Future's Bright for Flat-Panel Displays
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
SANTA CLARA, CA (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- What does the
future hold for flat-panel displays? Success and technological
improvements, definitely, but not at the expense of the venerable
cathode-ray tube. That's the assessment at this year's Flat
Information Displays Conference here, sponsored by Stanford
Resources, a consulting firm that deals specifically with the
electronic display market.
 
Flat-panel displays (FPDs) are "nontraditional" technologies,
including gas-plasma, electroluminescent, and liquid-crystal dis-
plays. FPDs are used in a variety of laptop computers and
portable TVs, as well as in other products, such as fax machines,
copiers, and printers.
 
According to Stanford Associates, worldwide sales of FPDs will
surpass $4 billion next year. But this is peanuts compared to CRT
sales, which next year alone will approach $11 billion, the
consultants say. That's nearly 70 percent of the electronic
display market.
 
The reasons for the continued success of the CRT are simple. It
offers superior color, resolution, speed, and is usually two to
three times cheaper than a comparable flat-panel unit. Current
attempts to improve FPDs involve making them more "CRT-like" by
developing full-color screens, wider viewing angles, larger
screen sizes, and higher resolutions.
 
FPDs have come a long way in the past year, featuring VGA
resolution and controllers that can handle halftones. Companies
are developing flat panel prototypes as large as 18 inches.
IBM/Toshiba have jointly prototyped a 14.3-inch diagonal 16-color
LCD; Hitachi has a 10-inch, 8-color active matrix LCD; Sharp has
developed a 14-inch, 16-color active matrix LCD; and Apple put an
LCD screen in the new Macintosh Portable.
 
FPDs could have a future in a workstation market currently
dominated by CRTs, said DEC senior hardware product manager
Dennis Witts. "Users want their desktops back," he said, and
CRTs are very large and bulky. Also, widely reported potential
health hazards caused by low-level radiation emissions from CRTs
could increase the popularity of FPDs.
 
                              --- Jeffrey Bertolucci
 
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