The Hindu Business Line : Goodbye CRT, hello LCD!

Trend-setter
Apple signals the end of bulky tube-based PC monitors with its `flat-n-cool' liquid crystal displays.
Move may anticipate across-industry trend this year.
Price gap between two technologies narrowing in India.

THE ORIGINAL CRT monitor for the iMac (left) and Apple's latest 17-inch LCD iMac, where the electronics and the drives are integrated into the flat panel.

Bangalore , July 10

What Apple does today, the rest of the personal computing world does tomorrow. This truism has held good for a quarter of a century. The use of graphical user interfaces or icons on the screen; the introduction of the mouse as a pointing device .... Apple led, and the rest of the Windows-Intel PC world followed, a few years later.

Over the weekend, Apple signalled that another crossroads in the history of the desktop PC has been reached. It has said a decisive goodbye to the era of bulky, power-guzzling monitors, based on the cathode ray tube - a display device that is over a century old: It was invented in 1897 by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun and created the image (on PC or TV) by bombarding a fluorescent screen with a stream of electrons pumped up to a very high voltage.

Besides being a delicate and heavy piece of equipment, the CRT monitor - particularly in the colour version which called for three electronic guns, one for each primary colour - created a lot of heat and consumed the bulk of the power required to run a personal computer.

LCD technology

Displays based on liquid crystal displays, or LCD, have become widely available only in the last five years - although the technology is based on an invention by American James Fergason over 37 years ago.

It uses white light that passes through tiny cells, filled with coloured liquid crystal - one for every dot or pixel that goes to form an image. The LCD PC monitor today cannot quite match the rich hues and quality of a good resolution CRT, and has the disadvantage that one cannot easily view the picture from the edges. But this is almost sure to improve.

Apple special edition

Apple says it will no longer offer PCs with CRT monitors: it has just launched a special edition of its flagship iMac PC with a 17-inch flat LCD and based on the latest Intel dual-core chip. Like last year's iMac G5, the new educational configuration incorporates all the associated electronics - motherboard, hard drive, graphics and DVD burner - in the thickness of the monitor. But unlike that machine, last week's release is sweetened by a special $900 pricing for students and teachers - that's a discount of about 25 per cent.

With Apple saying goodbye to the CRT monitor, it is inevitable that the bulk of the PC business - fuelled by Microsoft's Windows software will also follow suit, sooner rather than later.

This may be as much due to the push by Apple, as the added shove that the LCD flat panel makers are giving this year: Prices of CRT monitors are more or less steady, while LCDs are falling rapidly to narrow the gap.

A quick survey in the country's major metros on Saturday showed that entry-level 15-inch CRT monitors for the PC can be had for around Rs 4,000, while the increasingly popular 17-inch size is just Rs 1,500-Rs 2,000 more.

The cheapest LCD flat screen monitors are 15-inch models that can be had for Rs 8,000 - Rs 9,000. The 17-inch models cost Rs 11,000 upwards.

For the Indian customer who is on a tight budget, a CRT monitor still represents a cost of at least Rs 3,000-4,000.

But this is likely to change as LCDs become even more affordable. Most lay buyers don't factor in the power savings in switching over to LCD - it could be as much as that of a 100-watt light bulb.

When the gap between a 15-inch LCD and CRT is less than Rs 2,000 - that might be the sweet point for India when the whole user community, not just Apple, will be ready to ditch the warm, bulbous experience of the CRT and embrace the cool, energy-friendly charms of the liquid crystal screen.

When will that happen? Early 2007 is the gut feeling in the market.

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