that_punk_guy wrote:
Piru wrote:
Generally TFT's beat CRT in all aspects, except price.
And viewing angle, and colour fidelity...
I wonder whatever happened to ThinCRT?
If ThinCRT are who I was thinking of,** they were/are one of many companies working on "FEDs," or Field-Emissive Displays. These are basically a CRT with one gun per pixel, and you can find them in various expensive equipment... but they've been expensive, and there have been concerns about the materials used to create the electron guns.
It turns out carbon nanotubes are both cheap, easily produced (these days), and should last without ablating, so look for a sudden influx of cheap Taiwanese FEDs around the time OLED technologies take off. (The only problem is, of course, nanotubes might be as bad as asbestos when ingested or inhaled... but the chemicals involved in other electronics manufacture aren't always that healthy either.)
For direct-view displays (because I can't remember everything up-and-coming in the projection category, and projectors still need boring high-wattage lamps, anyway), there are really only a few technologies bouncing around right now. Everyone knows CRT and LCD, the 'new hotnesses' are:
OLED, Organic EL, Light-Emitting Polymer and related: Globs of chemical on a substrate that give off their own light. OLED is the big buzzword because chemical combinations that create light-emitting diodes are easy to drive and power-efficient; "electroluminescence" can refer to a number of things, but usually conjures the idea of a high-voltage/high-frequency requirement (like the Indiglo in your watch)... I gather most of the light emitting polymers are LED-based anyway, and 'organic' may or may not be a misnomer for a particular design, because companies are constantly trying new substances to produce something that works. The 'big battle' in that space seems to be between vapor-deposition (Kodak) and inkjet-printing (Epson).
'Folded' CRTs: Please tell me I'm not hallucinating this one, as I can't remember the proper term for it if it does exist. I could swear that, a few years back, RCA or someone figured out you could mount the electron gun off-center in a CRT, and use a 'mirror' of sorts to deflect the beam, creating a projection-TV arrangement within the tube itself, and allowing for a 'low profile' arrangement. If these were produced, they seem to have gone out of favor pretty quick, being as big and heavy and hard to manufacture as a regular tube, without the price premium and true flatness of a plasma panel.
Plasma: Cross a CRT with a fluorescent light. No concerns about electron-gun manufacture, since it doesn't need 'em, but big and gas-filled and fragile. Drive circuitry could probably be adapted to stimulate solid globs of EL phosphor as easily, but the full RGB gamut wasn't available in solid materials 10-15 years ago, and phosphor lifetimes are always a concern. A little more complex than a FED, since each pixel is a sealed gas-filled cell, but the phosphor backing of each cell lights across its full area (like a fluorescent tube), so it scales well to make 'giant,' relatively bright displays. As long as you don't let them burn in. (Early color designs could seem a bit flickery, since, like a TFT LCD, they have to modulate the pixels rapidly to create the illusion of varying luminance; if you haven't seen a recent $10,000 version, they now look like giant, bright LCDs, but without uneven backlighting, and with a complete viewing angle.)
FEDs: As mentioned above, an if-only that might be coming, like color LCDs were a dream in the 1980s. Probably not worth making wall-sized displays out of, but CRT tech is well-established and can mostly be reapplied here, and you get all the sharpness and direct-addressing of a fixed-resolution panel. If OLED takes a while to get cheap, these could take the ten-to-20something-inch desktop-panel market back from LCD. Upshots: Flat panels, less need for leaded glass and shielding (since each gun is right next to the phosphor, no need to fire electrons with quite so much energy), no magnetic susceptibility (since there's no magnetic steering), pixel-perfect accuracy (no more convergence/mask-alignment woes), probably no dead pixels, or at least none stuck on, no worries about blue fading any more than with a CRT... Downsides: Still glass, still a bit fragile, still likely to build up a dust-attracting charge... but think about how much of a CRT right now is just shipping cost, and at the desktop sizes the tech is good for, the fragility should be no more an issue than it is with shipping china from, er, China. (Personal opinion: I still think inkjetted OLED will be cheaper, but I also thought CD burners would forever be expensive and replaced with something sane.)*
EPaper: Reflective technology; either little electrically charged balls trapped in some sort of liquid (original 'epaper') or globs of colored oil and water (Phillips)... High-contrast, hopefully-cheap-and-high-DPI displays, roughly mimicking ink on paper. But remember to bring your book light, unless they adapt the oil-based tech to allow backlighting. Nobody's talking about how to use these to display motion, yet; Sony's just launched an eBook novelty using the monochrome version. Biggest upshot, at least in the monochrome incarnation: image stays when power's removed.
SRAM LCD: Speaking of low-power, this is a subtle variation on LCD I haven't heard much about recently; someone figured out how to build a LCD a while back where each TFT transistor somehow acts as a SRAM cell. Benefits: Display state preserved with just a trickle of power, if any at all, and the screen can act as its own framebuffer... but only of use to small devices. For all I know, they're already using this somewhere.
Finally, your reward for having read this far...
Iridigm: The only company doing anything marginally surprising, though they were actually around before Phillips announced their color oil-drop epaper, which will probably undercut them. Reflective displays using an interference principle, with tons of tiny electromechanical subpixels modulating the reflected light itself. Benefits: Low risk of dead 'pixels' ruining your day, unless a whole pixel's worth of practically invisible subpixels go at once; no fading, presumably fast-enough response, low-power... Downsides: Still needs an external light source, and who's going to care when flexible, practically-disposable OLED and epaper solutions get cheap, while monochrome LCDs are still 'good enough' for eParkingMeters? (Personal opinion: I want siding made of this stuff.)
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*If you haven't noticed, not only are burners cheap now, but hard drives themselves have already moved towards zoned recording, possibly even zoned-spirals. Beware Floid's sense of what's sane, though he's already started compensating himself.
**
Edit: They are, though the company's actually
Candescent. I guess the nanotube idea isn't *that* recent a development as regards FEDs, so they could be using them as much as vapor-deposited diamond or whatever the last big ideas were in that space... the big breakthrough seems to be that there are now
cheap-and-scalable techniques for actually putting nanotubes where you want them on an industrial basis.
YetAnotherEdit: And while I could've sworn I was reading about some sort of FED-related nanotube breakthrough this month, I could equally be thinking of
this article, which promised some sort of self-assembling lattice without the involvement of carbon.
