monitor

Last modified: Monday, September 20, 2004

1) Another term for display screen. The term monitor, however, usually refers to the entire box, whereas
display screen can mean just the screen. In addition, the term monitor often implies graphics capabilities.

There are many ways to classify monitors. The most basic is in terms of color capabilities, which separates
monitors into three classes:

monochrome : Monochrome monitors actually display two colors, one for the background and
one for the foreground. The colors can be black and white, green and black, or amber and black.
gray-scale : A gray-scale monitor is a special type of monochrome monitor capable of
displaying different shades of gray.
color: Color monitors can display anywhere from 16 to over 1 million different colors. Color
monitors are sometimes called RGB monitors because they accept three separate signals -- red,
green, and blue.

After this classification, the most important aspect of a monitor is its screen size. Like televisions, screen
sizes are measured in diagonal inches, the distance from one corner to the opposite corner diagonally. A
typical size for small VGA monitors is 14 inches. Monitors that are 16 or more inches diagonally are often
called full-page monitors. In addition to their size, monitors can be either portrait (height greater than
width) or landscape (width greater than height). Larger landscape monitors can display two full pages, side
by side. The screen size is sometimes misleading because there is always an area around the edge of the
screen that can't be used. Therefore, monitor manufacturers must now also state the viewable area -- that is,
the area of screen that is actually used.

The resolution of a monitor indicates how densely packed the pixels are. In general, the more pixels (often
expressed in dots per inch), the sharper the image. Most modern monitors can display 1024 by 768 pixels,
the SVGA standard. Some high-end models can display 1280 by 1024, or even 1600 by 1200.

Another common way of classifying monitors is in terms of the type of signal they accept: analog or digital.
Nearly all modern monitors accept analog signals, which is required by the VGA, SVGA, 8514/A, and
other high-resolution color standards.
A few monitors are fixed frequency, which means that they accept input at only one frequency. Most
monitors, however, are multiscanning, which means that they automatically adjust themselves to the
frequency of the signals being sent to it. This means that they can display images at different resolutions,
depending on the data being sent to them by the video adapters.

Other factors that determine a monitor's quality include the following:

bandwidth : The range of signal frequencies the monitor can handle. This determines how
much data it can process and therefore how fast it can refresh at higher resolutions.
refresh rate: How many times per second the screen is refreshed (redrawn). To avoid
flickering, the refresh rate should be at least 72 Hz.
interlaced or noninterlaced: Interlacing is a technique that enables a monitor to have more
resolution, but it reduces the monitor's reaction speed.
dot pitch : The amount of space between each pixel. The smaller the dot pitch, the sharper the
image.
convergence : The clarity and sharpness of each pixel.

Also see Northern vs. Southern Hemisphere Monitors in the Did You Know . . . ? section of Webopedia.

(2) A program that observes a computer. For example, some monitor programs report how often another
program accesses a disk drive or how much CPU time it uses.

The cathode ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun (a source of
electrons) and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and
deflect the electron beam, used to form images in the form of light emitted from the
fluorescent screen. The image may represent electrical waveforms (oscilloscope), pictures
(television, computer monitor), radar targets and others.

The single electron beam can be processed in such a way as to display moving pictures in
natural colors.

The CRT uses an evacuated glass envelope which is large, deep, heavy, and relatively
fragile. Display technologies without these disadvantages, such as flat plasma screens,
liquid crystal displays, DLP, OLED displays have replaced CRTs in many applications
and are becoming increasingly common as costs decline.

An exception to the typical bowl-shaped CRT would be the flat CRTs[1][2] used by Sony in
their Watchman series (the FD-210 was introduced in 1982). One of the last flat-CRT
models was the FD-10A. The CRT in these units was flat with the electron gun located
roughly at right angles below the display surface thus requiring sophisticated electronics
to create an undistorted picture free from effects such as keystoning.
Cutaway rendering of a color CRT: 1. Electron guns 2. Electron beams 3. Focusing coils
4. Deflection coils 5. Anode connection 6. Mask for separating beams for red, green, and
blue part of displayed image 7. Phosphor layer with red, green, and blue zones 8. Close-
up of the phosphor-coated inner side of the screen

Magnified view of an

Magnified view of a aperture grille color

shadow mask color CRT. CRT

The earliest version of the CRT was invented by the German physicist Ferdinand Braun
in 1897 and is also known as the 'Braun tube'.[3] It was a cold-cathode diode, a
modification of the Crookes tube with a phosphor-coated screen. The first version to use
a hot cathode was developed by John B. Johnson (who gave his name to the term Johnson
noise) and Harry Weiner Weinhart of Western Electric, and became a commercial product
in 1922. The cathode rays are now known to be a beam of electrons emitted from a
heated cathode inside a vacuum tube and accelerated by a potential difference between
this cathode and an anode. The screen is covered with a phosphorescent coating (often
transition metals or rare earth elements), which emits visible light when excited by high-
energy electrons. The beam is deflected either by a magnetic or an electric field to move
the bright dot to the required position on the screen.

In television sets and computer monitors the entire front area of the tube is scanned
systematically in a fixed pattern called a raster. An image is produced by modulating the
intensity of the electron beam with a received video signal (or another signal derived
from it). In all CRT TV receivers except some very early models, the beam is deflected
by magnetic deflection, a varying magnetic field generated by coils (the magnetic yoke),
driven by electronic circuits, around the neck of the tube.

Electron gun

The source of the electron beam is the electron gun, which produces a stream of electrons
through thermionic emission, and focuses it into a thin beam. The gun is located in the
narrow, cylindrical neck at the extreme rear of a CRT and has electrical connecting pins,
usually arranged in a circular configuration, extending from its end. These pins provide
external connections to the cathode, to various grid elements in the gun used to focus and
modulate the beam, and, in electrostatic deflection CRTs, to the deflection plates. Since
the CRT is a hot-cathode device, these pins also provide connections to one or more
filament heaters within the electron gun. When a CRT is operating, the heaters can often
be seen glowing orange through the glass walls of the CRT neck. The need for these
heaters to 'warm up' causes a delay between the time that a CRT is first turned on, and the
time that a display becomes visible. In older tubes, this could take fifteen seconds or
more; modern CRT displays have fast-starting circuits which produce an image within
about two seconds, using either briefly increased heater current or elevated cathode
voltage. Once the CRT has warmed up, the heaters stay on continuously. The electrodes
are often covered with a black layer, a patented process used by all major CRT
manufacturers to improve electron density.

The electron gun accelerates not only electrons but also ions present in the imperfect
vacuum (some of which result from outgassing of the internal tube components). The
ions, being much heavier than electrons, are deflected much less by the magnetic or
electrostatic fields used to position the electron beam. Ions striking the screen damage it;
to prevent this the electron gun can be positioned slightly off the axis of the tube so that
the ions strike the side of the CRT instead of the screen. Permanent magnets (the ion trap)
deflect the lighter electrons so that they strike the screen. Some very old TV sets without
an ion trap show browning of the center of the screen, known as ion burn. The aluminium
coating used in later CRTs reduced the need for an ion trap.

When electrons strike the poorly-conductive phosphor layer on the glass CRT, it becomes
electrically charged, and tends to repel electrons, reducing brightness (this effect is
known as "sticking"). To prevent this the interior side of the phosphor layer can be
covered with a layer of aluminium connected to the conductive layer inside the tube,
which disposes of this charge. It has the additional advantages of increasing brightness by
reflecting towards the viewer light emitted towards the back of the tube, and protecting
the phosphor from ion bombardment.
Oscilloscope tubes
For use in an oscilloscope, the design is somewhat different. Rather than tracing out a
raster, the electron beam is directly steered along an arbitrary path, while its intensity is
kept constant. Usually the beam is deflected horizontally (X) by a varying potential
difference between a pair of plates to its left and right, and vertically (Y) by plates above
and below, although magnetic deflection is possible. The instantaneous position of the
beam will depend upon the X and Y voltages. It is most useful for the horizontal voltage,
repeatedly, to increase linearly with time until the beam reaches the edge of the screen,
then jump back to its starting value (sawtooth waveform, generated by a timebase). This
causes the display to trace out the Y voltage as a function of time. Many oscilloscopes
only function in this mode. However it can be useful to display, say, the voltage versus
the current in an inductive component with an oscilloscope that allows X-Y input,
without using the timebase.

The electron gun is always centered in the tube neck; the problem of ion production is
either ignored or mitigated by using an aluminized screen.

The beam can be moved much more rapidly, and it is easier to make the beam deflection
accurately proportional to the applied signal, by using electrostatic deflection as
described above instead of magnetic deflection. Magnetic deflection is achieved by
passing currents through coils external to the tube; it allows the construction of much
shorter tubes for a given screen size. Circuit arrangements are required to approximately
linearize the beam position as a function of signal current, and the very wide deflection
angles require arrangements to keep the beam focused (dynamic focusing).

In principle either type of deflection can be used for any purpose; but electrostatic
deflection is best for oscilloscopes with relatively small screens and high performance
requirements, while a television receiver with a large screen and electrostatic deflection
would be many meters deep.

Some issues must be resolved when using electrostatic deflection. Simple deflection
plates appear as a fairly large capacitive load to the deflection amplifiers, requiring large
current flows to charge and discharge this capacitance rapidly. Another, more subtle,
problem is that when the electrostatic charge switches, electrons which are already part of
the way through the deflection plate region will only be partially deflected. This results in
the trace on the screen lagging behind a rapid change in signal.

Extremely high performance oscilloscopes avoid these problems by subdividing the

vertical (and sometimes horizontal) deflection plates into a series of plates along the
length of the "deflection" region of the CRT, and electrically joined by a delay line
terminated in its characteristic impedance; the timing of the delay line is set to match the
velocity of the electrons through the deflection region. In this way, a change of charge
"flows along" the deflection plate along with the electrons that it should affect, almost
negating its effect on those electrons which are already partially through the region.
Consequently the beam as seen on the screen slews almost instantly from the old point to
the new point. In addition, because the entire deflection system operates as a matched-
impedance load, the problem of driving a large capacitive load is mitigated.

It is very common for oscilloscopes to have amplifiers which rapidly chop or swap the
beam, blanking the display while switching. This allows the single beam to show as two
or more traces, each representing a different input signal. These are properly called
multiple-trace (dual trace, quadruple trace, etc.) oscilloscopes.

Much rarer is the true dual beam oscilloscope, whose tube contains an electron gun that
produces two independent electron beams. Usually, but not always, both beams are
deflected horizontally by a single shared pair of plates, while each beam has its own
vertical deflection plates. This allows a time-domain display to show two signals
simultaneously.

Many modern oscilloscope tubes pass the electron beam through an expansion mesh. This
mesh acts like a lens for electrons and has the effect of roughly doubling the deflection of
the electron beam, allowing the use of a larger faceplate for the same length of tube
envelope. The expansion mesh also tends to increase the "spot size" on the screen, but
this trade off is usually acceptable.

When displaying one-shot fast events the electron beam must deflect very quickly, with
few electrons impinging on the screen, leading to a faint or invisible display. A simple
improvement can be attained by fitting a hood on the screen against which the observer
presses his face, excluding extraneous light, but oscilloscope CRTs designed for very fast
signals give a brighter display by passing the electron beam through a micro-channel
plate just before it reaches the screen. Through the phenomenon of secondary emission
this plate multiplies the number of electrons reaching the phosphor screen, giving a
brighter display, possibly with a slightly larger spot.

The phosphors used in the screens of oscilloscope tubes are different from those used in
the screens of other display tubes. Phosphors used for displaying moving pictures should
produce an image which fades very rapidly to avoid smearing of new information by the
remains of the previous picture; i.e., they should have short persistence. An oscilloscope
will often display a trace which repeats unchanged, so longer persistence is not a
problem; but it is a definite advantage when viewing a single-shot event, so longer-
persistence phosphors are used.

An oscilloscope trace can be any color without loss of information, so a phosphor with
maximum effective luminosity is usually used. The eye is most sensitive to green: for
visual and general-purpose use the P31 phosphor gives a visually bright trace, and also
photographs well and is reasonably resistant to burning by the electron beam. For
displays meant to be photographed rather than viewed, the blue trace of P11 phosphor
gives higher photographic brightness; for extremely slow displays, very-long-persistence
phosphors such as P7, which produce a blue trace followed by a longer-lasting amber or
yellow afterimage, are used.

The phosphor screen of most oscilloscope tubes contains a permanently-marked internal

graticule, dividing the screen using Cartesian coordinates. This internal graticule allows
for the easy measurement of signals with no worries about parallax error. Less expensive
oscilloscope tubes may instead have an external graticule of glass or acrylic plastic. Most
graticule can be side-illuminated for use in a darkened room.

Oscilloscope tubes almost never contain integrated implosion protection (see below).
External implosion protection must always be provided, either in the form of an external
graticule or, for tubes with an internal graticule, a plain sheet of glass or plastic. The
implosion protection shield is often colored to match the light emitted by the phosphor
screen; this improves the contrast as seen by the user.