A liquid crystal display that is unsusceptible to the effect of a pixel potential during writing of data to a memory, allowing a large margin to be provided against variation in characteristics of transistors forming a pixel circuit, and a portable terminal having the liquid crystal display. In a pixel circuit including a memory circuit (25), separate paths are provided for writing image data from a signal line (16-i) to the memory circuit (25) via a data-write switch (24) and for reading image data held in the memory circuit (25) out into a liquid crystal cell unit via a data-read switch (27). Furthermore, image data are read via a data-read buffer (26). Accordingly, when image data is written to the memory, data held in the memory circuit (25) is not affected by a pixel potential. Thus, a large margin can be provided against variation in the characteristics of the transistors forming the pixel circuit, serving to avoid variation in picture quality due to the variation in the transistor characteristics.