The monitor is a flat-panel screen stuck onto the machinery box like a picture in an gracefully curved frame.

It looks like a typical, not especially sleek office phone, with a tilting six-inch flat-panel screen on top.

But the newer, flat-panel screens win in almost every other category.

Riker grinned as he sat down at the computer station and spun the terminal's flat-panel screen to face them both.

Forty-two-inch flat-panel screens will be mounted on the walls, about 11 feet in front of each bed, to show both computer displays and television.

Oldsmobile's video monitor is a 5.6-inch flat-panel screen like those in jetliners.

A television that size might not be a big hit, but flat-panel screens in general certainly are.

By the end of the decade, the typical home will have seven to eight flat-panel screens.

The company will soon release a unit with a built-in flat-panel screen for about $600.

First came the flat-panel screen, a monitor more expensive than the computer itself.