Patent ID: 7830474

Claim:
A lighting device for emitting light in a planar manner, comprising: a backlight section having non-uniformity in light emission in a plane perpendicular to a main light emitting direction; and an optical film arranged on the perpendicular plane and having an in-plane transmittance distribution which compensates for the non-uniformity in light emission; wherein said optical film has a plurality of slits which allow light to pass through and controls the in-plane transmittance distribution by varying shapes of openings of the slits; and wherein a part of said optical film other than the slits is composed of a light shielding layer which blocks light, a surface on a light source side of the light shielding layer is configured to reflect light, and the in-plane transmittance distribution of said optical film is set such that each of values in the in-plate transmittance distribution is smaller than a reciprocal of a corresponding value in a relative light intensity distribution of the backlight section.