State of Technology: Display Technology Promises Pizzazz

In the price-sensitive world of desktop hardware, displays, which often boast as many advanced features as the computers they are connected to, still frequently fail to incite users’ passions, according to solution providers.

The innovations that matter most are price and size, according to Russell Sakatani, director of sales at GST, a Brea, Calif.-based solution provider, and a member of ViewSonic’s partner advisory council. “If a customer can get a 19-inch LCD for the price of a 17-inch, they are thrilled,” Sakatani says. Sakatani’s views are consistent with the results of VARBusiness’ quarterly State of Technology survey. Solution providers surveyed said their most important considerations for displays are price and margin (46 percent), followed closely by resolution (44 percent).

The concerns of VARs, though, are a bit of a departure from the efforts of the vendors. In a market focused on the fundamentals of cost, there is still a great deal of innovative technology and new functionality on tap in both desktop displays and digital projectors.

The move toward bigger and notably wider displays is the obvious shift in the display landscape, says ViewSonic LCD product manager Erik Willey. “The size ranges are moving up. We’ve gone from 17 inches to 19 inches as the primary size.”

Contrast ratios, which a year ago were typically 500-to-1, are nearly double now, approaching 1,000-to-1. Viewing angles and color shifting are also improving, with most displays moving closer to the optimum 178-degree viewability, according to Willey.

Vendors are also boasting better response times—some as low as two milliseconds—but that metric leaves some resellers unfazed. Response times are an artificial indicator, says Chris Pollitt, Philips’ product marketing manager for business LCDs.

“The millisecond race has died down,” Pollitt says. “The truth be told, when you put those on the test bench and look at them, it’s often imperceptible, yet there can be trade-offs with viewing angle, color accuracy and contrast. It’s not without give and take.”

Pollitt says the biggest change on the horizon will be improvements in color accuracy on LCDs, which still lag behind their CRT-based counterparts by a significant margin.

“The industry in general is moving toward more accurate LCDs,” Pollitt says. “Everyone wants to be able to have the LCD map more closely to the accuracy of CRTs because CRTs are going away.”

The emergence of LED (light-emitting diode) displays, too, will have a significant impact on the high end of the display market. Their combination of red, green and blue LEDs produces a white-light backlight, providing a broad array of colors without degrading luminance (brightness).

Last year, NEC launched the industry’s first LED-backlit desktop monitor. But while the 21-inch SpectraView LCD2189WG produced a superior image, its price ($7,000) and weight (40 pounds) render it highly impractical in all but the most demanding environments, such as medical imaging and video postproduction.

“LEDs are very accurate but very expensive, as many new technologies are,” Philips’ Pollitt says. “We are looking at a solution that has virtually the same attributes at a much lower cost.”

ViewSonic is planning to offer LED-backlit displays as well. Those are set to arrive in the second half of this year, Willey says. “LEDs garner a premium, but there are markets where the color performance is so critical that it doesn’t matter,” he says.

NEXT: From the flat screen to the big screen