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Comment by didntcheck | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I just had poor ones, but my memory of CRTs was inferior blacks in practice due to the much higher reflectiveness of the glass surface. So while technically it was a perfect black in terms of direct emissions, it didn't help much when I could see the room behind me reflected in that "black" patch. In a dark arcade it's fine of course, but most of my monitor use is in a well-lit room. And I still dislike glossy modern monitors

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It's true that there were CRTs that performed worse than others and that glare was an issue. CRTs could develop some weird image issues when they started failing too so for a lot of people used to old CRTs that needed repair getting a new LCD probably did seem like an upgrade. Very few people who'd been using a well functioning Sony Trinitron would have felt that way though.

As someone that had a 22" Sony trinitron monitor on my (sagging) desk in the late 90s, no, I was glad to switch to LCD.

There's a Sony Wega that's been sitting outside my back door for 10 years because it could only handle a toddler pouring apple juice inside it twice. Should probably make a trip to hazmat drop off one of these years.

Anyway, no. The reason said toddler was able to damage it was because I replaced that sucker with an LCD TV the instant they didn't cost an arm and a leg and moved the CRT into the basement for the kids to watch.

I'd post it on your local craigslist, etc, as a free pickup. No more Trinitron tubes are being made. It's possible it has value to somebody. No point in it going to landfill if somebody can make something good out of it (and you potentially don't have to move it).

> been sitting outside my back door for 10 years

I'm thinking you missed that part :-)

He and I talked about it today and it's probably been out there for closer to 12 years.

There's still a decent chance the tube itself is salvageable.

Sadly with CRT monitors (at least today) there's a tradeoff where at low brightness (black level) settings, dark areas of the image are underexposed, and at high brightness even pitch-black emits a bit of light. The ideal solution would be a nonlinear gamma-like curve where dark areas of an image have a higher slope than the rest (but without decreasing the slope of whites compared to mid-tones).

CRT black levels compared to LCD are night and day. Even a game like Genshin Impact (shit game I know, but it has good graphics) looks unimaginably better on CRT than any LCD, due to the high contrast as a consequence of the low black level. CRTs generally have less reflection than a glossy LCD due to some different kind of coating or glass treatment hard to find info on it). Last summer I used a CRT that is 99% dead (99% brightness / contrast) with the windows open every day letting sun in on a ~90 degree angle, and there was never an issue, nor with cheaper ones.

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