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THE SOAP BOX 1997/12/03

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1997/12/03: Flat Panel Displays 1998 is going to be the year of the flat-panel display.
And it's about bloody time.
For too many years now the monitor manufacturers have been weighing us down with big, hot, space-hogging monitors. These things have been getting bigger and bigger and more expensive.
Not long ago, it was TVs that kept getting bigger -- at least until they hit a limit. Not a technical limit, but an architectural one: they wouldn't fit through doorways!
The bigger screens required longer picture tubes to keep the deflection angle down, but the longer tubes made the TV sets too deep to maneuver through the standard residential doorway width of thirty inches or so.
So the manufacturers solved the problem by using mirrors and murky rear projection screens to "fold" the tube up, allowing for a longer throw. As the saying goes, it's all done with "smoke and mirrors". Which pretty much describes what these things are like to watch.
Okay, the smaller monitors have been coming down in price a bit, but that is what you would expect from obsolete technology. Why does anybody still make these things?
The flat-panels displays promise to give us our desks back, but the prices remain outrageous. If a laptop with a 13" LCD costs about $2000, then why does the "desktop" version of the LCD alone cost the same amount? What kind of scam is that?
The monitor manufacturers should stop mucking around with the old technology and concentrate production on LCDs in order to get the price down to sensible levels.
I am still working with a monitor that has a 12.5" diagonal viewing area, for crying out loud. The thing is a foot and a half deep but has a smaller viewing area than most laptops sold today. Any kind of flat panel display would be an improvement on this.
I want my desk back!

Addendum: As of 1998/05, the following are just a few of the manufacturers that sell flat panel displays: LG Electronics, MAG Innovision, Acer, Mitsubishi, ViewSonic, dpiX, and Princeton.

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