The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300 | Hacker News Reader

The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

dfarq.homeip.net

235 pointsrbanffy166 comments

> In Japan, it sold for 2.6 million yen, but in the United States, it retailed for $40,000, a significant markup. To be fair, shipping them across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States must have been expensive.

Yes, I imagine the cost of shipping something from Japan to the States across the Atlantic would be nothing to sniff at.

Sea transport is really cheap in bulk. Somehow Japanese cars didnt fetch $15K premium after crossing the pond in the nineties.

The OP's point was more that the Atlantic is the wrong pond to ship across from Japan :)

Sony's competitive disadvantage was it found the Northwest Passage before others.

As one of my last monitors before LCDs took over, I had a 21-inch Sun, and boy was that sucker heavy (>30 kgs (>65 lbs)):

* https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...

I had that model too, acquired back when university classrooms were ditching them in favor of their first slimmer LCDs. I let it go during a move, and have missed it ever since.

All this old SGI and SUN equipment was super cool. It was all before my time but it was all super high end and really well built.

Yes though their displays were generally OEM.

In fact I'm pretty sure that Sun, SGI and HP all used the same OEM. They were really nice Trinitron displays though and this meant they were well interchangeable too. Which was great because by PC standard they used a weird DB25 with 3 composite RGB connector and sync on green iirc.

that looks a heck of a lot like a rebranded Trinitron. (I bought a super nice Sony Trinitron from BestBuy in fall 1994 to get a better screen for a second hand Sparcstation 1+ i had.)

all the sun displays were built by Sony afaik, so you're probably not far off.

Yup! I had 2 x SUN GDM-20E20 hooked up to my desktop in 1990-something. They were Sony screens and they were so clear & bright. They weighed a ton however and even broke a cheap desk I had.

Yeah the 21" sun monitors we had in school were trinitron. I remember they were heavy for a 21" monitor (shielding?) and the degaussing on startup would induct into an adjacent monitor. (I was a sysadmin for a Sun heavy CS department in the 90's.)

I'm pretty sure Trinitrons are always heavier than other monitors of equivalent size because of the aperture grill design. It let's more light pass through, making them brighter, but boy do they get stupid heavy as the size increases.

Yes, the aperture grille (hundreds of wires and a metal frame holding them in tension) is itself heavier than a traditional shadow mask.

However, aperture grilles also use differently-shaped glass from shadow masks. The screens are only curved horizontally like a cylinder rather than on both axes like a sphere. This requires thicker, heavier glass to hold the vacuum.

Later flat-glass shadow-mask tubes were much closer in weight to flat Trinitrons.

so was I, and HP and AIX a bit too (Urbana-Champaign college of engineering, for a couple years)

SGI also used rebranded Trinitrons. My first job out of college I had an Indy with a giant (for the time) Trinitron on top of it. Don't remember the exact size except that it was bigger than 17", so probably 19" or 21".

I had a 21” Viewsonic in the late 90s, with an enormous (for the time) 1600x1200 resolution. It weighed around 60 pounds. My desk sagged in the middle from the weight of the monitor.

I had something similar, though it was maybe a Trinitron? The glass was also flat. It was a long, long time until it felt worth it to “upgrade” to an LCD screen.

I threw out a 17" Trinitron last year. It had outlived all of the flatscreens bought to replace it and was still working, but after ~23 years the plastic casing was dangerously brittle. It left a trail of little bits of broken plastic all the way to the dumpster.

The trinitrons were great, but way beyond my budget at the time. I seem to remember at work we had a nice Trinitron with a flat screen that had 13w3 and vga inputs. IIRC, it was bought as a "budget" monitor for a Sun workstation, but was still like twice as much as my Viewsonic.

Yup, I had that one too.

A neighbor gave me his aging Apple ColorSync 850 back around 1999/2000 - https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/applevision_colorsync/sp...

67.4 lbs, but 20" and 1600x1200, which was incredible 25 years ago. It was by far the best monitor of my friend group, despite the heft.

It took a long time to find an LCD to replace it with.

Wow. Just that image of the monitor brings back memories of reading Mac magazine because they used that same example pictures on all their ads.

Early LCDs had that dumb dead pixel thing too, which made the upgrade from CRT risky.

Modern screen may have the issue too, but pixels are so small I probably wouldn’t notice.

Nowadays you get dead lines, like blue or red, and with high resolution it's generally liveable unless you're super sensitive. I'm fairly intolerant and had a Samsung with a blue line, but didn't bother me much.

I don't believe dead lines are a common problem with modern displays. I would certainly return one if it had a dead line.

There's a dead pixel on my 4k monitor. It's so small that I think it's just a speck of dust, if I notice it at all.

Haha AppleVision

I think we had one of those in the Remote Sensing Lab at my university. You could fit an entire Civilisation 1 map on screen without having to scroll vertically (you still had to scroll horizontally - natch).

This was my last CRT too. I bought mine from the local university's sale of scrap goods, a few months after spending $350 on a 19" LCD which paled in comparison.

Yeah same here, bought cheap used 21" from some design studio around 2002 i think. Barely fit keyboard on campus desk in front of it, but Counter strike while smoking some weed was very absorbing.

One of benefits of CRT was they flawlessly handled lower resolutions in a way impossible for LCDs. Very much required for the hardware of that era.

I had three of them on a cheap plywood desk - that I had just picked up for nothing from the kerb outside a brokerage who were switching to LCDs. They were great, and I loved them.

The desk, not so much, it ended up, uh, ergonomic.

An older guy at my first serious job bought himself a 21" to use at work, the weight was incredible.

> before LCDs took over, I had a 21-inch Sun, and boy was that sucker heavy

You should have seen Apollo 19" CRTs.

My parents had a Sony KV-40XBR700, the 40in 300lb CRT. I thought it was the largest you could buy until learning about the even larger one in TFA.

The picture quality on the KV-40XBR700 was amazing for the era (~2003). My Dad cleverly cut a hole into the wall up high and stuck the TV into it, then put a picture frame around it giving us one of the first "high definition flat screens" even if it was an illusion.

Of course these days our 43in TV weighs less than 20lbs and is mounted with a couple small wall anchors.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234568374191

Relive these days with the KV-40XBR800, only $750

Before I click "Buy It Now"... does this include shipping? :)

No, it says pickup only.

> Shipping and handling

> Item location:

> Negley, Ohio, United States

> Ships to:

> Will arrange for local pickup only (no shipping).

And wild to think that nowadays 43” is on the smaller side even for a non home theatre “living room” TV— the standard is much more around 55”.

Seems like every time I've bought one "standard" has moved up a size. My current is a 65", the one before that a 55", a 47" before that, and I think a 43 or 44 before that.

Yup, I have a 65” 1080p panel that came with my house and looking at a 77” 4K OLED to replace it.

The suggested viewing angle of 30-40 degrees has been stable, so it becomes a matter of how far away the seats can be to maintain that angle on a reasonable budget.

I actively waited for 47ish OLEDs to come out and drop in price before upgrading my tv as didn’t want or need anything bigger but definitely wanted OLED.

I’m getting bigger because I can but really going to OLED/HDR is a far bigger upgrade then either the size or the resolution bumps.

The resolution bump is a pretty big deal too, paired with 4K Bluray discs and players. Only way to get HDR content that hasn't been webcompressed to shit.

It’s true, and I did get a player and a handful of favourites to watch on it, so maybe in fooling myself that the hdr is more important than the resolution.

I think the difference is that I’ve already watched 4K content on my computer but hdr is genuinely something new.

I remember the KV-40XBR700. Those suckers were heavy. I worked at Circuit City in 2003 delivering those behemoths to customers until I dropped two in a single day (the handholds on the side weren't very good) and got moved to the warehouse.

That seems like an even worse place to move you to!

that's someone elses problem, I want this kid out of my deparment

Only the delivery team had to actually lift a 400 lb TV by 1/2" sloped handholds. I'm the warehouse, we had forklifts and pallet jacks to handle that.

If you have to do the dishes...

I worked at "The Only Sony Only" store in St. Louis when this TV came out. I delivered and installed equipment among other responsibilities. I might have delivered two of these particular units. I believe it was actually like 305 pounds.

This television had a couple of interesting traits. Sony flat Trinitrons were apparently the only true flat CRT televisions where both the outside AND inside of the tube were flat. This is why they were so heavy - the flat glass had to be thicker to withstand the vacuum inside.

It was a high definition television, but it was 4:3 aspect ratio. They sold a 34 inch CRT that was the only 16:9 CRT they offered at the time.

Additionally, the size of the 40 inch tube apparently left it extra vulnerable to stray magnetic fields. CRT screens all respond to magnets by producing rainbow colored distortions, but the 40 inch was extra sensitive. We delivered one to a house and turned it on only to find that the screen colors were distorted. I'm not sure how we figured it out, but we realized it was the proximity to the metal floor beam, so we moved the TV to another spot in the room and the color distortion went away.

For context, you could get an HD 65 inch rear projection wide screen television at the time that only weighed 265 pounds. I delivered both the 40 inch and the 65 inch up a flight of stairs. Those moving straps that hang from your forearms were not yet popular.

Here I am worried that my cat is going to knock my flat lightweight TV over one of these days, and you had a 300 lb TV? That sounds like what I need now!

I'm kinda curious if CRT technology advanced to the point where a TV like that would've been possible at a better weight and price tag? I assume that CRT technology development stopped decades ago, but could we have e.g., replaced the heavy glass with some plastic-like material to save weight without compromising the picture? And are there any heavy components in the mechanism itself (Coils, Magnets?) that would have had alternatives?

I know it's just theorycrafting, but I do wonder what kind of CRT someone could've created if it wasn't for market economy forces.

I imagine much of the weight is for the tube to be strong enough to hold the vacuum without shattering. As the screen area increases, you need stronger electron sources, and higher HT to get the electrons to the phosphor. I think small 14 inch trinitrons are already using 20-30kV so I imagine the power supply and associated HT stuff will be quite scary in these larger sets.

There are all sorts of complex magnet arrangements to tune the beam to stay in focus across the image area, i don't know how that will scale with size, but it's probably more of a complexity when assembling the sets to calibrate the tubes.

You’d be surprised how little glass is needed to be strong enough to withstand a near perfect vacuum.

I worked in a lab where we routinely held a few micro-torr of vacuum, which is about the limit for mechanical pumps. Cathode ray tubes are typically thousands or tens of thousands higher pressure.

We ran 1/4” wall thickness glass even in large flat stretches without issue.

I’m guessing the weight of large cathode ray tubes are more for durability than need for the vacuum inside.

How much did the flat sections bend or deflect under vacuum?

That's a bit misleading the level of vacum might differ by factor of 10000, but most of the force is still coming from atmosphere. For overall mechanical strength it doesn't matter that much if its 0.99 or 0.99999999999 atmospheres of pressure difference, temperature and other wheather changes are probably causing much bigger change in force applied to glass.

I don't think it's that misleading. At the end of the day you need a 14.696 psi negative pressure vessel. That isn't very dramatic. If you can confidently make something that works to 14.696 psi then you can be confident it will work at 14.65 or 14.5 psi.

The meat of the comment is that you don't need much material to withstand Earth's atmosphere compared to pressure vessel. It's a common misconception for folks who don't work with vacuums.

Having carried my share of heavy CRTs I can share that most of the weight is in the front glass. It needs to support the phosphor wire mesh and withstand the pokes and stabs of the world while not compromising the fragile thin-walled neck.

Living room tv sets need to be child-save, unlike lab equipment.

Here's the last gasp of thinner, bigger CRTs, in 2005.[1]

"Today, CRT markets are being threatened by flat-panel displays (FPDs) even though the screen quality of the CRT is one of the best of existing display devices. The depth of CRTs is one of its most important design factors to maintain its dominant position in the display market. Thus, a 32-in.-wide deflection-angle 125° CRT (tube length of 360 mm) has been developed, and mass production began in January 2005."

That was the Samsung Vixlim.[2] Apparently worked OK, but obsolete at launch.

Goes down in history as another last and greatest achievement of the wrong technology, along with the Doble steam car, the SS United States, 3-projector Cinerama, quadrophonic phonograph records, and the Olivetti Divisumma 24 mechanical four-function calculator.

[1] https://sid.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1889/1.216683...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/xgtmdw/does_anyo...

32 inch wide, 14.5 inch deep. Not bad. You could actually fit that on a 80cm desk.

"These wide-deflection CRTs attracted an extraordinary amount of attention even from end users in a variety of display shows last year and will help maintain the solid positions of CRTs in the coming era."

/r/crtgaming ... calling it, this the new hip before it's cool

The next big thing was supposed to be Field Emission Displays. Microscopic electron guns directly behind each phosphor. The big manufacturers experimented and tried getting it commercialized for decades, then pretty much gave up in the 2000s when LCDs got stupid cheap.

https://www.engineersgarage.com/field-emission-display/

There was also a brief reign of plasma TVs in-between, now almost a forgotten technology

A good 720p plasma is still a great display to this day.

I have the second to last generation Panasonic plasmas. 42" 1080p display. At first the picture was amazing but over time it degraded slightly with what looks like subtle noise affecting the entire display. Solid colors have a faint shimmer of noise in them. As if white noise was blended with everything.

I still use it as a bedroom TV. I can barely lift it myself and it claims to use 450watts of power. It's certainly a lot. It's notably warm near it and will heat my room if I don't open the door.

Still the picture quality is very good at a distance. Only oled or micro led displays look better.

This could be that you just noticed it? Panasonic plasma cells brightness is controlled by PWM off a 600 Hz carrier (it's even proudly advertised as "600 Hz!" on the TV box and stickers). While the number is quite big and stands out nicely against "240 Hz" advertised as refresh rate for the competing LCD TVs, it did not provide many different brightness levels per pixel (keep in mind that it's divided by 60 Hz or higher frame refresh) so those TVs were running temporal stochastic dithering to create more levels. If you looked closely at a new plasma TV screen it was very noisy with random pixels firing up at high frequency.

The level of noise went up dramatically after the first year. I read that this is part of the panel aging. It hasn't gotten worse since then. My two biggest gripes are high brightness areas don't work on large portions of the screen. A windows file browser is basically unusable.

The heat is probably what will eventually get me to replace it.

The heat! Many plasma displays had a faint heat you would feel on your face if you were near that I found uncomfortable. I am not sure if others felt the same.

I remember the heat.

I had a year of sickness, or so, back in the day. I decided I was gonna blow as much money as I could on the "best" TV setup. I bought a 42" plasma TV, and I sat it on the floor in my living room, in front of a window.

You could see the heat-haze above the screen, the air shimmering in front of the window, after it had been on for a while.

Lovely display, far too expensive, and far far too heavy, but for the five+ years I kept it I think I got my money's worth.

I had a Zenith 42" plasma (maybe Zenith Z42PX2D?) for about 10 years before the screen became insanely noisy and LG OLEDs hit the market. Really an amazing display though, at "tv distance" (6 to 8ft) the 852x480 resolution was not at all noticeable as "low resolution".

What I actually found was dog-shit quality video looked AMAZING on it, as did downsampled high-res video -- I had a media center pc hooked up via DVI, and off it went.

I replaced it with a 1080p 55" OLED in 2014 or 15 when it became unwatchable, and it's been incredible as well aside from very rare, short instances of judder.. As per my Zenith experience above, I figured lower-res (not 4k) would be better in the long run.

Curious to see how long it lasts, but it's still very bright and very good almost a decade later, no burn-in, no dead pixels, and it's on constantly.

> it claims to use 450watts of power.

I've still got a 42 inch GT60 plasma and while it certainly runs hot it's pulling about 140W on average so it's no space heater. It's become a bit more noisy, but not in a way that impacts viewing for me. After a while you don't see it anymore just like film grain...

I have an HD plasma and it is fantastic. It is the very best living room display I have owned.

Like the CRT, it has glowing phosphors in a tube. Unlike the CRT, it is pixel addressable, where the CRT is basically not addressable, or maybe just field, frame and or line addressable. Of course the tradeoffs are well known. Resolution scaling on a CRT is rarely an issue, except when the dot mask is too coarse. It still looks great. It can be a major issue with pixel addressable displays, when uneven multiples are in play.

In my experience, a good plasma is right there with the CRT on color gamut and contrast, even does well on speed. Or can. Mine is 120Hz and does not lag more than a CRT does on 60Hz signals.

(If you want a fast one, get one of the 3D capable TV sets from that era. They have fast video processors and basically can run at least double the necessary frame rate. And if you have an nVidia GPU and good CAD software, you can even use one as a wall sized 3D display featuring a bunch of things an ordinary set will struggle with and large assembly visualization as well as technical surfacing being two use cases I found amazing.)

AMOLED looks like it may be the next plasma. I have one from Waveshare that is 10.5" and has 2560x1600 resolution. I wish it were bigger. It is fantastic! It has a much higher DPI than my plasma does and appears to not require a PWM cycling of pixels to get those hard to hit grey levels.

I am learning I like displays where the light is not filtered down to a color, instead is just emitted at the color. Micro LED could be another contender if they can get the dot pitch high enough.

All that said, I keep a few CRT displays. I really like them for retro computing and gaming.

microLED is the next plasma, with tiny non-organic LEDs. Organic LEDs have some problems with color gamut and (AFAIR) response time that make them inferior to plasma, whereas microLED, while still exotic, is being rapidly developed.

I've even worked on a color science-related project that attempted to use LG OLED TV as a poor man's reference display, and turns out they use a lot of tricks like dithering, heavy power limiting and low brightness resolution for each subpixel that make them look bad when pixel-peeping.

Ahhh, thanks for that. microLED was my first hope, until the AMOLED tech seemed to fill the gap for the smaller, high DPI, display use case at least. Nice to see the rapid dev going on.

Are there differences between OLED sources? I'm using Samsung AMOLED displays at present. I don't have access to an LG.

Do you have any thoughts on DPI for microLED?

I will definitely poke at the displays I have more to see what I can learn.

Sorry, cannot answer these questions competently. From my understanding, LG has monopoly on TV-scale OLED displays, so others big players in premium TV market (Sony and Samsung come to mind) bet on productizing uLED.

Well you improved my own lacking understanding, and with exemplary form. It is rare to see others share what you did. Thanks again.

Despite its benefits over LCDs, it had no chance to compete on price. LCD prices just plummeted to far too fast.

OLED is the current equivalent (with perhaps QLED) and micro LED on the horizon.

The problem with MicroLED is that they remain very expensive to produce, so they may have no chance to compete on price, and the quality of OLED is getting better as well. Apple recently abandoned their MicroLED plans: https://www.yolegroup.com/strategy-insights/did-apple-just-k...

Yeah, and we can’t make them small enough either. But it seems like the probable next big thing to me. Just gotta solve some issues.

But FED was also better than LCD, and it was still abandoned because of cost. The same thing could happen with MicroLED.

The death knell was that they couldn’t shrink the plasma cells enough to support 4K. LCD didn’t kill it, in the same sense that LCD doesn’t kill OLED.

The glass has to be thicker, thus more weight, to withstand implosion from the vacuum it is holding.

Gorilla glass or sapphire glass might have enabled lighter tubes at a higher price, had CRTs retained popularity, but from what I can see, Corning never even considered it as a use case for Gorilla glass in their original 1960s attempt at development.

Would there be any point? Given the TV sizes of the 60s standard glass was probably more than strong enough, and the tube wouldn’t be very heavy.

No one would need to really think about until around 2000.

On top of the mechanical issues, CRT glass also functions as x-ray shielding, for which reason it is leaded (Pb). You can't really make that part lighter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode-ray_tube#Body

https://www.epa.gov/hw/frequent-questions-about-regulation-u...

(This isn't really an answer to the overall question—just a narrow observation of interest).

Oh I didn’t know that. Neat.

This is an interesting point. Does anyone know how much lead would be in a 21 inch monitor?

According to [0], about 1.2 kg (2.6 lbs). Surprisingly this is mostly in the neck and funnel of the tube - the screen itself uses different metals because lead would affect its optical performance.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...

I remember reading somewhere that there was this wild prototype flat CRT where the electron gun was at the top, shooting down, and the beam did a 180 degree turn at the bottom before being deflected into the surface of the screen.

Yes, the Sinclair TV80 worked on that principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV80

Nope, it's that, but folded in half. Found a mention of it (that I commented on, lol): https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/111219376410543899

I assume that CRT technology development stopped decades ago, but could we have e.g., replaced the heavy glass with some plastic-like material to save weight without compromising the picture?

Metal-cone CRTs were common in the early decades, and had a flatter screen than typical all-glass construction; here's the largest of those, a 30":

https://www.earlytelevision.org/dumont_30bp4.html

a TV using it cost almost $1800 in 1952 (equivalent to over $21k today):

https://www.earlytelevision.org/dumont_ra-119.html

I think metal-cone CRTs became unpopular due to the glass-to-metal seal not being as reliable, and difficulties with insulation (the whole cone is at the final accelerating voltage.)

Sony had all the coolest TVs in that era—one of the last great ones, which I've only seen in person _once_ at a broadcast TV tower site (it's still there today, and works!) was the KD-34XBR970[1]. It was 'only' 34", but it weighed nearly 200 lbs.

[1] https://youtu.be/W_U9pFfXjYA?t=614

I believe my friend still has our 32" 1080i tube TV kicking around. All 180lbs of it. has HDMI and everything if I recall. Old consoles look awesome on it and if you can get your PC drivers to play ball games on that also look stellar, but text looks like trash.

It was also a Trinitron.

Think I had this TV. It was an absolute unit and took 2-3 people to move.

An N64 and Mario Kart completed the setup.

I had one of these. Somehow got it on clearance at Circuit City when it was being EOL'd. I must have hit that window just right, because I got it for something like $450?

Managed to sell it about five years back for $200, and someone picked it up from my house and carried it out of my basement. It was a win all around. They got an amazing display for their old consoles, and despite my fondness for the same, I just wanted to be rid of the thing because I was prepping to move and wanted to rid the house of CRTs.

I really do miss my RCA mm36100. 190 pounds. 2 VGA inputs. It could do 800x600 progressive scan. The Dreamcast with a VGA adapter really did look incredible on it!

https://lowendmac.com/2019/rca-mm36100-amazing-under-the-rad...

https://archive.org/details/manualsbase-id-145505

Great TV. Iirc the last Triniton tube produced. After moving it 3 times over 15 years I sold mine to a guy during covid for $20 so he could play Time Crisis.

My friends dad had one of those. Incredible picture on that recent tvs can reach.

Ugh, reminds me of my parent's 35" Sony CRT. The picture was wonderful for its day, but my brother and I almost killed ourselves trying to carry it down the stairs. It was kind of brilliant by Sony in a way since it was so deep, there weren't any TV stands that could properly hold it so you had to buy a TV stand from Sony as well.

A friend in Bulgaria had a similar size CRT in his house when it got burglarized. The burglars drugged the dog, disabled the alarm system and stole all the things, except for the giant TV (they couldn’t lift it).

My family had one about the same size as well, and it was setup in the basement. When my parents sold the house the contract stated that the TV in the basement would not be removed and it was the buyers problem now.

Here's a news article saying that Sony had only sold 3 PVM-4300s as of April 1990: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1990/04/22/for-40000-tvs-pictur...

I guess it makes sense considering the price. I wonder how many of them still exist today.

Here are three of them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/liyitz/the_pictu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/egvuqt/kv3000r_u...

And this guy "I have a Sony KV-3000R in New Condition. Mike exestexas@aol.com" https://www.avsforum.com/threads/seeking-sony-pvm-4300-and-k...

the KV-3000R is not the PWM-4300 though? And since the second but older post is from a deleted redditor it's unclear whether it's two or one.

We rented one of these for a trade show (MacWorld), at the time there were reputedly 3 in the US, was brought in on a forklift, had to build a specially strong bench to put it on - people would come around just to see it (and the digital video hardware we were showing off)

450lbs… that’s approaching piano territory. Smaller grands are 600 or so, with a full sized concert 9fter being 900-1100.

And $40K, which will comfortably buy you a grand piano

Yeah but Doom 2 would look much nicer on that than on a piano.

Doom came out 4 years after this tho

You must be fun at parties

The rich have to spend their money somewhere...

When I see that weight, I think "medium-sized car engine". Not too difficult to move around with an engine hoist.

It’s not so much the moving it… it’s that it’s heavy enough that “can this floor/piece of furniture support this” becomes very relevant.

I had a 27" view sonic with something like 2500 4:3 resolution. One went out and I got a replacement that lasted till the 2010s. Also had a Sony vega 37" that was amazing. I was gonna get the 41 and probably should have because even though it was heavier it had handled. I used trucks to move both. I am sad I had to get rid of the vega as it was an amazing image and great for retro gaming, probably one of the best TVs ever made in the crt era. But just no where to keep the monstrosity. I dropped it at goodwill the month before they stopped taking carts and I knew I'd want it and my old 19" uncaged someday. Still don't have room for them.

Side note at the time I had a 144" projector as well and the 37 was the pip on the side. My cleaning lady (I traveled a lot) kept rearranging the room around the TV because she couldn't grok the projector. I had to turn it on for her one day before she stopped moving things. The big o on her face was priceless. Also the big o on that screen was also priceless as was ssx3

My AIM username for a while was kw34hd1 which is the model of Sony’s first (and maybe last?) 1080i CRT. I recall it being around $25k too at the time.

34” diagonal, 196lb.

Edit: A googling suggests it was launched end of ‘98 for $9k. $17k in 2024 dollars.

These kinds of TVs were under $2k a few years later. I had a Panasonic CT-34WX53 "Tau" display that I bought for $1600 in 2002.

and those Taus are still selling for that much due to the retro gaming craze and scalpers.

Which is strange because 240p and 480i absolutely looks worse on them than on an SD TV. Better than a flat panel though to be fair.

Yeah I would think that if you just wanted an amazing image from a PS1 or SNES then you'd want a regular aspect ratio anyway. If I was going to plunder eBay for such a thing I'd go with a Panasonic SuperFlat.

It’s so weird. The Super NT is as accurate as anything and has an HDMI out. I love CRTs and Trinitrons but I’d never want to game on one (again).

I was seriously considering Sony’s 32” CRT for my first HDTV around 2006 or so. It must have been right about the tail end.

It may have had a better picture, at least for analog stuff which was most all of it at the time. But the biggest factor was size. At ~150-200 lbs I couldn’t move it and would need new furniture to hold it.

The LCD I bought probably weighed 40 pounds, was easy to move, and my existing furniture was fine. It was 720p only though.

IIRC, Sony CRTs also love blowing up their flyback transformer boards.

They made a 40" CRT. I used to find them for free all the time on Craigslist because people just wanted them gone.

Here's a pic of one:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VkcAAOSw1jpij-aq/s-l1600.webp

I found a brand new one from someone's house where the person had died a long time ago and three of us lugged it back to my house (three people can barely lift it). I grabbed it for light gun games, but it uses some sort of digital filtering on all the inputs which stops gun games from detecting the scan. I was going to take it apart and figure out how to bypass it, but I lost it in my divorce lol.

That’s the one I had. What a beast. I gave it away around 2009 when I got my first LCD.

Be aware that this is not a TV. The PVM Series of monitors are professional video monitors that are not offered for sale to mere consumers. This is the kind of thing that would be installed in the control room of a TV station to display the station's final output.

20 years ago the small video company I worked for had a $30K Sony PVM monitor that was probably only 30-35 inches. So the $40K price in 1990 doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

The only thing interesting about this is "biggest CRT ever made" because it shows the limits of CRT technology.

I had a 38" Wide Flat Trinitron that I miss so much, dont miss the 500lb carry weight lol, buy damn the pinnacle of TV.

At some point I had one of those ugly wooden desks with the Trinny crammed into it and a dinky 17" CRT next to it. Ran S-Video and then eventually Component to the TV for games and movies. Pretty sure the desk sagged from all the weight.

That $40k price tag from 1989, with inflation, is about $100k today. That's quite something for a TV!

So what were “big screen TVs” (which my family never owned) that appeared in movies and tv? I feel like they looked more lightweight than this so I’m assuming they were like Plasma screens? Or maybe that technology was after the pop culture I’m referring to

Rear projection

Rear projection TVs were a neat party trick, but I always liked either a projector or screen, or just using a smaller CRT. Even the cheaper sets would give a brighter (and usually slightly sharper) image than even the nicer rear-projection TVs in that era.

They were projection TV's. Both front, or rear projection.

Late in the 90s we had a 27” CRT. That was absolutely sold as a big screen. I don’t think you could get much bigger.

Past that you had projection TVs. They could get way bigger but the picture was also dimmer and perhaps not as sharp? I only remember being around one a few times, we never had one.

CRT TVs up to 36” were widely available (although expensive) in the 90s. Projection sets usually started at 42 or 43”.

My impression is that projection TVs reflect/diffuse even more of ambient light than regular CRTs, making black areas of the image look gray (regular CRTs already reflect more light than LCD-like monitors, though CRTs could be tinted to improve contrast at the cost of brightness).

> Late in the 90s we had a 27” CRT. That was absolutely sold as a big screen. I don’t think you could get much bigger.

CRTs were 4:3 aspect ratio. I remember that a 19" CRT was about the same size as a 21" LCD with 16:9 aspect ratio.

Height, it was same height until you rotated LCD killing this nonsense argument :)

They were projection TVs, that typically had three small CRTs (red, green, blue) with lenses that projected the image either onto the screen from the back (rear projection) or bounced off a mirror from the front(front projection).

Color plasma screens did not become a real thing until the early 2000s or so.

Typically there was a projector in the bottom that pointed up at a mirror. The mirror was mounted at a 45 degree angle and pointed at a screen consisting of a giant Fresnel lens and another piece of plastic.

For big screen projected analog sources (aka, a video signal rather than film) there was this amazing piece of tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor

A mirror coated in a thin layer of oil that is deformed by electrostatic charges.

> Sony’s part number suggests it has a 45 inch tube inside. But in a rare case of truth in advertising, Sony advertised it as a 43-inch model.

The overall tube size is 45”, the actual screen size is 43”. I believe it was mandatory in the USA to market TVs based on screen size, in most of the rest of the world they were sold based on tube size.

That’s why common sizes of 4:3 CRT TV in the US were 13/20/24/27/32” whereas in the rest of the world the same size TVs were sold as 14/21/25/29/34”. Interestingly the tubes’ internal part numbers are based on the screen size in centimeters: 34/51/59/68/80 cm.

I had a Gateway Destination 36” monitor that I somehow acquired at a garage sale in my room as a teenager. Getting it into my upstairs room required my friends and I to all risk our lives but it was well worth it.

I really miss CRTs. They had more vivid colour, had near zero response times, and I even _liked_ the blur the scanlines caused. Not to mention the calm that the simplicity brought; turn on, watch.

While I can appreciate the advantages of CRTs (I didn't switch to LCD until 120Hz LCDs were released), I don't see how CRTs have "turn on, watch" simplicity. CRTs needed careful calibration to look their best, and even when calibrated correctly needed a minute or so to fully warm up.

For retro games especially, nothing can quite beat them.

This is like one of those moments for me where it feels like the phones are listening to me. I have been very actively hunting/shopping for PVMs the last two days.

I miss the fun thought of owning a desktop particle accelerator that came with CRTs. The physics behind LCDs doesn't feel as exciting.

John Carmack was programming on a Intergraph InterView 28hd96, which was a 28-Inch, 16:9, 1080p CRT Monitor. What a beauty.

Dang, that was probably when the rest of us were still using 16" or so CRT's, it must have been amazing.

Wouldn't surprise me if all ten remaining units were in the hands of Smash community members or something.

The "IDTV" buffering sounds like it increases latency, so unlikely.

It's really fascinating that most things in the US economy inflate (commodities, services, housing, etc...), but some things just inevitably deflate (TVs).

I used to have a CRT-based HDTV (16:9 ratio).

The screen size was 27 inches, and it was a big, heavy honker.

I think it was a Samsung. Many moons ago.

It was non-optimal. There was visible fringing on the edges.

I don’t miss CRTs.

> It was non-optimal. There was visible fringing on the edges.

> I don’t miss CRTs.

Samsung was cheap.

That aside about IDTV was interesting. Hadn’t heard of that before.

It used a buffer to interpolate multiple frames from OTA TV also had motion sensing!

Wonder how good it looked in reality?

The article is calling two-speaker mono “high fidelity” so I’d take details like this with a grain of salt. I’m sort of wondering if TFA is AI filtered content from another site.

While I don’t remember hearing the term before, it absolutely sounds like something on marketing department would come up with.

HD was around, but incredibly uncommon, in the late 90s. I remember seeing news segments and stuff on it every once in a while about how it was coming “soon”.

It doesn’t seem too unlikely to me that you might be able to trick some buyers into thinking “oh that’s that thing I heard about“.

My assumption is that IDTV is deinterlacing a 480i signal to 480p, which is shown on a CRT running at 31khz (though I don't know what algorithms it would use to deinterlace).

One of my bosses in the late 80s had one of these in his living room.

It was, indeed, a big TV- Somewhat impressive at the time.

That's interesting. So in a sense, we hit "peak CRT" in 1989, quite a bit before large flat screens hit.

The best CRT I ever had and kept well into the flat screen era was the Sony GDM-FW900. Released in 2002, 24" widescreen with a resolution of 2304x1440.

My back is aching just looking at it!

Sony in 1989 bought CBS which got renamed to Sony Music Entertainment (SME) in 1991. This was the beginning of the end for Sony as an engineering pioneer. Walkman, CD -- completely gone from these markets, crushed by noname, at the time tiny rivals. But seriously, Apple in 2001 was basically nothing and yet they won the US market with the iPod, more or less. Sony was too busy DRMing its music to bring an MP3 player to the market. It was an astounding defeat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com