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As PC Magazine's upcoming flat panel comparative review story will indicate, consumers spent more dollars on LCD monitors than CRT monitors in 2002, and next year LCDs will overtake CRTs in unit volume as mainstream computing displays. Even with such future prospects, CRTs are still hanging tough, serving many markets quite well, and CRT manufacturers continue to innovate and optimize their designs. While bulkier and much heavier than panels, CRTs employ proven and reliable technology. They still have many display quality advantages over flat panels, and are quite a bit less expensive than panels, though the price gap is closing.

The tried-and-true CRT-based PC monitor remains the best display choice for many applications, such as professional graphics design or animation, where color accuracy, luminance uniformity, color purity, black levels, and contrast ratios are critically important. Fast-action gaming and high-motion video are still best viewed on CRTs, because most panels suffer from motion blur or pixelation problems due to slower-than-required liquid crystal response times. Panels can't touch CRTs in the area of viewing angles and resolution scaling (when scaling up or down from their native, fixed-pixel resolution, panels still look pretty ugly in most cases).

Beyond personal computing uses, home theater/HDTV viewing with CRT tubes delivers vivid pictures with deeper blacks and better contrast ranges than plasma and flat panel screens, or front- and rear-projection CRT, DLP, or LCD systems.

In the reality-check department, Sony's recent announcement that they are stopping production of their 17" and 19" CRT retail monitor (and raw tube) lines by March 31, 2003 (following similar moves by Sharp, Matsushita, and Hitachi) could be viewed as the official sign that CRTs are finally phasing out of desktop computing, with panels ruling the future. Sony alluded that the cost of manufacturing CRTs combined with the declining market did not provide reasonable return on investment, especially being such a highly competitive market space. Sony prefers channeling its future marketing efforts selling LCD monitors, given that panels are a growth area, and presumably a higher revenue and higher margin business in the long run.

With that frame of reference, let's look at market-leading CRT manufacturers and monitor vendors, compare CRT and LCD futures, and then jump into CRT technology innovations. We received a number of interesting CRT and LCD market data points from iSuppli/Stanford Resources, an industry-leading market research and consulting firm covering various display technologies. (We'd especially like to thank iSuppli/Stanford's Director of Monitor Research, Rhoda Alexander, Market Research Analyst, Samantha Nebrich, and Marketing Manager, Neldie Africa Lee for their inputs.)

Here's a look at the top ten worldwide computer CRT monitor manufacturer shares for the year 2002. The majority of units are based on shadow mask technology, many with Invar shadow masks, and many having flat, or flat-square designs. (For a quick refresher on CRT technology, look at PCTechGuide's overview of CRT monitors.) You can see that Sony really isn't that big of volume player in computer CRT displays sold worldwide. Samsung, the largest CRT manufacturer, claims to still be very committed to CRT development and sales at the present time. NEC-Mitsubishi falls just under the top ten, and note we learned they plan to phase out some of their 15" and 17" CRT lines later this year.

Samsung 21.8% AOC (Top Victory) 10.7% Philips 10.6% LG Electronics 10.1% EMC/Mag/Proview 6.0% BenQ 4.6% Lite-On 4.2% Sony 3.4% Compal 2.9% Delta 2.8% Source: iSuppli/Stanford Resources

The following chart indicates a combination of top branded monitors and standalone monitor vendors (who don't necessarily manufacture the guts of their own monitors) for the U.S. market in 2002. You can see that Dell and HP ship a huge number of monitors as expected, which may be sourced by multiple manufacturers listed in the above chart.

Top CRT Vendors: 2002 Units System and Stand-alone Vendors 1 DELL 20.1% 2 HP 16.3% 3 VIEWSONIC 6.8% 4 GATEWAY 4.6% 5 AOC (ENVISION) 4.5% 6 NEC-MITSUBISHI 4.0% 7 SAMSUNG 3.5% 8 IBM CORPORATION 3.1% 9 KDS 2.6% 10 CTX 1.6% 11 SONY CORPORATION 1.5% 12 PHILIPS 0.9% Source: iSuppli/Stanford Resources

Here's a chart splitting out the top vendors of standalone CRTs sold in retail/online to end users, or to corporations directly.

Top Stand-alone CRT Vendors: 2002 Units 1 VIEWSONIC 12.2% 2 AOC (ENVISION) 8.1% 3 NEC-MITSUBISHI 7.3% 4 SAMSUNG 6.3% 5 KDS 4.7% 6 CTX 2.9% 7 SONY CORPORATION 2.7% 8 PHILIPS 1.6% 9 PGS 1.3% 10 PROVIEW 1.2% 11 BENQ 0.8% 12 HITACHI AMERICA, LTD. 0.8% Source: iSuppli/Stanford Resources

Finally, the next chart shows the predicted growth of LCDs and the decline of CRTs in the North American market over the next few years, represented in both thousands of units, and percentages. You can see that CRT production in Q4' 2004 will be nearly one-third the current levels in Q1'2003, LCD production will more than double in the same timeframe, and combined CRT and LCD production will increase about 14%.

 CRT Monitor - North America   1Q02 2Q02 3Q02 4Q02 1Q03 2Q03 3Q03 4Q03 1Q04 2Q04 3Q04 4Q04 CRT 8,118 7,372 6,840 6,811 5,962 5,645 5,431 5,300 4,187 3,513 3,032 2,091 LCD 2,353 2,511 2,902 3,877 4,043 4,161 4,809 5,915 6,456 7,079 8,440 9,356 Total 10,471 9,883 9,742 10,688 10,005 9,805 10,240 11,215 10,643 10,592 11,472 11,447   1Q02 2Q02 3Q02 4Q02 1Q03 2Q03 3Q03 4Q03 1Q04 2Q04 3Q04 4Q04 CRT 77.5% 74.6% 70.2% 63.7% 59.6% 57.6% 53.0% 47.3% 39.3% 33.2% 26.4% 18.3% LCD 22.5% 25.4% 29.8% 36.3% 40.4% 42.4% 47.0% 52.7% 60.7% 66.8% 73.6% 81.7% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Source: iSuppli/Stanford Resources

The market for CRTs will remain fairly strong for the next few years due to continued pricing advantages, and the fact LCDs cannot deliver proper image quality for certain usages, as mentioned above. By the end of 2004, most mainstream PCs will sell with panels, and looking ahead four or five years, sales of new computer CRTs will have gone the route of tube-based audio amplifiers. Certain users will still claim the images from CRTs are richer and truer, even though panels will have advanced to the point where objectionable artifacts, color accuracy and viewing angle problems, and other image anomalies are all but non-existent. CRTs will quietly fade away for most new home, business, and technical computing purchases.

Regardless of declining market share, CRTs are still important devices that many of us will continue to stare at for years, especially if purchased in the next year or two. So I thought it would be interesting to investigate the current state of CRT design and technology, by interviewing both Samsung and NEC-Mitsubishi, given they are leading manufacturers of shadow mask and aperture grille CRTs, respectively. Both companies still actively engineer new CRT enhancements, with emphasis on multimedia uses in particular. While most of the CRT enhancements we'll discuss have been shipping for about a year now, each company continues to refine their technologies. Cathodes, focusing grids, lenses, phosphors, deflection yokes, screen filters, and other components are continually being improved, providing a superior viewing experience. Efforts to simplify user-accessible monitor controls also remain at the top of the list, but we'll focus (pun intended) mostly on the monitor internals.

CRTs will unquestionably continue to get cheaper, and manufacturers are still trying to reduce physical size and weight, which requires significant design work. For example, reducing the depth of CRT monitors beyond current "short-neck" designs is a non-trivial task that directly affects image quality (edge distortion can occur with wide-angle horizontal electron beam-tracing requiring compensation circuits to manage beam intensity and beam spot shape – all of which results in higher power consumption and increased circuit costs). Entering this project, I was especially interested in knowing if current design innovations would notably affect image quality and usability, and I also wondered if today's CRTs have reached the point of being "good-enough", and given their declining market share, whether manufacturers are truly investing much in improvements.

As I learned, all CRT manufacturers are continuing to improve their CRT designs, and you can get a good idea of the type of changes seen across the industry by looking at what Samsung and NEC-Mitsubishi are doing. I spoke with Jim Muta, engineering manager with Samsung Displays, and Richard Atanus, VP of Product Development with NEC-Mitsubishi. I also looked at a representative 19" invar shadow mask display from Samsung, and a 19" Diamondtron (aperture grille) display from NEC-Mitsubishi. While both companies have innovative new software utilities to control various monitor settings, we'll be discussing key innovations within the CRTs themselves. Also, we won't cover CRT basics, or get into gory details of CRT design (see our CRT Resources section at the end of this story).

Samsung's relatively new 19" model 957MB invar shadow mask-based, flat multifunction display was designed to provide both excellent PC desktop display capability and TV/entertainment functionality. The unit's "MagicBright" technology includes different modes of display operation to provide TV-like high brightness and color saturation when viewing videos (either full-screen or in a window), while concurrently being able to provide the small dot pitch and high-resolution of a computer data display. Achieving both goals successfully is a single monitor is a difficult feat of engineering.

The orthogonal goals describe above required Samsung to reengineer the entire monitor display system from the electron guns and focusing grids, to the phosphors coating the inner picture tube. If Samsung did not perform the reengineering, and instead just drove their existing electron gun designs at higher current levels to attain similar brightness and color levels of a TV viewing experience, the tube would likely burn out in less than a year, or its display capability would be noticeably degraded. The reengineering also allowed Samsung to provide a three year warranty on their MagicBright monitors.

Looking into the issue of CRT burnout a bit deeper, Jim Muta indicated that by sustained overdriving of the cathodes (where the electrons are emitted) in the three electron guns, the cathodes could be depleted to the point of no electrons being emitted. With all CRTs, as electrons are emitted from a cathode, slight deposits of chemical residues are formed on the cathode surface, and over time as the CRT ages, cathode performance gradually decays. In fact, cathode depletion contributes more to reducing a CRTs lifespan than does phosphor aging, per Muta. To attain higher levels of brightness in standard computer monitors so they perform similar to a TV, higher electron beam currents are required, and this accelerates the deposition of chemical residues, reducing cathode life. Samsung realized something needed to be done to generate more brightness, while not prematurely aging the cathodes.

Samsung restructured their electron guns to allow a larger cloud of electrons to be emitted from the cathode, by increasing the cathode surface area. Interestingly, the density of the electron cloud was decreased and the beam current was decreased, allowing a longer cathode lifespan, but a greater number of electrons were capable of being emitted from the larger cathode surface. The gun and cathode restructuring is the cornerstone of the MagicBright technology, producing the higher brightness and color saturation required to parallel the TV viewing experience.

Here's a slide on MagicBright technology from Samsung; note the illustration of the wider cathode emission surface in the lower left area:

The larger electron cloud did pose a problem per Muta– specifically, how to focus the wider beam generated from a wider cathode emission area to attain a small beam spot profile when hitting the phosphors (for text viewing in particular). A more sophisticated set of beam focusing grids was required and integrated into Samsung's MagicBright monitor line.

In text mode, the electron guns aren't driven as hard as in entertainment mode (three modes are selectable with the MagicBright control on front of the monitor, including Text, Internet, and Entertainment), but Samsung's goal was to get the CRT beam spot as small as possible for Text Mode display, reducing blooming effects (where text looks unfocused) and yielding shaper text. In any modern CRT, small beam spots will still cause a bit of blooming and impact multiple adjacent pixel areas of a high resolution display. Therefore, controlling and focusing the beam to make the resulting beam spot as small and round as possible, with high enough electron emissions to create desired brightness, while positioning the electron beam through the proper holes/slots in a shadow mask, is critically important.

In Samsung's Entertainment Mode, brightness is increased substantially, and a larger cloud of electrons is drawn off the cathode, resulting in a wider and more intense beam. This more intense beam must still be focused to a fairly small beam spot to not cause excessive blooming, while producing a much brighter display than in Text Mode. (It's not advised to view text in this mode, as it can appear unfocused).

Samsung's "Highlight Zone" hardware feature and associated software utility work in conjunction with MagicBright, and permits two different regions of brightness to exist on a single screen at once. For example, a movie may be viewed in a Highlight Zone window requiring more brightness than the rest of the screen. It's not a good idea to leave the Highlight Zone window active in the same screen area for long periods of time, or uneven phosphor burn-in can occur.

Below is a shot of a screen area amplified in brightness by the Highlight Zone feature. I did not run a DVD in the highlighted area in the photo, because it would be more difficult to discern the intensity difference. Samsung's newer Highlight Zone II software auto-detects motion/movies, and you can read my experiences with this feature in the hands-on section below. Of course, various software DVD players or graphics board utilities or drivers may have their own windowed image enhancement effects, so things could get confusing. We'll soon try some tests to see how they might conflict.

Normal CRTs output around 100 candelas of luminous intensity (a candle outputs 1 candela, and a 100 watt light bulb roughly 150 candelas). In Text Mode, the Samsung MagicBright monitors output between 110-150 candelas, depending on windowed versus full-screen enhancement. In Entertainment Mode, the screen will deliver 300-310 candelas. The next generation of MagicBright tubes will likely drive up the candela factor much higher than the current 17" and 19" displays. Note that the larger the tube, the harder it is to achieve the high brightness levels across the entire screen.

On the phosphor front, Samsung is using higher-density phosphors, meaning the phosphor powder is finer and is packed denser. This allows for higher brightness, with more intense primary colors generated from the phosphors (which also increases overall color gamut). Samsung's "nano filter" on the front of the CRT screen provides light absorption in the 570nm to 590nm range (the green spectrum). Ambient light waves in the green spectrum reflected off on the screen surface might otherwise be out of phase with the CRT's emitted light, resulting in a canceling effect. By absorbing the ambient light in the green spectrum, overall screen brightness is enhanced. Again, many of these technologies have been in place for about a year now, but per Jim Muta, the above technical improvements are their state of the art and key innovations, whereas most other CRT designs remain pretty much the same.

You can see some hands-on testing with the 957MB later in this article.

One of the reasons that CRTs are still alive and well compared to expectations of their imminent demise, is that technology improvements have been made to the point of overshadowing LCD capabilities in some areas, while also reducing cost significantly, per Richard Atanus, VP of Product Development with NEC-Mitsubishi. In fact, contrary to all the present-day naysayers, NEC-Mitsubishi sees CRTs being available in the mainstream computer display market for another three to four years, but not much beyond.

While NEC-Mitsubishi acts as our aperture grille technology representative in this story, they also sell standard and flat shadow mask CRT monitors, giving their customers a full range of products, technologies, and pricepoints. But the company does plan to phase out some of their 15" and 17" CRT lines later this year, as mentioned earlier. Both Mitsubishi's and Sony's aperture grille technologies, called Diamondtron and Trinitron, are arguably the highest performing CRTs on the market (if comparing high-end aperture grille monitors to high-end shadow mask monitors). We'll take a look at some of the key improvements NEC-Mitsubishi has brought forth in CRT design over the past year or so.

A recent design improvement with NEC-Mitsubishi's aperture grille line is their multi-layer anti-reflective, anti-static, vacuum-deposited screen coating. With vacuum deposition, the thickness of the applied layers can be precisely controlled, and they are very evenly applied (versus spraying them on, as seen in many other monitor designs). Given that the glass on a monitor is typically thicker with different tint characteristics in the middle compared to the edges, coating thickness can be dynamically controlled based on the amount of tint in the glass layer, resulting in a more even and uniform screen image display.

Similar to Samsung, NEC-Mitsubishi has improved their electron gun output over the past year to provide brighter and more color-saturated display of video content. Their SuperBright technology is included in the sample 19" MultiSync FE991SB unit in our lab, and it increases from the standard 100-120 candela output up to 300 candelas at the maximum SuperBright setting. Blooming effects from the higher electron beam output definitely occurs for text based office applications, but when looking at Web sites, images or DVDs, it's actually ideal per Atanus. SuperBright technology has three settings (OFF/Text, Images, and Video), similar to MagicBright.

NEC-Mitsubishi also ships a 17" CRT with up to 500 candela output, but not in North America and Europe. It's targeted to Japan and China, where monitors are used a high percentage of the time for multimedia output, such as DVD viewing and not for general office applications.

Similar to Samsung's included Highlight Zone technology, NEC-Mitsubishi offers a free downloadable "Brightness Controller" software utility that works in conjunction with SuperBright to enhance the image quality and viewing experience of motion video applications. You can maintain standard applications at normal brightness, while boosting the brightness of video applications in a window.

About three years ago, CRT makers starting using two focus grids in each electron gun to steer the electron beam more precisely. But there was only a single lens inside the gun. NEC-Mitsubishi added a second lens to improve focus by 20% in their new U-NX gun. For those who are curious, because you likely won't find this info easily on the Web, U-NX means Ultra (Electro-field extended electron lens with integrated resistor), Neo (new compared to the original XF electron gun), Extended field lens. You can see the difference between beam spots formed by older conventional guns with a small primary len, compared to a U-NX gun (represented in the diagram below by an electron beam passing through a past-generation S-NX gun's large primary lens to the secondary lens of the U-NX gun, creating a much tighter focused beam spot.).

Another interesting development was in the area of deflection yokes. NEC-Mitsubishi's new U2 deflection yoke (used on its 19" and 22" aperture grille CRTs) reduces misconvergence error and also offers greater horizontal deflection sensitivity, which results in lower power consumption and a greater horizontal scanning frequency range.

Contrary to shadow-mask CRT cathode designs that build up harmful deposits over time, resulting in reduced electron emissions (as mentioned earlier), NEC-Mitsubishi claims that their patented scandium-oxide-coated cathode (Mitsubishi has had this technology in place for about four years; they do not share it with shadow mask CRT makers.) inhibits deposit build-up and maintains screen brightness for much longer periods. Atanus mentioned that while shadow-mask CRTs might lose 50% brightness in 10,000 hours, their aperture grilles maintain 90% brightness after the same timeframe, on average.

In the end, Samsung, NEC-Mitsubishi, Philips, LG, BenQ, and others will continue to enhance their CRT designs as long as they can derive benefits in reliability, visual quality, cost, and ergonomics. And, of course, as long as there's still a market for CRTs.

While this is not a formal CRT product review, with dark room and precision measurements, I did set up and look at the Samsung 957MB and the NEC-Mitsubishi FE991SB units side-by-side in our lab. In fact, I used a Kramer VP-6xl 1:6 VGA Distribution Amplifier, and hooked up the two test units, a two year old Dell UltraScan P991 aperture grille, a relatively new Micron 910 invar shadow mask tube to perform a quick comparison of features and video quality head-to-head. Testing was performed using two year old Dell 1GHz PIII systems with older GF2 GTS cards (with latest downloadable Nvidia drivers), to see if all the monitor features would work properly on an older PC and graphics system.

I viewed business documents, browsed the Web, watched DVDs, looked at various test screens in DisplayMate. I also fiddled with the hardware and software-based monitor controls, and tried the various MagicBright, Highlight Zone, and SuperBright settings with different content. After tuning brightness and contrast to optimal levels for my viewing in an ambient-lit lab room, ensuring color temperature was set to 9300 on all display units, degaussing, and adjusting screen geometry, I proceeded with my inspection.

Looking at all four monitors, it was immediately clear that the 957MB and FE991SB were superior in visual quality to the other monitors, though I'll note the Dell unit has been in use for a few years. With standard business applications and Web surfing with SuperBright/MagicBright in text mode, I preferred the clarity and sharpness of the NEC-Mitsubishi aperture grille monitor. Text and overall image clarity on the Samsung wasn't quite as crisp, but it was still very good overall. The Samsung's brightness needed to be turned down quite a bit, with contrast set to the maximum, to compete with the FE991SB's vibrant screen display. The black bezel of the FE991SB may have also contributed to perceived image sharpness.

Watching movies was definitely enhanced with the brightness modes on both the Samsung and NEC-Mitsubishi units. If you want to work on text applications while viewing movies in a window, you should use the Highlight Zone feature included with the Samsung, or the NEC-Mitsubishi Brightness Controller utility available here. Highlight Zone is more flexible, having hardware controls on front of the monitor, in addition to Highlight Zone II software that permits a user-defined highlight window anywhere on screen. And similar to the Brightness Controller utility, Highlight Zone II software detects and automatically enables the brightest mode for the active video window. Both features worked great in our test setup. As you move or resize the video playback window, the highlighted area moves with the video window. Brightness Controller provides a slider to adjust brightness to your liking in the non-video area, whereas Highlight Zone only has its three presets. For what it's worth, the Brightness Controller utility also worked on the background display of the Samsung monitor with a bit of tweaking. You could first set the brightness level to a lower level to read text clearly (which also lowers brightness of a video window on the Samsung), but once you move the video overlay window a bit, it triggers Highlight Zone to be enabled, with the background still at the lower brightness.

Overall, I thought the DVD playback looked more vivid on the Samsung, whether viewing with the entire screen brightened, or with Highlight Mode enabled. Others in the lab who watched video playback shared my opinion. Viewing a DVD with many shadows, such as the original dark and dreary Batman movie, was definitely a better experience on both the NEC-Mitsubishi and Samsung units compared to the other monitors.

Many monitor vendors provide software utilities to control monitor settings (given the front-panel buttons have always been difficult to navigate on most monitors). I liked both NEC-Mitsubishi's NaViSet V 1.0.40 and Samsung's MouScreen v 2.01 utilities that permit monitor adjustments with keyboard and mouse. NaViSet communicates with the monitor via DDC/CI (Display Data Channel/Command Interface) protocol (assuming it's supported in the OS) over the standard video cable to adjust display settings with the mouse and keyboard, versus a separate USB connection required with MouScreen on the Samsung.

The MouScreen interface was more stylish and it's readily accessible from the desktop, not buried in the advanced video settings, like NaViSet. However, being more tightly integrated in the display control panel, you always know where to find NaViSet. MouScreen does not display the name of the adjustable settings as you float your mouse over the icon as does NaViSet (you must click it to see what it does). As a minor aside, while I don't really care for a USB port being taken to control monitor settings, MouScreen worked great when the monitor was attached to our distribution amp, whereas NaViSet would not work when the FE991SB was attached to the distribution amp, as it requires direct video attachment to the PC for the DDC/CI protocol to work.

Here are a few shots of the FE991SB with its NaViSet monitor control software.

And here's a MouScreen geometry control screen:

To sum it up, CRT innovation still exists today as seen in the features present in the above monitors. Both provide excellent viewing experiences depending on your preference for an aperture grille or shadow mask display. Here's current pricing info: Samsung 957MB (check prices) NEC-Mitsubishi FE991SB (Black) (check prices) While CRTs have been around for ages, their operations are still pretty fascinating, and here's a few links and downloads that should get you up to speed.

PC Tech Guide -- Monitor Technology - a concise technology guide describing the insides and operations of modern CRTs

NEC-Mitsubishi -- Monitor Technology Guide - NEC-Mitsubishi provides an informative though slightly self-serving technology guide

EIZO -- Monitor Technology FAQ - See the FAQ on CRT Technology a few layers down from this page. They use frames, with no direct URL, but it's worth the navigating.

DisplayMate Technologies -- DisplayMate Utility - To test and tune your own CRT we highly recommend this product. You'll also find some great display technology whitepapers and tips at the DisplayMate site.

PC Magazine -- Display Buying Guide - PC Magazine's display expert Alfred Poor delivers keen insights on how to select the right monitor, covering CRTs and panels.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.

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