The dawn of a new century in Australia brought with it new experiences, from the Sydney Olympics to a goods and services tax. But the century’s first decade would also herald immense change not just in how we consumed entertainment, but where. The 2000s were the first decade to see real diversification in display technology, as the market dominance of cathode-ray tubes began to wane.
It was the decade that saw screen resolutions – the number of picture elements or ‘pixels’ we viewed – rise at almost the same rate as screen sizes fell. It was also the decade that the density of those pixels all but reached levels beyond the resolve of the human eye.
The dying of the light
It’s a testament to electrical engineers around the world – from Karl Ferdinand Braun to Vladimir Zworykin – that more than a century after the ‘Braun Tube’ was invented in 1897, the cathode ray tube (CRT) remained the world’s primary electronic display technology. Albeit, only just.
By 2000, CRT televisions were beginning their last dogfight against first-generation plasma and (to a lesser extent) LCD TVs, yet aside from laptops, CRTs largely remained the choice for the booming PC market. Moreover, while television greeted the new century with the same ‘standard’-definition resolution (576 TV lines or 720x576-pixels), CRT monitors had pushed resolution
