Dixons boxes off CRTs for good

There was another nail in the coffin of traditional CRT tellies last week when the head of Dixons (which also owns Currys and PC World) said that the chain would phase them out from its shops during 2006. "We have a CRT television selling at £1,300 (€1,900) last Christmas and £300 (€440) this Christmas and still people didn't want to buy it," John Clare told British reporters. He said that only one in seven TVs sold by Dixons is a CRT box. Dixons is following manufacturers such as Sony, which said before Christmas that it would soon stop selling CRT tellies in its stores. However, the switch to flat TVs over box ones is not yet matched by picture quality, say other experts. CRT sets still offer superior picture quality to most LCD and plasma models, a fact that is hard to discern by the distance they are kept from each other in TV retailers.