The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-biggest-crt-ever-made-sonys-pvm-4300/

by giuliomagnifico • 7 months ago

281 187 7 months ago

dfarq.homeip.net

jsheard6• 7 months ago

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

HardwareLust• 7 months ago

Those two videos are the real story here.

mercwear• 7 months ago

Link to the video where he goes to get the tv (diff channel, same creator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk

giancarlostoro4• 7 months ago

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.

actionfromafar5• 7 months ago

I didn’t catch that in the video? The part about marketing photos in the restaurant?

yftsui• 7 months ago

Sony didn’t give it to the restaurant; instead the restaurant purchased it during Japan’s economic boom.

mark-r• 7 months ago

The video was posted on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093

gbil• 7 months ago

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

rayiner2• 7 months ago

In high school we used them as a high voltage source to make lifters: https://youtu.be/jrfBrrDfdEA

vl• 7 months ago

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.

merpkz• 7 months ago

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.

zackmorris2• 7 months ago

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.

keitmo• 7 months ago

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.

s0rce• 7 months ago

I used the CRT HV powersupply to make a little electronic hovering thing back in high school http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm

loloquwowndueo• 7 months ago

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.

0_____0• 7 months ago

Not cookie gated for me. You can easily read the content without interacting with the cookie dialog.

TechSquidTV• 7 months ago

I remember when the video came out. What, 2-3 years ago? What an event.

telotortium• 7 months ago

One year ago today

indigodaddy2• 7 months ago

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.

rationalist2• 7 months ago

The real question is, did she return it after the football game? Apparently many people used to do that?

indigodaddy2• 7 months ago

No, we kept it, until we didn't want to lug it around anymore or LCD came around..

TacticalCoder• 7 months ago

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).

Jolter• 7 months ago

Presumably the wife would at least be able to watch TV on that big screen.

stuff4ben• 7 months ago

$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?

rob742• 7 months ago

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...

tacker2000• 7 months ago

yea, most people would have dumped the stock back then and not HODL'ed it through the 2000s until now...

nancyminusone• 7 months ago

S&P 500

kilpikaarna• 7 months ago

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!

weberer• 7 months ago

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.

rob742• 7 months ago

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...

cm21875• 7 months ago

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.

sprayk• 7 months ago

all CRTs televisions were either 60Hz or 50Hz depending on where you are in the world

numpad05• 7 months ago

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

ssl-36• 7 months ago

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.

mjg594• 7 months ago

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.

bob10292• 7 months ago

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.

anthk• 7 months ago

I did 1024x768@85 just fine.

_vqpz• 7 months ago

Even at just 43" it still weighed 450lbs. I bought a 27" CRT some years ago and even that was a nightmare to transport

dialogbox• 7 months ago

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.

EvanAnderson• 7 months ago

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.

RajT88• 7 months ago

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.

FuriouslyAdrift• 7 months ago

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.

plorg• 7 months ago

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.

deadbabe2• 7 months ago

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?

mikepurvis• 7 months ago

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.

jsheard6• 7 months ago

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.

alnwlsn• 7 months ago

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.

numpad05• 7 months ago

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.

ssl-36• 7 months ago

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.

jsheard6• 7 months ago

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

deadbabe2• 7 months ago

Given the lifespan of CRTs and no hope of repairs, when should the last CRTs be expected to die forever?

cgriswald• 7 months ago

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.

jsheard6• 7 months ago

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.

sgarland• 7 months ago

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.

ck2• 7 months ago

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)

bluedino• 7 months ago

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

delamon• 7 months ago

IBM was producing in Japan T221 monitor staring from 2001. It had 3840x2160 LCD screen.

BubbleRings• 7 months ago

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.

asciii• 7 months ago

My family bought our first one and we used it keep it on a carpet floor - boy was that an electrifying experience

RedShift1• 7 months ago

Not just shock you across the room, but shock straight into your next life.

actionfromafar5• 7 months ago

So we are all in post-tube life?

Scubabear68• 7 months ago

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…

preisschild• 7 months ago

Yeah the tube is essentially a large capacitor :P

I also learned electronics by shocking myself often

nextaccountic2• 7 months ago

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

addandsubtract• 7 months ago

Same goes for your microwave.

macintux• 7 months ago

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.

api• 7 months ago

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.

qingcharles5• 7 months ago

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.

bane2• 7 months ago

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.

crims0n• 7 months ago

So we decided to throw it away.

Somewhere, a retro game enthusiast winced at reading that.

bane2• 7 months ago

Later me, a more retro game enthusiast, physically recoiled while typing it if it makes any difference. :(

eduction• 7 months ago

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.

B1FF_PSUVM• 7 months ago

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!")

dustractor• 7 months ago

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.

bitwize4• 7 months ago

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.

mitchell_h• 7 months ago

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.

Tade0• 7 months ago

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?

stronglikedan• 7 months ago

My buddy had something like this. All I remember is it took four people to carry it.

vunderba• 7 months ago

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.

postalcoder• 7 months ago

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.

bob10292• 7 months ago

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.

KineticLensman• 7 months ago

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.

xp84• 7 months ago

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.

random_ind_dude• 7 months ago

Some CRTs had a button to degauss the display, to remove the distortion on the screen. You could also purchase a tool that could be used to degauss a CRT.

thunderbong• 7 months ago

Previously on HN

What happened to the world's largest tube TV? [video]

689 points, 295 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093

racl101• 7 months ago

I remember owning a 27 inch RCA CRT. It was a pain to carry. I could not imagine this thing.

qingcharles5• 7 months ago

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.

actionfromafar5• 7 months ago

So you have the other surviving specimen in the world?

timzaman• 7 months ago

Why write a story about someone else's story? Just go to the shank mod vid directly

butlike• 7 months ago

The text equivalent of a "reaction video" where they add nothing except pasting their face over 30-50% of the screen

oofoe• 7 months ago

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!

haxtormoogle• 7 months ago

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.

jsheard6• 7 months ago

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.

bitwize4• 7 months ago

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.

BuffaloEric33• 7 months ago

Tell me you lived in Rochester, NY without saying so.

Now I want a plate...

vachina• 7 months ago

Yeah. I remember growing up with a Trinitron flat CRT that I thought was humungous. TIL 43 inches is the upper limit for CRTs.

belter• 7 months ago

2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471

rconti2• 7 months ago

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.

ilamont2• 7 months ago

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.

ssl-36• 7 months ago

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.)

rconti2• 7 months ago

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.

expedition32• 7 months ago

My first TV in the early 2000s (Xbox!) was a Siemens. Another illustrious megacorp that doesn't make televisions anymore.

lizknope• 7 months ago

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.

sholladay• 7 months ago

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...

khalilravanna• 7 months ago

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.

lanthade• 7 months ago

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.

tylervigen• 7 months ago

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.

rendx• 7 months ago

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! :)

lrvick2• 7 months ago

I have the second largest, and 25 others, hooked up in my garage, fed by a modular synth, a pc, retro consoles, and several DVD and VHS players. Would still probably trade it all for one of these.

CRTs are literally precision particle accelerators in glass vacuum tubes we mass produced and put in peoples homes just to electronically reproduce entertaining images, and there is not a factory left on earth that can make them anymore.

It is some of the wildest shit humans have ever done.

femto• 7 months ago

This place claims to still be a manufacturer, with no plans to discontinue.

https://www.thomaselectronics.com/

Edit: Reddit claims that Thomas aren't really a CRT manufacturer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/1c9t5sf/company_...

lrvick2• 7 months ago

No tube manufacturers exist, though some refurbish old tubes and pair them with new electronics.

The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

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