Hitachi Ltd’s Hitachi Business Systems has the flat panel monitor you’ve always wanted, even if the price is not yet right, and the company has also filled the gap in the large screen Cathode Ray Tube market with the announcement of its Tornado 19 monitor. Hitachi has launched the DT3130E, a 13.3 Super Thin Film Transistor color liquid crystal display monitor, which it claims delivers more than 16m colors with very high clarity, and which, unlike the sort of LCD screens seen to date on notebook computers, has an all round viewing angle of more than 70(. Hitachi says the screen’s viewing area is equivalent to that of a conventional 15 monitor. The company has developed an algorithm- based switching technology, the Grey-Scale Integration method, to enable the monitor to display 16 million colors. It will take a full range of inputs from SVGA to XGA, and Hitachi says its use of line memory enables the monitor to use less memory and hence it has a lower power consumption. Unfortunately, at an expected cost of over $4,500, there are not likely to be too many companies throwing out their good old cheap CRT monitors just yet. Mark Wilkin of Hitachi Business Systems admitted that there was likely to be a niche market for the product at the moment, for example trading floors where space is at a premium, and presumably money isn’t. The Tornado, or CM751ET, claims to fill both the cost and size gap between existing 17 and 21 monitors. The company says it has added a new Electron gun which includes extra lenses for enhanced focus, and the monitor also has Hitachi’s Shadow Mask, and Enhanced Dot Pitch technology for improved brightness and clarity. It reckons to be one of the only monitors to offer true 1600 line resolution. The monitor also incorporates Hitachi’s Auto Beam Landing Elaboration, which apparently counteracts the effects of the world’s magnetic field on the light beam, a phenomenon that usually means monitors have to be set up differently for different geographic locations. The 19 monitor will sell for 900 pounds in the UK and will preview at the Cebit trade show in Hannover in March, with worldwide availability set for June or July. The flat panel monitor is available immediately.
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