Screening the future

The television business is going flat.

Like a slowly leaking tire, sales of traditional TV sets, with their bulky, lead-lined cathode-ray tubes, or CRTs, are on the wane. Meanwhile, consumers are going into hock for costly flat-panel TVs that are thin enough to hang on a wall and wide enough to simulate the look of a movie theater. And the world's leading electronics firms are racing to build flat TVs cheap enough to buy without taking out a second mortgage.

Some of us can't wait. Americans bought 3.4 million flat TV sets last year, an increase of 116 percent, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Old-style TVs did far better, with 19.9 million sold, but that number was down 4.4 percent from the previous year.

''Consumers are attracted to that thin form factor," said Ross Rubin, industry analyst for the NPD Group. ''It really blends into their living room aesthetic much better."

But it's murder on the family budget. A good 32-inch flat TV will cost around $2,000, compared to about $600 for the bulky old tube set. That's because CRT tubes are cheap to make, while producing flat displays is a complex and grueling task.

That's why last week's Boston convention of the Society for Information Display was as much a scientific gathering as a trade fair. While visitors to the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center gaped at gigantic new flat TVs, the industry's top scientists and engineers huddled in back rooms, comparing notes on new techniques for building bigger, flatter sets that will sell at lower prices.

Today, the flat screen market is dominated by liquid crystal displays, or LCDs -- the kind used in all laptop computers and in a growing number of desktop machines. These screens use tiny liquid crystals that open and shut when an electric current is applied. Color filters sit in front of the tiny shutters; fluorescent lights sit behind them. Each crystal is controlled by an electrical circuit that opens or shuts it very quickly to produce the image on the screen.

The other major flat screen technology is called plasma. This method uses tiny pockets of gas that glow when electrified. Again, filters are used to produce the correct colors.

Each technology has its pros and cons. ''LCD is the most capable," said Paul Semenza, vice president of iSuppli Corp., a research firm. LCD screens can be made to fit a cellphone, all the way up to a huge 82-inch TV display that Korean electronics firm Samsung showed off in Boston. By contrast, it's difficult to make a small plasma screen that delivers a good picture. So plasma is generally found in displays of 40 inches or bigger.

Purists say the old picture tube sets actually look better. Plasma sets are susceptible to ''burn-in" when an image stays on the screen for a long time; they also have problems displaying the dark portions of an image. Cheaper LCD screens may do a poor job of displaying moving objects; slow response from the liquid crystals may cause a ''smearing" effect. Neither of these weaknesses afflict old-style TVs, Semenza said. ''The CRT is still the standard to meet," he said, but added ''the flat panels are coming very close."

But manufacturing flat screens is costly. Japanese makers Fujitsu and Hitachi laid out $674 million last year to build a new plasma manufacturing line, and LCD factories can cost up to $2 billion, about the same as a plant for making computer chips. However, computer chips are tiny, and each production cycle at a chip plant produces thousands of them; that's why your desktop PC is so cheap. TV screens are big, so only a few can be made at a time, keeping per-unit costs high.

So engineers are hunting for ways to crank out flat screens as cheaply as old-style picture tubes. Samsung showed off one solution last week: an organic light-emitting diode screen, or OLED. This type of screen is already in service in many late-model cellphones. It's cheap to make and produces brilliant color. Besides, it doesn't need a backlight, like LCD screens, because the materials generate their own light when exposed to electricity.

''It can go very thin," said Samsung vice president Kyuha Chung, showing off a 32-inch OLED screen. ''This particular one is about three centimeters thick. Less than one inch thick." Eventually, Chung said, Samsung hopes to make an OLED just one millimeter thick that could be mounted on a plastic surface to create a flexible TV set. Thanks to the lack of a backlight, Chung said, a 40-inch OLED set would use no more than 70 watts of electricity, compared to 200 watts for the same size LCD.

IFire Technology Corp. of Toronto pushed its own solution, a system that would spray a light-emitting chemical between two layers of electrodes. The company is building a pilot plant to start producing sample panels this year, and hopes to be in full production by 2007. Don Carkner, vice president of product planning, said the iFire process could crank out 37-inch panels for about $300 each, which should result in retail prices of less than $1,000.

Perhaps the most radical idea came from Motorola Inc., of Chicago. It has developed a way to grow carbon nanotubes that work like the electron guns in an old-fashioned picture tube -- only each dot of light on the screen would have its own separate gun. Vida Ilderem, director of Motorola's physical sciences lab, said Motorola wants to license the technology to makers of LCD and plasma screens, who could quickly add it to existing production lines. ''If the partner has the manufacturing line all there, it could take 18 to 24 months," Ilderem said.

According to the MIT Technology Review website, industry research firm DisplaySearch says the nanotube system could lead in a few years to 40-inch TVs costing only about $800.

That's a price that would let middle-class consumers thin out their TV sets, instead of their wallets.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.