“People will begin using flat-screen portables as regular desktops,” a New York researcher correctly says.[[48]] Flat-screen computers may not be as viewable now as the best CRT displays, but this may quickly change. What’s more, flat-screen machines don’t hog desks as the Kaypro II-style portables can. After all, the flat screens are essentially—flat. They don’t need hefty transformers, moreover, and don’t burn out like old vacuum tubes. CRTs are vacuum tubes. Low voltage is still another plus of most flat screens. Not that CRTs are normally a shock hazard, but you’ll presumably feel safer if you didn’t sit near a 20,000-volt gizmo flinging electrons around inside some glass.
Also, as David LaGrande, an official with the Communications Workers of America notes, flat screens may “eliminate the radiation danger, reduce the risks for pregnant women.” And unless you spray a flat display with radioactive material, it just won’t give you cancer.
Again, no one’s proved that CRTs will turn people’s bodies into tumor farms. But why gamble? Your caution won’t hurt labor relations.
Flat screens, also, don’t flicker tiresomely as many CRTs do, and someday they may boast more fully formed images than those from the CRTs. So you might make fewer errors reading material from the screen.
The word “might” is important. Many liquid-crystal displays—LCDs, like the wristwatch kind—showed much cruder images in 1984 than did typical CRTs. The broken-up letters might bother you just like those from the cheap dot-matrix printers.
Also, some LCDs offered horrid contrast between the screen background and your typing.
That was as of late 1984. Even cheap LCDs in the future could do away with the breakup and contrast problems. Already the Japanese are selling color TVs with LCDs.
Perfected, LCDs could make computerized offices brighter and cheerier. They don’t glow. Rather, they reflect light, just like paper, so you needn’t darken the office. In fact, light helps.[[49]]
And if LCDs don’t fully pan out? There’s yet another choice—electropheretic screens, which may offer decent contrast and even beat CRTs’ sharpness. Here’s the theory. A magnetic charge pushes tiny particles to the surface of the screens, and patterns of particles form images.
These gizmos will tax your battery less than some other flat-screen displays do. And listen to this: when you turn an electropheretic off, it remembers. The images on your screen don’t vanish.