Bij de EE Times is een artikel verschenen waarin de neergang van de CRT monitor wordt beschreven. Er wordt verwacht dat er dit jaar 6.8 miljoen LCD monitoren over de toonbank gaan en 105 miljoen CRT monitoren. Hoewel het eerste getal nietig lijkt vergeleken met het tweede is het wel een factor 125 keer zo groot als in 1996. Deze groei zal zich in de toekomst voortzetten wat, zoals het er nu uitziet, betekent dat in 2005 de CRT monitor over zijn hoogtepunt heen is en vervangen zal worden door flatpanels :
Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at Stanford Resources Inc. (SRI; San Jose, Calif.), said LCD monitors are beginning to cut into the sales of CRT monitors. Although the worldwide monitor market is still heavily dominated by the CRT, both in unit volume and total revenue, she predicted that revenue from CRT monitor sales will begin a downward slide in 2005, with little hope of ever recovering.[...] The LCD monitors' increasing success is causing problems for their CRT counterparts for several reasons. While pricing on CRT monitors has decreased slightly, the price decline in LCD monitors has been steep, reducing the CRT monitor's pricing edge, and further declines in the pricing of the mature CRT monitors will be limited.
"Profit margins have badly eroded, [CRT] component manufacturers are pushing for price increases and [CRT monitor makers] have already moved to cheaper manufacturing regions," said Alexander. "There's not much more they can do to economize."
[...] According to SRI predictions, the overall worldwide market for desktop monitors in 2006 will be in excess of 200 million units, with over one-fourth of those units based on LCDs. But the LCD monitor, Alexander concluded, "has the potential to become a runaway train." By analogy, she noted that the market for color CRT monitors initially developed slowly, "but the transition [away from monochrome CRT monitors], when it occurred, happened in the space of three years."