The television of the future

Here is a news story that I found interesting. If you have been in a consumer electronics store with in the last year you know that one of the “hot” items in the market place are those flat panel television sets. I’m sure that one of these days we, like the cartoon family the Jetsons, will be watching flat panel displays that hang from the celling or sit on our desks.

I have been hearing rumors for over two years now that Dell will stop shipping monitors based on the cathode ray tube or CRT with their computers in favor of flat panel or flat plasma displays. So far it hasn’t happened so I have to assume that either the price point hasn’t fallen sufficiently on the flat screens or there are a large enough number of CRT displays in the pipe line that vendors can’t afford to just scrap them in favor of the new technology. In either case I keep hoping because I would really like to have one of those flat panels on my computer.

So I found this AP story in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette interesting.

Koreans seek to slow demise of television's dominant technology
Monday, August 15, 2005
By Elliot Spagat, The Associated Press
TIJUANA, Mexico -- Samsung Electronics Co. has an odd sales pitch for one of its new televisions. A slide show for dealers features a drawing of a TV on a tombstone that reads, "The news of my demise is greatly exaggerated!"
The Korean manufacturer is referring to cathode-ray tube, or CRT, televisions -- the heavy boxes that have dominated the business since television was introduced at the New York World's Fair in 1939.
As rival technologies become cheaper, the era of the conventional tube TV is ending.
Yet Samsung and a Korean rival, LG Electronics Co., are refusing to abandon the old-style tube TVs entirely. They continue trying to improve CRTs even as they and other television makers are building more and more factories that churn out super-thin LCD and plasma televisions.

Follow this link for the complete story.