Ever thinner display screens

Bigger, thinner, sharper and brighter — the goals driving PC display development haven't changed much over the past decade.

However, the technology used to push the boundaries of a monitor's features is charging forward on the R&D bullet train.

New acronyms and abbreviations have popped up; in addition to LCD, now there’s LED-backlit, OLED and E Ink.

“These days, when consumers walk into a electronics retailer, they can’t help but notice the elegant, wide, flat-panel LCDs,” said Pete Ellis, HP displays’ worldwide product manager. “Those looking for either a new computer, a second display or perhaps a CRT replacement, often wonder why there is a difference between LCD monitors. After all, they are a piece of glass that displays data, right? Well, it has been a little more complicated than that.”

With PCs used for a variety of roles — Web surfing, watching video, viewing and editing digital pictures, creating documents and playing games — a monitor needs to produce accurate colors, sharp detail and smooth action.

LCDs, or Liquid Crystal Displays, are the undisputed kings of laptop and desktop displays. LCD technology — thin and light, with relatively low power consumption — replaced a previous generation of heavy, bulky CRT desktop displays and made the svelte laptop form possible.

The latest trend in LCD displays is big widescreens with dazzlingly sharp resolutions. Oh, and let's not forget the big, wide, dazzling price tags.

Dell and Apple both offer 30-inch widescreen monitors that produce near hallucination-grade colors and stunning clarity.

Dell Dell's 30-inch, widescreen monitor ($2,000) has fast-motion video reproduction, making it a good choice for playing games or watching HD video.

Dell's 3008WFP ($2,000) edges out the Apple 30-inch Cinema HD ($1,800) in connection options, fast-motion video reproduction and contrast, making it a sublime HD video and gaming display, while graphics professionals swear by the color accuracy of Apple's Cinema HD.

Both displays feature variations of In-Plane Switching panels — the technological guts of the LCD screen. In-Plane Switching, with the widest viewing angles and best image quality, is considered superior to mid-range Vertical Alignment and cheaper Twisted Neumatic panels.

At work, you may be forced to work on monitors with a standard — but meager — 1,024-by-768-pixel resolution. But these 30-inch giants sport a whopping 2,560-by-1,600 resolution. The images and video displayed can be jaw-droppingly detailed.

Acer’s new Aspire 8920 notebook (starting at $1,300) strains the concept of portability. The 9-pound beast features an 18.4-inch widescreen display, the largest on the market.

Making way for LEDs
LCDs as we know them are a dying breed, particularly for laptop PCs. Standard LCDs are backlit by cold cathode fluorescent lamps, or CCFLs. The problems with CCFL backlighting include a limited color spectrum, relative bulk and the presence of mercury, a toxic element.

Light-Emitting Diode, or LED, backlighting is starting to gain ground as an alternative in LCD displays. Many individual LEDs illuminate the display, as opposed to a few larger CCFLs diffusing the light.

While LEDs produce a broader color spectrum and increased brightness while consuming less power than CCFLs, LED backlit displays are more expensive to produce. Samsung's 20” LED-backlit XL20 model retails for $1,600, for example, while the company’s 20” LCD monitors range from $270 to $370.

“As the cost differential between LED and CCFL backlights narrows, LED-based notebook PC panels will gain market share due to their thinner form factor, lower power consumption and lack of mercury content,” wrote Sweta Dash, iSuppli director of LCD and projector research, in a recent report.

iSuppli estimates that 90 percent of notebook PC displays shipped in 2012 will have LED backlighting, compared to just 4.7 percent in 2007. Larger LED backlit desktop displays will follow suit, but for now they are limited to a handful of pricey, professional-grade models.

HP’s 24-inch widescreen DreamColor LP2480zx ($3,500), designed with the help of DreamWorks Animation, is aimed at game developers, animation and graphics artists and product designers.

“LED backlighting is a key technology for next generation displays,” said Ellis of HP. The DreamColor “helps insure the integrity in color from what a user sees on their display versus what is printed out. You want to make sure that what you see is what others will see, and making sure that your colors are accurate to begin with is the first step.”

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