If a few years ago, acquiring a LCD monitor was a display of luxury which only the richest and demanding users could afford, now the things have changed. The price of the LCD technology has greatly decreased in the last period and its performances got closer to those of a CRT monitor. These changes reflected in the volume of sales which has nothing in common with the statistics from 2-3 years ago.

Currently, from 10 monitors sold, 6 are LCDs; at least that's what states a report published recently by DisplaySearch. Users bought 21.2 million LCD monitors in the fourth quarter of this year which represents an increase of 26% compared to the previous quarter. The main cause of this growth tendency is the price policy imposed by producers which determined a dramatic decrease of interest towards CRT monitors.

The DisplaySearch analysis company announced that the LCD solutions, which represent 57% of the market and 37 million units in the last quarter of 2004, are ahead of the CRT ones.

Nowadays, minimum prices for LCD monitors vary between 149$ and 199$ for the 15 inch models, 199$ and 299$ for the 17 inch models and 359$ and 399$ for the 19 inch models.

Dell has been declared the number one producer of LCD monitors. Dell sold 4.2 million monitors in Q4 2004 ensuring a market quota of 19.8 percents. These performances distance Dell from the second producer, Samsung which has a quota of 10%. In the United States, Dell has an even better position: 39.5% of the market, announces DisplaySearch. Following Samsung, the top is continued by Hewlett-Packard (9.1%), Acer (6.2%) and LG (6.1%).