Thin CRTs to Challenge LCDs in 2005

bigtangringo writes "First Samsung and now LG.Phillips have worked out a way to create thin CRT displays. Thin CRTs offer the best of both worlds -- superior picture quality with a slim size. Thin CRTs are expected to be more expensive than current CRTs, however they are also expected to drop in price rapidly. Both companies plan on releasing Thin CRTs in late 2005."

Comments

"Super-Slim"

[felonius maximus]

whereas the ultra-slim CRT developed by Samsung SDI has a depth of 417mm and weighs 44kg

Bugger me with a fish fork! That weighs as much as I do!

thin?

[rdc_uk]

I don't know about you lot, but to me, while its less-huge than current CRTs, 16-inches is not "thin".

YMMV, obviously.

(from TFA: "A 30-inch-tube television from Samsung Electronics will be about 16 inches thick, deeper than a flat panel set but about the same size as the typical stand on a flat-panel television, a Samsung executive said.")

Clive Sinclair did it first

[Anonymous Coward]

Britain's Clive Sinclair made a TV with a flat CRT back in the early 1980s. Here is a picture: http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/images/tv80.jpg

"20% reduction" in power consumption = not bad.

[mopslik]

Thin CRTs offer the best of both worlds -- superior picture quality with a slim size.

Of course, one of the other bonuses of LCD screens is their low power consumption. Good for the electricity bill, and for Mother Nature.

At a 20% reduction, that comes out to between 80-90W, compared to 30-40W for LCDs.

Re:"20% reduction" in power consumption = not bad.

[Lumpy]

what kind of LCD's are you using???

I just looked at the back of the DELL 19" LCD sitting at the reception desk and it uses 22.8Watts

any LCD that uses 30-40 watts is horribly inefficient.

Re:Eyes

[Gonzotek]

18 hours is far too long to be staring at any one thing, regardless of the technology used. LCDs probably have lower glare than CRTs, overall, but that's not the only factor.
Here are some generalized tips for monitor placement, lighting, and eye health:
http://www.crazycolour.com/os/ergonomics_ 06.shtml

Super-slim compared to Michael Moore. :-D

[TheConfusedOne]

It's marketing speak. 417 mm = 16.4 in

So it's "super-slim" compared to a current huge, "fat" CRT but is a real porker compared to an LCD or Plasma screen.

Re:Eyes

[DigitumDei]

Just to add to this. While the parent is correct, that a LCD is usually going to be better on your eye's, a good quality crt will also allow just as many hours of use with no eye strain.

I find with a cheaper CRT I get headaches after a couple of hours of work. However I purchased an Iiyama visionmaster pro 455 and I can literally spend days working on it with no noticable eye strain. It is also brighter and clearer than pretty much any LCD I've seen. So in the end, if you pay a decent amount for a monitor it should be fine.

All the same, unless you plan on playing games on the machine, I'd suggest going for an LCD.

Re:Eyes

[JavaMoose]

Um, it's obvious that you aren't aware of HOW the different types of LCDs work.

Reflective LCD doesn't mean that it reflects everything around you, or that there is any glare, it just bounces ambiant light back through the panel to improve brightness. This also has the effect of making them good outdoors in sunlight.

Re:LOL, depends what you mean by thin...

[GodsMadClown]

They are targeting LCD TVs. Samsung evaluated the physical needs of the market, and decided that 30 CM deep was what was needed to fit the average space. Plasma and LCD have much different characteristics than a direct-view CRT set:

Price. Try to find a decent looking (720p or 1080i) plasma for less than $2000. Samsung is targeting a ~$1k pricepoint on these new thin(er) CRT sets. LCD Tvs of comparaple size are even pricier.

Lifespan. If I'm going to drop $1-2K on a TV, I want the damn thing to last 10 years. CRTs have proven lifespans measured in the decades. Plasma screens tend to go tits-up all too frequently at the 3-5 year mark. LCD screens (being solid state) should have fine lifespan. Unless the backlight has problems.

Image quality. Plasma screens are very much on par with the image quality of CRTs. Blacks are black and they are very viewable at many angles. LCDs have problems with portraying a truely convincing black, and the viewing angle can be a problem. Direct-view CRTs have the disadvantage of being an analog technology, depending on a decent DAC implementation for digital inputs. However, they give great brightness and viewing angle, with deep blacks. They do need to be calibrated correctly, so the cost of a technician might be factored in. At the very least, a $30 calibration DVD is in order.

It's all about choices folks. I, for one, am looking forward to the pricing pressure this new CRT tech will exert on the market. I still have a SDTV. I'd love to get a decent HD set.

Re:picture quality

[rdc_uk]

Refresh rate.
Colour reproduction.
Viewable angle.
Brightness
Contrast
Difficulty to knock over :)

SED - the new 'killer app' in TV and monitors?

[bullet_tooth]

SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) panels. These are a new flat panel developed by Toshiba and Canon which are as thin as a plasma/LCD but allegedly produce picture quality on par with a CRT. read here:- http://www.physorg.com/news1295.html and http://www.engadget.com/entry/5732841184005838/ (picture and article illustrate that these TVs are already in production). I believe these are slated for a release in 2H 2005.

Re:SED - the new 'killer app' in TV and monitors?

[Thagg]

I've been following the SED technology for quite some time. It seems to be finally moving from the labs into production. In this article, Toshiba and Canon announce the creation of a company to begin producing the displays, with limited production in 2005, ramping up after that.

SED displays are CRTs, after a fashion. They have electron guns that fire modulated electron beams through a vacuum at phosphor screens. As such, they have the brightness, color purity, and response rate of regular CRTs. What is different is that there is an electron gun for every pixel, instead of just one that is scanned across the screen. This allows the screen to be flat and shallow, and gives the geometric flatness and sharpness usually associated with LCDs.

This was attempted before with a slightly different technology, and went by the acronym/buzzword FED, for Field Effect Display. As this article points out, there was tremendous anticipation of this technology quite some time ago, they were planning to go into production in 1996. FED's had an array of tiny, very sharp needles behind the phosphor screen. Unfortunately, the production and maintenance of this array of needles proved to be next to impossible.

SED's use a much more producable and durable semiconductor array of electron guns. The technology of creating large, dense arrays of semiconductors on substrates has been developed and perfected by the LCD process, so I feel that there is hope this time around that the machines will actually be mass-produced on the aggressive schedule that Canon and Toshiba have laid out.

The first generation of SED's, it is claimed, will unfortunately not have the resolution that would make them good for computer displays or home TV's, as the spacing of the pixels will be somewhat large. They'll be used for business displays of various kinds. But, in the not-too-distant future (three-to-five years) Canon and Toshiba predict that SED's will come to dominate TV and monitor production.

We'll see.

Thad Beier

Best of both worlds?

[oneiros27]

Did anyone look at the stats on the Samsung site before claiming this?

a roughly 20% reduction in depth, and a 10% reduction in weight. (mass, weight, whatever, I didn't do so well in Physics).

100mm is less than 4 inches. It's still 417mm deep -- that's over 16 inches... and 44kg? That's almost 100lbs.

So, the great break through is that you won't have to punch out the back of whatever cabinet you're trying to put the TV into. You'll still need help moving it so you don't throw your back out, and still need some sort of cabinet to put it in, as it's not light enough to be directly wall mounted without some reinforcing first.

I'm not saying this isn't a improvement, but it's not any real breakthrough -- things have been getting smaller for years. They'll continue to get smaller.

Yes- I do know

[purduephotog]

The best system for eyestrain is one that incorporates the entire room lighting environment. You don't say how long you want to code, but looking at high contrast imagery requires subdued background lighting that matches your monitor.

CRTs generally deliver the Lmin (lowest brightness level) and an almost good enough Lmax (Colour CRTs don't hit the high range, unfortunately).

Basically no numbers because I'm not sure what's proprietary, but I'd tell you to choose CRTs hands down.

The LCD model that pretyt much every cheap LCD follows is innapropriate for large hours in front of the screen. The impulse that describes how the light appears to your eyes isn't the way your brain is designed to view things- the image doesn't 'decay'.

So if you light the wall behind your computer evenly with about, say, 2x15 watt bulbs from about 10 feet off, that should be sufficient illumination (note the rest of the room is dark) to keep your eyes in a 'relaxed' state. Your monitor should be out of cutoff (deep blacks) so that your eyes stay adjusted to the whole range. The bezel itself could be painted grey, but that isn't critical.

Help any?

Candescent

[Skjellifetti]

A company named Candescent Technologies tried this a few years ago. They had backing from HP and Sony IIRC. I saw one of their demo screens. The color saturation was fantastic, there was no fading as you moved off to the side, and there were none of the ghost artifacts you get from LCDs when stuff on the screen is moving rapidly. Unfortunately, Candescent was poorly managed and is now in Chapter 11.

Re:Eyes

[danila]

I've always assumed that regular LCDs still were better than CRT because at least you don't have an electron gun deluging your face with radiation.

1) Modern CRT monitors produce a negligible amount of radiation.
2) Almost all of that radiation actually goes away from the back of the monitor in the opposite direction to you.
3) All displays emit a form of electro-magnetic radiation called "light". That's how you see objects on the screen.

Answering mfh's question, it's best to use an expensive LCD display. Test it before, a lot depends on the way your personal eyes work - different people would prefer different monitors. And make 5-minute breaks every hour. You can use these breaks to visit a toilet, eat a serving of fresh fruits or drink a glass of water. All these things (if done regularly) do wonders to your health. And don't forget about carpal tunnel syndrome and haemorrhoids. :)

Re:Eyes

[pz]

While there isn't any evidence I'm aware of that pulsing is bad in the visual system (the classical notion that epilepsy is uncontrolled synchronous firing has been brought into question of late), and one of the prevaling theories is that synchroized activity is used to bind object characteristics (eg, color, position, orientation, identification), we do have substantial evidence that the visual system has been very highly tuned for the real world -- that is, with illumination which does not flicker.

Personally, I find that my eyes spend more time trying to microaccommodate (focus) on CRT screens than on LCDs.

Excellent question on fluorescent lighting. It turns out that fluorescent lighting isn't nearly as aggressive as CRT illumination in terms of being pulsed. There are three reasons for this, first fluorescent bulbs -- and we're talking about the classic long tubes, not the newer compact fluorescents which are completely different -- are driven by a sinusoidal current rather than an impulse like the CRT electron beam, so that the pulsation is of lower magnitude. Second, the phosphor on fluorescent bulbs is much slower than that used for CRTs, to help filter out even more of the pulsation. Third, fluorescent bulbs have an effective refresh rate of 120 Hz (both half cycles of the 60 Hz sinusoid activate the phosphor). However, not all fluorescent phosphors are made equal, and in countries where AC power is 50 Hz, you can often see the flicker.

So, to return to the question at hand, will using an LCD monitor make a difference given that you have fluorescent lighting in your environment? Yes, but not as much as if the lighting were incandescent. Is it still worth doing? I'd say so.

What do I personally do? (Does the dentist actually chew Trident?) I use 5 screens total in my professional and personal life, three are LCDs, and two are CRTs running at 85 Hz (this is discounting the screens used for experimentation). The illumination at work is stock institutional fluorescent bulbs which would be full-spectrum if the physical plant staff didn't automatically change them every N months, and at home there's a mix of full-spectrum compact fluorescent (which don't pulse at anything close to a perceptually relevant frequency) and incandescent. I much prefer the LCDs to the CRTs.