The Computer Goes Flat That's The Future, Some Visionaries Say. They Foresee A Giant Display Screen As Thin As A Piece Of Posterboard And As Flexible As A Piece Of Typing Paper.

Take a look at the monitor on your desktop computer. Chances are it's heavy, at least a foot long, and shaped like a TV set.

Fast-forward a decade or so. That big cathode ray tube, or CRT, has been relegated to a museum. You're sure of it because you just called up the museum's Web page on your new monitor, a sheet that hangs on the living-room wall like a window shade. Or perhaps you viewed the image on a one-piece computer made of flexible plastic, which you subsequently rolled up and stashed in your briefcase.

Such are the dreams of people in the flat-panel display industry. These are the people who made possible the notebook computer, the camcorder view-screen, and the thin desktop monitor. Now they are reaching toward an even thinner target, displays no thicker than a piece of poster board and as flexible as a piece of typing paper that will be used in devices as small as cell phones and palmtop computers and as large as wall-size television screens.

Realizing such a revolution means finding a good alternative to the liquid-crystal display, or LCD, currently the gold standard in flat panels. Especially tough to beat are active-matrix LCDs, which use a thin-film transistor to activate each pixel, or picture element, in the screen, resulting in sharper images that refresh quickly.

Despite their popularity, LCDs have drawbacks. For one, they require a lot of materials and are expensive to make, said David E. Mentley, vice president of Stanford Resources, a research firm in San Jose, Calif., that tracks the display industry.

``It's pretty hard to beat the price performance of the CRT,'' Mentley said. ``The active-matrix LCD is the most well-entrenched flat-panel technology. It's fairly well-suited for the notebook computer market, but it's still quite a stretch for the desktop market because of the price.''

A 14- or 15-inch flat monitor may cost $600 to $800, but a larger LCD monitor is still in the $2,000 to $4,000 range, Mentley said. People can buy entire computer systems for less than that.

And for computer screens, LCDs have a major drawback: They offer less of a viewing angle than traditional CRT monitors.

Cost and quality issues aside, the LCD market seems firmly out of the hands of U.S. companies. The market is dominated by Asian firms, and this has forced U.S. manufacturers to seek alternative gateways to the flat-panel industry.