[HN Gopher] The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
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The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 202 points
Date : 2025-12-22 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Those two videos are the real story here.
| mercwear wrote:
| Link to the video where he goes to get the tv (diff channel,
| same creator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I didn't catch that in the video? The part about marketing
| photos in the restaurant?
| yftsui wrote:
| Sony didn't give it to the restaurant; instead the restaurant
| purchased it during Japan's economic boom.
| mark-r wrote:
| The video was posted on HN a while back:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093
| gbil wrote:
| 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
| rayiner wrote:
| In high school we used them as a high voltage source to make
| lifters: https://youtu.be/jrfBrrDfdEA
| vl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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.
| jama211 wrote:
| Oof, a whole CAT scanner is insane! Did insurance cover it?
| keitmo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not cookie gated for me. You can easily read the content
| without interacting with the cookie dialog.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| I remember when the video came out. What, 2-3 years ago? What an
| event.
| telotortium wrote:
| One year ago today
| indigodaddy wrote:
| 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.
| rationalist wrote:
| The real question is, did she return it after the football
| game? Apparently many people used to do that?
| indigodaddy wrote:
| No, we kept it, until we didn't want to lug it around anymore
| or LCD came around..
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Presumably the wife would at least be able to watch TV on that
| big screen.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| $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?
| rob74 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| yea, most people would have dumped the stock back then and
| not HODL'ed it through the 2000s until now...
| kergonath wrote:
| Some people found the faith and got onboard in 1998,
| though, when the iMac took the world by storm. If only I
| held for a bit longer... :D (I never had $40k to invest,
| though, so the returns would be smaller anyway).
| nancyminusone wrote:
| S&P 500
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| rob74 wrote:
| 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...
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| all CRTs televisions were either 60Hz or 50Hz depending on
| where you are in the world
| cm2187 wrote:
| Yes and no. Half of the screen was refreshing at a time, so
| it was really flashing at 30Hz. You still had a visible
| stroboscopic effect. True 60Hz and 100Hz screen appeared in
| the late 90s and made a visible difference in term of
| comfort of viewing.
| mabster wrote:
| I'm guessing you're talking about interlacing?
|
| I've never really experienced it because I've always
| watched PAL which doesn't have that.
|
| But I would have thought it would be perceived as
| flashing at 60 Hz with a darker image?
| pledg wrote:
| PAL had interlacing
| walkerbrown wrote:
| For anyone this deep on the thread, check out this video
| (great presenter!) explaining TV spectrum allocation,
| NTSC, PAL, and the origin of 29.97 fps.
|
| https://youtu.be/3GJUM6pCpew
| DonHopkins wrote:
| TIL NTSC: He explained that NTSC stands for Not The
| Smartest Choice, but I always assumed it meant Never The
| Same Color.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah I remember I could not use a CRT computer monitor at
| 60Hz or less for any length of time, as the strobing gave
| me a headache.
| ntoskrnl_exe wrote:
| I think you're mixing monitors and TVs together.
|
| CRT TVs only supported vertical refresh rates of 50Hz or
| 60Hz, which matched the regional mains frequency. They
| used interlacing and technically only showed half the
| frame at a time, but thanks to phosphor decay this added
| a feeling of fluidity to the image. If you were able to
| see it strobe, you must have had an impressive sight. And
| even if they supported higher refresh rates, it wouldn't
| matter, as the source of the signal would only ever be
| 50/60Hz.
|
| CRT monitors used in PCs, on the other hand, supported a
| variety of refresh rates. Only monitors for specific
| applications used interlacing, customer grade ones
| didn't, which means you could see a strobing effect here
| if you ran it at a low frequency. But even the most
| analog monitors from the 80s supported atleast 640x480 at
| 60Hz, some programs such as the original DOOM were even
| able to squeeze 70Hz out of them by running at a
| different resolution while matching the horizontal
| refresh rate.
| myself248 wrote:
| For some reason I remember 83Hz being the highest refresh
| rate supported by my XGA CRT, but I think it was only
| running at SVGA (800x600) in order to pull that rate.
|
| Some demos could throw pixels into VRAM that fast, and it
| was _wild_ looking. Like the 60Hz soap-opera effect but
| even more so.
|
| I still feel that way looking at >30fps content since I
| really don't consume much of it.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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
| wkat4242 wrote:
| They did exactly what you say. Split the image and pixel
| shift. It was not like 30Hz at all.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Thanks, I wonder if the phosphor stripes are giving
| people false impression that those would be pixels...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.
| mjg59 wrote:
| 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.
| cm2187 wrote:
| The irony is that most of those who downvote didn't spend
| hours in front of those screens as I did. And I do remember
| these things were tiring, particularly in the dark. And the
| worst of all were computer CRT screens, that weren't
| interlaced (in the mid 90s, before higher refresh frequency
| started showing up).
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I spent literally thousands of hours staring at those
| screens. You have it backwards. Interlacing was worse in
| terms of refresh, not better.
|
| Interlacing is a trick that lets you sacrifice refresh
| rates to gain greater vertical resolution. The electron
| beam scans across the screen the same number of times per
| second either way. With interlacing, it alternates
| between even and odd rows.
|
| With NTSC, the beam scans across the screen 60 times per
| second. With NTSC non-interlaced, every pixel will be
| refreshed 60 times per second. With NTSC interlaced,
| every pixel will be refreshed 30 times per second since
| it only gets hit every other time.
|
| And of course the phosphors on the screen glow for a
| while after the electron beam hits them. It's the same
| phosphor, so in interlaced mode, because it's getting hit
| half as often, it will have more time to fade before it's
| hit again.
| cm2187 wrote:
| You assume that non interlaced computer screens in the
| mid 90s were 60Hz. I wish they were. I was using Apple
| displays and those were definitely 30Hz.
| LocalH wrote:
| Which Apple displays were you using that ran at 30Hz?
| Apple I, II, III, Macintosh series, all ran at 60Hz
| standard.
|
| Even interlaced displays were still running at 60Hz, just
| with a half-line offset to fill in the gaps with image.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I think you are right, I had the LC III and Performa 630
| specifically in mind. For some reason I remember they
| were 30Hz but everthing I find googling it suggest they
| were 66Hz (both video card and screen refresh).
|
| That being said they were horrible on the eyes, and I
| think I only got comfortable when 100Hz+ CRT screens
| started being common. It is just that the threshold for
| comfort is higher than I remember it, which explains why
| I didn't feel any better in front of a CRT TV.
| bitwize wrote:
| Have you ever seen high speed footage of a CRT in
| operation? The phosphors on most late-80s/90s TVs and
| color graphic computer displays decayed instantaneously.
| A pixel illuminated at the beginning of a scanline would
| be gone well before the beam reached the end of the
| scanline. You see a rectangular image, rather than a
| scanning dot, entirely due to persistence of vision.
|
| Slow-decay phosphors were much more common on old
| "green/amber screen" terminals and monochrome computer
| displays like those built into the Commodore PET and
| certain makes of TRS-80. In fact there's a demo/cyberpunk
| short story that uses the decay of the PET display's
| phosphor to display images with shading the PET was
| nominally not capable of (due to being 1-bit monochrome
| character-cell pseudographics):
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n87d7j0hfOE
| numpad0 wrote:
| There are no pixels in CRT. The guns go left to right,
| Y=rY=n, left to right, while True for line in
| range(line_number).
|
| The RGB stripes or dots are just stripes or dots, they're
| not tied to pixels. There would be RGB guns that are
| physically offset to each others, coupled with a
| strategically designed mesh plates, in such ways that e-
| from each guns sort of moire into only hitting the right
| stripes or dots. Apparently fractions of inches of
| offsets were all it took.
|
| The three guns, really more like fast acting lightbulbs,
| received brightness signals for each respective RGB
| channels. Incidentally that means they could go between
| brightness zero to max couple times over 60[Hz] * 640[px]
| * 480[px] or so.
|
| Interlacing means the guns draw every other _lines_ but
| not necessarily _pixels_ , because CRTs has beam spot
| sizes at least.
| bitwize wrote:
| Interlace was common on platforms like the Amiga, whose
| video hardware was tied very closely to television refresh
| frequencies for a variety of technical reasons which also
| made the Amiga unbeatable as a video production platform.
| An Amiga could do 400 lines interlaced NTSC, slightly more
| for PAL Amigas--but any more vertical resolution and you
| needed later AmigaOS versions and retargetable graphics
| (RTG) with custom video hardware expansions that could
| output to higher-freq CRTs like the SVGA monitors that were
| becoming commonplace...
| LocalH wrote:
| CGA ran pretty near 262 or 263 lines, as did many 8-bit
| computers. 200 addressable lines, yes, but the background
| color accounted for about another 40 or so lines, and
| blanking took up the rest.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| ikamm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I remember having the 36" version in ~1997. I wouldn't want
| to guess how much it weighed, it was insane. I remember how
| impressive it was watching the Fifth Element Laserdisc on
| it.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 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.
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| Most likely it's a central component of the buildings
| statics calculation meanwhile
| rationalist wrote:
| They put it on a floating surface, now it's the
| building's earthquake counterweight.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I had the 40" version and I left it in the house when I got
| divorced. That thing was insane to move. Needed minimum
| three people to lift it.
| plorg wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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-3 wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| I think I may have already known that at one point, but
| I'll try to include this the next time I am motivated to
| brain-dump some CRT lore.
| cgriswald wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| jsheard wrote:
| Those Intergraphs were bigger than the FW900 at 28",
| although lower resolution at 2048x1152@80hz max, so I
| suppose YMMV which was better.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My family bought our first one and we used it keep it on a
| carpet floor - boy was that an electrifying experience
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Not just shock you across the room, but shock straight into
| your next life.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| So we are all in post-tube life?
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah the tube is essentially a large capacitor :P
|
| I also learned electronics by shocking myself often
| nojvek wrote:
| You either learn by shocking yourself, or die trying.
|
| The survival selection is real in electronics.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| 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
| userbinator wrote:
| "by contracting the muscles"
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Same goes for your microwave.
| macintux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| bane wrote:
| 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.
| eduction wrote:
| > 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.
| dustractor wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My buddy had something like this. All I remember is it took four
| people to carry it.
| vunderba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| The draw of the LCD in the 2000s was the idea that the
| image you were seeing was a pixel-perfect representation of
| the creator's intent.
| smj-edison wrote:
| Funny that--I'm literally using a shader on my SNES
| emulator to get a sense for how the graphics would look
| on a CRT!
| xattt wrote:
| I think it was a time before the vintage feels for CRTs
| really. Sure, there were greybeards naysaying the coming
| of the LCD due to motion artefacts and smearing but the
| rest of users just wanted something high-res and flicker-
| free.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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.
| thunderbong wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I remember owning a 27 inch RCA CRT. It was a pain to carry. I
| could not imagine this thing.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| So you have the other surviving specimen in the world?
| qingcharles wrote:
| No, the 40" ones are common. They were sold in the USA. You
| can find them on Craigslist etc (where I found mine). The
| 43" and 45" are the rare ones.
|
| Here's a pic of one:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/ce52bb/behold_m
| y...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Oh no, another useless craving I didn't know I had,
| unlocked. :)
| timzaman wrote:
| Why write a story about someone else's story? Just go to the
| shank mod vid directly
| butlike wrote:
| The text equivalent of a "reaction video" where they add
| nothing except pasting their face over 30-50% of the screen
| oofoe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tell me you lived in Rochester, NY without saying so.
|
| Now I want a plate...
| belter wrote:
| 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471
| rconti wrote:
| 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.
| ilamont wrote:
| > 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-3 wrote:
| 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.)
| ilamont wrote:
| > Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a
| direct-view CRT.
|
| You're right about that. A friend's dad was a gearhead and
| had one of those. It always seemed dim, practically
| unwatchable during the day and even at night it was flat
| which made darker films hard to watch.
|
| But it was a mid-80s model and I figured 10 or 20 years
| later the tech had improved.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I also had a friend whose dad had a big, for the time,
| rear-projection set in the 80s.
|
| It was in the room with the furniture that we weren't
| allowed to sit on, and we weren't allowed to think about
| using that TV. (I mentioned once when we were
| unsupervised that maybe we could turn it on and watch
| something, and the color drained out of his face like
| doing anything like that would surely result in a very
| painful death. After he calmed down, we went outside and
| played with bugs or something instead.)
|
| As far as I could tell, the old man (who was much younger
| than I am at this point) only ever switched it on for
| watching football on Sunday afternoons. But once or twice
| I'd wander by and -- with permission, and being careful
| to touch nothing -- try to watch part of the game.
|
| It was a miserable thing to view. Big, blurry, dim, and
| just broadly indistinct. I didn't see the attraction
| compared to the perfectly-good 20" Zenith we had at home
| at that time that seemed so much more vibrant and useful.
| But the speakers sure sounded better on the projection
| set, so I guess there's that.
|
| The tech did improve. The brightness did get a lot
| better, and so did processing (including using tricks
| like Velocity Scan Modulation that sought to improve
| brightness, at the expensive of making geometry an
| deliberately-dynamic thing instead of an ideally-fixed
| thing), and the colors improved. Things like line
| doublers and scalers and higher-resolution electronics to
| drive the tubes did improve some aspects of the blur that
| was apparent, even with regular NTSC sources. But those
| same improvements were also made in direct-view CRTs;
| after all, they were both the same tech.
|
| So CRT rear-projection was as good as a person could get
| for a bigger-than-direct-view for a long time, but the
| fidelity was very seldom particularly awesome on an
| absolute scale -- at any pricepoint.
|
| Competing rear-projection systems like DLP and LCD began
| to dwarf it in the market not long after the turn of the
| century. Despite their hunger for expensive light bulbs
| (and single-chip DLP's own inherent temporal problems),
| these new players were often cheaper to produce and sell,
| came in smaller packages (they could often rest on
| furniture instead needing their own floor-space), had
| fewer setup issues, and fared pretty well in brightness
| and geometry.
|
| CRT rear-projectors then got pushed completely aside as
| soon as things like plasma displays became cheap-enough,
| and big LCDs became good-enough -- somewhere between 2006
| and 2009, on my timeline.
|
| (CRT did last a bit longer in front-projection form, for
| people with very serious home theaters [think positively-
| enormous screen, tiered seating, dedicated space, and
| some blank checks], but LCD caught up there soon-enough
| as well.)
| rconti wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My first TV in the early 2000s (Xbox!) was a Siemens. Another
| illustrious megacorp that doesn't make televisions anymore.
| lizknope wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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! :)
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