23
2012
Technology Trends Part 2
An article by admin
Comments Off Presentation Technology
The applications for video will be expanding in the next decade due to its digital future, and hence will create the necessary for improved presentation technology. Color LCD displays from postage is much more mature and less expensive, LCDs will have their day. From DICK Tracy TV watches to home projection TV theatres to Star Trek-like touch screen notebooks, it’s all coming.
The CRT technology contained in most color TV sets and computer monitors is fairly well known. There are red, green, and blue dots, slots, or stripes (depending on the tube manufacturer) that are modulated in an analog fashion to give the desired color picture. TV sets usually have a dot pitch of approximately 0.6 mm. Cheap computer monitors will have a dot pitch of 0.42 mm or 0.39 mm. standard grade VGA monitors usually have a dot pitch of 0.31 mm or 0.28 mm. some expensive monitors have even finer dot pitch. The smaller the dot pitch the higher the resolution.
For instance, a TV set can only display an image of 320×200, whereas a VGA monitor can display 640×480 and large 21″ monitors with 0.28 dot pitch can display images as large as 1280×1024. This is fairly well established technology and it is not likely to change drastically in the years ahead. Making large tubes with small dot pitches is a fairly tricky business, similar to silicon wafer fabrication. The yield must be very high. If just one pixel is bad on a CRT, the entire tube must be scrapped. In the years ahead, the major R&D investment in CRT’s will be in improving yields of large CRT’s in anticipation of a market for wide-screen HDTV TV sets. From a CRT point of view, HDTV changes the aspect ratio of 4:3 to 16:9, but the underlying process technology is the same.
Presentation Technology in Laptop
Laptop computers have had a major impact on the development of larger LCDs. In this case the displays must have a resolution of at least 640 ×480 with at least a 9″ diagonal size. Strictly black and white displays is required as a minimum. New LCD controller ICs were developed to achieve this gray scale performance by tightly controlling the linear region of the display. Segments (which are inherently nonlinear). More recently there has been a driver to bring down the price of VGA sized color LCDS, but they are still quite pricey and power hungry compared to monochrome displays. If the technology becomes cost competitive with CRTs, then will be relegated to products where people will pay a premium price for a small package such as a laptop computer.
