Apple to discontinue use of CRTs
 

Apple announced last week that they will discontinue support for CRT's and will now be going with fpds.

Link: http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/51693.html

It was bound to happen. Now were in a transition that sucks. I know LCDs are getting better, but you'll have to pry my high contrast ratio CRTs from my cold dead hands first...

My CRT's are five or years old and showing signs of fade, etc. Think it's time to find what's left in stock new and buy myself another three-years.

Apple quit selling new stand alone CRT's years ago. You'll still be able to use CRT's with your Mac if you can find them. What I think is a bigger deal is that LaCie and some other manufacturers quit making CRT's.

Actually that announcement came with the introduction of the education iMac on July 5, see: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=70888

and also:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060705/apple..._crt.html?.v=4

While on the subject, I assume this is across the board for the entire industry, another example:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/re...c-2180wg.shtml

I'm sure much of this has to do with polution and waste also. It has to be expensive to salvage or scrap this monitors.

The only positive from all this is that eventually all our viewers will only have LCDs to view with. So if we edit on LCDs, it's more WYSIWUG.

Beyond the waste disposal issue, I believe that LCD's use less power and generate less heat.

But you also have less room to stack your toys and other swag on, compared to those big old CRTs. My LCD won't even hold my coffee cup!

My beer keeps falling off my 17" Apple flat panel studio display. Maybe I should upgrade to one of the new ones. At least they have squared off tops.

Now that is form following function!

The brightness and contrast of newer LCDs is very good. There are plenty of reasons to choose LCD over CRT these days. Personally, I'm never going to buy a CRT again. They're heavy, bulky, suck too much power, etc.. The two predominant technologies for CRT displays are aperture grille (Sony Trinitron type) and Shadow Mask. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Trinitron displays are capable of higher resolutions than shadow mask displays (well, not really true anymore) and they have much lower phosphor persistence. Unfortunately, they lack the color saturation ability of shadow mask displays, which can be a problem for some applications. Aperture grille displays also have that annoying "support wire" that runs horizontally across the screen and due to the lower persistence, those who are sensitive to refresh flicker will have to ramp up the refresh rates. I can't stand looking at a Trinitron monitor at anything less than 87Hz and anything less than 100Hz is still visible in my peripheral vision. Shadow mask displays typically have richer color and no support wires, but they also lack overall brightness and sharpness in comparison. With the richer color, we also gain color splotches and inconsistant color across the screen. It's also more difficult to maintain perfect screen geometry on a shadow mask. Although I have yet to see any CRT that provides a perfect geometry on all 4 sides....

LCDs are getting a lot better. The new Sony/Samsung 24" panels (used by Dell and a few others) are a testament to that. Just as with HDTV displays, don't get caught up inthe contrast ratio numbers as they are somewhat meaningless as there's no industry standard for measuring them.

IMO, the only thing that keeps me from picking LCD as the [current] best display technology is that dead/stuck pixels are still a way of life and 120Hz refresh rates aren't quite here yet. Although JVC's new panels (from Hitachi) that will be in some upcoming HDTVs later this year will offer 120Hz refresh. 60Hz is problematic for anyone doing film work or animation or other applications that are often created at 24 fps. But some pro level LCD displays offer refresh reates of 48Hz and 72Hz which eliminates the 60Hz juddering with 24Hz sources.

Other new technologies are just around the corner too... OLED, SED and even fiber-backlight LCD. The fiber-backlight concept is a no-brainer, but for some reason it's been a long time coming. Instead of using a large backlightl lamp, a smaller lamp is used with a fiber carrying light to each pixel. In a 4-layer TFT arangement, there are the typical R, G and B layers plus a diffuse layer. Incorporating the diffuse layer gives a dynamic contrast ratio to each pixel. Similar to what Samsung and others are doing now with dynamic contrast on the whole panel, but this is per pixel. The fiber lighting is also a lot brighter too.