Silver News
New Flat Panel Television
Displays Give Push to Silver
By Samuel Etris, Senior Technical Consultant
to The Silver Institute
The large screen flat panel display television sets now featured in home entertainment showrooms rely on a new technology
wholly dependent upon silver.
Although only on the market for four years, the sales of flat panel
display television have been growing at a rate of more than 20 percent annually. Major electronics firms such as Samsung, Fujitsu, Phillips, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, Pioneer, and Mitsubishi are committed to improving flat panel display technology and decreasing the costs of production. The price of flat panel 42-inch television sets, recently about US$9,000, is being cut nearly in half as new improvements and the economy of scale take hold.
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Flat panel displays consist of two parallel flat sheets of glass. On the back of the glass facing the viewer is a grid of thousands of lines of silver, each thinner than a human hair. These lines conduct the elec-tronic signals activating a special gas that hits color phosphors and more lines of silver on the opposite pane. On impact, these color phosphors react by flashing color for the picture seen by the viewer. The flat panel display is a milestone achievement of micro-electronics. It has made the bulky cathode ray tube television obsolete and achieved a “hang-on-the-wall” display.
The very large television display panels have found not only enthusiastic users in the home, but also in industry. Large flat panels display fine details in operators to touch the screen and control, change, or shut down a process
without using
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a computer keyboard. This convenience is important in food processing, pharmaceutical, and other manufacturing facilities where aggressive sanitation would foul the keyboard. For these applications, flat panel displays are often housed in a variety of mounts such as stainless steel.
Silver is an active metal and can tarnish, but this drawback has been overcome by the use of hermetic enclosures within flat panel displays.
Consultancy DisplaySearch estimates that worldwide sales of 2002
flat panel TV displays will reach 1.82 million units, possibly doubling in 2003 as more consumers replace their older TV sets. Manufacturers are mum on the amount of silver used in flat panel displays, but estimates peg this at an average of one gram per unit, which could consume 113,000 ounces in 2003. Electrical and electronic
applications consumed 132.5 million ounces of silver in 2001.
Silver News - First Quarter 2003
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