Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product [video]
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Cheers.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Made-Japan-Akio-Morita-Sony/dp/045115...
This isn't related to TVs, but I have a couple pieces of old Sony HiFi equipment from the very early 1970's and I'm always amazed by the quality and attention to detail Sony had back then. I feel like it's back when Sony had something to prove. This may have been the case for most consumer electronics manufacturers back then though.
One is a TA-1130 amplifier, and the other is a reel-to-reel tape player (I forget the model). The most amazing to me is that the reel-to-reel still works fine after nearly 50 years, considering all the moving parts.
He called the local Sony store to buy a spare part and the assistant was born after the part ceased production.
Begrudgingly he had to replace the record player.
Every (remaining) part of that old Sony is beautiful, unmistakably 80s but so well designed and finished it's still a joy to use; plus it sounds great.
I can't help but wonder if there's some correlation there. Perhaps the assistant's father was so dismayed at the part's cessation that the only comfort he could attain was in the arms of his wife.
(It's that robotic dog, for anyone wondering)
By the time the PS3 rolled around Sony was getting a little too full of itself, lacking the competitive fire that made products like the Walkman and the Trinitron screen. It was a good console, but not one that redefined what a console was.
Champion perhaps in terms of sales, but the Dreamcast felt like the more forward thinking console of that generation.
It introduced the console industry to online gaming, downloadable content (it was free on the DC though), the idea of games being able to write portable mini games. Ok, that was badly executed but the VMU still had other cool quirks which was new for its era, like an LCD screen showing in game graphics.
The PlayStation 2, as nice as it was, was really just a hardware upgrade rather than a paradigm shift
At the time we called it a bacon and eggs partnership where they are the chicken and you are the pig.
That all said, I don't recall DirectX being hugely popular - or at least for games development - until around that era or not that long before. So it might have felt like it was pretty new back then. Particularly with how some of the new releases being quite a fundamental change from their previous releases (I seem to recall one version of DirectX (possibly 7?) dropped the previous version of Dx's DirectDraw APIs in favour of promoting Direct3D for all 2D rendering).
The first was truly groundbreaking in many ways (though some might say that was in part due to Sony was originally developing it with a games company).
After that later generations have mostly just gone with “make it faster” style evolution and taking the best parts of the previous generations competitors.
No drive to evolve like we’ve seen from Nintendo (Wii, Switch) or MS (Kinect, XBL, or even their games sharing ideas that got them pilloried).
The PS2 was better in that it not only became popular, but it had a huge wealth of titles for it. The true gems for a console come out usually near the end of the life-cycle when everyone's pushing the hardware to the limit. Sadly the Dreamcast never got that far.
I've never been as frustrated with a console as I have reading "disc read error" dozens of times a day.
At least lens replacement is a simple thing, not like changing the solder.
That must be Philips. Google "Philips natlab".
There is a saying in Vietnam that goes "Sharp/Fine like a Sony," when someone talks about an act, a product, or a person so fine. That's in the context of a culture that does not (as) often associate products with brands (for example, they say photocopy instead of xerox, clasp locker instead of zipper, permanent marker instead of sharpie,...)
and read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/j...
to understand what happened in home electronics, especially TV sector. It was an economical revenge for WW2.
For the record, it is a "beast", even if it is "only" 32" in size, it is weighing around 70 Kg!
I bought it at the time with a specific table/support for it.
CRT in the old days, especially Sony's Trinitron CRT were extremely well designed and well made. Pretty much like ALL "Made in Japan" electronics sold were designed to last. I have a LCD TV from Sony that is now on 12 years of services, still going strong.
But as tech improves it seems the life expectancy of the product are taken less into account.
I would bet the Sony CRT monitor will out last my Sony LCD TV. And OLED is only going to be worst.
I'm not entirely sure I agree, but here we are.
I know exactly 0. :-) So YMMV.
On the contrary. The life expectancy has never been more important: it has never been more important to time the death of a device in such a manner that it hits some generational sweet spot to make the customer buy the same product over and over :-)
Yes you can still watch the new series of Star Trek on a 26" CRT, but it'll look a lot nicer on a 55" 4K HDR OLED. In 10 years time I'm sure that will look just as outdated.
If you have one be sure you know how to be safe before opening it - deathly voltages inside!
Yes, once upon a time, with the exclusion for portable devices of course (in which Sony excelled as well, if anyone remembers the first series of Walkman, it had the "wow" factor as it was only a little bigger than the cassette), electronics did actually "go by the weight", it meant that "better" hardware was put in it, both in the electronics and in the case.
Only a few days ago, while attempting (vainly) to put some order in a storage room, I happened to move a (relatively recent) compact stereo player, you know one of those that has radio, cassette player and CD player + amplifier in a little cube of 20x20x20 cm, and right after that I moved a venerable ol'time Marantz amplifier.
I simply applied the wrong amount of force, at first I had the impression that the amplifier was glued to the shelf.
(We do have a modern LED/LCD TV in another room but I mostly prefer the picture on the CRT, at least when watching TV or films)
Yes it does, but to be fair, it has never been used much (at least far less that what would be normal use) as I have it connected to a satellite box that has a remote that duplicates the TV's remote main commands and that is used like 99% of the times.
And I was optimistic about the weight:
https://docs.sony.com/release//specs/KV32FS120_mksp.pdf
• KV-32FS120: 165 lbs. 6 oz. (75 kg)
They weighed 200 lbs (90kg) and nearly all of it was at the front with that thick cylindrical tube face. So you definitely needed a strong stand for them and you'd also want to add a strap to secure it to the wall so it wouldn't fall over on a child or pet.
They looked so much obviously better that it took plasma into the late 2000s to catch up
The closest comparison i can think of is gaming laptops vs desktops. You got objectively better performance for less money, at the cost of it being large and heavy. They were also pretty reliable, especially compared to early plasmas that blew various expensive boards constantly.(and i would know, i scored several for free this way)
The TV has barely seen any use, i got it because at the time i was thinking to buy one of the upcoming gaming consoles but i never got one and i do not watch TV. I couldn't connect it to my PC and, being on the floor, it wouldn't be very comfortable anyway. So it just stayed there until i moved and sent it to my sister who promptly sent it back once she moved :-P. That was the only time it saw any use. It is now in my bedroom, sitting there for 7+ years and - considering the weight - as far as i am concerned it is part of the house now.
Sometimes i am thinking to buy an HDMI to whatever input it uses (it has a bunch but not HDMI) adapter to connect a Raspberry Pi for watching a movie or something, but it is aligned at the side of my bed and it'd be much easier to rearrange the bed (and the rest of the room) than moving the TV.
It is like this TV was doomed to never be used since the first day i bought it.
I'm using it force mine into 480p mode, to feed a HDMI->S-Video converter, which gives better video quality than using the composite output.
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1080p-HDMI-to-Scart-converte...
The HDMI output on the Pi is really flexible... you can even coax 2160P24 out of it... at least for static 2D displays.
Anyhow, setting resolution in config.txt ought to work everywhere.
You've got to make sure that the cable has the ground in the right place, because I guess that different devices position it differently, so not all TRRS-to-RCA cables are compatible.
While the image quality was good, I replaced with with a cheaper, larger LCD a decade later and haven't looked back.
My favorite trivia about them was that, for some engineering reason, every Trinitron screen had a barely perceptible horizontal line artifact about 2/3 of the way down the display. This was true in every Trinitron, from televisions to monitors even through the 1990s.
Apparently, there was always one wire 2/3 of the way down, but they would put a second one 1/3 of the way down on larger screens.
I do miss my 17" FD Trinitron monitor though. That was lovely. I didn't have enough money or room for a 21"
Luckily my studio Trinitron I got second-hand doesn't have the line, or at least is imperceptible to me.
* well kinda, it was the only thing at the time able to properly display the anywhere near the dynamic range that 10bit log provide.
The display was expensive at the time ($2,300 in 2017 dollars), but lasted me a good 6 or 7 years. By the time 2000 rolled around, I was doing most of my computing on employer-owned machines and laptops, so my need for a desktop display was minimal. (That didn't stop me, though, from a briefly owned 19" Dell rebrand of a Trinitron display.)
Display quality on those CRTs was excellent, although the thin horizontal wires were indeed noticeable if you looked.
There's really no comparison in terms of picture quality. And the Samsung is light enough that it can be easily mounted from the ceiling.
There are reasons why the market has shifted to some of these other technologies. Apart from nostalgia and familiarity, you won't miss the Trinitron if you upgrade.
I bought an OLED to my parents as a present, thinking, ohh removing the old trinitron screen is easy. It required like 4 different people, and creating a set of wheeled machines. It takes so much 3d space(specially deepness) as well as weight.
Had I known about that, I would never have bought the OLED in the first place.
If you think Trinitron quality is great in your average Television CRT, it's _amazing_ in true RGB. Who knew SCART would keep bare-metal retrogaming alive?
1. An assault with a rock to the screen by my then three year old sister.
2. Over 4000km in a shipping container.
3. Putting a blank x-ray plate to the screen, which apparently created a static shock powerful enough to disable the device(not sure about this one because I was five when I did that).
One New Years Eve I was at home and a friend was having a party at his around the corner. He asked if he could borrow my TV which I agreed to, but when he turned up he'd taken far too many pharmaceuticals.
I helped him carry it to his house and was at the front crossing the road when I heard what sounded like a huge explosion. I turned round and he'd dropped the TV, it had imploded, and he was gurning and dancing around it.
I miss that Trinitron...
How'd you get access to a blank X-Ray plate? What do you mean by "device" here?
By "device" I meant the TV set. I remember hearing an obvious zap as the plate glued itself to the screen which went blank even though the TV seemed to be still on.
Unfortunately I never got an ELI5, even though I was literally five back then.
But then flat screens hit and all of a sudden I could have more screen real estate and more desk space. No contest really, the future had arrived even if the future was worse colour and response rates for a while.
I can't imagine the tonnage of CRT needed to recreate all the flat screens around my home and office now.
Oh sure, in terms of resolution I went from the CRT being able to do 1600x1200 back to an LCD that could do 1280x1024 (IIRC). But the physical screen sizes were bigger very quickly, that's what I meant.
CRTs were certainly superior in terms of image, response time and resolution. But when I could buy a larger flat panel at 1280x1024 with a 16ms response time for a couple of hundred pounds... buh-bye forever CRT.
You are comparing an old and small CRT to an LCD of a different era. You could have bought a better and just as big CRT instead if you had wanted to.
(Not saying that you should have, but I find it weird to state that LCDs were bigger, that happened when the 24" widescreens arrived (at a ludicrous price)).
Yeah but they were massive and still heavy. I'm not sure I ever met a CRT monitor over 19". LCDs larger than that became cost effective sometime around 05-06 ish. It wasn't much after that I got a widescreen too.
Many years ago I delivered and set up 22" and, I think 24", Cornerstone and Sony branded monitors for banking, drafting, and medical use when I worked for VARs. They were beasts to lift but beautiful displays. I personally bought and used for many years a Mitsubishi Diamond CRT display with the NEC version of the Trinitron tube because it had multiple inputs (and I had all kinds of adapters) and would happily sync to nearly anything- Sun, Mac, SGI, pc, composite.
It weighed more than 70lbs and literally bent my (very 90s) trestle desk.
The image was fine, but not memorably outstanding. I remember colour calibration was a real problem.
I wasn't unhappy when LCD monitors took over.
FWIW there were improvements on CRT's size at the end of their popularity with some having like half the depth or less, but by that time LCDs had won in terms of mainstream preference.
Then I got my first big paycheck from some remote work and I replaced them all with the original Apple 30" Cinema Display. That was a glorious day.
Lasted me a good 8+ years until I replaced it with a Dell 2407WFP.. which, to be fair, is ALSO still going strong today.
Those things are beasts. A little over 90 lbs each, 16x10 aspect ratio, and supported a resolution of 2304 x 1440 at 80 Hz.
The game is considered "very fast" mechanically so a slight change in screen rendering is a big deal.
People claim they can see the difference between a CRT vs LED with the same input latency, in how they differ in rendering the frame (I don't know technical details on this, but they do "feel" different).
It's an interesting scenario that the community is actively trying to migrate from.
When it was finally my money to spend on games, I bought an N64. The only thing the Playstation seemed capable of was RPGs. And with the sole exception of FF7, the SNES ones were better.
I've known a few people in the scene to prefer these Trinitron TVs specifically, usually because the colors "pop" more, making it easier to discern movement on the screen. Or so they tell me.
For more modern consoles that output digital signals, no conversion is needed and you will typically see LED TVs being used instead.
Interestingly, Smash Bros. Melee also has a PC-based online community, where Gamecube emulators are used to play a modified version of the game over the internet. On an emulator, it's actually possible to provide less input lag than on a real console + CRT.
Electrons are coaxed away from matter, then shot through an artificial vacuum near the speed of light. Then they're meticulously guided by magnetic forces to SMASH into a pinpoint of phosphor to excite the release of photons, thousands of times every second, in perfect harmony.
LCDs are just really really smart Christmas lights. Very practical, but a bit boring.
Also, horizontal storage space, like having a shelf in the most ideal place to have a shelf.
The only issue it has is that it has been used a lot (i got it used) and the guns are wearing out so it is a bit dim. I opened the case to calibrate it a bit using a guide i found and it was mostly fixed, but i avoid using it for too much because, well, things are only going to get worse. So i only use it in short bursts mainly to play older 2D games, like Fallout, that look way better in a CRT than any flat panel tech.
Which basically leads me to the main thing that CRT has over any modern tech: native support for multiple resolutions. Pretty much any resolution between 320x200 to 1280x1024 looks as good as it gets (although 1024x768 is the best resolution for this monitor due to size and refresh rate which maxes at 85Hz in that). With flat panels you are locked at whatever the native resolution and everything else looks blurry (if only Nvidia and AMD allowed integer nearest neighbor pixel scaling so we could at least get some resolutions crisper - that would also solve my main issue with 4K monitors, but that is another story).
As far as OLED goes, OLED seems to have the potential to match and perhaps surpass the best CRTs (and certainly my cheap one) but it first needs to come in the form of a PC monitor - preferably one that doesn't get discolored areas within the year. I have one of the first gen PS Vita handhelds which have OLED monitors and the image quality is great, so i'd like a monitor that looks like that.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/AdLcOGu.jpg [2] https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg
The prices of OLED will come down, expect the WOLED which LG current uses to be around the same as Top Range LCD in 2019 or 2020.
MicroLED, will fix every problem OLED has. Or may be MiniLED which allows up to 250ppi will be good enough.
Just wondering if there are anything CRT still wins, because even latency problem is an non issues with OLED, HDMI connection and software issues aside.
So in terms of CRT comparison, CRT at the moment still wins when it comes to colors and latency (since OLED doesn't exist yet for PC) and the ability to support multiple resolutions. OLED (or any other *LED) will solve the first two, but i doubt it'll solve the last one unless perhaps if we go to 500+ DPI where the inaccuracies of fractional scaling wouldn't be visible. Assuming Nvidia and AMD finally gives us the ability to scale without bilinear filtering, of course.
Additionally, OLED is stuck at one native resolution. A multi sync video monitor or PC monitor can natively display any resolution up to the highest the dot pitch can really resolve
Luckily, I soon started my career and was sent as an exchange student to Singapore. That put an end to my Quake 3 obsession,and lust for expensive gaming gear.
digital input>processor>analog conversion>screen
was faster than
analog input>digital conversion>image processor>analog conversion>screen
There's a big thread on AVSforum with people whinging about this somewhere. The upside is, they're still nice to play stuff like switch games on
EDIT: the processing of analog sources, like 480p dvds, laserdisc, etc was superior to cheap modern TVs. They designed the scaler very well for older formats and it really did look quite nice. I remember being totally disappointed by my "high end" samsung tv in 2013~ or so in comparison. The colors are handled especially nice even on like, VHS. Artifacting/macroblocking/banding wasn't an issue with however they were handling the effects/processing which was a noticeable advantage over the flat screens of the era and even more recently
2 monitors stand out in my memory:
In 1998 I bought myself a 19" name-brand Sony monitor, for $650! I used it for 10 years, until I finally replaced it with a pair of LCD monitors.
In the early 00s I worked for Sun Microsystems, and worked mostly from home. I bought a 27" Sun-branded Trinitron monitor off an internal surplus equipment auction and had it shipped to my home. It was so heavy it came on a shipping pallet!
That said, it really was a boat anchor as far as weight goes.
edit: As other commenters pointed out there are some rather obvious categories I seem to have missed, including cameras and gaming consoles.
The thing that still shocks me, though, is the degree to which they blew their market leading position in portable music players. They OWNED that market in the 80s and 90s with the then-ubiquitous Walkman brand, which they extended into the CD era with "Discman" players that seemingly everyone had when I went to college in 1988.
Internal politics (I assume?) kept them from introducing a reasonable MP3 player until far, far too late for them to catch up. Some of their early efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird format to use (ATRAC, I think?) -- and this while smaller players (Rio, etc) had devices you could load by copying MP3s to a memory card. I assume this is because Sony Music was afraid of the Mp3 revolution, but my understanding is that Sony Electronics has always been far more profitable than Sony Music, so it's hard to understand how that tail ended up wagging that particular dog.
(Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.)
And then, of course, Apple came in with the iPod and gathered up the high-end, high-margin customers that were Sony's constituency.
[suggested viewing: the techmoan episode on DAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K1QKKPX_g ]
It's not really different from iPods, those required iTunes to load music just like Sony's devices used SonicStage, with the difference of the iPod having an internal hard drive instead of a MiniDISC drive (and later CD walkmans with ATRAC/MP3 support).
Sony's early digital players required your music to be in Sony's proprietary format, which was a whole additional step. And remember, 20 years ago, re-encoding took longer, so it was meaningfully less convenient.
There's definitely a case to be made that requiring iTunes to load iPods/iPhones is annoying and needlessly complex, but I think it's clear Apple did this to make it more accessible to normal humans, not to exert control or in a quixotic attempt to sideline open codecs.
(That Apple's current path is clearly away from iTunes sync and towards independent device connections to Apple Music kinda bears this out, I think, even if that's not something I'm interested in using.)
The Memory Stick was bizarre, no doubt about it. Minidisc (and with it, ATRAC), however, was quite groundbreaking and had the potential to be huge.
As a lossy psychoacoustic codec, ATRAC predated MP3 for years in commercial availability. Minidisc was both sturdy and flexible (esp. in comparison to DCC), had adequate audio quality (and later ATRAC versions became really good), and itcould have even been a contender for a 3.5" floppy successor in both capacity and speed. Sadly, this was the worst days of Sony hubris, both the physical format and the codec cost a lot to license, the use as a data medium was needlessly crippled, and as such it never really took off globally.
I really wonder what would have happened if Sony and Philips could have reconciled and worked together on this like they did with the CD, instead of going all format war (with the DCC being the real head-scratcher here...).
Minidisk didn't have either of those going for it -- plus, Sony's complete (?) control of it meant nobody else was making equipment. That nearly everyone brought CD decks to market in the early/mid 80s meant that, over the course of maybe 4 years, CD went from "rich dude toy" to "I got a CD boom box for high school graduation".
You probably nail it with "Sony Hubris." To think they could recreate that perfect storm of demand and success was bananas. People duplicated their music libraries on CD, but no WAY were they gonna do that AGAIN after having bought into "perfect sound forever" on CD.
(Well, at least "perfect sound for decades;" my oldest CDs are from 1987, and the ones I still want to listen to still sound fine.)
Sony would, in my opinion, ruin their name by mistreating people (both customers and would-be customers) by publishing what we now call "fake news" in the form of movie reviews by "David Manning" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ... for more) and distributing malware to Windows users on some audio CDs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... for more).
The latter means that Windows users who may have legally acquired a copy of the affected 58 known audio CDs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Compact_Discs_sold_wit... for the list) and inserted them into their Windows OS computer may have contracted software now identified as either spyware, a trojan horse, or a rootkit called "XCP" that could not easily be removed even if the user refused the EULA presented to them. Some of the software on these CDs appeared to be copyright infringements from FLOSS as well. And to cap it all off, the uninstaller for the malware only hid the software's entry in the Windows add/remove software list without uninstalling the software. Even Sony BMG's initial rootkit removal software exacerbated the problem further mistreating users. Ostensibly this was all done in the name of preventing people from making a copy of the audio tracks to their computers.
I don't recommend running Windows or any other nonfree software. But that's no excuse for Sony's abuses. There's no good way to justify committing copyright infringement against developers who are respecting a user's software freedom. Nor is there good reason to justify Sony's choices to repeatedly subject users to malware, stand in the way of a non-infringing use, or make malware hard to remove.
I'm not keen to distinguish between the various arms of Sony, so I choose not to do business with any of them. I also notice that despite all this malicious behavior the people who run the various arms of Sony are apparently not keen to distance themselves from the name "Sony".
Generally we prefer to link to text rather than video, but there really isn't much in that article, so it doesn't seem justified to link there. The HN guidelines ask for original sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.