With a 100-year head start over more modern screen technologies, the CRT is still a formidable technology. It’s based on universally understood principles and employs commonly available materials. The result is cheap-to-make monitors capable of excellent performance, producing stable images in true colour at high display resolutions. But in the world of miniaturization, Cathode ray tubes (CRT) are giant dinosaurs waiting for extinction. A CRT uses a single-point hot electron source that is scanned across the screen to produce an image.

The CRT’s most obvious shortcomings are well known:

• It uses too much electricity.
• Its single electron beam design is prone to misfocus, misconvergence and colour variations across the screen.
• Its clunky high-voltage electric circuits and strong magnetic fields create harmful electromagnetic radiation.
• It’s physically too large.

Attempts to replace bulky Cathode ray tubes resulted in the introduction of the field emission display screens (FED) screens. It will be the biggest threat to CRT’s dominance in the panel display arena. Instead of using a single bulky tube, FEDs use tiny ‘mini tubes’ for each pixel, and the display can be built in the same size as a CRT screen. 

The FED screens are lightweight, low power consuming and compact. The FEDs can be used instead of some other technologies are gaining market share in big screen and PC monitors, such as Projection TV, Plasma Displays, Liquid Crystal, and Organic Transistor Displays.