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CRT monitor replacement in LCD form,12 inch size

A Kent Modular Electronics product story

Edited by the Processingtalk editorial team Apr 15, 2005

12 inch Cathode Ray Tubes were once the most popular size of colour CRT on the market and were used in a variety of Industrial and Military applications: a replacement monitor is now available

12 inch Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) were once the most popular size of colour CRT on the market and were used in a variety of Industrial and Military applications.

Their non-availability now poses serious problems for some sectors where equipment (e.g machine tools) must be kept in service for several more years.

KME has used its TFT LCD expertise to design a Universal Replacement 12.1 inch TFT Chassis monitor to fit in place of the existing CRT chassis.

Flexibility is the keynote, not only in terms of the simplified mechanical design but also in the ability of the TFT monitor to handle low resolution (slow scan) legacy signals such as CGA, Hercules and EGA.

The simple metal chassis is designed to fit comfortably within the existing 12 inch CRT space envelope.

The base plate is drilled with holes and slots to pick up the original CRT chassis fixing positions.

The TFT can be fixed to a tilt position between 0 and 30 degrees.

As an eco-friendly design input the whole assembly packs flat after test and burn-in at KME, to save packing volume and shipping costs.

It is easily reassembled at its final destination.

This 12.1 inch "UN Series" monitor is the first in a family of LCD-for-CRT Replacement Chassis Monitors that KME will export worldwide.

KME was formed 25 years ago to make CRT monitors.

Larger sizes of CRT are still in production but markets are changing rapidly to high resolution flat-panel LCD monitors.

KME has a wide range of modern displays to meet this demand.

However high resolution TFT monitors are not able to display legacy signals that were presented to old CRT monitors designed specifically for them.

KME has invested heavily in R and D to develop a range of LCD monitors that are specifically designed to interface with any legacy signal and give full-screen, crisp, bright displays, whatever the resolution.

KME LCD monitors are manufactured at their facility at Rochester, Kent.

Full details of all products may be found on the company website.

The technical background is that LCD Flat Panels expect signals to VESA standards (VGA, SVGA, SXGA etc) that are fixed in terms of horizontal and vertical scan rates and also in terms of pixels.

A typical 12.1 inch LCD panel has a fixed resolution of 800 x 600 pixels (SVGA) and expects a video signal of 38kHz horizontal and 60Hz vertical.

A typical 12 inch colour monitor from a 1980s machine tool, might have a resolution of 560 x 240 pixels and be driven at 15.6kHz horizontal and 50Hz vertical.

Applying this signal to a standard PC monitor will produce no picture whatsoever! KME design expertise is not only to translate the scan frequencies but also to expand the pixels to fill the available screen size.

The legacy systems from the 1980s followed no standards with the result that each manufacturer's controller was different from their peers.

CRT monitors developed multiscanning circuitry to cope with the variables.

Now KME has applied this philosophy to LCD monitors.