Generally, display devices are devices that display an image and include a display panel to display an image and a backlight unit to emit light to enable viewing of a bright image.
With technical improvement and screen enlargement, in recent years, curved display devices, which employ a curved screen, rather than a flat screen, in order to enlarge a sense of immersion, have been developed.
In such curved display devices, in addition to a curved display panel, a backlight unit is also fabricated into a curved form to uniformly irradiate the curved display panel with light.
Conventional backlight units have been fabricated in such a manner that a back plate is fabricated into a curved from to correspond to a curved display panel and light sources are spaced apart from one another by a constant distance to uniformly irradiate the curved back plate with light.
These conventional backlight units, however, require not only a mold to form the curved back plate, but also precise design for arrangement of light sources to enable uniform light irradiation of the curved back plate, which causes high manufacturing costs of the resulting backlight unit.
In addition, backlight units must be newly fabricated all the time whenever it is necessary to supplement insufficient luminous flux or to provide curved display devices with light sources in various ways.