The Consumer Electronics Hall Of Fame: Sony Trinitron (2018)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/the-consumer-electronics-hall-of-fame-sony-trinitron

by proxybop • 7 years ago

123 118 7 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

spectramax• 7 years ago

Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s with Trinitron TVs and Walkmans, seeing the SONY logo even to this date evokes a deep sense of trust, brand loyalty and pleasure in using their products. I think there is tons to learn from companies like SONY, Braun, Apple, IBM (old IBM that is). They innovated relentlessly, put excellence in design as part of the ethos, understood UX/UI, and deeply cared about the customer experience. Trinitron TVs were part of my childhood, a window into the world of imagination...in color :)

outworlder2• 7 years ago

and deeply cared about the customer experience

I'm guessing you missed the whole Betamax thing?

That's tongue-in-cheek though. I think the Betamax experience is what motivated them to listen to consumers.

bch• 7 years ago

Until their phone-home rootkit CDs[0]. Or is that also “listening to your customers?” /s

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

mywittyname3• 7 years ago

I think they were genuinely listening to their customers with Betamax, it's just a situation where the customers didn't use a product the way they said they would.

Of course we customers think image quality is important! Well, turns out, people are pretty cheap and were totally happy with sacrificing image quality of TV recordings in order to maximize the amount they could record on their, like, $20-in-1970s-money tape.

TheOperator• 7 years ago

80s/90s
Deeply cared about the customer experience.
Cared

And then they started installing rootkits on their customers computers.

agapon• 7 years ago

I wonder if their change of attitude coincided with them becoming more of an American company rather than Japanese.

nabla9• 7 years ago

Eizo Nanao Trinitron monitors where the absolute best. example: EIZO FlexScan T965 with FD Trinitron https://www.cnet.com/products/eizo-flexscan-t965-crt-monitor...

Eizo monitors are still very good and I use them. They are very ergonomic and their settings, especially preset values just work.

jotm4• 7 years ago

VAIO used to be a symbol of quality and status, as well. Really great laptops, how did Sony let them get so bad... They sold the brand, too.

walrus015• 7 years ago

There's a whole community of "CRT enthusiasts" who search these out on Craigslist now, and buy them for retro video gaming setups. A big Trinitron CRT 27 to 36 inches in size, in good condition, is actually appreciating in market value now due to how many of them have been trashed.

Sony PVMs (professional video monitors), such as used in a tv production studio have been increasing in market value. Similar tubes but with more advanced electronics.

To the best of my knowledge there are zero remaining manufacturers of CRTs in the world.

phkahler• 7 years ago

I wonder if it's possible to wind a new yoke and make a vector monitor out of a Trinitron. That would be the ultimate gaming experience.

mark-r2• 7 years ago

The Vectrex was a video game that came with its own vector monitor built in. It was only black and white and relied on plastic screen overlays to get color in different parts of the screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex

pryelluw• 7 years ago

I dont own a trinitron, but own a huge and heavy crt for my snes gaming needs. It was free at a garage sale.

flylikeabanana• 7 years ago

For Super Smash Bros Melee (released 2001), it's an existential issue. Many high-level interactions in the game move so quickly that issues playing on modern LCD TV's a non-starter. 1000 entrant tournaments need enough CRT TV's to support them. Tournament organizers often will keep a cache of CRTs specifically to host melee tournaments.

aeyes• 7 years ago

The problem is the significant input lag most modern TVs have.

Nursie2• 7 years ago

OLED!

Lag might still be an issue depending on the electronics, but the screens have a roughly 10us response time.

m463• 7 years ago

I imagine modern technologies like gsync or freesync have solved that problem for modern games, but there's probably no way to weave that into the pipeline of old arcade hardware.

navbaker• 7 years ago

I have a friend at work that plays competitively and I just gave him an old CRT we had lying around as he stocks up for tournaments!

zumu• 7 years ago

How about plasma TVs as an alternative?

leecb• 7 years ago

To the best of my knowledge there are zero remaining manufacturers of CRTs in the world.

I have seen plenty of stores selling (small) CRTs in stores in Asia. They are usually quite small, and I bet they are quickly disappearing, but they are still around.

philg_jr• 7 years ago

Ugh my grandparents gave me a modern 36in Trinitron when I was in college. I ended up leaving it with one of my old roommates when I moved out, mostly because I didn't want to move it again. It felt like it was made out of solid glass, it had to be near 200 pounds (probably exaggerating, but it was heavy and extremely awkward to hold while moving with two people). I'm kinda wishing I still had it now.

OnlineGladiator4• 7 years ago

Not sure about which model, but 200 pounds is actually a bit light for a 36" CRT.

https://www.cnet.com/products/sony-kv-36fs12-wega-36-crt-tv/

(It's 222 pounds for those who don't want to click the link).

I used to lug around a 27" CRT by myself every time I moved, and it was a giant pain in the ass. It was worth it though for the picture quality.

bearcobra• 7 years ago

it had to be near 200 pounds (probably exaggerating

You are probably pretty close based on the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FD_Trinitron/WEGA

jdkee• 7 years ago

We have a Sony 36" 4:3 HD Trinitron in the basement for the kids to play old Nintendo and Sega games on. It weighs 238.5 lbs without the stand. I can barely pick it up.

When we moved from a 3rd floor walk-up to our house, one mover used several straps to strap it to his front and carried it down the stairs by himself. He was a beast, as broad as he was tall.

jaclaz• 7 years ago

it had to be near 200 pounds (probably exaggerating, but it was heavy and extremely awkward to hold while moving with two people)

Only as anecdata, I stil have and use daily a "huge" Sony 32" trinitron as TV:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16060031

that is 75 Kg/165 lbs, so 100 Kg or more for a 36" seems just right (as said on the other thread I have a special table/support for it).

And BTW the only reason why I changed my good ol' (as well trinitron) 20" inch computer monitor with a "flat" 22" screen is because aging I see better the screen at a slightly increased distance (i.e. thanks to the reduced thickness I can have the screen some 30-40 cm farther on my desktop).

SmellyGeekBoy7• 7 years ago

As someone who spent a few years working in home entertainment retail I can confirm that Trinitrons were by far the heaviest CRTs of any given size. They were truly excellent, though.

bsder• 7 years ago

A big Trinitron CRT 27 to 36 inches in size, in good condition, is actually appreciating in market value now due to how many of them have been trashed.

Yeah, not for very much. And certainly not for an amount worth dealing with the "You should take money off that because it doesn't have HDMI. Hurr-durr." crowd on fleabay.

When I see my Sony GDM-FW900 boat anchor actually selling for more than $1000, then I'll believe you.

walrus015• 7 years ago

That specific model of Sony, I have literally seen sell for more than $800 in the enthusiast market. Search for sold items on ebay.

busterarm2• 7 years ago

There's a huge amount of variance in CRTs and the last Trinitrons made are the holy grail in terms of features and display quality.

Specifically the BVM-D24E1WU & BVM-D32E1WU. They usually go for a few thousand dollars un-calibrated, with tube issues, and without the required addon cards (broadcast trinitrons have add-on cards giving different features like PCs) and master broadcast remote control receiver. The RGB module for these specific models is practically un-obtainium, with less than 150 produced globally, and everyone looking for these monitors now needs one. They sold for over $20k when they were new twenty years ago.

If you're looking to get one fully-loaded and in proper shape, expect to drop 6-8k. And there's only one guy still doing routine service of these who has adequate spare parts & knowledge, he's in Southern California and he won't ship the best models because of the huge risk of damage.

Scoundreller• 7 years ago

Also, Duck Hunt only works on CRTs.

mark-r2• 7 years ago

The gun relied on the phosphor fade to detect where it was aimed. Since the electron gun was scanning, the timing of the peak light detection would tell you what point was in the gun's focus.

pkorzeniewski• 7 years ago

Believe it or not our only TV set is from 1985 (Blaupunkt Scout T8 [1]) and we use it daily :-) We didn't have a TV by choice for the last several years and just used laptop when we wanted to watch a movie, but as I got more and more interested in stuff from the 80s, I started looking for an old TV as a fun project to try connect HDMI to it, play NES and so on. Long story short (because I could talk a lot about it) the TV somehow stayed with us for 2 years now and we don't plan to get rid of it anytime soon. It has a beautiful form factor, the image and sound quality is surprisingly good and we simply don't feel the need to change it for a modern one.

[1] http://www.hifi-archiv.info/Blaupunkt/1984-85/17.jpg

ikeboy2• 7 years ago

A casual search turns up https://www.thomasnet.com/products/cathode-ray-tubes-crt-885..., with 23 CRT manufacturers as of now.

Are the products they sell different in some important way?

userbinator• 7 years ago

Those look like military/aerospace suppliers, i.e. astronomical prices and very specialised designs. Also, picture tubes are CRTs, but not all CRTs are picture tubes.

bluedino2• 7 years ago

I've been picking up Sony Vegas that I see on the curb and can usually sell them for $100.

My back is going to make me pay as they are about 160-180lbs for the 32" models

mattkrause3• 7 years ago

Visual neuroscientists too!

CRTs update in a nice, predictable order, can have crazy-high refresh rates, and don't do anything clever (or slow) with their inputs. This makes them perfect for experiments that require showing stimuli precisely and promptly.

More recent displays do all kinds of weird trickery that either changes what's actually shown (e.g., motion blur) or presents it at some hard-to-determine time.

takeda3• 7 years ago

It's probably just limitation of LCD. I remeber using laptop in 90s and refresh rate was so bad that if you moved a mouse it was not visible (the motion blur special effect for the mouse pointer in early Windows helped a bit with this, I was also wondering if maybe that was the reason it existed).

Since then LCD studios made huge progress, but maybe still can't compare with CRT.

OLED magnitude faster than LCD, I'm wondering how these compare.

p1necone4• 7 years ago

Seems like there's a reasonable market - I wonder if there's any companies still making new CRTs

snvzz2• 7 years ago

retro gaming setups

Do consider the OSSC (Open Source Scan Converter). It works line by line, so it adds virtually no latency to the chain. It is OSHW and FPGA based, getting regular updates.

It doesn't do s-video or composite, but otherwise it is imho much better than the closedhw framemeister, which buffers entire frames and is less flexible.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 7 years ago

Hook it up to a RetroTINK-2X in passthrough mode and you'll get lag-free composite and s-video too!

outworlder2• 7 years ago

There's an interesting video about the history of Trinitron.

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

mywittyname3• 7 years ago

I love this guy. He's just wacky enough to be fun to watch by not so much that it's annoying. And his videos have the right amount of technical minutiae; detailed enough that you understand the important bits without having to pause the video for a while to chew on the explanation.

willis9364• 7 years ago

His content is most refreshing because he gives an engineer’s level of understanding. Most “tech personalities” don’t seem to dig very deep into the whys and hows of things.

Tokkemon• 7 years ago

Yes! I was waiting for a reference to Alec's channel. So good!

ben1040• 7 years ago

My mother-in-law inherited a mid-90s Trinitron TV when her father died in 2005. It's been the TV in their guest room since.

Their flat panel TV died a couple weeks ago and they put that TV in their living room as a stopgap.

The picture tube on that TV is still so good after all this time, they now don't want to bother buying a new TV.

Johnny555• 7 years ago

Do they only watch broadcast TV? Even DVD's look far better on my LCD flatscreen (though the TV or player may be upscaling to 720 or 1080) than on the old CRT in my parents house (admittedly not a Trinitron)

jotm4• 7 years ago

I don't know what kind of nostalgic glasses people wear, but CRT TV quality degraded over time, became noticeably blurry. Had Panasonics, Sony, JVC, all looked like shit. Monitors with degaussing were fixable for a short time.

gandalfian• 7 years ago

Someone paid £1400 for a 32" widescreen sony crt with digital tuner in 2006. By 2009 they ebay'd it to me for £32. A pound an inch. Shows how fast the market collapsed when flatscreens became common. (Good tv, only stopped using it last year when the lack of hdmi got too much).

Incidentally why did europe get a last generation of widescreen CRT's but the USA basically went from humoungous 4:3 CRT's straight to wide flatscreens?

johncalvinyoung• 7 years ago

There were a few Stateside too. I owned a ~30" widescreen flat CRT (secondhand) for a while before I got a cheap LCD.

headsupftw• 7 years ago

And Sony Walkman/Discman! To me Sony in the 80s/90s was like today's Apple. In 2000s I bought a small Sony box that could stream Comcast cable TV from my house to my PSP when I was out and about so that I could watch my own TV while playing poker at my friend's house.

copperx• 7 years ago

Jobs loved Sony products. I'm sure they were an inspiration to create good products.

mzs2• 7 years ago

This only touches on the CRT portion of the TV. I had a 19" Sony from '82. While other manufacturers were trying to save costs with fewer and less heavy duty parts, because the quality of the picture was better, Sony could charge a premium and did not skimp on the rest. It's evident when you look at the tuner/RF, power, and chassis what a quality product it was. Coming from Soviet TVs that would start on fire when they worked, it was no comparison.

StillBored2• 7 years ago

Odd that they spend so much time talking about alignment, because all of my trinitron based CRT monitors over 20" needed to be adjusted seemingly on a daily basis to converge correctly across the whole screen. This was something that I rarely remember doing with the cheap shadow mask monitors (although frankly they were generally smaller screens) and at a lower resolution.

The trinitron monitors I had were running 1600x1200 or better and with a small font the convergence would give white text a purple shadow/etc. Very 1980's apple ][, which a lot of people seemed to be OK with, or maybe its just because they ran much lower resolution TV signals or much larger fonts.

deergomoo• 7 years ago

Are they flat screens? Flat as in the glass is not curved of course, not flat as in thin. The flat ones are well known for developing a whole host of convergence/geometry issues that the curved ones either don’t, or take much longer to manifest.

StillBored2• 7 years ago

"vertically flat"

Yah, by the mid/late 1990's when I had a pile of them at work/etc they were mostly "flat" screens because that was sort of the default for a midrange+ monitor in that timeframe.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 7 years ago

Drifting convergence is usually caused by failing (if old) or poor-quality (if new) capacitors.

gorgoiler• 7 years ago

No mention in this article of the famous support wires found in Trinitron PC monitors.

These wires were needed in all Trinitron products, but the more exacting demands of high resolution (1024 lines!) meant the support wires were quite visible horizontally, especially on uniform backgrounds like a gray Windows desktop. They divided the screen into three equal areas.

Despite this apparent flaw, Trinitron still had huge market share amongst enthusiast PC owners. Maybe it was brand loyalty, or maybe they really were much better quality than any other CRT out there?

At least as I remember it, if you wanted to take (or be seen to be taking) color reproduction seriously, then you had to have a 21” Trinitron. I guess the black horizontal support wires became just as much a part of brand signaling as the RGB lozenges in the logo. Lots of people I knew had amazing Trinitron CRTs and all they did was edit Word documents!

Kind of like a Leica red dot, or the white spot on Dunhill pipes.

https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/q406.jpg

bluedino2• 7 years ago

When I worked at Best Buy circa 2000 we got lots of people who tried returning those because of the "lines" on the screen.

cyberjunkie• 7 years ago

You could tap the monitor and all the strings would move in this wave-like manner. The two horizontal wires were so cool to have. They were the sharpest CRT monitors.

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

I finally got rid of my 1970's Trinitron TV because LCDs were so much lighter and sharper and didn't warm up the room. I used it for something like 25 years.

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

Some people in the 1970's converted them into inexpensive color computer graphics monitors.

I don't mean hooking up to the RF or composite video input, but directly connecting to the guts of it to get a crisp bitmapped image.

TD-Linux4• 7 years ago

It's a thing people still do to this day, especially to use with game consoles modified to output RGB directly. https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=56155

SmellyGeekBoy7• 7 years ago

Atari's early arcade cabinets used gutted consumer TVs around the same time.

jimmaswell2• 7 years ago

My computer CRT uses the trinitron style of aperture grille. VX920, 19", 1600x1200@75. Still looks great today alongside my newer 1440p144 flatscreen.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5• 7 years ago

Here’s a comment from down the rabbit hole:

Back in the day I spent an afternoon configuring my old 19" CRT like that. I ended up with settings like 800x600x167Hz, 1024x768x133Hz, 1600x1200x89Hz and 1920x1440x73Hz. Many refresh rates were much higher than the stated documentation, and I ran it for years like that.

I’m amazed at that those resolutions and refresh rates were achieved so long ago. LCDs were so thin as to ge unstoppable, but definitely came with trade offs.

mzs2• 7 years ago

Honestly RAMDAC was more the limiting factor.

LargoLasskhyfv2• 7 years ago

Matrox could do it, later all-in-one Voodoos from 3DFX also, and anything with the shiny transparent blue chips where you could see the die from IBM [1], many better cards with chips from S3 had that. No blurryness at all.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/IBM_37RG...

edit: link

LargoLasskhyfv2• 7 years ago

Had a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme and needed to do the same. Got it from a gamer who couldn't use it because most games at the times programmed the hardware directly, und thus anything you've set up with tools like Scitech Display Doctor/UniVBE/UniVesa got overwritten. Whereas i couldn't care less about that, happily enjoying two pages of DIN A4 in original size next to each other, crisp and clear on that highend monster :)

gerbilly• 7 years ago

I used to configure my own non VESA resolutions in the X windows config file.

If the monitor had enough bandwidth you could push it past the standard VESA modes.

I used to run bespoke resolutions like 1600x1200 in the mid 90s on a big Trinitron monitor I bought at a surplus store.

IIRC the only limitation was that the resolutions had to be both divisible by eight.

The Consumer Electronics Hall Of Fame: Sony Trinitron (2018)

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