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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Considering you make it into 15 years of usage I think the price might be well worth 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.

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> But as tech improves it seems the life expectancy of the > product are taken less into account.

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 :-)

One response to this is: the market has spoken, it's not interested in paying for product longevity.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, but here we are.

I dont think it's a choice in the hands of the consumer anymore.

The market doesn't have enough information about product longevity to make an informed decision. The only reliable data point I have as a consumer is the warranty. The few brands that advertise longevity usually cost so much more than cheap versions of the same product that it's hard to justify the purchase. Why for example should I pay $150 for Patagonia jeans if I can get ten pairs of El-Cheapo jeans for the same amount?

How many people get rid of TVs in perfect working order just to get something with more features. I know at least 3.

> How many people get rid of TVs in perfect working order just to get something with more features. I know at least 3.

I know exactly 0. :-) So YMMV.

If someone asked me for advice, I'd tell them to skip "smart TVs" and hook up a Raspberry Pi with OpenELEC, or an Android TV box — resolution's probably the only thing worth upgrading for.

I seems like some people buy a new screen, fridge, washing machine, speakers, etc etc, just because they feel like a change of scenery.

>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.

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.

I still nowadays use a high-frequency, high-contrast, high-resolution 20-years-old CRT for my desktop at home, it works as well as the first day. I laugh at all those retina resolution debates.

I used a CRT monitor until the resoluions of LCD monitors were really “retina” and the IPS with color calibration appeared (and the graphic cards and OSes supported these resolutions properly). At least until that point a good CRT was better: analog transitions between the pixels on the quality CRT were much easier for reading than the TFT LCDs of these times. The analog elements provided the smoothness.

My trinitron started having issues after 10 years. At first the colors would shift and in the end everything would be greenish, if I remember correctly.

Also IIRC ... colour cast was one of the things you could adjust on the internals of a CRT: like some sort of collar or potentiometer on the green gun ... how I didn't kill myself messing around with CRTs before I knew better, I don't know.

If you have one be sure you know how to be safe before opening it - deathly voltages inside!

Is that really that much of an issue though? The current generation of monitors and TVs are probably going to become obsolete before they stop working.

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.

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