Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk

by sohkamyung • 9 years ago

162 170 9 years ago

neya• 9 years ago

I urge every one in HN to give this masterpiece a read - "Made in Japan". It's an autobiography of the founder of Sony himself and there is a section in the book where he talks about the engineering and spirit that went behind these TVs. In fact, he talks a lot about the engineering spirit that made Sony the Apple of its era. If you liked Steve Job's biography, you'll certainly love this.[1]

Cheers.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Made-Japan-Akio-Morita-Sony/dp/045115...

Unklejoe• 9 years ago

Cool.

This isn't related to TVs, but I have a couple pieces of old Sony HiFi equipment from the very early 1970's and I'm always amazed by the quality and attention to detail Sony had back then. I feel like it's back when Sony had something to prove. This may have been the case for most consumer electronics manufacturers back then though.

One is a TA-1130 amplifier, and the other is a reel-to-reel tape player (I forget the model). The most amazing to me is that the reel-to-reel still works fine after nearly 50 years, considering all the moving parts.

petepete• 9 years ago

The record player in my dad's mid-80s Sony hifi recently stopped working.

He called the local Sony store to buy a spare part and the assistant was born after the part ceased production.

Begrudgingly he had to replace the record player.

Every (remaining) part of that old Sony is beautiful, unmistakably 80s but so well designed and finished it's still a joy to use; plus it sounds great.

supersrdjan• 9 years ago

Yes, this is an excellent book. I like how it gets boring towards the end as the discussion turns to USA-Japan import/export issues and other less inspiring subjects. As the book slips into being boring it coincides with the decline of Sony so it's symbolic. But it's only perhaps the final third that is boring. Otherwise, it's a great read that rarely gets mentioned online.

ousta• 9 years ago

for me sony is not the apple of its era but much more. It is simply spoken the greatest electronics company that ever existed and their peak was the AIBO

frou_dh• 9 years ago

Sorry to be a grouch, but I had an AIBO (2nd gen) and the thing was overall corny and very limited, even at the time. Lightyears away from inducing any suspension of disbelief.

(It's that robotic dog, for anyone wondering)

astrodust3• 9 years ago

No love for the PS2 which was the champion of its era?

By the time the PS3 rolled around Sony was getting a little too full of itself, lacking the competitive fire that made products like the Walkman and the Trinitron screen. It was a good console, but not one that redefined what a console was.

flavio81• 9 years ago

the greatest electronics company that ever existed

That must be Philips. Google "Philips natlab".

jimmies• 9 years ago

Sony was so legendary in terms of their CRT.

There is a saying in Vietnam that goes "Sharp/Fine like a Sony," when someone talks about an act, a product, or a person so fine. That's in the context of a culture that does not (as) often associate products with brands (for example, they say photocopy instead of xerox, clasp locker instead of zipper, permanent marker instead of sharpie,...)

rasz• 9 years ago

You might also want to watch Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c

and read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/j...

to understand what happened in home electronics, especially TV sector. It was an economical revenge for WW2.

doomlaser2• 9 years ago

Trinitron TVs definitely were the best. Famously, the Trinitron as a product was a huge inspiration to Steve Jobs and influenced the design of the Apple II casing.

My favorite trivia about them was that, for some engineering reason, every Trinitron screen had a barely perceptible horizontal line artifact about 2/3 of the way down the display. This was true in every Trinitron, from televisions to monitors even through the 1990s.

DiabloD3• 9 years ago

It held the aperture grill. It was truly a triumph, a huge success. I wish my Trinitron was still alive.

lurquer• 9 years ago

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction with the Triniton. Believe me... it's still alive.

look_lookatme• 9 years ago

I thought there were two lines?

bluedino• 9 years ago

Smaller screens only had 1 wire

IronBacon• 9 years ago

Yeah, I still have somewhere a CPD-G400 monitor that used a Trinitron tube and IIRC there were two of them, in the manual they called them "damper wires" and it was related to the use of an aperture grille instead of a slot mask or something like that...

doomlaser2• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk — just watched the linked video with a nice Trinitron historical overview.

Apparently, there was always one wire 2/3 of the way down, but they would put a second one 1/3 of the way down on larger screens.

cjsuk2• 9 years ago

They were only barely perceptible until someone told you about them. Then you saw them every time you looked at the screen :)

I do miss my 17" FD Trinitron monitor though. That was lovely. I didn't have enough money or room for a 21"

taneq• 9 years ago

I had the 19", saved up for it for my first computer. I used that screen for years, it was wonderful. Permanently bent my desk.

kalleboo3• 9 years ago

I was a kid at the time and we had an Apple display that used a Trinitron tube. One of my friends came over and tried to erase the "line" in the paint program. I had no idea what he was on about until I finally noticed what I had missed all along - the support wire.

Torgo4• 9 years ago

That line drove me bonkers, and I wasn't buying "the line means quality". I couldn't have been the only one.

Luckily my studio Trinitron I got second-hand doesn't have the line, or at least is imperceptible to me.

seanalltogether• 9 years ago

He discusses that in the attached video, it was needed to prevent picture vibrations due to audio. https://youtu.be/0aFhzGEBQlk?t=9m9s

KaiserPro• 9 years ago

Up until quite recently sony's grade 1 CRTs were the only* thing you could "grade" on. Even though they had stopped being manufactured in ~2006 there was a strong second hand market up until at least 2011.

* well kinda, it was the only thing at the time able to properly display the anywhere near the dynamic range that 10bit log provide.

thinkythought4• 9 years ago

And there's still a very, very strong market for these as retro gaming displays. I scored a few when they were dirt cheap used, and now people are charging $400+ for an old 20in with a ton of hours on it, and even more if it's a high end "broadcast" model

bcaulfield3• 9 years ago

I own and use a Sony FD Trinitron Flat Screen CRT every day. Works great. I need a special adapter to connect it to my SHIELD. But it's outlasted several DVD players and game consoles. It's my family's only TV. Hadn't thought about how long I've owned it, but now realize it's been at least 12-15 years. I'd thought about chucking it for a flat screen, but was waiting for prices to come down. Then waited for HD prices to come down. Lately been waiting for 4k prices to come down. Now, why wait? They're so damn cheap. But after all these years, feels like I just... can't, and I just want to discourage too much TV watching (rationalization). Should I hang on to this thing?

foobarian• 9 years ago

Newer TVs take a long time to change channels. You probably want to hang on to this one.

gaius• 9 years ago

Yes. I wish I’d kept mine.

KozmoNau75• 9 years ago

I'm hanging on to a ~2005 Bang & Olufsen 28" MX8000, in my opinion one of the greatest 4:3 CRT TVs ever made (not a flat tube, but absolute TOTL in every other aspect, including sound). I use it primarily for retro gaming, and although I have considered getting an Open Source Scan Convertor and plugging the consoles into my 27" LCD, there's just something about playing games on an SD 4:3 CRT.

mark-r3• 9 years ago

It probably still has better black levels than any LCD you can buy. Wait for the OLED prices to come down.

totalZero• 9 years ago

My parents had a Trinitron when I was a kid; now they have a Samsung Quantum Dot LED display. The Trinitron was nice, but I could spend hours watching videos on the QLED. It's sharper, motion is crisper, and the colors are deep and vibrant.

There's really no comparison in terms of picture quality. And the Samsung is light enough that it can be easily mounted from the ceiling.

There are reasons why the market has shifted to some of these other technologies. Apart from nostalgia and familiarity, you won't miss the Trinitron if you upgrade.

bcaulfield3• 9 years ago

I mount my Sony from the ceiling I'll break the ceiling.

pipio212• 9 years ago

Well, the thing is a real pain in the ass to get rid off.

I bought an OLED to my parents as a present, thinking, ohh removing the old trinitron screen is easy. It required like 4 different people, and creating a set of wheeled machines. It takes so much 3d space(specially deepness) as well as weight.

Had I known about that, I would never have bought the OLED in the first place.

bcaulfield3• 9 years ago

Yeah, my 27-inch tube is very, very heavy.

baybal22• 9 years ago

I was once a happy owner of last Sony's HDCRTs with hdmi input that I ordered from Japan for almost double the price.

Luckily, I soon started my career and was sent as an exchange student to Singapore. That put an end to my Quake 3 obsession,and lust for expensive gaming gear.

Torgo4• 9 years ago

Did it have input lag or artifacting, to your recollection?

baybal22• 9 years ago

I believe, there was some little extra lag on hdmi, because dac lag was added to hdmi buffering lag, but it was barely noticable

thinkythought4• 9 years ago

They did, but it wasn't worse than modern TVs. The paradoxical thing is because everything went through the image processor,

digital input>processor>analog conversion>screen

was faster than

analog input>digital conversion>image processor>analog conversion>screen

There's a big thread on AVSforum with people whinging about this somewhere. The upside is, they're still nice to play stuff like switch games on

EDIT: the processing of analog sources, like 480p dvds, laserdisc, etc was superior to cheap modern TVs. They designed the scaler very well for older formats and it really did look quite nice. I remember being totally disappointed by my "high end" samsung tv in 2013~ or so in comparison. The colors are handled especially nice even on like, VHS. Artifacting/macroblocking/banding wasn't an issue with however they were handling the effects/processing which was a noticeable advantage over the flat screens of the era and even more recently

jaclaz3• 9 years ago

I am probably too much an old-timer, but my TV is actually a Sony Trinitron CRT, bought (for a very steep price) in 2002 or 2003 and still going strong.

For the record, it is a "beast", even if it is "only" 32" in size, it is weighing around 70 Kg!

I bought it at the time with a specific table/support for it.

ksec3• 9 years ago

Considering you make it into 15 years of usage I think the price might be well worth it?

CRT in the old days, especially Sony's Trinitron CRT were extremely well designed and well made. Pretty much like ALL "Made in Japan" electronics sold were designed to last. I have a LCD TV from Sony that is now on 12 years of services, still going strong.

But as tech improves it seems the life expectancy of the product are taken less into account.

I would bet the Sony CRT monitor will out last my Sony LCD TV. And OLED is only going to be worst.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 9 years ago

One response to this is: the market has spoken, it's not interested in paying for product longevity.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, but here we are.

TuringTest• 9 years ago

I still nowadays use a high-frequency, high-contrast, high-resolution 20-years-old CRT for my desktop at home, it works as well as the first day. I laugh at all those retina resolution debates.

bborud• 9 years ago

But as tech improves it seems the life expectancy of the product are taken less into account.

On the contrary. The life expectancy has never been more important: it has never been more important to time the death of a device in such a manner that it hits some generational sweet spot to make the customer buy the same product over and over :-)

fyfy18• 9 years ago

Is that really that much of an issue though? The current generation of monitors and TVs are probably going to become obsolete before they stop working.

Yes you can still watch the new series of Star Trek on a 26" CRT, but it'll look a lot nicer on a 55" 4K HDR OLED. In 10 years time I'm sure that will look just as outdated.

dsego3• 9 years ago

My trinitron started having issues after 10 years. At first the colors would shift and in the end everything would be greenish, if I remember correctly.

jaclaz3• 9 years ago

CRT in the old days, especially Sony's Trinitron CRT were extremely well designed and well made. Pretty much like ALL "Made in Japan" electronics sold were designed to last.

Yes, once upon a time, with the exclusion for portable devices of course (in which Sony excelled as well, if anyone remembers the first series of Walkman, it had the "wow" factor as it was only a little bigger than the cassette), electronics did actually "go by the weight", it meant that "better" hardware was put in it, both in the electronics and in the case.

Only a few days ago, while attempting (vainly) to put some order in a storage room, I happened to move a (relatively recent) compact stereo player, you know one of those that has radio, cassette player and CD player + amplifier in a little cube of 20x20x20 cm, and right after that I moved a venerable ol'time Marantz amplifier.

I simply applied the wrong amount of force, at first I had the impression that the amplifier was glued to the shelf.

kevin_thibedeau• 9 years ago

Does the remote still work? That always seemed like Sony's kryptonite.

cannam• 9 years ago

We have a similar one (a 28" widescreen Trinitron from 2002) and you're quite right: while the TV is still fine, the excessively stylish remote died a decade ago. Happily we bought a Sony video recorder at the same time, and its more chunky remote still works and is also capable of controlling the TV.

(We do have a modern LED/LCD TV in another room but I mostly prefer the picture on the CRT, at least when watching TV or films)

jaclaz3• 9 years ago

Does the remote still work? That always seemed like Sony's kryptonite.

Yes it does, but to be fair, it has never been used much (at least far less that what would be normal use) as I have it connected to a satellite box that has a remote that duplicates the TV's remote main commands and that is used like 99% of the times.

And I was optimistic about the weight:

https://docs.sony.com/release//specs/KV32FS120_mksp.pdf

• KV-32FS120: 165 lbs. 6 oz. (75 kg)

taude2• 9 years ago

All my friends and myself had these Sony "flatscreen" TVs from around 2001. Took maybe three of us to move them out of our apartments. My friend had a bigger one, maybe 40" that was truly a beast and took up like a quarter of his Boston apartment living room. I remember I paid about $1K USD for the 32" model. I recently purchased a 4K 60" Samsung refurbed for $540. Memories.

chiph2• 9 years ago

When HDTV was getting started, the TV you wanted was the Sony XBR Trinitron. There was a reason that Best Buy didn't put them in the television display area with all the then-new LCD and Plasma flatscreens - because it had a far better picture and was half the cost (even at $1400).

They weighed 200 lbs (90kg) and nearly all of it was at the front with that thick cylindrical tube face. So you definitely needed a strong stand for them and you'd also want to add a strap to secure it to the wall so it wouldn't fall over on a child or pet.

badsectoracula5• 9 years ago

I have a similar Sony Trinitron TV - i'm not sure about the size, it should be at least 32" but might be bigger (it is a widescreen too). It is so heavy that you need at least two people (preferably three) to move it around and for the first three years i had it when i got it, i had it placed on the floor because... i couldn't lift it to place it anywhere else :-P.

The TV has barely seen any use, i got it because at the time i was thinking to buy one of the upcoming gaming consoles but i never got one and i do not watch TV. I couldn't connect it to my PC and, being on the floor, it wouldn't be very comfortable anyway. So it just stayed there until i moved and sent it to my sister who promptly sent it back once she moved :-P. That was the only time it saw any use. It is now in my bedroom, sitting there for 7+ years and - considering the weight - as far as i am concerned it is part of the house now.

Sometimes i am thinking to buy an HDMI to whatever input it uses (it has a bunch but not HDMI) adapter to connect a Raspberry Pi for watching a movie or something, but it is aligned at the side of my bed and it'd be much easier to rearrange the bed (and the rest of the room) than moving the TV.

It is like this TV was doomed to never be used since the first day i bought it.

pjc50• 9 years ago

Pi will drive it from the composite output, although you may need to borrow a HDMI screen to set it up.

hondadriver• 9 years ago

Not so strange. We just parted a few months ago from our 4:3 29 inch trinitron. It still worked, but we wanted a bigger screen for our new home. I never liked LCD so replaced it with a Sony OLED (yes I know the panel is from LG)

dhimes• 9 years ago

I still have one too- from the 90's

dekhn• 9 years ago

I came to post here about exactly that TV. That TV was a major pain. It was the last CRT I ever owned. It requires two people to move it.

While the image quality was good, I replaced with with a cheaper, larger LCD a decade later and haven't looked back.

ksec3• 9 years ago

Do CRT monitor, given today's technology advance, still offers any benefits? Does it still wins on colouring and latency when we have OLED?

agumonkey• 9 years ago

A few years back I booted my beloved diamondtron. It felt ... better. It's no scientific measure, but even compared to 4K OLED, there's something pretty that is visually pleasing. Kinda like looking at kodachrome films.

simonlc• 9 years ago

They are still sought after by the retro gaming community, although there are many who like the professional studio monitors Sony made (BVM and PVM series) which have a cylindrical tube.

freshyill• 9 years ago

A friend of mine has one for this reason. He actually manages equipment and medical devices for a company that runs hospitals and was able to get one that one of their hospitals was going to throw away. It’s a really nice display for gaming on a CRT, but, to my eyes, not that much nicer than the Sony Wega he otherwise uses.

Torgo4• 9 years ago

The Trinitron studio monitors also have RGBS (red, green, blue, composite-sync) BNC connectors, meaning that it's fairly easy to directly hook up bare arcade boards and get that real arcade experience.

Sholmesy2• 9 years ago

The competitive Super Smash (Melee) community still uses them, and the good ones (like the trinitrons) are highly coveted.

dagw• 9 years ago

Why? What actual competitive advantage do they offer? Or is it more an abstract look and feel thing.

Zardoz84• 9 years ago

Nothings wins a CRT on latency

craigsmansion• 9 years ago

CRTs give the excitement of science

Electrons are coaxed away from matter, then shot through an artificial vacuum near the speed of light. Then they're meticulously guided by magnetic forces to SMASH into a pinpoint of phosphor to excite the release of photons, thousands of times every second, in perfect harmony.

LCDs are just really really smart Christmas lights. Very practical, but a bit boring.

Also, horizontal storage space, like having a shelf in the most ideal place to have a shelf.

tlb• 9 years ago

With 15 kV acceleration voltage (which I think is typical), the electrons only go 24% the speed of light.

rwmj• 9 years ago

This video about retro-console users seeking out CRTs and PVMs is interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAi8AVj9GV8

leoc• 9 years ago

Many high-end late-era CRTs can do 1600×1200 or above at 60Hz or more while also being able to do 800×600 at esports-friendly refresh rates of 100Hz or above, all on a screen with an area which is still good by today's standards and with very low latency. You can now get a flat-panel monitor which does both a higher resolution and a higher refresh rate (and at the same time) but that basically wasn't true until a couple of years ago: and you'll pay quite a lot for that high-end gaming screen, and it still won't do 4K.

badsectoracula5• 9 years ago

I have a cheap trinitron (here is hooked on a retro PC running Quake [1] and here it is running a retro game i'm working on [2]). As far as colors go, it has hands down the best looking image in any of my other monitors, including a Dell U2713HM which i bought because all the artists in the (gamedev) company i worked at used it and recommended it to me (and i also used it myself at work, but wanted other opinions too), especially when it comes to contrast. Black looks like black, not washed out gray and white looks like white.

The only issue it has is that it has been used a lot (i got it used) and the guns are wearing out so it is a bit dim. I opened the case to calibrate it a bit using a guide i found and it was mostly fixed, but i avoid using it for too much because, well, things are only going to get worse. So i only use it in short bursts mainly to play older 2D games, like Fallout, that look way better in a CRT than any flat panel tech.

Which basically leads me to the main thing that CRT has over any modern tech: native support for multiple resolutions. Pretty much any resolution between 320x200 to 1280x1024 looks as good as it gets (although 1024x768 is the best resolution for this monitor due to size and refresh rate which maxes at 85Hz in that). With flat panels you are locked at whatever the native resolution and everything else looks blurry (if only Nvidia and AMD allowed integer nearest neighbor pixel scaling so we could at least get some resolutions crisper - that would also solve my main issue with 4K monitors, but that is another story).

As far as OLED goes, OLED seems to have the potential to match and perhaps surpass the best CRTs (and certainly my cheap one) but it first needs to come in the form of a PC monitor - preferably one that doesn't get discolored areas within the year. I have one of the first gen PS Vita handhelds which have OLED monitors and the image quality is great, so i'd like a monitor that looks like that.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/AdLcOGu.jpg [2] https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg

blattimwind• 9 years ago

There's a method (a bunch of slightly different ones, actually) for rejuvenation of cathodes to improve emittance. This can significantly prolong the life of a tube and has been applied by many with great success to expensive measurement equipment.

ksec3• 9 years ago

I know CRT is better than LCD, that is why i specifically mention OLED.

The prices of OLED will come down, expect the WOLED which LG current uses to be around the same as Top Range LCD in 2019 or 2020.

MicroLED, will fix every problem OLED has. Or may be MiniLED which allows up to 250ppi will be good enough.

Just wondering if there are anything CRT still wins, because even latency problem is an non issues with OLED, HDMI connection and software issues aside.

c38331743• 9 years ago

They have space to place stuff on top of them, any LCD setup gets messy if you have to add an external box like a decoder without a specialized TV table.

thinkythought4• 9 years ago

You can get a top of the line(or close to it) high performance CRT for free if you look around a bit, both PC monitors and TVs. Even the pro grade displays with RGB in. I haven't been able to find even a used OLED display of any kind that wasn't in a phone or tablet under $800

Additionally, OLED is stuck at one native resolution. A multi sync video monitor or PC monitor can natively display any resolution up to the highest the dot pitch can really resolve

kazinator• 9 years ago

For the benefit of the kids, let me dredge up how these used to be lovingly pronounced "tri nitron". :)

Nursie3• 9 years ago

I had a 17" Iiyama 'Diamondtron' (really trinitron) monitor through the late 90s and well into the 00s. It had amazing picture quality for the time, put up with a fair amount of abuse and was still working perfectly when I gave it away in '05.

But then flat screens hit and all of a sudden I could have more screen real estate and more desk space. No contest really, the future had arrived even if the future was worse colour and response rates for a while.

I can't imagine the tonnage of CRT needed to recreate all the flat screens around my home and office now.

tjoff3• 9 years ago

LCDs had much less screen real estate compared to CRTs which could run much higher resolutions. The first generations of LCDs were quite inferior on everything but form factor and power consumption.

dsego3• 9 years ago

Much higher resolutions at lower refresh rates and way too much flicker.

Nursie3• 9 years ago

LCDs had much less screen real estate compared to CRT

Oh sure, in terms of resolution I went from the CRT being able to do 1600x1200 back to an LCD that could do 1280x1024 (IIRC). But the physical screen sizes were bigger very quickly, that's what I meant.

CRTs were certainly superior in terms of image, response time and resolution. But when I could buy a larger flat panel at 1280x1024 with a 16ms response time for a couple of hundred pounds... buh-bye forever CRT.

badsectoracula5• 9 years ago

I can't imagine the tonnage of CRT needed to recreate all the flat screens around my home and office now.

FWIW there were improvements on CRT's size at the end of their popularity with some having like half the depth or less, but by that time LCDs had won in terms of mainstream preference.

lvoudour• 9 years ago

I bought the Vision Master Pro 410 in the early 2000's (http://vesta.homelinux.free.fr/wiki/iiyama_vmpro410.jpg), fantastic monitor, my last CRT. Worked great up until ~2008 when I replaced it with an LCD. Crappier quality but I reclaimed half of my desk.

kalleboo3• 9 years ago

When I was in uni I built up a multi-monitor setup of CRTs people left behind (the centerpiece was a 20" Apple Multiple Scan Trinitron, off to the sides was a 15" Sony Trinitron and a 17" Samtron display)

Then I got my first big paycheck from some remote work and I replaced them all with the original Apple 30" Cinema Display. That was a glorious day.

rconti• 9 years ago

19" visionmaster pro 450 here (.25 dot pitch!)

Lasted me a good 8+ years until I replaced it with a Dell 2407WFP.. which, to be fair, is ALSO still going strong today.

Tade03• 9 years ago

We had a Sony Trinitron and I remember them for being sturdy. Ours survived:

1. An assault with a rock to the screen by my then three year old sister.

2. Over 4000km in a shipping container.

3. Putting a blank x-ray plate to the screen, which apparently created a static shock powerful enough to disable the device(not sure about this one because I was five when I did that).

sofaofthedamned• 9 years ago

They were very sturdy, but not in all situations.

One New Years Eve I was at home and a friend was having a party at his around the corner. He asked if he could borrow my TV which I agreed to, but when he turned up he'd taken far too many pharmaceuticals.

I helped him carry it to his house and was at the front crossing the road when I heard what sounded like a huge explosion. I turned round and he'd dropped the TV, it had imploded, and he was gurning and dancing around it.

I miss that Trinitron...

exikyut• 9 years ago

_You_ did #3?!

How'd you get access to a blank X-Ray plate? What do you mean by "device" here?

Tade03• 9 years ago

My father used to be a lecturer/chief technician at a university and his field is medical equipment in general(the course he was responsible for was something along the lines of "x-ray devices"), so we had a few of those lying around in the house.

By "device" I meant the TV set. I remember hearing an obvious zap as the plate glued itself to the screen which went blank even though the TV seemed to be still on.

dmitriid• 9 years ago

Trinitron TVs had a legendary near-mythical status in the USSR beginning sometime in the 80s. It was the TV to measure anything by. To the point that "sonytrinitron" was common enough name everyone understood (much like "xerox" or "jeep" became common names over there).

pnut• 9 years ago

Used to love degaussing mine at work, it was so strong it would have a secondary effect on every monitor in a 6 foot radius.

thirdsun• 9 years ago

I think it's kind of sad that Sony's attention to detail and their status as a premium brand has been fading in recent decades. There are few product categories these days where Sony really is state of the art, although it seems as if they're trying to position themselves as premium manufacturer again (audio players, projectors come to mind) - a development I welcome, as I think there's room for brands in consumer electronics that work with the care of a small shop but can manufacture on a large scale.

edit: As other commenters pointed out there are some rather obvious categories I seem to have missed, including cameras and gaming consoles.

xedarius• 9 years ago

I'd argue they're top of the tree in gaming consoles, but on the whole I agree.

jrockway• 9 years ago

I'd say they compete favorably with Canon and Nikon with digital cameras.

lykr0n• 9 years ago

In my view, they make great-ish Smart Phones.

pipio212• 9 years ago

Sony digital cameras sensors are the best in the market. Guess what the Iphone uses, that is the number one camera in the world.

ubermonkey3• 9 years ago

Sony's huge and complicated. Obviously they're still doing well as a purveyor of gaming consoles, and their mirrorless cameras are AMAZING right now, but at the same time their forays into other markets (computing, e.g.) haven't fared well, and they went from market leader to also-ran in displays.

The thing that still shocks me, though, is the degree to which they blew their market leading position in portable music players. They OWNED that market in the 80s and 90s with the then-ubiquitous Walkman brand, which they extended into the CD era with "Discman" players that seemingly everyone had when I went to college in 1988.

Internal politics (I assume?) kept them from introducing a reasonable MP3 player until far, far too late for them to catch up. Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) -- and this while smaller players (Rio, etc) had devices you could load by copying MP3s to a memory card. I assume this is because Sony Music was afraid of the Mp3 revolution, but my understanding is that Sony Electronics has always been far more profitable than Sony Music, so it's hard to understand how that tail ended up wagging that particular dog.

(Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.)

And then, of course, Apple came in with the iPod and gathered up the high-end, high-margin customers that were Sony's constituency.

kalleboo3• 9 years ago

Sony got screwed so hard by copyright owners in the US on Betamax and DAT, that they decided to buy up movie/record labels and become a copyright owner themselves. This put them on the wrong side of the tech war and they got mired in the DRM bullcrap which made their music players a PITA to use.

[suggested viewing: the techmoan episode on DAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K1QKKPX_g ]

c38331743• 9 years ago

Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?)

It's not really different from iPods, those required iTunes to load music just like Sony's devices used SonicStage, with the difference of the iPod having an internal hard drive instead of a MiniDISC drive (and later CD walkmans with ATRAC/MP3 support).

dahauns• 9 years ago

(Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.)

The Memory Stick was bizarre, no doubt about it. Minidisc (and with it, ATRAC), however, was quite groundbreaking and had the potential to be huge.

As a lossy psychoacoustic codec, ATRAC predated MP3 for years in commercial availability. Minidisc was both sturdy and flexible (esp. in comparison to DCC), had adequate audio quality (and later ATRAC versions became really good), and itcould have even been a contender for a 3.5" floppy successor in both capacity and speed. Sadly, this was the worst days of Sony hubris, both the physical format and the codec cost a lot to license, the use as a data medium was needlessly crippled, and as such it never really took off globally.

I really wonder what would have happened if Sony and Philips could have reconciled and worked together on this like they did with the CD, instead of going all format war (with the DCC being the real head-scratcher here...).

b3b0p• 9 years ago

In our house hold we had the infamous 40 inch XBR 700 (our neighbors had the 40 inch Mitsubishi equivalent, which was also very nice at the time). A 320 lb glorious spectacle. We loved it. Eventually though it started to wear out and because of it's shear weight and size, dad posted on Craig's List for free, with the caveat the person(s) had to come get it without him helping. The people who came were in for a rude awakening.

nsxwolf• 9 years ago

But they have those damned horizontal tungsten wires going across the screen. Once seen cannot be unseen.

abtinf• 9 years ago

I had the same problem with these screens. Even after years of using Trintron monitors at work, I was never able to ignore the lines. I've never heard anyone else complain about them though - others seem to get used to them very quickly.

triplesec• 9 years ago

except they are hardly visible, most people filter them out again and it really doesn't impact the experience for them

Gregordinary2• 9 years ago

Not Trinitron (Edit: Yes it is), but I had a pair of Sony FW900 Monitors. I got them free off of craigslist in 2010 when my laptop screen broke, I didn't have an external monitor and I was unemployed.

Those things are beasts. A little over 90 lbs each, 16x10 aspect ratio, and supported a resolution of 2304 x 1440 at 80 Hz.

https://www.cnet.com/products/sony-gdm-fw900/specs/

c38331743• 9 years ago

Those are Trinitrons too

Gregordinary2• 9 years ago

Even says that on the page I linked. Thanks for pointing that out.

chaoticmass• 9 years ago

I have one of these at home in my closet. It was my primary home display from around 2005 to 2012.

_Codemonkeyism• 9 years ago

Still remember the small Triniton Sony TV I've connected my Amstrad CPC to. It had a glass in from of the tube and was portable with a handle.

vanadium• 9 years ago

I use a 14" RGB Sony Trinitron medical imaging monitor for retrogaming; PVMs and BVMs are pretty much the gold standard these days, especially the Trinitrons, for their quality and longevity.

If you think Trinitron quality is great in your average Television CRT, it's _amazing_ in true RGB. Who knew SCART would keep bare-metal retrogaming alive?

jhoechtl• 9 years ago

Is there currently a TV/panelntechnology to rule them all? I am very fond of OLED technology - superb contrast and vivid colors, even on UHD.

homero• 9 years ago

I mostly remember the two thin support wires crossing the screen. Loved my Sony vaio desktop.

m3kw9• 9 years ago

Had one of these at my parents and they just out lasted most of my friends TVs and it was still working like new the day we finally was urged to switch to LCD tv after they had it 20+ years

mschaef• 9 years ago

One of my first large purchases of computer hardware was a Sony GDM-17SE1 monitor. This was in 1994, when a 17" display was unusual, and the display went along with an 8MB 486DX/33 machine.

The display was expensive at the time ($2,300 in 2017 dollars), but lasted me a good 6 or 7 years. By the time 2000 rolled around, I was doing most of my computing on employer-owned machines and laptops, so my need for a desktop display was minimal. (That didn't stop me, though, from a briefly owned 19" Dell rebrand of a Trinitron display.)

Display quality on those CRTs was excellent, although the thin horizontal wires were indeed noticeable if you looked.

Brockenstein• 9 years ago

I ended up with a refurbed trinitron monitor in 2005 or so, it was 19 or 20 inches, 1600x1200, so sweet at the time. Thing weighed like 100lbs. After a while you developed wire blindness, but people who saw it for the first time would see the wires straight away... and would recoil in horror.

dang• 9 years ago

Url changed from https://hackaday.com/2018/01/03/why-sonys-trinitron-tubes-we..., which points to this.

Generally we prefer to link to text rather than video, but there really isn't much in that article, so it doesn't seem justified to link there. The HN guidelines ask for original sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

busterarm• 9 years ago

I still sorely miss my GDM-5010PT monitor. It gave up the ghost in about 2006, losing the ability to display green. I didn't bother to service it and I'm kicking myself because it was a reasonable repair.

That said, it really was a boat anchor as far as weight goes.

dsego3• 9 years ago

Previous discussion 1 day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16048202

jdblair• 9 years ago

I've had multiple Trinitron monitors over my career. Until LCDs got good I would insist on having one. They had the least distortion and the best color.

2 monitors stand out in my memory:

In 1998 I bought myself a 19" name-brand Sony monitor, for $650! I used it for 10 years, until I finally replaced it with a pair of LCD monitors.

In the early 00s I worked for Sun Microsystems, and worked mostly from home. I bought a 27" Sun-branded Trinitron monitor off an internal surplus equipment auction and had it shipped to my home. It was so heavy it came on a shipping pallet!

Digital-Citizen• 9 years ago

I appreciate the quality of the screen, but I think the Mitsubishi flat screens were a step up from Sony's Trinitrons. If I recall, the Trinitron were a section of a cylinder (vertically flat) but the Mitsubishi 2040U (and later short-neck version, 2060U or something like that) used a strategically distorted picture to ultimately hit a flat screen (both vertically and horizontally flat) and appear focused.

Sony would, in my opinion, ruin their name by mistreating people (both customers and would-be customers) by publishing what we now call "fake news" in the form of movie reviews by "David Manning" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ... for more) and distributing malware to Windows users on some audio CDs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... for more).

The latter means that Windows users who may have legally acquired a copy of the affected 58 known audio CDs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Compact_Discs_sold_wit... for the list) and inserted them into their Windows OS computer may have contracted software now identified as either spyware, a trojan horse, or a rootkit called "XCP" that could not easily be removed even if the user refused the EULA presented to them. Some of the software on these CDs appeared to be copyright infringements from FLOSS as well. And to cap it all off, the uninstaller for the malware only hid the software's entry in the Windows add/remove software list without uninstalling the software. Even Sony BMG's initial rootkit removal software exacerbated the problem further mistreating users. Ostensibly this was all done in the name of preventing people from making a copy of the audio tracks to their computers.

I don't recommend running Windows or any other nonfree software. But that's no excuse for Sony's abuses. There's no good way to justify committing copyright infringement against developers who are respecting a user's software freedom. Nor is there good reason to justify Sony's choices to repeatedly subject users to malware, stand in the way of a non-infringing use, or make malware hard to remove.

I'm not keen to distinguish between the various arms of Sony, so I choose not to do business with any of them. I also notice that despite all this malicious behavior the people who run the various arms of Sony are apparently not keen to distance themselves from the name "Sony".

Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product [video]

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