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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn. Yes, this should be focused on. Ideally, things get better.

But things are better. Sure televisions have a shorter life span. They are also absurdly cheaper than they have ever been. To not ack that the lower cost options are, at large, what we are complaining about hits me the wrong way.

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The environmental impact of producing a product that needs frequent replacement should not be ignored. Especially when it's proven to be avoidable.

There is an easy, proven way to make it count: include it into the price.

You would be shocked to know that the environmental impact per TV has also dropped. Significantly. There was a lot that went into early televisions.

> They are also absurdly cheaper than they have ever been.

Are they cheaper or just larger?

They are absolutely cheaper. You can get a pretty decent 48 inch TV for ~$200.

For that price you could also get a CRT TV.

The point was: they are cheaper per size. You can either get LCD TVs at the price of a CRT that are much larger than a CRT of the same price, or a LCD TV at the size of a CRT which is much cheaper than the same-sized CRT.

Are there really TVs which are "much cheaper" than $200 CRT-TVs?

Well there are 24 inch TVs for around $100, so I would say yes

If CRTs kept being manufactured and evolving, maybe they would be more competitive on price compared to today's cheap LCDs.

No. The requirement of having a massive vacuum tube has already put you over a modern LCD when you look at cost of goods, shipping (bigger boxes), stocking, etc. There's no way. If you bend and twist and spindle the definition of "CRT" until you've got something that can compete just to win the argument you'll find that you've created something that no normal person would recognize as a "CRT".

Technology is not a magic force that just ambiently shrinks everything. The resulting products have to correspond to real configuration of atoms that can be really manufactured and really sold in the real world. The base specifications for what you need to A: have a vacuum chamber that B: doesn't mind being constantly bombarded by electrons and the resulting radiation for decades at a time is not something that is going to magically get to a one-inch depth for a 60-inch TV.

There's no world in which Walmart is selling cheap 70" CRTs.

I want to see the math for creating an electron gun that can blast phospors on a screen a foot away that is 70 inches wide and flat. That big space in most CRTs let the math be simple for how the electron gun emitted electrons. If the gun had a narrow angle to the screen (small screens or deeper backing), then the screen could be slightly curved and t just needed to be a grid coming out of the gun. To visualize this on imagine if you following the curve of CRT screens up and down then left and right, eventually it would make a sphere around the electron gun.

But towards the end of CRTs there were flat screens, not thin CRTs, but things that were clearly a CRT but with a non-curved screen. To make this happen the electron gun needed to perform a distortion on the scan lines that would account for this.

In theory the gun could be moved closer and closer to the screen and the math adjusted to be correct at any distance. But the further towards the edge of the screen a pixel was the more precise the gun would need to be to hit the right spot and the fewed trick filters and gratings on the screen itself could do. Clearly 70 inches inches practical for an in home CRT, but I think it is fun to think about.

You can get a 70 inch TV for $400 at Walmart today. My last CRT was a 27" and I payed $1,000. They are absolutely cheaper.

Edit: To be clear, I'm agreeing with parent post here. It is mind blowing how cheap televisions have become.

Weren't the largest wide scale retail CRTs around 36~40 inches?

Actually, the thins screens are higher cost because they are more expensive to make. So it’s not the case that cheaper ones break sooner.

They are higher cost than what? My point was that televisions, as a category, have absolutely plummeted in costs. It is laughable how much they have fallen. When we moved into our first house, we kept a few nice CRTs because we thought they would make good extras for the house. By the time we admitted that they were silly, a replacement panel was barely $100 and nobody was accepting the CRT for resale.

I would be interested in knowing how much harder it is to recycle these new panels. And what the environmental impact of producing them is. I would not be at all shocked to know that the effort that goes into making them lowers both of those metrics. I would be shocked if it is dramatic.

> I would be interested in knowing how much harder it is to recycle these new panels.

I actually had a hard time finding a place to actually take my last LCD TV for recycling. It was 55", but the local recycler only took LCDs up to 50" in size. They suggested going to Best Buy or other places as they took TVs up to I think 70" or something. But the people at the Best Buy nearby didn't understand me wanting to recycle the TV, they kept asking why I didn't just throw it in the trash. They ultimately wanted to charge me something like $40 to take the TV for recycling.

This is the exact run-around we got for our 27" CRT. I think they were charging more to take it for recycling, oddly. Flat didn't accept it for landfill.

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