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Comment by PearlRiver | Hacker News Reader

How many CRTs could you put in one standard sized shipping container versus LCD panels?

Saw a box at Costco the other night, looked like it was a queen-sized mattress. I doubt that they're less bulky than CRTs, just shaped different.

The largest CRT had a 43” viewable screen and had a volume of 0.75m³. A 43” LCD TV has a volume around 0.025m³. I’m not saying you could fit 30 packaged LCD TVs in the space of one CRT, but the volume is completely different. If you don’t think LCDs are less bulky, you probably never had a CRT.

But the size of the box is what, again? We're not measuring the volume of the tv, but the volume of the tv's box. I've never seen a tv box less than about 10" deep. Most are more like 14". They're what, even for a 43", nearly 5ft long by 4ft. That's 20 cubic feet, or something like it, for the crappy little smallest tv that they sell at Walmart. That would compare what, to a 13" crt (similar price points and so on). That probably fit in a box that was 8 cubic feet.

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.

Again, I’m going to disagree. Boxes for CRTs were massive. I had to RMA my 19” CRT in college and it was heavy, but worse was how wide and tall the box was. I had no car so had to painfully lug it a few blocks to the post office. I can’t quickly find package dimensions, but did find a YouTube video of a guy packaging a 13” trinitron for sale second had. The volume of the box was approx 0.075m³. The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. 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.

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.

>I had no car so had to painfully lug it a few blocks to the post office. I'm sure that it was awkward, and it without a doubt was heavy. But heaviness is only one factor in shipping difficulty, the other is volume. For comparable tvs, flatscreens are going to outdo them on that count.

>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?

...No, even the CRT TV my parents picked up off the side of the road in about 2001 was something like 30" diagonal.

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.

>You're just going to assume that? There were absolutely Trinitron TVs.

And yet you didn't answer the question.

In case you didn't read the usernames, I'm not the one with the Trinitron TV.

The 13” Trinitron was a TV. Believe it or not, it’s not easy to find the retail package dimensions for CRTs anymore (maybe Crutchfield pages on the Wayback machine have them).

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.

Sure, LCD TVs come in boxes that have padding.

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.

The other thing is that TVs are nearly trapezoidal prisms, but the boxes are nearly cubes. There’s a lot of dead space to fill with some structure, especially if the boxes need to be stackable.

Also I wonder if there was some density limit too. Were CRTs more dense and if they were was it enough to be limiting factor in shipping.

I don’t understand. You doubt that LCDs are less bulky than CRTs? How is that possible?

Because we were talking about how much space they take up in a shipping container, not in your living room. That means comparing the boxes they ship in, not the tv themselves.

CRTs were often deeper than they were wide, they were incredibly bulky in all dimensions.

It's not as if CRTs didn't also have package and padding.

You doubt they are less bulky? A screen the size of something you claim as large as "queen-sized mattress" would dwarf the largest of CRTs. It would also be drastically lighter. I'm guessing the weight of the thing would still be manageable by one person if not for the awkwardness of the size. Modern TVs are damn near weightless when compared to CRTs. Even your "queen-sized mattress" example could fit so many more into a shipping container than you could with CRTs. Even if the CRTs could fit more with respect to volume, their weight would quickly become a limiting factor.

"less bulky". I'm flabbergasted at the implication

They are absolutely, 100% less bulky than CRTs. If you saw a box the size of a queen mattress it was presumable for a massive screen. A CRT that's 100" or whatever would be insanely large and weigh so, so much.

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