CRT - LCD Comparison
The CRT is a very difficult product to replace. We will never totally replace the CRT because they are intrinsically a very simple and reliable device which have received considerable investments for improvement over the years. However, they do have their limitations.
 | Positive CRT characteristics
| Negative CRT characteristics
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 | Positive LCD characteristics
| Negative LCD characteristics
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An LCD is intrinsically a digital device and produces images that are sharp and crisp. There are no issues of linearity where you have to correct for pincushion or other types of artifacts that you will see with a CRT.
CRTs have the benefit of being very fast. CRTs can respond in microseconds; literally as fast as the drive electronics can react. Some high-speed displays are still in use for this reason. For normal viewing, one chooses phosphors with a decay time long enough so you don’t see flicker. LCDs have caught up to CRTs with response times that are under 6 milliseconds even for grayscale transforms – so good video performance is now the norm for LCDs.
LCDs have surpassed the color saturation capability of many high-performance CRTs. Even the consumer can now select a complete display featuring the 80% level of NTSC.
The obvious advantages of LCDs are that they can be made very thin, use considerably less power, and can be made very lightweight. They are usable in applications that are impossible for CRTs because of their bulk.
Another advantage is that LCDs reflect far less light since the shadow mask of a CRT is an intrinsic reflector. When you take an LCD into an area with a high ambient light level, much less light is reflected, so it is better for applications such as ATM machines or kiosks where it is very difficult to protect a CRT from direct sunlight without turning up the brightness to extreme levels. LCDs can be made reflective or transflective to perform much better in these situations.
Environmentally, LCDs are the clear winner because of their significantly reduced power consumption. While there have been attempts to recycle CRTs, the overall benefits of LCDs in terms of energy use and the materials they are made from leads to much better environmental solutions in the long term.