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Comment by doomlaser | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

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

Ah yes - mine had a notable bend in the shelf as well :)

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

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

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

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

I thought there were two lines?

Smaller screens only had 1 wire

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

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

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

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

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

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