Comments On: We talk about LCD prices and gluts

[iansmith]

I do not think LCD's are ever going to be cheaper than CRT's.

Tube based displays have more than a half-century lead on LCDs and we are very good at making them in quantity and cheap.

Another problem is LCD's are extremely complicated and delicate. A 20" LCD can have 5 million pixels, each with display elements and a transistor that all have to work perfectly. It's expensive and labor intensive to make one, and the percentage of displays that are flawed and never make it off the assembly line is pretty huge. They have gotten cheaper due to mass production and experience, but are still one of the most complicated devices the computer user will come across. Even CPU's are easier to crank out once you get the process working.

My guess is we will eventually see the high resolution LCD panel go the way of LED watches. (Anyone remember those?) What will replace it is anyones guess, but organic LED displays look very promising.

I think the history books will record LCD's as an interm technology between the simple, huge and ungainly CRT and whatever eventually takes over. The same way we look back at times before everyone had a freezer and you had weekly deliveries of ice to your cold box. Chopping up ice from a frozen lake to hand-deliver to a million people six months later? Thats crazy talk. :-)

[Albuquerque]

Actually, I think your definition of "interim technology" will have to be stretched... The individual pixel element size needed for a computer display isn't yet possible with individual LED's, and LEO's have a lot of color, saturation and brightness limitations still. Liquid crystal is still very viable, and has quite a bit further to go before being unusable or replacable.

Some of the new technology on the horizon will combine LCD displays with LED backlights, which "fixes" issues with brightness and contrast and also "gives" us true high dynamic range rendering on the desktop level. Imagine a display that can generate 8000mcd worth of brightness; this is the point where you really DO have to squint at the rendered sunshine in FarCry or the oncoming traffic in NFS:U. That same display could also give you a true black with absolutely zero lux, even in the same scene that is rendering the full brightness of the oncoming light.

There are a lot of technological advances to be made with LCD components before we replace them. With the energy saved, the lesser heat disappation, the almost nonexistant EMI, the lesser weight, the higher contrast ratios and much higher brightness levels obtainable from newly discovered methods, LCD's have quite a bit of future in front of them.