What happened to the world's largest tube TV? [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
As I was watching it, there was the drama of whether it would be saved from imminent destruction, and it actually seemed unlikely that they could, but their approach was to be... secretive about it.
It turned out that they wanted it for themselves, and didn't that create a conflict of interest? By keeping it quiet, they increased the chance that they would obtain it themselves (and the YouTube story to tell about it), but increased the likelihood that the TV would be lost entirely (because other efforts wouldn't be brought)?
Fortunately the gamble worked out, and the TV wasn't destroyed.
There's also a possibly related matter, in how Sony stopped talking with them. Is it possible that Sony and/or Japanese government aren't very happy to learn that a possibly unique museum piece, of one of the heights of Sony achievement, was quietly removed from the country, to the US, by a YouTube influencer?
I applaud preserving this rare artifact, and compliment the storytelling, but did have these couple odd thoughts.
As for the Sony not talking bit, it can probably be chalked up to corporate policy. Large organizations rarely let staff speak on matters when it may be construed as being speaking for the corporation.
As well as keep it in country?
Perhaps the current owners will be reached by a museum, and decide to repatriate it. I imagine that the right museum home could be a win for everyone.
Responsibility and autonomy to preserve one's own heritage (with the associated risk of failing to do so) is a longstanding ethical dilemma between cultures, and the answers aren't so clear imho! (This argument is much more compelling for museums, rather than Sony)
Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair. Mechanics will tell you horror stories of rare car models being destroyed this way so the owners can claim a few hundred bucks from the DOT. I'm sure car collectors had a field day back then but with such a glut in the market they could not save everything that's worth saving.
Shank Mods was able to obtain a copy of the service manual in English from somebody in the US. This fact probably means that the TV was sold on (or imported to) the domestic US market for a while. (Sony have always allowed individuals to order parts through an authorised service centre, and the latter often insist on requesting a repair manual first even if you are 100% sure of the part number) It's very likely that a number of them existed in the US only to be unceremoniously thrown out by their owners when LCD TVs became more popular. I bet nobody batted an eyelid when that happened.
So. Fucking. Stupid. As though Joe Consumer with a V8 Mustang he puts a few thousand miles on per year is the boogeyman of climate change, and not, hell just off the dome:
- Every standing military on planet Earth
- The global shipping industry
- The fossil fuel industry
Scrappage schemes target the smokey, rusty shit-boxes that are worth next to nothing. Not Joe Mustang's prized V8, which would be worth far more than the value of the incentive anyway.
And when it comes to old cars, reducing local air pollution is often the major concern. Not just climate change.
People still needed cars, and everything is relative. When used car prices go up relative to that of new cars, then new cars become relatively inexpensive.
This helps sell more new cars. And back in the time of "too big to fail" auto industry bailouts, selling more new cars was kind of important.
edit: And remember, there were restrictions for Cash for Clunkers. The car had to be less than 25 years old, it had to run, and it had to have been registered and insured for the last 12 months. It was deliberately designed to thin the pool of functional used vehicles.
This program claimed revered cars like Audi Quattros and BMW E30s...along with V8 Mustangs. And once turned in, they were all quite purposefully destroyed: Sodium silicate replaced the engine oil and they were run at WOT until they seized, and then they were crushed just to be sure.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System
[1]:https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle...
That isn't a ton but it also isn't nothing, and however you feel about it, that's 677,000 vehicles that were, according to the requirements laid out by the program, perfectly serviceable daily-driver vehicles that were in active use, that taxpayers paid to buy from consumers, strictly to destroy them. Irrespective of if it ruined the used market as the GP says, that's still a shit ton of perfectly usable machines that our government apportioned tax money to buy, and then paid contractors to destroy, on purpose.
how much did the price go up because of 2%? and all other factors excluded. even inflation is 2% a year. so thats one year. sorry but i dont buy it made a dent in the used car market. proof it to me with numbers etc please otherwise it sounds like the usual useless rant about „everything is getting worse without proof“
That's simply not a thing when the other guy down the block will sell a similar car for $300 less and have his money today.
Any salesman can ask for whatever price they wish to ask for, and if it doesn't sell then there is simply no sale. (The annals of Ebay, to name one dataset that can be poked at, is rife with asking prices for things that simply did not sell.)
(This is one of the very few things that the "invisible hand of the free market" actually assures us of: Sure! A salesperson can ask $16000 for a car that is worth $6000. But if they sit on that car for years and years hoping for a bite that never comes, then maybe they can eventually sell it for $3000 -- losing money the entire time, for ever step of the process.
And while that's an example of how sales can happen, it is not an example of how sales both work and make money.
Used car salesmen do not butter their bread by losing money on sales. That's not a thing at all.)
Only "dirty" vehicles that do not meet modern emissions standards qualified. And it only makes sense to scrap your vehicle if it's worth less than the £2000 payment you'd get by scrapping it. So nobody is scrapping modern, good quality vehicles: you'd just sell it instead and get more money.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone/scr...
But what else happened with that?
The glut ended. Used cars got more expensive relative to quality.
And now the cost of a 'reliable used car' is far more than inflation adjusted for the time passed.
getting back on topic...
> unceremoniously thrown out by their owners when LCD TVs became more popular. I bet nobody batted an eyelid when that happened.
IDK about all that, during the 'LCD Phase-in' everyone I knew either donated theirs and/or moved CRTs into smaller rooms when they replaced a working one.
Especially if it was 'Decent' TV, i.e. Progressive scan and component input...
Let alone if the thing cost as much new as a very nice car of the day. The sheer responsibility of it (thinking more, you really can't throw this thing out unceremoniously, at minimum it's part of a house or business space eviction proceeding...) has some weight, ironically.
That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center. My city runs a annual kerbside collection program for large appliances and furniture, and I distinctly remember metal scavengers cruising the street gutting old CRTs people have left out for the copper coils, leaving whatever remains to be collected as hazardous e-waste. Around the same time, my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".
In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.
Maybe I just grew up poorer than you but it took longer than that in my world.
> my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s
Yeah meanwhile some of us had to deal with a Zenith TV that would 'jump' with a PS1 and other consoles on the RF/AV output because 'lord knows why'.
> and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".
Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.
Resourceful not-well-off people used to really appreciate repairable things, and the worst thing C4C did was get rid of a lot of not-fuel-efficient vehicles that were at least cheap to repair.
The video of that TV and the pair further underscores it. Everything on decently laid out boards. Nowadays an LCD tv, sometimes a part can go bad and it's so integrated that even 15 years ago it could be a 30 min solder job, nowadays it's cuck the whole shebang.
> In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.
Corporate maybe but I'd guess any smart corporation would try to load the 'disposal' costs of a 440 pound object onto the taker somehow. Similar for any rich household that wanted to keep wealth for more than a generation or two.
Let me assure you that none of what I said was meant to diminish your point of view which I agree with mostly.
What I was trying to convey was that people’s mindsets were rather different during the last decade of CRT. CRT had been around since the end of WWII, it may have gotten bigger over the years but the form it took on largely remained the same so there was a sense of continuity as people handed down old TVs when they got something nicer.
When cheap LCD TVs came to the market it represented something more akin to a paradigm shift as people with limited space at home could now easily own screens 30 inches and up. My parents are actually rather frugal with my dad borders on being a tech hoarder who insist on keeping every single cell phone and laptop he ever owned somewhere in his garage. However even he was unable to justify the sheer bulk and running cost of CRT TVs back in that period. Even if he were to give it away there would have been very few takers of any.
Therefore it’s not inconceivable that this model could have been sold in the US or even few more places outside Japan. Most of them simply disappeared without a trace because at some point they were probably worth less than the space it occupies, and people were overly eager to embrace the flat panels without realising that they are not getting some of the utilities back.
You don’t need to drive that much for fuel inefficiency to get really expensive. Even 10k miles/year which is well below average at 10MPH vs 30MPH @ 3$ / gallon is an extra 2,000$ / year, and adjusted for inflation gas is currently fairly cheap. Inflation adjusted in 2011 and 2012 gas was over 5$/gallon.
We might see consistent low gas prices intended to delay the EV transition (or the could spike), but these cars were already old 15 years ago when the program happened.
But you can’t do that with a 400lbs behemoth of a TV, it would fill the entire room.
This beast is highly impractical and still only 480p.
Even those smaller CRTs got disposed of quickly as soon as the 2nd generation of flat screens arrived as they already took up way too much space.
Could you elaborate?
Those were wild times. I remember they also had a similar scheme in Germany. Absolute madness (and that's even if you ignore the useless damage to old cars.)
They should have just printed more money to juice the economy, instead of these wild schemes to give subsidies to specific industries.
Cash for Clunkers - 700,000 cars SCRAPPED by the USA Government https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZMJ_oNtzzE
UK had its own program in 2009 https://www.banpei.net/2010/04/07/wtf-mr2-sw20-in-british-ca...
All the cars lost to the 2009 Scrappage Scheme - The UK SCRAPPED all these rare cars?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLLNOUUqCUc
Ultimately if it was a TV designed in Japan, having it on display at a local tech museum would be nice. I just don't know where it would go that could deal with the space and the weight.
Closest thing I could think of is the NTT museum, which is ginormous... but it's mostly about NTT's stuff. "Some other company in Japan made big TVs" is a bit less interesting than, say, some older tabulation machines they have there.
It probably does make sense in the house of a massive hoarder.
It's also just one of the world's best for Sony - they make a lot of bests(with many asterisks too).
One thing I only understood after I've bought a 3D printer is, someone wanting an obsolete product is weird from creator perspective. I still fully understand consumer side sentiments, and also am aware of vital importance of reference data archives, but I'd rather want audiences to seek the latest and greatest than asking me about a shelf bracket that I stopped making some time ago.
So I think it's an okay outcome. The TV lives on. Someday Sony might buy it back, or it might get transferred to some other museums. That's good enough.
The only stretch goal left is an interview with its creators or their autobiography(s). But that would be a cherry on top.
Japan’s suitability for industrial museums can be debated, but saying “summer steam is brutal, disasters are routine” as reasons is ridiculous. This is the 21st century, not the Middle Ages. Besides, Japan already has plenty of industrial museums.
This makes absolutely no sense. Japan is full of museums of all kinds, including really weird ones you'd never see in America. Not far from me, there's a museum of miniatures, a museum about sewers, a museum about tap water, a museum about subways, and a museum with an indoor recreation of an entire village from ~300 years ago. And the summers here are better than most southern US states like Florida or Arizona, and disasters much less routine than Florida.
Turns out to be the modern equivalent of colonisers stealing local artefacts.
Why export this at all!?
And so much of what is considered "stolen" was given away by someone in that culture as trash.
The only people claiming theft are a third party that never owned the property in question or at the time gave it away freely.
Western societies took advantage of multiple other societies to plunder their treasures. Those same societies didn't have the infrastructure and/or care to preserve these things themselves.
Sometimes two things can be true.
And it is a damn TV. A big one for sure but it isn't Moctezuma II headdress nor are those Devatas carved from Banteay Srei cambodian temple.
(nit) Please don't use "conflict of interest" that way (casually). It should only apply to situations where there are actual legal or ethical obligations in opposition. Nobody owes the online CRT community anything.
If those other obligations existed, could we say "conflict of interest" about them, or is there a better term or phrasing?
Actually I think this might be a false equivalency OP, because this isn't just any old used car. I think it's fair to at least stop and question whether this should go to some greater good or not.
The owner had seen discussions of the TV online and knew it was a big deal. But he still couldn't get rid of it until this guy came along.
The owner even said he wanted the TV to go to someone who would use, appreciate, and take care of it. The video clearly demonstrates all of the above. If the TV ended up in some museum, forever powered off, that would be even more tragic in some ways.
I didn't get the impression that anyone was bamboozled or cheated.
Yep. There are always droves of "it belongs in a museum" crowds, but when you ask if they want it there is only silence.
It wouldn't matter if the heirs value it or not, because it wouldn't have been theirs. Because he let it remain in his estate, he left it to his heirs to decide what to do with it, and clearly, they did not care to keep it as a public collection, nor to endeavor to keep it together as a collection. I guess I should have visited it when I had the chance.
I went to go back one day with friends, and found it had permanently closed in the interim, apparently because they couldn't afford the rent. [1]
(People in that thread love to complain about only getting a 1Y lease - but if they needed to move in a hurry, there's sort of a time crunch, and the longer the lease terms, the less favorable they're likely to be, since the landlord probably wants to hedge against prices going sharply up over that window...)
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/pinball/comments/18wsn6/national_pi...
I totally understand the impulse but it's just not realistic to preserve everything.
It's not really realistic to expect everyone that values something to also be in a position to house and care for it. Someone can acknowledge that something should be protected and displayed without taking on the burden of doing it themselves.
This whole "if it's so great why don't you take it" attitude that comes up anytime someone laments the lost of a cultural/historic/artistic item is just negativity for the sake of negativity.
>I totally understand the impulse but it's just not realistic to preserve everything.
Agreed, but many of the comments here go too far in trying to denigrate the folks expressing the impulse without being able to act upon it.
> With no time to lose, Shank posted a call for help on Twitter, hoping someone in Osaka could investigate. Enter Abebe, a stranger who volunteered to check the location.
The restaurant was about to be demolished.
I don’t see any problems with this process or outcome. I think you’re comparing this outcome to an imagined alternative reality (going into a museum) that wasn’t even an option.
Unless you're like, Linus Tech Tips size and contact your YouTube "account manager"; and there's probably limits to what you can use that power for.
he even went to the lengths of calling up different CRT experts trying getting them to fix it
all this negativism just feels like older people being all "zoomers bad" because the medium is not what they prefer. maybe we should just be happy to pass the torch and glad that younger generations even have interest in this sort of thing
I didn't read that as Sony being pissed off by. Occam's razor says it's more likely to be your regular corporate dysfunction. Japanese corporations do seem as a whole to be more concerned about preserving their history than US ones, and Sony did have a small museum called ソニー歴史資料館 (the Sony Archive), but that Museum closed down in 2018[1]. Meanwhile, Toyota has six different Museum dedicated to its history and the history of the industries it participated in (including textile — Toyota was a major textile machinery manufacturer before it was an automotive company).
Sony still seems to display some of the archive's content in its headquarters, but I'm unclear how much of it. In general, closing the museum shows that preservation is perhaps important, but not very high on their priority list.
But even if preservation was a top goal, you still can't expect every employee on the PR department to be dedicated to that. PR departments are generally more concerned with current events, and may view such an interview as a distraction that isn't worth their time.
[1] https://nakamura.yokohama/sony-history-museum-36870.html
They definitely have their perks but I only own one CRT for retro gaming, and I wouldn't trade any of my newer monitors or TV's for a bulky old tube if you paid me. Hardest conceivable pass please.
The market the CRTs would steal is practically non existent, surely. I’d love this in my house for retro gaming purposes, but I’d still have my LG C/Gx or Samsung N95x or whatever the newest, fanciest models are for movies and modern use cases.
1) point out how heavy they are. Give them a facsimile to lift to show them, after making them sign a waiver that they may permanently injure their back doing so.
2) show them how deep they are, and how far away from the wall they must sit because of this.
3) show them two power meters, showing the power consumption of a CRT and a modern LCD for comparison. Also show the actual costs for that power, and how much typical usage of these displays will cost per day and per year.
The last one alone should dissuade most people from wanting to go backwards.
Most people don't give two shits about latency, and modern LCDs with >= 120 fps capability already exist.
Nothing could persuade me to voluntarily go back to CRTs.
However, the OP was trying to claim CRTs are superior because of latency and refresh rate for gaming applications, specifically, so I was just focusing on those aspects. The refresh rate part is silly; high-refresh-rate LCDs and OLEDs are common now. The latency part might have some validity, but compared to all the other factors it's really not that important.
Nothing. Why would any folk down the street go out of their way to try and find a TV: More expensive, Heavier, Non-smart, power hungry, smaller. They are like classic cars, everyone loves them but not everyone wants to put up with all the hassles that come with them.
The only thing CRTs are really better for is for content that is designed for CRTs, i.e. oldschool video games. And of course, that's what they are demonstrating. But it is just about giving the right context to historical video games.
Based on the timeline there was limited time to act.
Additionally, given they did some public 'reach-out' posts (that wound up finding them the thing) there were theoretically others that could have tried to handle it via their own channels.
Per the YT video's 'sponsorship', I'll note that shipping a ~450 pound TV and ~150-200 pound stand overseas in general is not a cheap, or easily logistical task given the timeframe. Esp if it's on the 2nd floor of a building to start (can't just do a simple hand hydraulic lift for the hard parts.)
> There's also a possibly related matter, in how Sony stopped talking with them. Is it possible that Sony and/or Japanese government aren't very happy to learn that a possibly unique museum piece, of one of the heights of Sony achievement, was quietly removed from the country, to the US, by a YouTube influencer?
Overthinking it perhaps. Sony has a lot of divisions and it's hard to get live assistance from them even if you are a current user of their products, at least speaking from personal experience with a couple different lines.
-----
That said, the YT video drew things out way too much for drama's sake and it made me glad I have ad-free.
If Japan, Sony or any other individual wanted to save this CRT for themselves, it would have been snatched up by now. The fact stands that the creator of the video is the only person on earth who did the detective work and put boots on the ground to make it their own rare CRT. Good work, I say!
Funny you say Japan when same thing is happening to US Arcades :) Here an interview with Euro importer:
'453: Resurrecting Arcades: Meet Europe’s Biggest Arcade Importer - The Retro Hour EP453' - The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast) 1 Nov 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzfVLY5Ag3s
One of the stories is him buying out half of Las Vegas rare arcades auction for pennies because he was the only one willing to sit all night clicking on bids.
What got me was the four-player game where each player effectively had their own 21" monitor. Mind-boggling.
Only giving value when something is already gone is kind of a toxic trait. It means you don't actually value it and you have other motives.
I even happily watched a very well executed sponsor ad.
I didn’t want to get in trouble because it was so nice, so I just kind of squatted there pinned under it trying to lever it back. Thankfully my dad walked by, noticed, and kept into action. And here I still am today.
This model retailed for $40,000 in the US (100K adjusted for inflation) and only a small number (reportedly in the low double digits) were ever sold.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/03/06/to-get-the-big-pic...
I... just don't get it. What I remember from my young is not that much but it all definitely happened and does not need any artistic license.
* This comment is not an endorsement of totalitarian governments
The other photo is a mystery, nobody knows who took it or whether that unit is still intact.
This paragraph was the last straw that made me think so: >This story isn’t just about a TV; it’s about preserving history and celebrating the people who make it possible. Shank’s journey serves as a reminder of the lengths we’ll go to honor the past and connect through shared enthusiasm.
Also
>Shank Mods’ video is not just a celebration of retro tech but a love letter to the communities that keep these technologies alive. From the daring extraction to the meticulous restoration, every moment of this story is a testament to what can be achieved with determination and collaboration.
Looking at this and other posts, they often feel like if one prompted ChatGPT with something like "please write a timeline of the Walkman". I think they may want to dial it back for a more natural feeling.
Now we need local crap blockers which will delete that crap. Good AI problem.
[1] https://www.72works.com/marketing/how-long-should-a-youtube-...
I love the upcoming tech arms racing which is just going to be developing new technical solutions to problems cause by technical solutions. It's more convenient because it removes the inconvenience created by the thing that makes your life more convenient?
At what point is it not worth it any more and people just avoid it all and start reading books again? I think something like that is a probable (though hyperbolically illustrated) outcome.
Feels like it's written as if it's a press release. Normally a press release would have notes for editors with biography and additional info. Feels off.
Just a random example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6769d176-af34-8006-9c47-e40f1efca0...
You can clearly see lots of similarities, especially the "Why it matters" section. Of course the substack post fed the actual video transcript to the model to write or refine the contents, but it's still very obvious.
> Retailing for $40,000 (over $100,000 today), it pushed the boundaries of what CRTs could achieve, offering professional-grade performance.
"Professional-grade" huh? There are professional TV watchers? It's not a studio reference monitor. It's just a regular TV but bigger.
> The urgency was palpable.
Where does one palpate urgency?
> Against the odds, Abebe found the CRT still in place, fully operational, and confirmed that the restaurant owner was looking for a way to get rid of it.
We establish later that it wasn't fully operational at all. And what odds? We didn't establish any. The TV is rare, and we later establish that the original owner knew it.
> What follows is a race against time to coordinate the TV's extraction, involving logistics experts, a moving team, and a mountain of paperwork.
> Abebe, the man who made the rescue possible, turned out to be the director of Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon. His selfless dedication during the final months of the game’s development exemplifies the power of shared passions.
Cool detail, but irrelevant, even if followed by breathless admiration fluff.
> This story isn’t just about a TV; it’s about preserving history and celebrating the people who make it possible.
I don't recall anybody being celebrated. They got a cool TV. Cool.
The original video gives plenty of appreciation to the people who made moving it possible, the shop owner, and the people who restored it to perfect working condition.
> Where does one palpate urgency?
Most frequently in metaphors. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=urgency+was+pa...
Ask an urologist!
> "Shank Mods’ video is not just a celebration of retro tech but a love letter to the communities that keep these technologies alive. From the daring extraction to the meticulous restoration, every moment of this story is a testament to what can be achieved with determination and collaboration"
Not just a X but a Y
From the A to the B
GPT LOVES this kind of verbose garbage - it's the non-fiction equivalent of purple prose and reads like a 6th grader desperately trying to pad out their MLA-formatted 5 paragraph essay.
(I am semi-convinced that the only job that’ll really be impacted by LLMs is estate agent copywriters, because estate agents already love that awful style.)
It really is, and I see more and more of it in Reddit comments, and even at work.
I had some obvious AI writing sent to me by a lawyer on the other side of a dispute recently and I was pissed - I don't mind if you want to use it to help you (I do myself), but at least have the decency to edit so it doesn't read like ChatGPT trash.
I have a morbid fascination with how bad Reddit has become. LLMs have supercharged the problem, but even before ChatGPT became popular Reddit was full of ragebait, reposts, lies, and misinformation.
The scary and fascinating thing to me is that so many people eat that content right up. You can drop into the front page (default subreddits or logged out) and anyone with basic adult level understanding of the world can pick out obvious lies and deliberate misinformation in many of the posts. Yet 1000s of people in the comments are getting angry over obviously fabricated or reposted AITA stories, clear ragebait in /r/FluentInFinance, and numerous other examples. Yet a lot of people love that content and can’t seem to get enough of it.
There's two variations of this that are very common:
* Watering down - the interesting details are spread apart by lots of flowery language, lots of backstory, rehashing and retelling already established points. It's a way of spreading an cup of content into a gallon of text, the same way a cup of oatmeal can be thinned.
* High fiber - Lots of long-form essays are like this. They start with describing the person being interviewed or the place visited as though the article were a novel and the author is paid by the word. Every person has some backstory that takes a few paragraphs. There is some philosophizing at some point. The essay is effectively the story of how the essay was written and all the backstory interviews rather than a treatise on the supposed topic. It's basically loading up your beef stew with cabbage; it is nutritive but not particularly dense or enjoyable.
Both are pretty tedious. AI can produce either one, but it can only hallucinate or fluff to produce more content than its inputs. As such, AI writing is a bit like a reverse-compression algorithm.
What I mean is that if the author does not put in the least effort to make it not AI sounding, how much does the author actually care about his/her content?
You take the video transcript, ask ChatGPT to write a short blogpost about it, and this is what you get.
When I was about 14, my mom got a new TV and I got the 27” Trinitron. I was simultaneously excited and terrified. I would have to move it.
My arms were too short to get around it. Somehow we made it down the basement stairs without help. By “we” I mean the TV and I. I got it across the room and onto the TV stand.
33 year old me would definitely need an Advil after.
It worked great, I thought about how much of a pain it would be to drag into the house and up the stairs to the gaming room, and decided I'd just find a 19-27" to use for old consoles.
Ended up selling it on Craigslist for $250.
Mom: "Dont sit too close to that thing"
Fast forward 20 years, a 27 inch monitor is right up on my face, contemplating a 32 or 43.
Definitely a 32. 43 is a bit much.
Edit: Unless you're an office manager and plan on watching football most of the day.
Ignore the other commenter, there is no such thing as too big as long as there are enough pixels!
4K is absolutely too few pixels for 55” for me. To go 55”, I’d need at minimum 2.5x that many personally. As such a thing doesn’t exist, I use two 27” 5K monitors and endure the bezel divider.
Tbh I'll prefer 27" 4k.
43 might be a bit better because you can move the screen a little farther away.
In fact it’s nicer in that I can sit a little further back than a 27” which ultimately is better for my eyes.
Fun fact: it had a special "anamorphic" mode. You know how widescreen movies on 4:3 displays are cropped? Someone had the idea that maybe instead of cropping them, you could use all of the resolution must just direct the electron beam to display it on middle 3/4 (vertically) of the screen. There, an extra 33% better vertical resolution and brightness for free?
There weren't a whole lot of DVDs mastered that way, but when you could get one, and your DVD player supported it, and your TV supported it, it looked freaking fantastic.
I had the fully "decked out" version with better speakers, two tuners (picture in picture or two pictures side by side), and tons of other features.
Glorious picture quality, and the tube was completely flat (but still very deep, of course).
I bought it at Best Buy. They had put it off on an aisle and not next to all the new LCD and Plasma TVs they were selling. Likely because it had a much better picture than those early flat-screens and was $1200 vs the others that started at $1800 and quickly went up from there.
And you can't really repair that in any feasible way. There are hundreds or thousands of windings, which have to duplicate exactly the configuration from the factory (and then probably be calibrated by processes that are lost to history). A dead CRT is just a useless hunk of glass, forever.
They're all dying. And that's kind of sad.
Ever broke one?
Like 2/3 of the weight is that front glass. It's _thick_.
When I was younger and dumber (well, at least younger) I tried breaking one. Took a running swing at the screen with a wrecking bar. It bounced off and all I got for my trouble was a sore shoulder.
People were starting to get scared of the cancer those xrays might produce, and I suspect CRT manufacturers predicted a huge court settlement for cancers caused by TV's with insufficient shielding.
So far, it seems that hasn't materialized - not, I suspect because those xrays didn't cause cancer, but because it is simply impossible to produce any kind of evidence of cause/effect.
The energy of the X-rays produced is limited by the CRT's acceleration voltage. The electrons get almost all of their energy from the field produced by the acceleration voltage. Electrons can produce photons when they hit matter, and one electron produces at most one photon, so by conservation of energy the X-ray cannot have greater energy. Smaller CRTs typically use low acceleration voltages, which means the X-rays are low energy and thus easy to block.
Yes, drop one from a few feet, and the immense weight will do the work for you.
The coils in the deflection yoke are run at 24-100V.
The acceleration voltage is the high voltage one.
> There are hundreds or thousands of windings, which have to duplicate exactly the configuration from the factory (and then probably be calibrated by processes that are lost to history).
Tubes are very not exact compared to solid state devices— to replace a deflection yoke, it has to be of similar deflection angle and inductance, all the rest of the adjustment has to be done anyway.
It’s hard but pales in comparison to the impossibility manufacturing a new CRT vacuum tube.
They aren't the kV scale killer voltages, no. My memory was closer to 200, but sure. That's still "high voltage" for magnet wire, and a short will rapidly destroy the coil. I've had three different monitors go to that kind of failure. One day you turn them on and... nope.
I'm not opposed to AI tools on principle, but why does this article exist?
It's not because the author had anything interesting to say. It's not because the AI had anything interesting to say. It's a summary of a Youtube video because... clicks or something.
I am not a CRT collector, but as a NES dev I keep a small 13" around and use it reqularly for dev purposes and for showing off my games at conventions. 13" is the perfect size in my opinion. Does not take up too much space and is easy to lug around to shows.
I fear the day that mine dies because small 13" models in good condition are getting harder to find for a decent price. Seems like some people caught on and are selling them on FB Marketplace for high prices and advertising them as "Retro Gaming TVs".
Big, heavy honker, and suffered from chronic fringing, around the edges.
I gave it away, in the mid-oughts, which required a pickup truck, and two strong men.
I don’t miss it, at all.
My job was for an imaging company, and we had a massive HDTV CRT in our showroom. I think it was around 32”. It was a Sony. That was in the early ‘90s.
The best that we found was a Sony 34XBR910 HD widescreen CRT!
I had no idea that a widescreen HD CRT existed until my friend brought one home. As far as I know, this was the pinnacle of CRT displays.
Here is a video about that same model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccUF1eeIz4
It took FIVE adults to carry up the two stories to our apartment! But man, that thing was awesome back in 2007.
CRT rebuilding, where the neck is cut off, a new electron gun installed, and the tube re-sealed and evacuated, used to be part of the TV repair industry. That can be done in a small-scale workshop.
There's a commercial business which still restores CRTs.[2] Most of their work is restoring CRTs for old military avionics systems. But there are a few Sony and Panasonic models for which they have parts and can do restoration.
It's much cheaper to emulate CRT effects so that they work with any display technology. Modern LCDs and OLEDs have fast enough response times that you can get most CRT effects (and omit the ones you dislike, such as refresh flicker). And you don't have to deal with a heavy, bulky display that can implode and send leaded glass everywhere.
https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/
CRT phosphors light up extremely brightly when the electron beam hits them, then exponentially decay. Non-phosphor-based display technologies can attempt to emulate this by strobing a backlight or lighting the pixel for only a fraction of the frame time, but none can match this exponential decay characteristic of a genuine phosphor. I'd argue that the phosphor decay is the most important aspect of the CRT look, more so than any static image quality artifacts.
There is such a thing as a laser-powered phosphor display, which uses moving mirrors to scan lasers over the phosphors instead of an electron beam, but AFAIK this is only available as modules intended for building large outdoor displays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-powered_phosphor_display
Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.
You essentially draw the frame over and over with progressive darkening of individual scan lines to emulate phosphor decay.
In practice, you'd want to emulate the full beam scanout and not even wait for full input frames in order to reduce input lag.
Mr. Blurbuster himself has been pitching this idea for awhile, as part of the software stack needed once we have 960+ Hz displays to finally get CRT level motion clarity. For example:
Many retro signals are 240p60 rather than 480i60. Nearly everything before the Playstation era.
You'd need a screen that had a maximum brightness 10x more than normal, or something to that effect.
In real life, there's no flicker. Motion blur is part of real life. Filmmakers use the 180-degree shutter rule as a default to intentionally capture the amount of motion blur that feels natural.
I can understand why the CRT would reduce the motion blur, in the same way that when I super-dim an LED lamp at night and wave my hand, I see a strobe effect instead of smooth motion, because the LED is actually flickering on and off.
But I don't understand why this would ever be desirable. I view it as a defect of dimmed LED lights at night, and I view it as an undesirable quality of CRT's. I don't understand why anyone would call that "excellent motion quality" as opposed to "undesirable strobe effect".
Or for another analogy, it's like how in war and action scenes in films they'll occasionally switch to a 90-degree shutter (or something less than 180) to reduce the motion blur to give a kind of hyper-real sensation. It's effective when used judiciously for a few shots, but you'd never want to watch a whole movie like that.
Isn't motion blur the best workaround to mitigate this problem?
As long as we're dealing with low frame rates, the motion blur in movies looks entirely natural. The lack of motion blur in a flicker situation looks extremely unnatural.
Which is why a lot of 3D games intentionally try to simulate motion blur.
And even if you're emulating an old 2D game designed for CRT's, I don't see why you'd prefer flicker over sample-and-hold. The link you provided explains how sample-and-hold "causes the frame to be blurred across your retinas" -- but this seems entirely desirable to me, since that's what happens with real objects in normal light. We expect motion blur. Real objects don't strobe/flicker.
(I mean, I can get you might want flicker for historical CRT authenticity, but I don't see how it could be a desirable property of displays generally.)
Motion blur in real life reacts to eye movement. When you watch a smoothly moving object, your eye accurately tracks it ("smooth pursuit") so that the image of that object is stationary on your retina, eliminating motion blur. If there are multiple objects moving in different directions you can only track one of them. You can choose where you want the motion blur just by focusing your attention. If you bake the motion blur into the video you loose this ability.
If there's motion blur on something I'm tracking in smooth pursuit, it doesn't seem particularly objectionable. (I guess I also wonder how accurate the eye's smooth pursuit is -- especially with fast objects in video games, surely it's only approximate and therefore always somewhat blurry anyways? And even if you're tracking an object's movement perfectly, it can be still be blurry as the video game character's arms move, its legs shift, its torso rotates, etc.)
Whereas if there's a flicker/strobe effect, that feels far more objectionable to me.
At the end of the day, my eyes are used to motion blur so a little bit extra on an object my eye is tracking doesn't seem like a big deal -- it still feels natural. Whereas strobe/flicker seems like a huge deal -- extremely unnatural, jumpy and jittery.
With strobing, moving objects still remain sharp when tracked.
Source @1:59: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk&t=119
Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you. A lot cheaper than restarting the production of cathode-ray tubes.
Yes, of course, "objectively" speaking, an OLED display is superior. It has much better blacks and just better colors with a much wider gamut in general. But there's just something about the way a CRT looks - the sharp contrast between bleeding colors and crisp subpixels, the shadows that all fade to gray, the refresh flicker, the small jumps the picture sometimes makes when the decoding circuit misses an HBLANK - that's hard to replicate just in software. I've tried a lot of those filters, and it just doesn't come out the same. And even if it did look as nice, it would never be as cool.
Retro gaming has to be retro. And to be honest, the CRT plays Netflix better as well. It doesn't make you binge, you see? Because it's a little bit awful, and the screen is too small, and you can't make out the subtitles if you sit more than two meters away from the screen, and you can't make out anything if you sit closer than that.
Does that mean we have to restart the production of cathode-ray tubes? Hopefully not. But you can't contain the relics of an era in a pass-through device from jlcpcb.
OLEDs are still behind on motion clarity, but getting close. We finally have 480 Hz OLEDs, and seem to be on track to the 1000Hz needed to match CRTs.
The Retrotink 4k also exists as a standalone box to emulate CRTs and is really great. The main problem being it's HDMI 2.0 output, so you need to choose between 4k60 output with better resolution to emulate CRT masks/scan lines, or 1440p120 for better motion clarity.
Something 4k500 or 4k1000 is likely needed to really replace CRTs completely.
Really hoping by the time 1000 Hz displays are common we do end up with some pass-through box that can fully emulate everything. Emulating full rolling CRT gun scan out should be possible at that refresh rate, which would be amazing.
Direct-view color CRTs topped out at about 300 nits, which is IMO plenty for non-HDR content.
I imagine one could target smaller CRTs as an idea though.
He had a giant ass CRT in his home (took up like half the living room in his tiny house). He got it from a facilities friend at a university that he was friendly with in like ~00s. They were getting rid of all these because flat-screens and projectors were much more in vogue at the time and these behemoths were simply dated.
I wonder if he still has it.
(This is a Weird Al reference)
The real estate agents, as a token of their thanks for allowing them to claw back 6% of an outrageously priced house, gave us back some of the money in the form of a $2500 gift card to BestBuy.
Of course, I immediately used it to buy a state of the art Samsung DLP rear projection TV with more inputs than you could shake a stick at including then new HDMI and VGA. I still have that TV, it looks pretty good for 720p and 46" or so, and has a chromecast dongle permanently stuck in its HDMI port to make it useable. It works amazing as an impromptu VGA monitor, and old games console system as well. The cost, with stand, was something like $2400 plus some change and I was left with a few dollars at the end.
I wanted to finish off the gift card so I looked around the store. There, off in the corner was an absolutely massive Sony CRT tv with a yellow sticker on the side. "$1.72". I gasped.
"Is that TV really $1.72?"
"Yup, the future is these DLP or these Plasma TVs, we're getting rid of our CRTs"
Instant purchase, closed out the card, set the delivery dates for both and waited.
A week later two guys showed up "we got two TVs, one of them if fcking heavy, where do we put 'em?"
The DLP went of course into the living room without any fuss, but the Sony...well that was the heavy one. It took two guys, working hard, to move all 39" of it up a flight of stairs into an upper bedroom. It sat in its place until we sold the house and decided to move. That's when I learned what a monster it was.
For absolutely foolhardy reasons, I decided to junk it, so I had to take it to the curb. I tried to lift it. No go. I was like trying to lift Mjolnir or free Excalibur. I had a friend come over. It took us about an hour to move it down that flight of stairs and drag* it on piece of plastic to the curb.
The trash people, even prepped for an unusually heavy pickup, had to make three attempts at it before they could get it. During that time it was at the curb, two cars stopped and tried to pick it up before giving up.
Looking up the specs now, it looks like it was probably somewhere north of 300 lbs (136 kg). I see on Ebay that today it's probably worth around $600-$1000. But damn, if it wouldn't cost that much to move it within the same county. I still have a 24" I'll keep until I'll die for old gaming reasons, but man, that other monster was too big.
A guy at work the other day moved a 72" TV by himself, like it was nothing. There's a reason some tech falls away.
People that play competitive Smash Bros Melee will only play on CRTs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/wr31qd/my_crt_vs_my...
"…scanlines were used to blend “pixels” together, plus “pixels” on a CRT tend to bleed color slightly and artists would also use that to their advantage."
I played some Mario Bros 3 and... I kept dying. Jumping too late led to running into holes and enemies. It was so bizarre, I couldn't believe how bad I'd gotten. Tried the next day, same deal.
Then I had a thought re delays. Pulled out my NES and hooked it up to the CRT and all that stopped
There was sufficient delay in the NES mini and modern TV it made a huge difference.
I'm sure I could retrain myself, but it was honestly stunned at how much of a difference it made
That said, if you ever get an urge to play Mario on modern hardware, try run ahead emulation. It’s quite magical.
Also, it's very very difficult to get the "look" right on an hdtv. The original graphics were intended to be displayed on a slightly "fuzzy" CRT, and if you care about the aesthetic, just transferring those same graphics to an hd-tv display often doesn't look right in a bunch of different ways. (Pixel aspect ratio, aliasing, frame blending effects, color bloom effects, interlacing artifacts, etc.) It's a very deep rabbit hole you can go down.
Sadly the 40" have a framebuffer and I didn't have a chance to find a way around it. The 43" in the post has a bypass.
My guess is that enthusiasts will get around these laws by modifying old vehicle frames. New emissions and safety standards tend to grandfather old vehicles in, so as long as the VIN says it was made before a certain date, you can avoid having curtain airbags, backup cameras, tire pressure monitoring systems, electronic stability control, etc. (There requirements are why new cars have so many computers in them.)
1. https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/9.23.20-EO...