Personal computers are great tools for office activities, for Internet activities and many other uses, but they have a big drawback: the monitor is still an electronic device and creates electromagnetic fields of many kinds that are unhealthy.
From the beginning of the "computer revolution", about 1995, we have seen the gradual replacement of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors with LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) ones with a few improvements but not so many.
A CRT monitor creates a strong magnetic field all around itself, and radiates low frequency waves that are almost impossible to shield.
An LCD monitor doesn't have big coils so it doesn't generate a strong magnetic field, however both the backlight system and the other circuits emit lots of electromagnetic fields of various frequency bands.
The electromagnetic fields are completely invisible and this fact has many consequences on the way people and society behave and consider them.
The effects of electromagnetic fields are of course variable from an individual to another.
But if there is this negative subproduct of the device, why the industry hasn't done anything to stop it ? The reasons are many and complex: industries, like nations, aren't real entities that can see and touch, and feel pain, they are complex organizations where thousands of people do something for receiving a salary or bonus, and the result is that products are never tested for enough time to see these problems.
On the other hand single users, expecially who works on software or web site development, use the computer monitor for many hours each day so they can notice the naughty effects of the electromagnetic emissions of monitors on physical health.
Of course industry managers are looking for profits and market shares and do not think to it twice if they have a chance to sell something to millions of people, making billions of dollars, even if the device they are selling is polluting and dangerous, as long as the product doesn't kill or harm people evidently and in short time.
Even if industry managers had respect for human health and decided to avoid all electromagnetic emissions from such an important device as the computer monitor, there are many technical problems as we can see.
Every electrical and electronic circuit generates electromagnetic field around it, and once the fields are produced it is very difficult to stop them.
We've been researching for more than a decade the ways to reduce unwanted electromagnetic emissions from computer monitors, and we have collected many techniques that give very good results.
Yes, today it is possible to build computer monitors with very, very low electromagnetic emissions, but industries still don't make them, why ? Why, if it is possible to avoid these harmful emanations, don't they make it ?
The reasons are always the same: organizations are slow and bloated, and profit interests have the precedence.
Very large, enormous, factories have been built to produce LCD modules and displays by machine. Automated factories cost millions or billions, and anyway redesigning them requires much much work and time.
OLED (Organic Led) is a technology to make displays, it is completely different from LCD panels with backlight, OLED panels emit their own light, they don't need a backlight, so an OLED monitor doesn't need the circuits for backlighting, it needs much less current and power so the power supply can be much smaller.
We have been looking at the news about OLED products for decades. It is more than 10 years that they are talking about the fantastic flexible screen made with OLED. Still today OLED monitors aren't available, because OLED sheets have a very short life time, they ruin in the time of few months.
We have been using LCD monitors with LED backlight for more than three years now and we have removed almost all the electromagnetic emissions. Of course if OLED technology became reliable and mature LCD monitors would be replaced by them, but we need to save our health now, we need to save our children while they are little, we simply can't wait.
Of course behind the OLED/LCD transition there are the always present profit interests: who would abandon stocks of thousands and thousands just assembled and perfectly working LCD monitors because they are lightly dangerous for people that use them for more than few minutes a day ? Of course industries make accordance on delaying the new technologies for some years, to sell their products to final users first.
Finally, even if the OLED technology was perfected there would be always the electronic boards attached to the OLED panel to convert the VGA signals into the signals required by the panel, and to control the other functions of the monitor. Such boards are a big source of electromagnetic emissions, they should not be behind the panel, in front of the user's head, but we can be sure that manufacturers of the future OLED monitors will ignore this fact again.