What Happened to the Largest Tube TV? [video] | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to the Largest Tube TV? [video]

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63 pointszdw11 comments

The best of the internet, engineering and humanity... all in one video.

And yet it disappeared off Hacker News almost immediately. I kind-of feel lucky to have stumbled upon it, what a gem of a video.

Yes, a shame. I honestly expected this could get picked up as a mainstream news story over Christmas (except I think the actual story is older than this video);

Young people with talent and ingenuity, using modern skills and tools to acquire and maintain something with a history behind it.

I've bookmarked it for next time some old guy complains that young people aren't smart or motivated etc. etc.!

It's a real shame that Sony didn't allow the interview to happen

This was a very fun video. Both the technology involved and the passion of someone collecting these things.

This is an epic tale about a marvel of engineering.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093

Single-tube. Jumbotrons count and they are way bigger, but you can only boil electrons off a cathode at such a rate and velocity.

Fun fact (from wikipedia):

> The largest JumboTron in use was located at SkyDome (now Rogers Centre) in Toronto, Ontario, and measured 10 m tall by 33.5 m wide (33 ft × 110 ft), with a resolution of 672 × 200 pixels, or 134,400 pixels.[9] Its cost was US$17 million.

I was told a pretty significant amount of hard RF leaks out the back of a tube. I wonder if its more, on a bigger one.

I was also surprised by how gentle the round off was. Sony did a decent job on the trinitron making tube front flat but it always pushed up against size. You gotta make it stable under a fair bit of vacuum.

RF is not an issue, but X-ray emission is indeed a problem that had to be confronted by TV engineers back in the day. A rule of thumb is that a color TV needs about 1 kV of acceleration voltage per diagonal inch. 43 kV is no joke when it comes to X-ray generation, so I'm curious if they found a way to make it work at a lower voltage.

At one point in the video you can see that the TV has two second-anode leads, so maybe that was the trick, using two separate acceleration electrodes at half the voltage.

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