FLAT PANEL DISPLAYS

With a 100-year head start over competing screen technologies, the CRT is still a formidable technology. It's based on universally understood principles and employs commonly available materials. The result is cheap-to-make monitors capable of excellent performance, producing stable images in true colour at high display resolutions.

However, no matter how good it is, the CRT's most obvious shortcomings are well known:

• it sucks up too much electricity
• its single electron beam design is prone to misfocus
• misconvergence and colour variations across the screen
• its clunky high-voltage electric circuits and strong magnetic fields create harmful electromagnetic radiation
• it's simply too big.

With even those with the biggest vested interest in CRTs spending vast sums on research and development, it is inevitable that one of the several flat panel display technologies will win out in the long run. However, this is taking longer than was once thought, and current estimates suggest that flat panels are unlikely to account for greater than 50% of the market before the year 2004.