CRT Manufacturing | Hacker News Reader

CRT Manufacturing

vintagetek.org

130 pointsthrowup23861 comments

My first job as a 16 year old was working in a TV repair shop. I learned how to test PCBs for dry joints, how to make an electrolytic capacitor explode and most importantly of all, how to discharge the anode before starting work.

It was amazing how many bits there were inside an old-fashioned TV, but even in the mid-90s the business was on its last legs as modern TVs couldn’t be repaired.

How often did they need repair after most of the circuitry went solid-state? I have a small CRT TV that was manufactured in 1998 and it still works perfectly. So does my slightly larger LCD TV manufactured in 2006. My parents' CRT TV from 1989 was replaced in 2010 by an LCD TV but it still worked too. I have never personally encountered a TV that stopped working.

A lot of the time it is just 1-2 capacitors that pop and damage the power supply or something similar and once they are replaced, they work again for years.

There's some "tv repair shop" channels on youtube that's interesting/nostalgic to watch.

On the older ones it was mostly checking the soldering - years of being warmed up and cooled down would cause cracking. A quick touch-up with some fresh solder would generally sort things out.

maybe because you got to experience only "original high quality" TV sets? I remember owning a color CRT in late 80's which was almost unheard of in Romania and it was a russian made TV called "Alpha" (written in cyrillic of course). By the late 90's it needed work on color phases because sometimes green would cut out or blue or red. They all went one at a time and a good smack on the side would fix it for a while until it didn't and things had to be replaced inside. My neighbour accross the street was an electrician (hydro-plant engineer or something) and had his house stacked full with TVs waiting to get repaired by him. In a more entrepreneurial environment he would've made it by definition but in Romania he was just the guy accross the street who fixes TVs for a pack of contraband cigarettes or whisky.

Flyback transformers and electrolytic capacitors loved to die in that era. They were big components and easy to resolder so they were repaired relatively frequently.

It's survivorship bias; most people only had one or two TVs every decade.

Yeah they were the main things that went - most of the things we did were replacing the capacitors or transformers.

The CRTs you mention weren't that old. Once you get to '70s or '80s CRTs a lot more of them have problems (specifically for me arcade games, which have a hard life).

The guy who ran the shop used to go into long rants about how modern TVs were just a tube, a transformer and a PCB. If the problem wasn’t with the tube or transformer then it was virtually impossible to fix as the boards were more expensive than a new TV. They closed not long after I stopped working there.

A lot of TVs and other electronics in the 2000s failed because of the capacitor plague.

I worked on analog monitors (and a few TVs).

The problem wasn't (usually) that they couldn't be repaired.

The problem was that new electronics were so cheap that it wasn't economical to repair them.

I would buy a new CRT terminal in a heartbeat. It's a shame that there isn't really a market for them, and that this whole segment of technology is gradually being lost to time.

I ended up trashing a few older CRTs that had pretty severe burn-in and bad contrast. As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.

There’s still a couple of US-based manufacturers of CRTs, for military / aerospace applications.

Drop them a line and get a quote, should be good for a laugh! :D

https://www.thomaselectronics.com/

https://www.lexelimaging.com/crt_products.html

I have one very nice 19" Dell CRT with one of the later stage Sony Trinitron setups (i.e. completely flat screen) that I use with my vintage computer collection (old SGI, Apple, NeXT, etc. systems).

I don't use it often, but I have a moment of terror each time I pull it out to fiddle with something and it takes a moment for the picture to display. So far, thankfully, I've been able to follow that moment of fear with a sigh of relief.

I should probably keep an eye out for a few more decent specimens just to keep in the closet as back ups.

It’s a shame the totally flat ones are so much more prone to geometry issues over time, though it’s an inevitability for all types.

I had a 20” Sony PVM for a while for retro games and still don’t think any display I’ll ever own will match it for that specific purpose. Ended up selling it on because it was starting to have geometry issues itself, and I don’t have the ability to maintain it nor know anyone who does—plus it was hard to find a good space for it anywhere I’d actually want to play games. I do miss it though.

The P1130! I plucked a few of those from the uni trash several years ago. I haven't taken them out of storage recently, but they are indeed a prize.

I have a couple of SGI monitors, broadcast Sony BCM, and half a dozen if not more Commodore monitors. I figured it's still the only thing I will not be able to emulate for quite some time.. at least until 8k+ OLED + a decent shader comes through.

In a hundred years, the only ones left will be in museums… there won’t be anyone around who remembers using them first-hand.

Longer than that. There are still WWII vets around and it began more than 80 years ago.

People will still be using and maintaining existing CRTs for decades - there are still a lot in operation run by hobbyists, old people, and hipster types that make use of them.

I'd say we have at least another 30 years before they are entirely relegated to museums and collections, and at that point, who knows what life expectancy will look like.

There could be people alive even now who'll be among the first to achieve immortality, if the rate of improvements to longevity starts exceeding the speed at which people age against their life expectancy.

We live in interesting times.

With the latency + perfect blacks of modern OLED displays you could probably build a "fake" CRT with some purpose built image processing in to fake the look of subpixels etc. Stick it in a housing with appropriate inputs, have it curved behind a curved glass panel.

There’s a couple of high-end scalers for retro games that can apply a facsimile of various aperture grilles and shadow masks from popular consumer and professional CRTs.

In fact, the RetroTINK 4K will even use a HDR container to boost the brightness to offset the loss from drawing scanlines and other unlit areas over the image.

It’s a super cool effect and one of many signs how much a labour of love those things are, but it would never fool anyone into believing it was an actual CRT.

I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I’ve often thought the “CRT look” is as much biological as it is physical, it’s almost like the phosphor glow and persistence and the mask overlaid on the image convinces the brain to start filling in detail.

Cool, but I'll still get the OSSC Pro[0] instead, as that one is Open Source Hardware proper.

0. https://videogameperfection.com/products/ossc-pro/

With the RetroTINK 4k and a good 4K HDR tv I think it might be good enough to emulate the CRT look. LinusTechTips did a video on it on YouTube and its really amazing how good it loonks.

It falls apart immediately in motion sadly. Though if combined with BFI/strobing it can indeed get “close”.

Source: I have a house full of CRTs and am continually trying to move away from them as I know I can’t keep them going forever (I can do basic repairs). I have a collection of consumer TVs, VGA monitors and broadcast monitors I use currently, including a 21” trinitron that still sits on my desk.

My endgame for “close enough” will be a reasonably size 4k oled with like 60hz strobe which will cover a large enough portion of legacy content.

I had a trinitron in the 90s and absolutely loved it. I would love to get another one, but it’s quite pricey and I’m worried about keeping it running.

Exactly correct. If you wanted "authentic" warping you could install a unity lens with warping around the edges on the face of the OLED. I built a simple hexagonal phosphor simulator module in HDL that one could use in an FPGA to reproduce the characteristics of any tube[1]. It has been suggested that I build a "retro" terminal kit out of it (but with selectable phosphor colors :-).

[1] My thought was that you could "restore" old test equipment for which tubes were no longer available without changing the interface the electronics in the gear expected.

I'd buy a few units of that :)

The recently released product 'Retrotink4k' is somewhat along these lines.

but can you make it squeal with the high pitch that a CRT can make?

Yeah, I don't miss the age of CRTs at all, and that's the biggest reason. Why anyone pines for those noisy squealing things, I have no idea; I guess they're all deaf. Even decades later, I can still hear that annoying sound the rare times I find myself in a place with a CRT TV.

> As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.

Adrian from the Youtube channel "Adrian's digital basement" has done several recent videos about replacing CRT TVs and CRT monitors' PCBs with new, still produced (and easy to order) chinese PCBs.

So there are still new (and cheap) parts being made.

As for the screen itself: they've been produced by the hundreds of millions and there many lying around in caves/garages/basement so it should be possible to at least find some for the foreseeable future.

There are a couple of companies that still make CRTs (Google turns up Thomas and Gassler for display rather than X-ray applications), but I expect your stock options will have to have done very well to afford their services on a small scale. Still, if someone were sufficiently motivated, I bet it would be possible to arrange a group buy of a limited run of tubes for some retro device.

Or you can take up glass blowing! This is, in principle, 125-year-old technology, and therefore possible to construct with non-esoteric tooling.

> This is, in principle, 125-year-old technology, and therefore possible to construct with non-esoteric tooling.

Tooling maybe, but I wouldn't underestimate the required know-how. For example, making good vacuum-grade glass-to-metal seals is a technology that took decades of research and experimentation.

Vacuum tubes are still being made. And all the patents for the seals and joints have long expired.

And they definitely, describe in great detail in patent documents how to make their "secret sauce", right? No, wrong. Patents are often written in a way to give maximum protection and minimum information how to recreate the thing.

according to the law, the patent office has the job of rejecting patents that don't give enough information, and throughout the middle of the 20th century they seem to have done a reasonably good job of it. i've found reams of valuable information in patents from that time period, though not specifically about vacuum-sealing glassblowing

also, fusion (not online, but available in many university libraries) is the quarterly journal of the american scientific glassblowers society https://asgs-glass.org/fusion-journal-asgs/ and they also have had symposia which have published proceedings (not online)

and it's common for scientific papers from the period when this stuff was getting figured out to describe their apparatus in detail (rather than saying they purchased such-and-such a model from such-and-such a company), and those are online

finally, the bell jar seems to be defunct, but they have put their 27 issues online https://www.belljar.net/articles.html

There's a lot of old tech that I really miss and wish dearly that it still existed. I have to admit, though, that CRTs aren't among them.

"A $200,000 plant..."

Those 1954 dollars comes out to about $2.3 million today. That seems really low for a factory. Could you set up manufacturing for anything for $2 million today? (Besides Etsy shops...)

Do it in China. It's way easier and faster. Guangzhou has like 15 manufacturers who can build CRTs for you with delivery mid-Feb. You'll have to do QC, though, because they have al sorts of image issues. But I think it would be way easier to get one of them to be good (for a price) than to build these yourself unless you're already an expert with access to the facilities.

Oooh – I need to find a replacement for "standard" 9" tubes, for both industrial hardware and for compact Macintoshes... do you know who they would be?

Depends where and what exactly you're doing.

Based on someone else's post, the land value alone is far higher than the total inflation adjusted costs.

As for how low the cost was, we'd need to see what they produced there, versus what parts they bought at other places and assembled into a product at that location.

It’s pretty cheap to build a factory when it basically a building with some tables inside

Perhaps, but CRT manufacturing is far more sophisticated than that.

This was also a time when vacuum tube electronics were still ubiquitous, so there were probably a lot of things that were common back then that aren't available today. Not to mention domain expertise and workforce.

> 9450 S. W. Barns Rd

Portlandians: Are Barns Rd and Barnes Rd the same thing? Looks like a nice spot if so: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/45.50901/-122.77468

That building is now a SFX agency: https://hellohinge.com/ (No relation to the dating app)

Also curious if the TEKsystems employment agency next door took its name from Tektronix.

Quite likely. The Tektronix Industrial Park is only a mile or two from there.

There's also a museum that may be of interest here: https://vintagetek.org/

Yes, that's the same museum as the site with the article.

If you ever find yourself in Oregon, it's a wonderful place to visit if you like electronics, manufacturing history, etc.

Yes, that Barns without the e is a mistype, which is funny given it was the Oregonian.

You can see a copy of TekTimes:

https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TekTalk_Se...

They reference the building on 9450 Barnes Rd.. and indeed that building is still there today.

This is quite an interesting corporate video about how black and white CRTs were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32yYfTVIzBE

This is probably apocryphal: early CRTs had their yoke coils wound by hand, which became a lost art as winding machines took over for volume manufacturing.

I think that in about 20 years there will be enough demand for vintage computing that someone will be able to start up a new CRT plant. Getting all of the materials and specialized equipment will be hell even then.

Are there good software filters to simulate CRT effect in desktop enviroments? I see some pretty compelling retrogaming emulations on OLED. I don't miss my trinitron.

$200 000 for a crt plant? Thats $2.5 millions today. There's no way we could do that today.

The YouTube guy Linus Sebastian has a net worth of 85 million apparently.

So he could do it as a hobby if he wanted to.

>The YouTube guy Linus Sebastian has a net worth of 85 million apparently.

Any source on this? I know he said in a video he was offered 100 million to sell Linus Media Group, but I don't remember ever hear him talk about his net worth since he usually keeps this stuff private, as he's always playing poverty and acting cheap everywhere, even though you should drop this act when you own a multi million dollar McMansion with pool and a drive a Porsche Taycan.

Many (edit: self-made) rich people have such habits. It's part of why they are rich.

Investments and assets make you rich, not being overly stingy with pennies, otherwise every coupon snipping grandma would be rich.

There's a correlation that might imply causation: many rich people have "overly frugal" habits. I'm thinking of Warren Buffett, Nicolas Berggruen ("wears shirts until they fall apart"), the Albrecht brothers (founders of Aldi), and others that I'm too lazy to look up now.

I guess it's less common among people that became rich with software - I can't think of a case.

Warren Buffett and the others didn't get rich by wearing tshirts till they fall apart wtf. I also do that and I didn't become rich.

Can we please drop this BS propaganda that Warren Buffett snips coupons and that the IKEA billionaire drives a 30 year old Volvo, propaganda made so that they can seem relatable to the average peasant, when the IKEA billionaire runs a multinational tax dodging scheme to not pay Swedish levels of taxation. That's how you get rich.

You could say they're being frugal through methods that only people making that level of money and business have access to, like setting up shell tax havens and not providing free snacks at work. But this just amounts to saying you need lots of money to make lots more money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com