Resistive touchscreen technology comes with low cost, but it suffers from poor contrast because of extra layer of material over the screen.
How Capacitive Touchscreen Works?
Capacitive touchscreen makes use of electrical properties of the human body. A capacitive touchscreen panel consists of an insulator (glass) coated with a transparent conductor. As electricity can pass through human body (conductor), a touch to the screen can cause distortion in its electrostatic field, which we can measure as a change in capacitance. There are different technologies used to determine the location of touch. As this technology uses electrical property of human body, it has it’s own limitations when we try to use this type of touchscreen with insulated material, like gloves.
Difference Between Resistive and Capacitive Touchscreen
| Resistive Touchscreen | Capacitive Touchscreen |
| It is based on resistance and pressure of touch. | It is based on change in capacitance and electrical properties of human body. |
| Low Cost. | Comparatively Expensive. |
| For touch, you can use anything that can create mechanical pressure on screen. | As this technology is based on conductive properties, you can not use insulating material to touch, like gloves. |
| Poor contrast because of extra layer of material on screen. | One main thin layer which makes display sharper. |
| Less Sensitive and accurate. | More sensitive and accurate touchscreen technology. |
You can easily determine the type of touchscreen (resistive and capacitive touchscreen) that your smartphone have. If the touchscreen display of your phone never responds to the touch of insulated material, then it is capacitive touchscreen. Otherwise it should be a resistive type of touchscreen. Today, almost every smartphone using this resistive and capacitive touchscreen technology.
Capacitive touchscreen was invented before resistive touchscreen. Though resistive touchscreens are cost effective, capacitive touchscreens are more sensitive, responsive, accurate and have a good screen display qualities. Because of these qualities, today every high-end smart device with touchscreen technology using capacitive type of touchscreen. The more information about resistive and capacitive touchscreen technology is available on Wikipedia.