TFA goes into the industrial engineering efforts associated with LCD manufacturing, but I don't think those wins would have shown up without a huge market for TVs.
CRTs got cheap too (relatively speaking), but the scale was smaller back then. The bulkiness and high power requirements of CRTs limited their use to a narrower set of applications, and the overall global economy was smaller. They never saw this scale.
Today the number of TVs plus commercial displays plus phones plus laptops plus gaming consoles plus cars plus consumer appliances with screens is just gigantic, and they all use flat panel displays. While there are different variations on flat panels there are ultimately only a few core technologies and there's a lot of overlap in how the fabrication process works for all of them. They are all delicate sandwiches of micro-electronics and light-modifying layers and various exotic materials that block, reflect, or emit light.
not all things.
Things that can scale are things that have a non-linear scaling production output vs input. For the LCDs (and semi-conductors), the area of the output is squared, if you increased the size of the production by a linear amount (let's say, the glass width). But the work required is not quadrupled!
Things that are linear in scaling - e.g., a burger cooked, does not scale the same way (at least, not for a McDonalds burger) - it's a one to-one, even if you tried to make it scale up by having more cooks/more machines etc. Cars, to a similar degree, but the fixed cost of a car factory/assembly line vastly out weight the lack of scaling i suppose, and so cars did get cheaper but not from the scaling manufacturing, but from cheaper components, and more automated steps etc.
Now LCDs are used at effectively every scale - tiny embedded systems, watches, phones, tablets, laptop displays, monitors, TVs, projectors, and even billboards. CRTs can’t scale like that.
None of you are looking at this right. We were talking about how much space to ship one of them. And here you are talking about how thin the tv is when you stare and gawk at it, not the box it came in. Reddit-tier commentary.
Costco wasn’t selling 24” CRTs, though, they were selling 27” & higher up to projection. These were massive, maybe three to a palette at most. CRTs needed to get deeper as they got larger, so their packaging grew in all three dimensions. LCDs only get bigger in two dimensions.
Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office. It is a production to move it. I could fit at least four of the package boxes for the 27” monitor I just bought for my in laws in footprint of that display.
>The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. I
That's what, to hang on the back of a minivan front seat for the kids to watch? Or a computer monitor? No one is buying televisions like that. Could you even find one retail that small?
>I have a 65” TVs that came in a box approximately 68”x38"x8". That’s rough equivalent to the package volume of a 24” CRT.
And both of those are comparable, are they not? That's about the max (non-gargantuan) television people get, and the 24" crt was pretty close to the max size back in the day.
>Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office.
You're being unfair in this comparison. That Trinitron isn't a tv is it, it's a monitor right? The CRT televisions were rarely Trinitrons, even most 25" televisions are half it's size. If you have to stoop to corner cases to win the argument, did you really win?
My 25” Trinitron is a TV. It’s no bigger than any other 25” TV of the time (maybe even a little smaller since it’s a late model) I’m being absolute genuine and trying to be as fair as possible.
I’ve spent a lot of time with TVs and monitors. I kept my CRT monitors for far too long because they had better resolution than any LCD panels well into the 2000s. I still have two CRTs for retro games and AV (the previously mentioned Trinitron and a beloved 12” PVM). I have to move them, find space for them, maintain them.
I’m not trying to win anything, just share my experience. I could easily fit inside of a 19” CRT box (curled up). I could barely cover my legs with a 19” LCD box.
They got much bigger than that.
> That Trinitron isn't a tv is it,
You're just going to assume that? There were absolutely Trinitron TVs.
If there's anyone being uncharitable here, it's you.
And yet you didn't answer the question.
So did CRT TVs.
The padding was probably a lower percentage of the volume, because they were honkin' great cubes to start with, but don't try to pretend that LCDs in boxes come to the same size as (or even remotely comparable to) equivalent-viewing-size CRTs in boxes.
"less bulky". I'm flabbergasted at the implication
It's not as if CRTs didn't also have package and padding.