1. Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….
2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.
CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!
EDIT: I meant to reply to the other thread with the dangers of CRTs
I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically.
That was nothing compared to the time the CAT scan machine fell face down off the lift gate on the back of the delivery truck because our driver pushed the wrong button and tipped it instead of lowering it, but I missed the flack from that because I was on a move somewhere thankfully. Afterwords he was forever known as the quarter million dollar man.
I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes.
> Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….
My father ran his own TV repair shop for many years. When I was a teen he helped me make a Tesla coil out of a simple oscillator and the flyback transformer from a scrapped TV. It would make a spark 2 or 3 inches long and could illuminate a florescent light from several feet away. It definitely produced higher voltage than normally exists in a TV, but not orders of magnitude more. The high voltage circuits in CRTs are dangerous as hell.
It was high voltage but low current. I touched high-voltage circuit in the back of TV accidentally while poking in it as a teen, and while it was quite unpleasant, all it did was burn a hole in the skin of my finger. It eventually healed.
What's wild is this TV was not mass produced, which added to the cost, plus the shipping costs. Not only did he get the TV but he got the premium model too, I think Sony intentionally gave the restaurant that model so they could take some marketing photos, and sure enough, that was it.
Sometime in 2006 we bought a house and our realtor gave us a gift certificate for $2500 at Best Buy (weird, but...those were the days). A brand new, state of the art 720p DLP projection TV was just a hair under that - we still have it and it works great. But I had a couple dollars to burn off on the card.
I happened to have noticed that they were trying to clear out any remaining floor models of CRTs. One of them was an absolutely giant Samsung, memory says it was >34", but I'm not sure how big...with a sticker on it for, and I'll never forget this...$.72.
Soooo two big TVs for the price of one!
Long story short, we were moving out of that house, CRT tvs were long since obsolete and that TV hadn't even been turned on for at least 5 years. So we decided to throw it away. I had never picked it up before and had forgotten how heavy CRTs could be. I ended up having to get two friends to come help me move it to the curb, it was well over 250 lbs. The trash company also complained when they had to pick it up and had to make a return trip.
I kinda regret getting rid of it, but it was among the heaviest pieces of furniture in our house.
If you like playing with old hardware, be aware that old CRTs have a gotcha that can getcha: they hold a charge that can shock you across the room, and they can hold that charge for weeks or more. Google how to discharge it before poking around in a CRT.
When I was about 12 I got an old TV in my room which I of course decided to take apart to figure out how it worked.
I was VERY smart and of course unplugged the TV before doing anything.
My flat head screwdriver brushed against the wrong terminal in the back, I was literally thrown across the room several feet, and my flat head screw driver was no longer usable as the tip had deformed and slightly melted.
I later found an electronics book that had a footnote mentioning grounding out the tube before going near it…
It's not the tube (which is just a chamber for an electron gun. It's the high voltage capacitors used to hold charge for the supply driving the electron gun.
I have a vague recollection that my little cousin was nearly ended when he managed to destabilize the stand that a CRT was sitting on, and it fell just behind him, but I may be entirely hallucinating that memory.
Regardless, there are multiple ways old CRTs can cause great harm.
Somewhat related but back in my university days, I spent practically all my savings from a summer part-time job to buy a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT. I absolutely loved that thing, but at the end of each year I dreaded having to lug it home and then haul it back to the dorms again.
The elevators often didn’t work and climbing 10 flights of stairs while carrying a 70 lb (31kg) cube was brutal. It’s not often you buy a piece of electronics and get a complimentary workout regimen thrown in.
In my own university days, I was once walking into the apartment building when some maintenance men called me over. (This building was part student housing and part normal families). They pointed me to a TV set in an apartment. Apparently a family had abandoned it. It was a big 27” or so set with some weird geometry problems, no visible brand, and menus exclusively in Chinese. Thankfully we had an elevator! I was pretty stoked despite the weird pincushion effects (maybe side effect of being imported from at least 100° of longitude away??) because our apartment’s only TV was a 13” which looked funny in a comically big living room.
Some time in the early 1990s I worked with a Macintosh of some variety that had a massively heavy CRT display. It was a real bummer when we were asked to do offsite customer demos, but luckily my back and knees were young enough to carry it upstairs. In retrospect, this is probably why my boss took me to the demos, which was actually quite useful career-wise.
I am nostalgic about their operational principles, but I was already willing to give these up for the convenience of an LCD panel circa 2003. We had a lot of LAN parties to attend back in those days.
I think it was a time before the vintage feels for CRTs really. Sure, there were greybeards naysaying the coming of the LCD due to motion artefacts and smearing but the rest of users just wanted something high-res and flicker-free.
It’s less the feels (though the glow from a CRT in a dark room is entirely different from an LED) and more that the games especially were designed for the bleed and flow that CRTs have.
It’s similar to how subpixel antialiasing really depends on the screen design and what order the colors are in.
The pixelated 8bit aesthetic is more reminiscent of early emulators in LCD than how it actually was “on hardware”.
It's fascinating that the biggest CRT ever made had a 43" diagonal, which is at the low end for modern flatscreen TVs. But yeah, I can see why the market for this beast was pretty limited: even with deinterlacing, SD content would have looked pretty awful when viewed from up close, so the only application I can think of was using it for larger groups of people sitting further away from the screen. And even for that, a projector was (probably?) the cheaper alternative...
I remember having the 36" version in ~1997. I wouldn't want to guess how much it weighed, it was insane. I remember how impressive it was watching the Fifth Element Laserdisc on it.
I had the first high-def Sonys in the US market. I worked at a high end audio video store in the mid 90s and they gave it to me cheap as they couldn't get rid of it.
Even at 34", the thing weighed 200lbs (plus the stand it came with). I lived in a 3rd floor walk up. I found out who my true friends were the day we brought it back from the store. I left that thing in the apartment when I moved. I bet it is still there to this day.
I'd forgotten how heavy CRTs are. A local surplus auction has a really tempting 30's inch Sony CRT for sale cheap, but when I saw it was over 300lbs I had to pass on it.
In the late aughts I worked a summer at a company that was designing an articulating (flat screen) TV mount. I went with the engineers to one of the Intertek testing sessions. We wanted it to be rated for a 60" TV, but I was given the impression that the weight formulas they used for testing were based on CRT screens. The salesperson who came with us was giddy seeing the thing loaded up with 1000lb of steel plates and not giving way, but the actuators could not lift and our advertised rating was not more than 200lb.
A lot of those CRT screens had a pretty low refresh frequency, you were basically sitting in front of a giant stroboscope. That was particular bad for computer screens where you were sitting right in front of them. I think they pretty much all displayed at 30Hz. I can imagine how a gigantic screen can get pretty uncomfortable.
I recall a lot of people playing counterstrike at 640x480 to get at 100+hz refresh rates. The lower the resolution, the faster you can refresh. I don't recall the absolute limit but it would give the latest LCD gaming panels a serious run for their money.
Yes and no. Half of the screen was refreshing at a time, so it was really flashing at 30Hz. You still had a visible stroboscopic effect. True 60Hz and 100Hz screen appeared in the late 90s and made a visible difference in term of comfort of viewing.
CRT TVs only supported vertical refresh rates of 50Hz or 60Hz, which matched the regional mains frequency. They used interlacing and technically only showed half the frame at a time, but thanks to phosphor decay this added a feeling of fluidity to the image. If you were able to see it strobe, you must have had an impressive sight. And even if they supported higher refresh rates, it wouldn't matter, as the source of the signal would only ever be 50/60Hz.
CRT monitors used in PCs, on the other hand, supported a variety of refresh rates. Only monitors for specific applications used interlacing, customer grade ones didn't, which means you could see a strobing effect here if you ran it at a low frequency. But even the most analog monitors from the 80s supported atleast 640x480 at 60Hz, some programs such as the original DOOM were even able to squeeze 70Hz out of them by running at a different resolution while matching the horizontal refresh rate.
For some reason I remember 83Hz being the highest refresh rate supported by my XGA CRT, but I think it was only running at SVGA (800x600) in order to pull that rate.
Some demos could throw pixels into VRAM that fast, and it was wild looking. Like the 60Hz soap-opera effect but even more so.
I still feel that way looking at >30fps content since I really don't consume much of it.
The only time the electron gun was not involved in producing visible light was during overscan, horizontal retrace, and the vertical blanking interval. They spent the entire rest of their time (the very vast majority of their time) busily drawing rasterized images onto phosphors (with their own persistence!) for display.
This resulted in a behavior that was ridiculously dissimilar to a 30Hz strobe light.
The limiting factor is the horizontal refresh frequency. TVs and older monitors were around 15.75kHz, so the maximum number of horizontal lines you could draw per second is around 15750. Divide that by 60 and you get 262.5, which is therefore the maximum vertical resolution (real world is lower for various reasons). CGA ran at 200 lines, so was safely possible with a 60Hz refresh rate.
If you wanted more vertical resolution then you needed either a monitor with a higher horizontal refresh rate or you needed to reduce the effective vertical refresh rate. The former involved more expensive monitors, the latter was typically implemented by still having the CRT refresh at 60Hz but drawing alternate lines each refresh. This meant that the effective refresh rate was 30Hz, which is what you're alluding to.
But the reason you're being downvoted is that at no point was the CRT running with a low refresh rate, and best practice was to use a mode that your monitor could display without interlace anyway. Even in the 80s, using interlace was rare.
CGA ran pretty near 262 or 263 lines, as did many 8-bit computers. 200 addressable lines, yes, but the background color accounted for about another 40 or so lines, and blanking took up the rest.
Interlace was common on platforms like the Amiga, whose video hardware was tied very closely to television refresh frequencies for a variety of technical reasons which also made the Amiga unbeatable as a video production platform. An Amiga could do 400 lines interlaced NTSC, slightly more for PAL Amigas—but any more vertical resolution and you needed later AmigaOS versions and retargetable graphics (RTG) with custom video hardware expansions that could output to higher-freq CRTs like the SVGA monitors that were becoming commonplace...
The irony is that most of those who downvote didn't spend hours in front of those screens as I did. And I do remember these things were tiring, particularly in the dark. And the worst of all were computer CRT screens, that weren't interlaced (in the mid 90s, before higher refresh frequency started showing up).
I spent literally thousands of hours staring at those screens. You have it backwards. Interlacing was worse in terms of refresh, not better.
Interlacing is a trick that lets you sacrifice refresh rates to gain greater vertical resolution. The electron beam scans across the screen the same number of times per second either way. With interlacing, it alternates between even and odd rows.
With NTSC, the beam scans across the screen 60 times per second. With NTSC non-interlaced, every pixel will be refreshed 60 times per second. With NTSC interlaced, every pixel will be refreshed 30 times per second since it only gets hit every other time.
And of course the phosphors on the screen glow for a while after the electron beam hits them. It's the same phosphor, so in interlaced mode, because it's getting hit half as often, it will have more time to fade before it's hit again.
There are no pixels in CRT. The guns go left to right, ¥r¥n, left to right, while True for line in range(line_number).
The RGB stripes or dots are just stripes or dots, they're not tied to pixels. There would be RGB guns that are physically offset to each others, coupled with a strategically designed mesh plates, in such ways that e- from each guns sort of moire into only hitting the right stripes or dots. Apparently fractions of inches of offsets were all it took.
The three guns, really more like fast acting lightbulbs, received brightness signals for each respective RGB channels. Incidentally that means they could go between brightness zero to max couple times over 60[Hz] * 640[px] * 480[px] or so.
Interlacing means the guns draw every other lines but not necessarily pixels, because CRTs has beam spot sizes at least.
No, you don't sacrifice refresh rate! The refresh rate is the same. 50 Hz interlaced and 50 Hz non-interlaced are both ~50 Hz, approx 270 visible scanlines, and the display is refreshed at ~50 Hz in both cases. The difference is that in the 50 Hz interlaced case, alternate frames are offset by 0.5 scanlines, the producing device arranging the timing to make this work on the basis that it's producing even rows on one frame and odd rows on the other. And the offset means the odd rows are displayed slightly lower than the even ones.
This is a valid assumption for 25 Hz double-height TV or film content. It's generally noisy and grainy, typically with no features that occupy less than 1/~270 of the picture vertically for long enough to be noticeable. Combined with persistence of vision, the whole thing just about hangs together.
This sucks for 50 Hz computer output. (For example, Acorn Electron or BBC Micro.) It's perfect every time, and largely the same every time, and so the interlace just introduces a repeated 25 Hz 0.5 scanline jitter. Best turned off, if the hardware can do that. (Even if it didn't annoy you, you'll not be more annoyed if it's eliminated.)
This also sucks for 25 Hz double-height computer output. (For example, Amiga 640x512 row mode.) It's perfect every time, and largely the same every time, and so if there are any features that occupy less than 1/~270 of the picture vertically, those fucking things will stick around repeatedly, and produce an annoying 25 Hz flicker, and it'll be extra annoying because the computer output is perfect and sharp. (And if there are no such features - then this is the 50 Hz case, and you're better off without the interlace.)
I decided to stick to the 50 Hz case, as I know the scanline counts - but my recollection is that going past 50 Hz still sucks. I had a PC years ago that would do 85 Hz interlaced. Still terrible.
I think you are right, I had the LC III and Performa 630 specifically in mind. For some reason I remember they were 30Hz but everthing I find googling it suggest they were 66Hz (both video card and screen refresh).
That being said they were horrible on the eyes, and I think I only got comfortable when 100Hz+ CRT screens started being common. It is just that the threshold for comfort is higher than I remember it, which explains why I didn't feel any better in front of a CRT TV.
Have you ever seen high speed footage of a CRT in operation? The phosphors on most late-80s/90s TVs and color graphic computer displays decayed instantaneously. A pixel illuminated at the beginning of a scanline would be gone well before the beam reached the end of the scanline. You see a rectangular image, rather than a scanning dot, entirely due to persistence of vision.
Slow-decay phosphors were much more common on old "green/amber screen" terminals and monochrome computer displays like those built into the Commodore PET and certain makes of TRS-80. In fact there's a demo/cyberpunk short story that uses the decay of the PET display's phosphor to display images with shading the PET was nominally not capable of (due to being 1-bit monochrome character-cell pseudographics): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n87d7j0hfOE
Interesting. It's basically a compromise between flicker and motion blur, so I assumed they'd pick the phosphor decay time based on the refresh rate to get the best balance. So for example, if your display is 60 Hz, you'd want phosphors to glow for about 16 ms.
But looking at a table of phosphors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor ), it looks like decay time and color are properties of individual phosphorescent materials, so if you want to build an RGB color CRT screen, that limits your choices a lot.
Also, TIL that one of the barriers to creating color TV was finding a red phosphor.
Did they really do that, or did the tubes just ran at 2x vertically stretched 640x240 with vertical pixel shift? A lot of technical descriptions of CRTs seem to be adapted from pixel addressed LCDs/OLEDs, and they don't always seem to capture the design well
In the 90s I was tasked with fixing our CEOs computer and entered his office to see the largest CRT I’ve ever seen in my life. (It was not a PVM-4300, though. This one was sat on a metal table.) The size of it was shocking. I was more shocked, however, to find out he used it at 640 x 480. I never saw him use it so maybe he played games on it… from the moon.
The Sony FW900 was the peak of desktop CRT monitors, and it came out in 1999 so it or one of its rebadges might have been what you saw. That was much smaller than the PVM-4300 at 24" but with a much higher max resolution of 2304x1440@85hz, roughly what we'd now call 1440p, about eight years before the first 1080p LCDs arrived.
Those were still sought after well into the LCD era for their high resolution and incredible motion clarity, but I think LCDs getting "good enough" and the arrival of OLED monitors with near-zero response times has finally put them out to pasture as anything but a collectors item.
We set up one of those widescreen Intergraph CRTs for a client way back then, I think the cost of that thing plus the workstation was easily more than I made in a year
Was turned onto the the FW900 from hardforum years before LCD was available/reasonable
Now I have a FW900 sitting in a closet for decades because I can't lift it anymore
Also will never forget I was taking a walk in the woods years ago and in the middle of nowhere, no houses/apartments for miles, there was a FW900 just sitting there like someone must have thrown it out of an airplane but of course impossible as it was intact and inexplicable WTF (when got home made sure mine was still in the closet and had not somehow teleported itself)
This reminds me of my grandparents’ old, huge rear projection TV (RPTV). It was 4ft wide, 4ft tall (with the base), 2ft thick, and weighed 200lbs. This was the intermediary between CRTs and flat screens for me.
They had it installed in their basement. However, later they remodeled the basement stairway to add a turn. With the new layout, it would be impossible to bring back up the TV the way it was brought down. There was no other way to access the basement (it only had storm cellar windows), so they left it there when they moved.
I think about the new owners sometimes and wonder what they ended up doing. Perhaps they disassembled it, or maybe it’s still down there collecting dust.
I think I saw one as a child in the mid 90s - it belonged to an upper-middle class Kuwaiti whose at the time preschooler daughter was approximately as tall as the device, which was laid on the carpeted floor.
At the time there were a lot of private import items in Kuwait - particularly cars - so it's not impossible it was this particular model. I mean, what other TV could boast being the height of a four year old?
Interestingly that first link is to the same URL as today's yet it's from June 22 2024. The linked article however has today's date as the publish date. There's no indication that the article was updated from what was published originally.
I have a Samsung SlimFit HD tube TV from 2005 or so. It’s such an interesting piece of retro tech because it is widescreen, supports 1080i, and has HDMI, but it is a CRT! It’s also quite a bit thinner than most tubes. Super unusual.
I got it because LCDs always looked terrible to me and plasmas were still very expensive.
For fairly obvious reasons, most people were unaware this set ever existed. In the 90s (~1993?), my family replaced our old 1970s-era 19" Sony Trinitron with a HUGE new TV, a 35" Toshiba.
At the time, a "big" CRT was a 32". I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available. (PVM-4300 stragglers aside).
A couple years later (1995-6?), a friend's family bought a 40" Mitsubishi, which I _thought_ was the largest CRT made. But, again, Sony aside, it probably was.
> I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available
I helped friends move one of these old monsters out of an apartment in MIT's west campus 15 years ago. Don't remember the brand but it seemed even bigger than 35". It was shockingly huge and heavy and they lived on the top floor.
As we were doing this, I was thinking, how come the original owner didn't get a projection TV? They have been available since the 80s, the separate components were easier to manage, and the screens were far bigger.
In addition to the reasons mentioned in the other reply, maybe you actually didn't want anything much bigger. People replacing (say) a 27" CRT might upgrade to the latest fancy 32". They wouldn't have seen the purpose of a 60" projector behemoth. Depth could have been an issue as well. CRTs are deep, but depending on the projector style, it might have been worse.
Projectors (front/rear/enclosed/whatever) could produce a huge image, but they had their own issues.
In a bright room, the contrast was typically lacking.
Even on relatively late versions like the Toshiba 57HX93 (a 57" 16x9 doghouse from ~20 years ago with an integrated scaler and a 1080i input), which I personally spent some time with both in Toshiba form and as $10k Runco-branded units. Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
And viewing angle is an issue, too: Whether front- or rear-projection, one of the tricks to improve brightness (and therefore potential contrast) is to reduce the angle of light transmission from the screen. Depending on the room layout, this can mean that people in seats off to the side might get a substantially darker image than those near the middle. (This applies to all projectors; film, CRT, DLP, LCD, front, rear, whatever -- there can be a lot of non-obvious tech that goes into a projection screen.)
And CRT projectors were fickle. Their color convergence would change based on external magnetic fields (including that produced by the Earth itself), so they needed to be set up properly in-situ. A projection set that was set up properly while facing East would be a different thing when rotated 90 degrees to instead face North: What once was carefully-adjusted to produce 3 overlapping images that summed to be pure white lines would be a weird mix of red, blue, and green lines that only sometimes overlapped.
The CRT tubes themselves were generally quite impressively small for the size of the image that they'd ultimately produce. This meant pushing the phosphor coatings quite hard, which translated into an increased opportunity for permanent image retention ("screen burn") from things like CNN logos and video game scores.
Plus: They'd tend to get blurry over time. Because they were being pushed hard, the CRTs were liquid-cooled using glycol that was supposed to be optically-clear. But stuff would sometimes grow in there. It was never clear whether this was flora or [micro]fauna or something else, but whatever it was liked living in a world filled with hot, brightly-lit glycol. Service shops could correct this by changing the fluid, but that's an expense and inconvenience that direct-view CRTs didn't have.
And they were ungainly things in other ways. Sure, they tended to be lighter (less-massive) because they were full of air instead of leaded glass, but a rear-projection set was generally a big floor-standing thing that still had plenty of gravity. Meanwhile, a front-projection rig ~doubled the chance of someone walking by occluding the view and came with the burden of a hard-to-clean screen (less important these days, but it used to be common for folks to smoke indoors) and its own additional alignment variables (and lens selection, and dust issues, and, and).
So a person could deal with all that, or -- you know -- just get a regular direct-view CRT.
Even today where projectors use friggin' laser beams for illumination and produce enormous, bright images with far fewer issues than I listed above, direct-view tech (like the flat LCD and *LED sets at any big-box) is still much more popular.
(But I do feel your pain. When I was a teenager, my parents came home from shopping one wintry night with a 36" Sony WEGA for me to help unload. Holy hell.)
> Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
You're right about that. A friend's dad was a gearhead and had one of those. It always seemed dim, practically unwatchable during the day and even at night it was flat which made darker films hard to watch.
But it was a mid-80s model and I figured 10 or 20 years later the tech had improved.
I also had a friend whose dad had a big, for the time, rear-projection set in the 80s.
It was in the room with the furniture that we weren't allowed to sit on, and we weren't allowed to think about using that TV. (I mentioned once when we were unsupervised that maybe we could turn it on and watch something, and the color drained out of his face like doing anything like that would surely result in a very painful death. After he calmed down, we went outside and played with bugs or something instead.)
As far as I could tell, the old man (who was much younger than I am at this point) only ever switched it on for watching football on Sunday afternoons. But once or twice I'd wander by and -- with permission, and being careful to touch nothing -- try to watch part of the game.
It was a miserable thing to view. Big, blurry, dim, and just broadly indistinct. I didn't see the attraction compared to the perfectly-good 20" Zenith we had at home at that time that seemed so much more vibrant and useful. But the speakers sure sounded better on the projection set, so I guess there's that.
The tech did improve. The brightness did get a lot better, and so did processing (including using tricks like Velocity Scan Modulation that sought to improve brightness, at the expensive of making geometry an deliberately-dynamic thing instead of an ideally-fixed thing), and the colors improved. Things like line doublers and scalers and higher-resolution electronics to drive the tubes did improve some aspects of the blur that was apparent, even with regular NTSC sources. But those same improvements were also made in direct-view CRTs; after all, they were both the same tech.
So CRT rear-projection was as good as a person could get for a bigger-than-direct-view for a long time, but the fidelity was very seldom particularly awesome on an absolute scale -- at any pricepoint.
Competing rear-projection systems like DLP and LCD began to dwarf it in the market not long after the turn of the century. Despite their hunger for expensive light bulbs (and single-chip DLP's own inherent temporal problems), these new players were often cheaper to produce and sell, came in smaller packages (they could often rest on furniture instead needing their own floor-space), had fewer setup issues, and fared pretty well in brightness and geometry.
CRT rear-projectors then got pushed completely aside as soon as things like plasma displays became cheap-enough, and big LCDs became good-enough -- somewhere between 2006 and 2009, on my timeline.
(CRT did last a bit longer in front-projection form, for people with very serious home theaters [think positively-enormous screen, tiered seating, dedicated space, and some blank checks], but LCD caught up there soon-enough as well.)
I want to call false on the claim that this is s the biggest crt ever made.
I used to work in a computer recycling center in the monitor testing area bak in 2007. One day a giant 60 inch blue aluminum industrial sized sony trinitron was brought in by the fork trucks for me to test. There was 2 of them from a large conference room at xerox or kodak or used by a tv station. They were bigger than an average pallet and took a forklift to move them.
That was most likely a rear projection unit, they looked kind of like CRTs but it's different technology. Sony did make them although they weren't marketed as Trinitrons AFAIK.
Projection displays were CRTs, but they were small (10" or so) and monochrome. Three of them—one each for the red, green, and blue channels, were each oriented and focused to project a clear image at the exact same spot on the screen, overlaying each other to form a single color image.
Projection TVs were even prone to CRT "raster burn", perhaps even more so than single-tube TVs due to the brightness of the image required, which is why Nintendo instruction booklets had stern warnings not to use their consoles with projection TVs.
A very long time ago, sometime during the first geologic age, I worked at a facility on Queen Street in Toronto. On the street side of the building, we had two Flame suites (very high-end (for the time) realtime editing and effects, used for composing television commercials). Each one had a Sony Trinitron TV of about this size as the client preview monitor. They were amazing, but every time a streetcar passed outside, they would get involuntarily degaussed!
In the mid 90s (feel like it was 1996 but can't remember) my grandmother bought us a 40" Mitsubishi right before the Super Bowl. The thing was insane. Took 6 people to move it.
Such a cool piece of technology. I will say though I enjoyed our 200 lb monster CRT of yore I’m thankful we have Mike Chi and the RetroTINK 4K now. Being able to play any old console on any modern TV while still having it look accurate it is a dream.
A few years back someone near me was giving away a (basically) brand new 40" Sony one with the stand. Took three of us a lot of effort to get that thing into my house.
My gamer friend found a 23-inch CRT monitor on ebay and the box it showed up in was large enough to ship a washing machine. I can't imagine what it would be like for a 43-inch TV.
I have a 43-inch LCD monitor and even that's unwieldy (but still manageable by one man). A 43-inch CRT is the kind if equipment whose weight, bulk, and power draw warrant a brown M&Ms clause in a band's performance contract.
In the video, the guy is looking for some official contact at SONY to authorize an interview with a long-term SONY CRT designer and employee who already agreed to give it but can't do without official approval. Public channels all yielded no response.
My lord... this thing probably requires the power grid to do a generation dispatch when you turn it on.
When I was a kid I lived down in Southeastern Kentucky (Somerset) which gets a lot of its power from the local lake via hydro. My grandfather had this large (not this big but big) tube TV, the old wooden case kind. When you turned it on it'd take about ten seconds in which you could hear tube heaters tinkling, followed by a "grrrnnnnnzzzzz" sound as the tube came to life. I remember my uncle joking that the lake level started visibly falling.
Between LCDs/etc. and LED lighting, the amount of efficiency improvement we've done in home electronics is wild. I can now put my hand right on an equivalent to 100W light output light bulb and it's just... warm.
I had the 36" widescreen and I don't remember any issue with the power requirements, but I just calculated the screen area difference. The 43" 4:3 is 60% more area and the 45" 4:3 is 75% more area, so they are vastly bigger screens.
way back when, I had a 32" CRT from SGI attached to an o2. So heavy I had to buy a special desk to hold it. I can't imagine carrying that PVM-4300 anywhere.
I had a 36" 4:3 Toshiba CRT that had component video inputs for 1080i signals. If you displayed a 16:9 aspect ratio signal you could turn on a mode to change the display area to make the electron beam display all 1080 lines in that area so the other system didn't need to add black bars. This way you got the full 1080i resolution in a 4:3 TV
I used to go to a local high end home theater store and they had the Sony 40" XBR TV that weighed 300 pounds or something crazy.
> In Japan, it sold for 2.6 million yen, but in the United States, it retailed for $40,000, a significant markup. To be fair, shipping them across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States must have been expensive.
If they were going all the long way around to the Atlantic that would indeed explain the markup. Not sure why they would though.
Is it true we just don’t really have the technology anymore to build a CRT? We’ll never see a new CRT ever again, unless it’s the passion project of some billionaire?
Industrially, it's very nearly a completely lost tech.
Last I heard the only new-production of electron guns for CRTs was one singular source in Russia, but that was before the war started.
Even preservation of already-manufactured CRTs is difficult.
The last CRT rebuilder in France closed years ago. Some folks purchased some of the equipment and tried to get it set up at the Vintage Television Museum in Columbus, Ohio, but ultimately failed. It's in the care of a dude in Maryland now but is not in production status.
AFAICT, the singular remaining entity presently capable of working on existing picture tubes is Colorvac, in Germany: https://colorvac.de/service/
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In the unlikely event that new CRT production ever ramps up again, it will be a lot like the reboot of Polaroid film was: So much institutional knowledge will have simply evaporated that even though the new product works, it will never work exactly the same as it once did.
Thomas Electronics in the US supposedly still makes and repairs CRTs for military and aerospace, but those will be much smaller than you'd want for a TV or monitor and often if not always monochrome. Even if they did make big colour tubes they wouldn't give mere mortals the time of day anyway, they're in it for the big money contracts.
If you want a good one, you'll need the materials, machines and skills to make good ones. Probably not too likely unless you like building factories for fun and no profit.
I think it’s more that the production lines that existed to build them in volume have all been long dismantled, so it would be prohibitively expensive and all the people involved would be doing it for the first time.
And even if you found the money to resurrect the production lines, modern regulations probably wouldn't look too kindly on making new consumer goods with several pounds of lead in each unit. Better set aside your morals and enough money to buy some politicians while you're at it.
The tubes start generating X-rays above 5kV or whatever(some docs say 15kV), and you need leaded(literally Pb melted in) glass for the screen to block it, unless you could find a substitute material(Sn nanoparticles or something) or you're fine with <5kV brightness for the tube whatever that amounts to. So you can't pitch it as a nicely eco friendly product, and the glass can't be easily recycled(Pb removed from glass).
Otherwise they're not THAT complicated. They're a lot like lightbulbs. Certainly not as exotic as LCDs.
I wonder about the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) of that one: she's already not too thrilled about my vintage arcade cab and its 21" CRT. Arcade cab which has already been to three different countries with us and, no, the movers typically ain't that happy when they have to move it (I already moved it by myself but that's quite the endeavour).
$40k invested in AAPL in 1990 would be worth about $40m today. $40k is about what $100k is today. So what stock would you invest $100k in today, that in 35 years would give you a similar return?
Keep in mind that AAPL came pretty close to becoming absolutely worthless around the mid 1990s before Steve Jobs rode to the rescue. Which is to say, you would really need a crystal ball to make such predictions. I could definitely see an "alternate universe" where Apple fared a bit worse and Commodore didn't mismanage the Amiga as much, then Commodore could be in the place where Apple is now...
Some people found the faith and got onboard in 1998, though, when the iMac took the world by storm. If only I held for a bit longer… :D
(I never had $40k to invest, though, so the returns would be smaller anyway).
I know I'm ngmi with this attitude, but I just find it hard to believe there even could be such a thing. All the numbers point towards us hitting up against planetary limits, at some point something's got to give.
Positive news about e.g. solar PV shrinks away to some miniscule number when compared against the big picture, do nothing to address the myriad other things such as species loss or peak-phosphorus and the gains are eaten up by Jevon's paradox (or LLM datacenter buildout) anyway.
Even the past performance of AAPL feels like it's more to do with central bank funny money than the real economy. Numbers keep going up but in the rral world everything gets increasingly enshittified.
Don't sleep on that Shank Mods video linked at the end, it's insane that he managed to pull that off.
He also made a second video (not linked) which shows off more of the actual hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgkw3uu19V8
Personal anecdotes from my early mid teen years
1. Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….
2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.
CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!
EDIT: I meant to reply to the other thread with the dangers of CRTs
I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically.
That was nothing compared to the time the CAT scan machine fell face down off the lift gate on the back of the delivery truck because our driver pushed the wrong button and tipped it instead of lowering it, but I missed the flack from that because I was on a move somewhere thankfully. Afterwords he was forever known as the quarter million dollar man.
Oof, a whole CAT scanner is insane! Did insurance cover it?
I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes.
> Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….
My father ran his own TV repair shop for many years. When I was a teen he helped me make a Tesla coil out of a simple oscillator and the flyback transformer from a scrapped TV. It would make a spark 2 or 3 inches long and could illuminate a florescent light from several feet away. It definitely produced higher voltage than normally exists in a TV, but not orders of magnitude more. The high voltage circuits in CRTs are dangerous as hell.
In high school we used them as a high voltage source to make lifters: https://youtu.be/jrfBrrDfdEA
It was high voltage but low current. I touched high-voltage circuit in the back of TV accidentally while poking in it as a teen, and while it was quite unpleasant, all it did was burn a hole in the skin of my finger. It eventually healed.
I used the CRT HV powersupply to make a little electronic hovering thing back in high school http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm
What's wild is this TV was not mass produced, which added to the cost, plus the shipping costs. Not only did he get the TV but he got the premium model too, I think Sony intentionally gave the restaurant that model so they could take some marketing photos, and sure enough, that was it.
Sony didn’t give it to the restaurant; instead the restaurant purchased it during Japan’s economic boom.
Something feels off about that, somehow it was the only photo of the TV. Its like if he was the only one interested in a big TV?
I didn’t catch that in the video? The part about marketing photos in the restaurant?
Link to the video where he goes to get the tv (diff channel, same creator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk
The video was posted on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093
Those two videos are the real story here.
Sometime in 2006 we bought a house and our realtor gave us a gift certificate for $2500 at Best Buy (weird, but...those were the days). A brand new, state of the art 720p DLP projection TV was just a hair under that - we still have it and it works great. But I had a couple dollars to burn off on the card.
I happened to have noticed that they were trying to clear out any remaining floor models of CRTs. One of them was an absolutely giant Samsung, memory says it was >34", but I'm not sure how big...with a sticker on it for, and I'll never forget this...$.72.
Soooo two big TVs for the price of one!
Long story short, we were moving out of that house, CRT tvs were long since obsolete and that TV hadn't even been turned on for at least 5 years. So we decided to throw it away. I had never picked it up before and had forgotten how heavy CRTs could be. I ended up having to get two friends to come help me move it to the curb, it was well over 250 lbs. The trash company also complained when they had to pick it up and had to make a return trip.
I kinda regret getting rid of it, but it was among the heaviest pieces of furniture in our house.
> So we decided to throw it away.
Somewhere, a retro game enthusiast winced at reading that.
Later me, a more retro game enthusiast, physically recoiled while typing it if it makes any difference. :(
If you like playing with old hardware, be aware that old CRTs have a gotcha that can getcha: they hold a charge that can shock you across the room, and they can hold that charge for weeks or more. Google how to discharge it before poking around in a CRT.
When I was about 12 I got an old TV in my room which I of course decided to take apart to figure out how it worked.
I was VERY smart and of course unplugged the TV before doing anything.
My flat head screwdriver brushed against the wrong terminal in the back, I was literally thrown across the room several feet, and my flat head screw driver was no longer usable as the tip had deformed and slightly melted.
I later found an electronics book that had a footnote mentioning grounding out the tube before going near it…
How does an electric shock throws someone across the room? What's the mechanism for this push?
I know a shock can paralyze (by contracting the muscles) and it can burn (by joule effect) but never seen one push
Typically it forces your leg muscles to contract as the current flows to ground and you literally kick yourself into the air.
Exact same thing happened to me as a child. I do not remember the event, but I do remember waking up on the other side of the room.
"by contracting the muscles"
Yeah the tube is essentially a large capacitor :P
I also learned electronics by shocking myself often
It's not the tube (which is just a chamber for an electron gun. It's the high voltage capacitors used to hold charge for the supply driving the electron gun.
You either learn by shocking yourself, or die trying.
The survival selection is real in electronics.
Not just shock you across the room, but shock straight into your next life.
So we are all in post-tube life?
I have a vague recollection that my little cousin was nearly ended when he managed to destabilize the stand that a CRT was sitting on, and it fell just behind him, but I may be entirely hallucinating that memory.
Regardless, there are multiple ways old CRTs can cause great harm.
My family bought our first one and we used it keep it on a carpet floor - boy was that an electrifying experience
Same goes for your microwave.
Somewhat related but back in my university days, I spent practically all my savings from a summer part-time job to buy a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT. I absolutely loved that thing, but at the end of each year I dreaded having to lug it home and then haul it back to the dorms again.
The elevators often didn’t work and climbing 10 flights of stairs while carrying a 70 lb (31kg) cube was brutal. It’s not often you buy a piece of electronics and get a complimentary workout regimen thrown in.
In my own university days, I was once walking into the apartment building when some maintenance men called me over. (This building was part student housing and part normal families). They pointed me to a TV set in an apartment. Apparently a family had abandoned it. It was a big 27” or so set with some weird geometry problems, no visible brand, and menus exclusively in Chinese. Thankfully we had an elevator! I was pretty stoked despite the weird pincushion effects (maybe side effect of being imported from at least 100° of longitude away??) because our apartment’s only TV was a 13” which looked funny in a comically big living room.
Some time in the early 1990s I worked with a Macintosh of some variety that had a massively heavy CRT display. It was a real bummer when we were asked to do offsite customer demos, but luckily my back and knees were young enough to carry it upstairs. In retrospect, this is probably why my boss took me to the demos, which was actually quite useful career-wise.
I think I’m legitimately traumatized by how heavy CRTs were. The memories of the pain carrying them induced is etched in my body.
I dont feel nostalgic in the least about them.
I am nostalgic about their operational principles, but I was already willing to give these up for the convenience of an LCD panel circa 2003. We had a lot of LAN parties to attend back in those days.
As another person going to LAN parties. I am nostalgic about many things. CRT screens and CRT TVs are not on that list!
SNES/N64 games might look a little better on them, but I take that over the downsides. I can also look longer and more comfortably at modern screens.
On the other hand my current desktop PC with a huge GPU and CPU cooler is not particularly carry friendly either..
The draw of the LCD in the 2000s was the idea that the image you were seeing was a pixel-perfect representation of the creator’s intent.
Funny that—I'm literally using a shader on my SNES emulator to get a sense for how the graphics would look on a CRT!
I think it was a time before the vintage feels for CRTs really. Sure, there were greybeards naysaying the coming of the LCD due to motion artefacts and smearing but the rest of users just wanted something high-res and flicker-free.
It’s less the feels (though the glow from a CRT in a dark room is entirely different from an LED) and more that the games especially were designed for the bleed and flow that CRTs have.
It’s similar to how subpixel antialiasing really depends on the screen design and what order the colors are in.
The pixelated 8bit aesthetic is more reminiscent of early emulators in LCD than how it actually was “on hardware”.
It's fascinating that the biggest CRT ever made had a 43" diagonal, which is at the low end for modern flatscreen TVs. But yeah, I can see why the market for this beast was pretty limited: even with deinterlacing, SD content would have looked pretty awful when viewed from up close, so the only application I can think of was using it for larger groups of people sitting further away from the screen. And even for that, a projector was (probably?) the cheaper alternative...
Even at just 43" it still weighed 450lbs. I bought a 27" CRT some years ago and even that was a nightmare to transport
I have one of those Sony WEGA CRT TV's, which were widescreen and even had HDMI.
https://www.mediacollege.com/equipment/sony/tv/kd/kd30xs955....
148 pounds! A total nightmare to get into our car and into our house.
WORTH IT.
I remember having the 36" version in ~1997. I wouldn't want to guess how much it weighed, it was insane. I remember how impressive it was watching the Fifth Element Laserdisc on it.
I had the first high-def Sonys in the US market. I worked at a high end audio video store in the mid 90s and they gave it to me cheap as they couldn't get rid of it.
https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-kw-34hd1
Even at 34", the thing weighed 200lbs (plus the stand it came with). I lived in a 3rd floor walk up. I found out who my true friends were the day we brought it back from the store. I left that thing in the apartment when I moved. I bet it is still there to this day.
I had the 40" version and I left it in the house when I got divorced. That thing was insane to move. Needed minimum three people to lift it.
Most likely it's a central component of the buildings statics calculation meanwhile
They put it on a floating surface, now it's the building's earthquake counterweight.
I'd forgotten how heavy CRTs are. A local surplus auction has a really tempting 30's inch Sony CRT for sale cheap, but when I saw it was over 300lbs I had to pass on it.
I remember I had a 27inch crt on my desk. The desk top bended after a humid rainy season so I had to fix it by adding multiple metal supports.
In the late aughts I worked a summer at a company that was designing an articulating (flat screen) TV mount. I went with the engineers to one of the Intertek testing sessions. We wanted it to be rated for a 60" TV, but I was given the impression that the weight formulas they used for testing were based on CRT screens. The salesperson who came with us was giddy seeing the thing loaded up with 1000lb of steel plates and not giving way, but the actuators could not lift and our advertised rating was not more than 200lb.
A lot of those CRT screens had a pretty low refresh frequency, you were basically sitting in front of a giant stroboscope. That was particular bad for computer screens where you were sitting right in front of them. I think they pretty much all displayed at 30Hz. I can imagine how a gigantic screen can get pretty uncomfortable.
I recall a lot of people playing counterstrike at 640x480 to get at 100+hz refresh rates. The lower the resolution, the faster you can refresh. I don't recall the absolute limit but it would give the latest LCD gaming panels a serious run for their money.
In the meanwhile, oled monitors can go to 480hz.
all CRTs televisions were either 60Hz or 50Hz depending on where you are in the world
Yes and no. Half of the screen was refreshing at a time, so it was really flashing at 30Hz. You still had a visible stroboscopic effect. True 60Hz and 100Hz screen appeared in the late 90s and made a visible difference in term of comfort of viewing.
I think you're mixing monitors and TVs together.
CRT TVs only supported vertical refresh rates of 50Hz or 60Hz, which matched the regional mains frequency. They used interlacing and technically only showed half the frame at a time, but thanks to phosphor decay this added a feeling of fluidity to the image. If you were able to see it strobe, you must have had an impressive sight. And even if they supported higher refresh rates, it wouldn't matter, as the source of the signal would only ever be 50/60Hz.
CRT monitors used in PCs, on the other hand, supported a variety of refresh rates. Only monitors for specific applications used interlacing, customer grade ones didn't, which means you could see a strobing effect here if you ran it at a low frequency. But even the most analog monitors from the 80s supported atleast 640x480 at 60Hz, some programs such as the original DOOM were even able to squeeze 70Hz out of them by running at a different resolution while matching the horizontal refresh rate.
For some reason I remember 83Hz being the highest refresh rate supported by my XGA CRT, but I think it was only running at SVGA (800x600) in order to pull that rate.
Some demos could throw pixels into VRAM that fast, and it was wild looking. Like the 60Hz soap-opera effect but even more so.
I still feel that way looking at >30fps content since I really don't consume much of it.
I'm guessing you're talking about interlacing?
I've never really experienced it because I've always watched PAL which doesn't have that.
But I would have thought it would be perceived as flashing at 60 Hz with a darker image?
PAL had interlacing
For anyone this deep on the thread, check out this video (great presenter!) explaining TV spectrum allocation, NTSC, PAL, and the origin of 29.97 fps.
https://youtu.be/3GJUM6pCpew
TIL NTSC: He explained that NTSC stands for Not The Smartest Choice, but I always assumed it meant Never The Same Color.
Yeah I remember I could not use a CRT computer monitor at 60Hz or less for any length of time, as the strobing gave me a headache.
Except CRT televisions weren't like that at all.
The only time the electron gun was not involved in producing visible light was during overscan, horizontal retrace, and the vertical blanking interval. They spent the entire rest of their time (the very vast majority of their time) busily drawing rasterized images onto phosphors (with their own persistence!) for display.
This resulted in a behavior that was ridiculously dissimilar to a 30Hz strobe light.
The limiting factor is the horizontal refresh frequency. TVs and older monitors were around 15.75kHz, so the maximum number of horizontal lines you could draw per second is around 15750. Divide that by 60 and you get 262.5, which is therefore the maximum vertical resolution (real world is lower for various reasons). CGA ran at 200 lines, so was safely possible with a 60Hz refresh rate.
If you wanted more vertical resolution then you needed either a monitor with a higher horizontal refresh rate or you needed to reduce the effective vertical refresh rate. The former involved more expensive monitors, the latter was typically implemented by still having the CRT refresh at 60Hz but drawing alternate lines each refresh. This meant that the effective refresh rate was 30Hz, which is what you're alluding to.
But the reason you're being downvoted is that at no point was the CRT running with a low refresh rate, and best practice was to use a mode that your monitor could display without interlace anyway. Even in the 80s, using interlace was rare.
CGA ran pretty near 262 or 263 lines, as did many 8-bit computers. 200 addressable lines, yes, but the background color accounted for about another 40 or so lines, and blanking took up the rest.
Interlace was common on platforms like the Amiga, whose video hardware was tied very closely to television refresh frequencies for a variety of technical reasons which also made the Amiga unbeatable as a video production platform. An Amiga could do 400 lines interlaced NTSC, slightly more for PAL Amigas—but any more vertical resolution and you needed later AmigaOS versions and retargetable graphics (RTG) with custom video hardware expansions that could output to higher-freq CRTs like the SVGA monitors that were becoming commonplace...
The irony is that most of those who downvote didn't spend hours in front of those screens as I did. And I do remember these things were tiring, particularly in the dark. And the worst of all were computer CRT screens, that weren't interlaced (in the mid 90s, before higher refresh frequency started showing up).
I spent literally thousands of hours staring at those screens. You have it backwards. Interlacing was worse in terms of refresh, not better.
Interlacing is a trick that lets you sacrifice refresh rates to gain greater vertical resolution. The electron beam scans across the screen the same number of times per second either way. With interlacing, it alternates between even and odd rows.
With NTSC, the beam scans across the screen 60 times per second. With NTSC non-interlaced, every pixel will be refreshed 60 times per second. With NTSC interlaced, every pixel will be refreshed 30 times per second since it only gets hit every other time.
And of course the phosphors on the screen glow for a while after the electron beam hits them. It's the same phosphor, so in interlaced mode, because it's getting hit half as often, it will have more time to fade before it's hit again.
There are no pixels in CRT. The guns go left to right, ¥r¥n, left to right, while True for line in range(line_number).
The RGB stripes or dots are just stripes or dots, they're not tied to pixels. There would be RGB guns that are physically offset to each others, coupled with a strategically designed mesh plates, in such ways that e- from each guns sort of moire into only hitting the right stripes or dots. Apparently fractions of inches of offsets were all it took.
The three guns, really more like fast acting lightbulbs, received brightness signals for each respective RGB channels. Incidentally that means they could go between brightness zero to max couple times over 60[Hz] * 640[px] * 480[px] or so.
Interlacing means the guns draw every other lines but not necessarily pixels, because CRTs has beam spot sizes at least.
No, you don't sacrifice refresh rate! The refresh rate is the same. 50 Hz interlaced and 50 Hz non-interlaced are both ~50 Hz, approx 270 visible scanlines, and the display is refreshed at ~50 Hz in both cases. The difference is that in the 50 Hz interlaced case, alternate frames are offset by 0.5 scanlines, the producing device arranging the timing to make this work on the basis that it's producing even rows on one frame and odd rows on the other. And the offset means the odd rows are displayed slightly lower than the even ones.
This is a valid assumption for 25 Hz double-height TV or film content. It's generally noisy and grainy, typically with no features that occupy less than 1/~270 of the picture vertically for long enough to be noticeable. Combined with persistence of vision, the whole thing just about hangs together.
This sucks for 50 Hz computer output. (For example, Acorn Electron or BBC Micro.) It's perfect every time, and largely the same every time, and so the interlace just introduces a repeated 25 Hz 0.5 scanline jitter. Best turned off, if the hardware can do that. (Even if it didn't annoy you, you'll not be more annoyed if it's eliminated.)
This also sucks for 25 Hz double-height computer output. (For example, Amiga 640x512 row mode.) It's perfect every time, and largely the same every time, and so if there are any features that occupy less than 1/~270 of the picture vertically, those fucking things will stick around repeatedly, and produce an annoying 25 Hz flicker, and it'll be extra annoying because the computer output is perfect and sharp. (And if there are no such features - then this is the 50 Hz case, and you're better off without the interlace.)
I decided to stick to the 50 Hz case, as I know the scanline counts - but my recollection is that going past 50 Hz still sucks. I had a PC years ago that would do 85 Hz interlaced. Still terrible.
You assume that non interlaced computer screens in the mid 90s were 60Hz. I wish they were. I was using Apple displays and those were definitely 30Hz.
Which Apple displays were you using that ran at 30Hz? Apple I, II, III, Macintosh series, all ran at 60Hz standard.
Even interlaced displays were still running at 60Hz, just with a half-line offset to fill in the gaps with image.
I think you are right, I had the LC III and Performa 630 specifically in mind. For some reason I remember they were 30Hz but everthing I find googling it suggest they were 66Hz (both video card and screen refresh).
That being said they were horrible on the eyes, and I think I only got comfortable when 100Hz+ CRT screens started being common. It is just that the threshold for comfort is higher than I remember it, which explains why I didn't feel any better in front of a CRT TV.
Have you ever seen high speed footage of a CRT in operation? The phosphors on most late-80s/90s TVs and color graphic computer displays decayed instantaneously. A pixel illuminated at the beginning of a scanline would be gone well before the beam reached the end of the scanline. You see a rectangular image, rather than a scanning dot, entirely due to persistence of vision.
Slow-decay phosphors were much more common on old "green/amber screen" terminals and monochrome computer displays like those built into the Commodore PET and certain makes of TRS-80. In fact there's a demo/cyberpunk short story that uses the decay of the PET display's phosphor to display images with shading the PET was nominally not capable of (due to being 1-bit monochrome character-cell pseudographics): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n87d7j0hfOE
Interesting. It's basically a compromise between flicker and motion blur, so I assumed they'd pick the phosphor decay time based on the refresh rate to get the best balance. So for example, if your display is 60 Hz, you'd want phosphors to glow for about 16 ms.
But looking at a table of phosphors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor ), it looks like decay time and color are properties of individual phosphorescent materials, so if you want to build an RGB color CRT screen, that limits your choices a lot.
Also, TIL that one of the barriers to creating color TV was finding a red phosphor.
Did they really do that, or did the tubes just ran at 2x vertically stretched 640x240 with vertical pixel shift? A lot of technical descriptions of CRTs seem to be adapted from pixel addressed LCDs/OLEDs, and they don't always seem to capture the design well
They did exactly what you say. Split the image and pixel shift. It was not like 30Hz at all.
Thanks, I wonder if the phosphor stripes are giving people false impression that those would be pixels...
I did 1024x768@85 just fine.
If it supported it, 100 Hz paired with a mouse set for 200 Hz was nice and smooth.
In the 90s I was tasked with fixing our CEOs computer and entered his office to see the largest CRT I’ve ever seen in my life. (It was not a PVM-4300, though. This one was sat on a metal table.) The size of it was shocking. I was more shocked, however, to find out he used it at 640 x 480. I never saw him use it so maybe he played games on it… from the moon.
The Sony FW900 was the peak of desktop CRT monitors, and it came out in 1999 so it or one of its rebadges might have been what you saw. That was much smaller than the PVM-4300 at 24" but with a much higher max resolution of 2304x1440@85hz, roughly what we'd now call 1440p, about eight years before the first 1080p LCDs arrived.
Those were still sought after well into the LCD era for their high resolution and incredible motion clarity, but I think LCDs getting "good enough" and the arrival of OLED monitors with near-zero response times has finally put them out to pasture as anything but a collectors item.
I remember in the mid ‘00s having a 19” that did 1600x1200 at (I think) 85 Hz. Damn thing was a tank, but I loved it. So crisp.
We set up one of those widescreen Intergraph CRTs for a client way back then, I think the cost of that thing plus the workstation was easily more than I made in a year
Those Intergraphs were bigger than the FW900 at 28", although lower resolution at 2048x1152@80hz max, so I suppose YMMV which was better.
Was turned onto the the FW900 from hardforum years before LCD was available/reasonable
Now I have a FW900 sitting in a closet for decades because I can't lift it anymore
Also will never forget I was taking a walk in the woods years ago and in the middle of nowhere, no houses/apartments for miles, there was a FW900 just sitting there like someone must have thrown it out of an airplane but of course impossible as it was intact and inexplicable WTF (when got home made sure mine was still in the closet and had not somehow teleported itself)
This reminds me of my grandparents’ old, huge rear projection TV (RPTV). It was 4ft wide, 4ft tall (with the base), 2ft thick, and weighed 200lbs. This was the intermediary between CRTs and flat screens for me.
They had it installed in their basement. However, later they remodeled the basement stairway to add a turn. With the new layout, it would be impossible to bring back up the TV the way it was brought down. There was no other way to access the basement (it only had storm cellar windows), so they left it there when they moved.
I think about the new owners sometimes and wonder what they ended up doing. Perhaps they disassembled it, or maybe it’s still down there collecting dust.
I think I saw one as a child in the mid 90s - it belonged to an upper-middle class Kuwaiti whose at the time preschooler daughter was approximately as tall as the device, which was laid on the carpeted floor.
At the time there were a lot of private import items in Kuwait - particularly cars - so it's not impossible it was this particular model. I mean, what other TV could boast being the height of a four year old?
Previously on HN:
The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471
Overview of the KX45ED1 / PVM-4300 (Worlds Largest CRT) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588259
Interestingly that first link is to the same URL as today's yet it's from June 22 2024. The linked article however has today's date as the publish date. There's no indication that the article was updated from what was published originally.
I have a Samsung SlimFit HD tube TV from 2005 or so. It’s such an interesting piece of retro tech because it is widescreen, supports 1080i, and has HDMI, but it is a CRT! It’s also quite a bit thinner than most tubes. Super unusual.
I got it because LCDs always looked terrible to me and plasmas were still very expensive.
https://www.crutchfield.com/S-WXftqFAhnMu/p_305TXR3079/Samsu...
For fairly obvious reasons, most people were unaware this set ever existed. In the 90s (~1993?), my family replaced our old 1970s-era 19" Sony Trinitron with a HUGE new TV, a 35" Toshiba.
At the time, a "big" CRT was a 32". I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available. (PVM-4300 stragglers aside).
A couple years later (1995-6?), a friend's family bought a 40" Mitsubishi, which I _thought_ was the largest CRT made. But, again, Sony aside, it probably was.
> I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available
I helped friends move one of these old monsters out of an apartment in MIT's west campus 15 years ago. Don't remember the brand but it seemed even bigger than 35". It was shockingly huge and heavy and they lived on the top floor.
As we were doing this, I was thinking, how come the original owner didn't get a projection TV? They have been available since the 80s, the separate components were easier to manage, and the screens were far bigger.
In addition to the reasons mentioned in the other reply, maybe you actually didn't want anything much bigger. People replacing (say) a 27" CRT might upgrade to the latest fancy 32". They wouldn't have seen the purpose of a 60" projector behemoth. Depth could have been an issue as well. CRTs are deep, but depending on the projector style, it might have been worse.
Projectors (front/rear/enclosed/whatever) could produce a huge image, but they had their own issues.
In a bright room, the contrast was typically lacking.
Even on relatively late versions like the Toshiba 57HX93 (a 57" 16x9 doghouse from ~20 years ago with an integrated scaler and a 1080i input), which I personally spent some time with both in Toshiba form and as $10k Runco-branded units. Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
And viewing angle is an issue, too: Whether front- or rear-projection, one of the tricks to improve brightness (and therefore potential contrast) is to reduce the angle of light transmission from the screen. Depending on the room layout, this can mean that people in seats off to the side might get a substantially darker image than those near the middle. (This applies to all projectors; film, CRT, DLP, LCD, front, rear, whatever -- there can be a lot of non-obvious tech that goes into a projection screen.)
And CRT projectors were fickle. Their color convergence would change based on external magnetic fields (including that produced by the Earth itself), so they needed to be set up properly in-situ. A projection set that was set up properly while facing East would be a different thing when rotated 90 degrees to instead face North: What once was carefully-adjusted to produce 3 overlapping images that summed to be pure white lines would be a weird mix of red, blue, and green lines that only sometimes overlapped.
The CRT tubes themselves were generally quite impressively small for the size of the image that they'd ultimately produce. This meant pushing the phosphor coatings quite hard, which translated into an increased opportunity for permanent image retention ("screen burn") from things like CNN logos and video game scores.
Plus: They'd tend to get blurry over time. Because they were being pushed hard, the CRTs were liquid-cooled using glycol that was supposed to be optically-clear. But stuff would sometimes grow in there. It was never clear whether this was flora or [micro]fauna or something else, but whatever it was liked living in a world filled with hot, brightly-lit glycol. Service shops could correct this by changing the fluid, but that's an expense and inconvenience that direct-view CRTs didn't have.
And they were ungainly things in other ways. Sure, they tended to be lighter (less-massive) because they were full of air instead of leaded glass, but a rear-projection set was generally a big floor-standing thing that still had plenty of gravity. Meanwhile, a front-projection rig ~doubled the chance of someone walking by occluding the view and came with the burden of a hard-to-clean screen (less important these days, but it used to be common for folks to smoke indoors) and its own additional alignment variables (and lens selection, and dust issues, and, and).
So a person could deal with all that, or -- you know -- just get a regular direct-view CRT.
Even today where projectors use friggin' laser beams for illumination and produce enormous, bright images with far fewer issues than I listed above, direct-view tech (like the flat LCD and *LED sets at any big-box) is still much more popular.
(But I do feel your pain. When I was a teenager, my parents came home from shopping one wintry night with a 36" Sony WEGA for me to help unload. Holy hell.)
> Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
You're right about that. A friend's dad was a gearhead and had one of those. It always seemed dim, practically unwatchable during the day and even at night it was flat which made darker films hard to watch.
But it was a mid-80s model and I figured 10 or 20 years later the tech had improved.
I also had a friend whose dad had a big, for the time, rear-projection set in the 80s.
It was in the room with the furniture that we weren't allowed to sit on, and we weren't allowed to think about using that TV. (I mentioned once when we were unsupervised that maybe we could turn it on and watch something, and the color drained out of his face like doing anything like that would surely result in a very painful death. After he calmed down, we went outside and played with bugs or something instead.)
As far as I could tell, the old man (who was much younger than I am at this point) only ever switched it on for watching football on Sunday afternoons. But once or twice I'd wander by and -- with permission, and being careful to touch nothing -- try to watch part of the game.
It was a miserable thing to view. Big, blurry, dim, and just broadly indistinct. I didn't see the attraction compared to the perfectly-good 20" Zenith we had at home at that time that seemed so much more vibrant and useful. But the speakers sure sounded better on the projection set, so I guess there's that.
The tech did improve. The brightness did get a lot better, and so did processing (including using tricks like Velocity Scan Modulation that sought to improve brightness, at the expensive of making geometry an deliberately-dynamic thing instead of an ideally-fixed thing), and the colors improved. Things like line doublers and scalers and higher-resolution electronics to drive the tubes did improve some aspects of the blur that was apparent, even with regular NTSC sources. But those same improvements were also made in direct-view CRTs; after all, they were both the same tech.
So CRT rear-projection was as good as a person could get for a bigger-than-direct-view for a long time, but the fidelity was very seldom particularly awesome on an absolute scale -- at any pricepoint.
Competing rear-projection systems like DLP and LCD began to dwarf it in the market not long after the turn of the century. Despite their hunger for expensive light bulbs (and single-chip DLP's own inherent temporal problems), these new players were often cheaper to produce and sell, came in smaller packages (they could often rest on furniture instead needing their own floor-space), had fewer setup issues, and fared pretty well in brightness and geometry.
CRT rear-projectors then got pushed completely aside as soon as things like plasma displays became cheap-enough, and big LCDs became good-enough -- somewhere between 2006 and 2009, on my timeline.
(CRT did last a bit longer in front-projection form, for people with very serious home theaters [think positively-enormous screen, tiered seating, dedicated space, and some blank checks], but LCD caught up there soon-enough as well.)
My first TV in the early 2000s (Xbox!) was a Siemens. Another illustrious megacorp that doesn't make televisions anymore.
I want to call false on the claim that this is s the biggest crt ever made. I used to work in a computer recycling center in the monitor testing area bak in 2007. One day a giant 60 inch blue aluminum industrial sized sony trinitron was brought in by the fork trucks for me to test. There was 2 of them from a large conference room at xerox or kodak or used by a tv station. They were bigger than an average pallet and took a forklift to move them.
That was most likely a rear projection unit, they looked kind of like CRTs but it's different technology. Sony did make them although they weren't marketed as Trinitrons AFAIK.
Projection displays were CRTs, but they were small (10" or so) and monochrome. Three of them—one each for the red, green, and blue channels, were each oriented and focused to project a clear image at the exact same spot on the screen, overlaying each other to form a single color image.
Projection TVs were even prone to CRT "raster burn", perhaps even more so than single-tube TVs due to the brightness of the image required, which is why Nintendo instruction booklets had stern warnings not to use their consoles with projection TVs.
Tell me you lived in Rochester, NY without saying so.
Now I want a plate...
Previously on HN
What happened to the world's largest tube TV? [video]
689 points, 295 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093
A very long time ago, sometime during the first geologic age, I worked at a facility on Queen Street in Toronto. On the street side of the building, we had two Flame suites (very high-end (for the time) realtime editing and effects, used for composing television commercials). Each one had a Sony Trinitron TV of about this size as the client preview monitor. They were amazing, but every time a streetcar passed outside, they would get involuntarily degaussed!
In the mid 90s (feel like it was 1996 but can't remember) my grandmother bought us a 40" Mitsubishi right before the Super Bowl. The thing was insane. Took 6 people to move it.
The real question is, did she return it after the football game? Apparently many people used to do that?
No, we kept it, until we didn't want to lug it around anymore or LCD came around..
Such a cool piece of technology. I will say though I enjoyed our 200 lb monster CRT of yore I’m thankful we have Mike Chi and the RetroTINK 4K now. Being able to play any old console on any modern TV while still having it look accurate it is a dream.
I remember owning a 27 inch RCA CRT. It was a pain to carry. I could not imagine this thing.
A few years back someone near me was giving away a (basically) brand new 40" Sony one with the stand. Took three of us a lot of effort to get that thing into my house.
So you have the other surviving specimen in the world?
No, the 40" ones are common. They were sold in the USA. You can find them on Craigslist etc (where I found mine). The 43" and 45" are the rare ones.
Here's a pic of one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/ce52bb/behold_my...
Oh no, another useless craving I didn’t know I had, unlocked. :)
Why write a story about someone else's story? Just go to the shank mod vid directly
The text equivalent of a "reaction video" where they add nothing except pasting their face over 30-50% of the screen
My buddy had something like this. All I remember is it took four people to carry it.
My gamer friend found a 23-inch CRT monitor on ebay and the box it showed up in was large enough to ship a washing machine. I can't imagine what it would be like for a 43-inch TV.
I have a 43-inch LCD monitor and even that's unwieldy (but still manageable by one man). A 43-inch CRT is the kind if equipment whose weight, bulk, and power draw warrant a brown M&Ms clause in a band's performance contract.
I remember when the video came out. What, 2-3 years ago? What an event.
One year ago today
In the video, the guy is looking for some official contact at SONY to authorize an interview with a long-term SONY CRT designer and employee who already agreed to give it but can't do without official approval. Public channels all yielded no response.
Leaving this here just in case! :)
TFA immediately slammed me with an intrusive cookie banner so I didn’t read it, here’s another option about this TV : https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/retro-gamers-save-one... at least ars technica didn’t cookie-gate me from the get go.
Not cookie gated for me. You can easily read the content without interacting with the cookie dialog.
My lord... this thing probably requires the power grid to do a generation dispatch when you turn it on.
When I was a kid I lived down in Southeastern Kentucky (Somerset) which gets a lot of its power from the local lake via hydro. My grandfather had this large (not this big but big) tube TV, the old wooden case kind. When you turned it on it'd take about ten seconds in which you could hear tube heaters tinkling, followed by a "grrrnnnnnzzzzz" sound as the tube came to life. I remember my uncle joking that the lake level started visibly falling.
Between LCDs/etc. and LED lighting, the amount of efficiency improvement we've done in home electronics is wild. I can now put my hand right on an equivalent to 100W light output light bulb and it's just... warm.
I had the 36" widescreen and I don't remember any issue with the power requirements, but I just calculated the screen area difference. The 43" 4:3 is 60% more area and the 45" 4:3 is 75% more area, so they are vastly bigger screens.
way back when, I had a 32" CRT from SGI attached to an o2. So heavy I had to buy a special desk to hold it. I can't imagine carrying that PVM-4300 anywhere.
I had a 36" 4:3 Toshiba CRT that had component video inputs for 1080i signals. If you displayed a 16:9 aspect ratio signal you could turn on a mode to change the display area to make the electron beam display all 1080 lines in that area so the other system didn't need to add black bars. This way you got the full 1080i resolution in a 4:3 TV
I used to go to a local high end home theater store and they had the Sony 40" XBR TV that weighed 300 pounds or something crazy.
> In Japan, it sold for 2.6 million yen, but in the United States, it retailed for $40,000, a significant markup. To be fair, shipping them across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States must have been expensive.
If they were going all the long way around to the Atlantic that would indeed explain the markup. Not sure why they would though.
Also ...
> And news articles in 1990 said Sony dealers would not allow any bickering. [...] no discounts.
... that's probably "dickering", and an amusing typo. ("Hey, you can't squabble here!")
Is it true we just don’t really have the technology anymore to build a CRT? We’ll never see a new CRT ever again, unless it’s the passion project of some billionaire?
Industrially, it's very nearly a completely lost tech.
Last I heard the only new-production of electron guns for CRTs was one singular source in Russia, but that was before the war started.
Even preservation of already-manufactured CRTs is difficult.
The last CRT rebuilder in France closed years ago. Some folks purchased some of the equipment and tried to get it set up at the Vintage Television Museum in Columbus, Ohio, but ultimately failed. It's in the care of a dude in Maryland now but is not in production status.
AFAICT, the singular remaining entity presently capable of working on existing picture tubes is Colorvac, in Germany: https://colorvac.de/service/
---
In the unlikely event that new CRT production ever ramps up again, it will be a lot like the reboot of Polaroid film was: So much institutional knowledge will have simply evaporated that even though the new product works, it will never work exactly the same as it once did.
Thomas Electronics in the US supposedly still makes and repairs CRTs for military and aerospace, but those will be much smaller than you'd want for a TV or monitor and often if not always monochrome. Even if they did make big colour tubes they wouldn't give mere mortals the time of day anyway, they're in it for the big money contracts.
https://www.thomaselectronics.com
Thanks.
I think I may have already known that at one point, but I'll try to include this the next time I am motivated to brain-dump some CRT lore.
Given the lifespan of CRTs and no hope of repairs, when should the last CRTs be expected to die forever?
Not true, you can make one yourself by hand if you want to, it just won't be very high quality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PzoAReMXOE
If you want a good one, you'll need the materials, machines and skills to make good ones. Probably not too likely unless you like building factories for fun and no profit.
I think it’s more that the production lines that existed to build them in volume have all been long dismantled, so it would be prohibitively expensive and all the people involved would be doing it for the first time.
And even if you found the money to resurrect the production lines, modern regulations probably wouldn't look too kindly on making new consumer goods with several pounds of lead in each unit. Better set aside your morals and enough money to buy some politicians while you're at it.
The tubes start generating X-rays above 5kV or whatever(some docs say 15kV), and you need leaded(literally Pb melted in) glass for the screen to block it, unless you could find a substitute material(Sn nanoparticles or something) or you're fine with <5kV brightness for the tube whatever that amounts to. So you can't pitch it as a nicely eco friendly product, and the glass can't be easily recycled(Pb removed from glass).
Otherwise they're not THAT complicated. They're a lot like lightbulbs. Certainly not as exotic as LCDs.
2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471
I wonder about the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) of that one: she's already not too thrilled about my vintage arcade cab and its 21" CRT. Arcade cab which has already been to three different countries with us and, no, the movers typically ain't that happy when they have to move it (I already moved it by myself but that's quite the endeavour).
Presumably the wife would at least be able to watch TV on that big screen.
$40k invested in AAPL in 1990 would be worth about $40m today. $40k is about what $100k is today. So what stock would you invest $100k in today, that in 35 years would give you a similar return?
Keep in mind that AAPL came pretty close to becoming absolutely worthless around the mid 1990s before Steve Jobs rode to the rescue. Which is to say, you would really need a crystal ball to make such predictions. I could definitely see an "alternate universe" where Apple fared a bit worse and Commodore didn't mismanage the Amiga as much, then Commodore could be in the place where Apple is now...
yea, most people would have dumped the stock back then and not HODL'ed it through the 2000s until now...
Some people found the faith and got onboard in 1998, though, when the iMac took the world by storm. If only I held for a bit longer… :D (I never had $40k to invest, though, so the returns would be smaller anyway).
I know I'm ngmi with this attitude, but I just find it hard to believe there even could be such a thing. All the numbers point towards us hitting up against planetary limits, at some point something's got to give.
Positive news about e.g. solar PV shrinks away to some miniscule number when compared against the big picture, do nothing to address the myriad other things such as species loss or peak-phosphorus and the gains are eaten up by Jevon's paradox (or LLM datacenter buildout) anyway.
Even the past performance of AAPL feels like it's more to do with central bank funny money than the real economy. Numbers keep going up but in the rral world everything gets increasingly enshittified.
Change My Mind.
Happy Holidays!
>All the numbers point towards us hitting up against planetary limits, at some point something's got to give.
Sounds like space is the next big thing then.
S&P 500