PURPOSE: To provide the free pattern type display device equipped with a control part which can increase the switching speed of display operation while making the most of data scanning systems by stages which are small in the number of control data lines (economical).

CONSTITUTION: Display data are inputted from a display data memory 2 stored with all display data to be displayed to plural shift registers 3 and a stand-by shift register 5 and shifted. data are inputted again and shifted, and thus the scanning is repeated to edit the display data. In this case, addreses of the display data memory 2 which are written in the shift registers in 16-bit units are only changed according to the data displayed at a display part. Further, the shift registers where the data are shifted and inputted are properly selected. The edited display data are outputted to plural display blocks 1 which have display elements arrayed in a dot matrix of (n) rows × (m) columns and input the display data along the columns in order and are stored with the display data in order. A controller 4 repeat this operation on a time-division basis by as many times as (m) columns.