What's wild is this TV was not mass produced, which added to the cost, plus the shipping costs. Not only did he get the TV but he got the premium model too, I think Sony intentionally gave the restaurant that model so they could take some marketing photos, and sure enough, that was it.
1. Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….
2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.
CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!
EDIT: I meant to reply to the other thread with the dangers of CRTs
If you like playing with old hardware, be aware that old CRTs have a gotcha that can getcha: they hold a charge that can shock you across the room, and they can hold that charge for weeks or more. Google how to discharge it before poking around in a CRT.
When I was about 12 I got an old TV in my room which I of course decided to take apart to figure out how it worked.
I was VERY smart and of course unplugged the TV before doing anything.
My flat head screwdriver brushed against the wrong terminal in the back, I was literally thrown across the room several feet, and my flat head screw driver was no longer usable as the tip had deformed and slightly melted.
I later found an electronics book that had a footnote mentioning grounding out the tube before going near it…
Sometime in 2006 we bought a house and our realtor gave us a gift certificate for $2500 at Best Buy (weird, but...those were the days). A brand new, state of the art 720p DLP projection TV was just a hair under that - we still have it and it works great. But I had a couple dollars to burn off on the card.
I happened to have noticed that they were trying to clear out any remaining floor models of CRTs. One of them was an absolutely giant Samsung, memory says it was >34", but I'm not sure how big...with a sticker on it for, and I'll never forget this...$.72.
Soooo two big TVs for the price of one!
Long story short, we were moving out of that house, CRT tvs were long since obsolete and that TV hadn't even been turned on for at least 5 years. So we decided to throw it away. I had never picked it up before and had forgotten how heavy CRTs could be. I ended up having to get two friends to come help me move it to the curb, it was well over 250 lbs. The trash company also complained when they had to pick it up and had to make a return trip.
I kinda regret getting rid of it, but it was among the heaviest pieces of furniture in our house.
In the 90s I was tasked with fixing our CEOs computer and entered his office to see the largest CRT I’ve ever seen in my life. (It was not a PVM-4300, though. This one was sat on a metal table.) The size of it was shocking. I was more shocked, however, to find out he used it at 640 x 480. I never saw him use it so maybe he played games on it… from the moon.
The Sony FW900 was the peak of desktop CRT monitors, and it came out in 1999 so it or one of its rebadges might have been what you saw. That was much smaller than the PVM-4300 at 24" but with a much higher max resolution of 2304x1440@85hz, about eight years before the first 24" 1920x1200@60hz LCDs arrived.
Those were still sought after well into the LCD era for their incredible motion clarity, but I think LCDs getting "good enough" and the arrival of OLED monitors with near-zero response times has finally put them out to pasture as anything but a collectors item.
Was turned onto the the FW900 from hardforum years before LCD was available/reasonable
Now I have a FW900 sitting in a closet for decades because I can't lift it anymore
Also will never forget I was taking a walk in the woods years ago and in the middle of nowhere, no houses/apartments for miles, there was a FW900 just sitting there like someone must have thrown it out of an airplane but of course impossible as it was intact and inexplicable WTF (when got home made sure mine was still in the closet and had not somehow teleported itself)
It's fascinating that the biggest CRT ever made had a 43" diagonal, which is at the low end for modern flatscreen TVs. But yeah, I can see why the market for this beast was pretty limited: even with deinterlacing, SD content would have looked pretty awful when viewed from up close, so the only application I can think of was using it for larger groups of people sitting further away from the screen. And even for that, a projector was (probably?) the cheaper alternative...
I had the first high-def Sonys in the US market. I worked at a high end audio video store in the mid 90s and they gave it to me cheap as they couldn't get rid of it.
Even at 34", the thing weighed 200lbs (plus the stand it came with). I lived in a 3rd floor walk up. I found out who my true friends were the day we brought it back from the store. I left that thing in the apartment when I moved. I bet it is still there to this day.
I'd forgotten how heavy CRTs are. A local surplus auction has a really tempting 30's inch Sony CRT for sale cheap, but when I saw it was over 300lbs I had to pass on it.
A lot of those CRT screens had a pretty low refresh frequency, you were basically sitting in front of a giant stroboscope. That was particular bad for computer screens where you were sitting right in front of them. I think they pretty much all displayed at 30Hz. I can imagine how a gigantic screen can get pretty uncomfortable.
Yes and no. Half of the screen was refreshing at a time, so it was really flashing at 30Hz. You still had a visible stroboscopic effect. True 60Hz and 100Hz screen appeared in the late 90s and made a visible difference in term of comfort of viewing.
The only time the electron gun was not involved in producing visible light was during overscan, horizontal retrace, and the vertical blanking interval. They spent the entire rest of their time (the very vast majority of their time) busily drawing rasterized images onto phosphors (with their own persistence!) for display.
This resulted in a behavior that was ridiculously dissimilar to a 30Hz strobe light.
Did they really do that, or did the tubes just ran at 2x vertically stretched 640x240 with vertical pixel shift? A lot of technical descriptions of CRTs seem to be adapted from pixel addressed LCDs/OLEDs, and they don't always seem to capture the design well
$40k invested in AAPL in 1990 would be worth about $40m today. $40k is about what $100k is today. So what stock would you invest $100k in today, that in 35 years would give you a similar return?
Keep in mind that AAPL came pretty close to becoming absolutely worthless around the mid 1990s before Steve Jobs rode to the rescue. Which is to say, you would really need a crystal ball to make such predictions. I could definitely see an "alternate universe" where Apple fared a bit worse and Commodore didn't mismanage the Amiga as much, then Commodore could be in the place where Apple is now...
I know I'm ngmi with this attitude, but I just find it hard to believe there even could be such a thing. All the numbers point towards us hitting up against planetary limits, at some point something's got to give.
Positive news about e.g. solar PV shrinks away to some miniscule number when compared against the big picture, do nothing to address the myriad other things such as species loss or peak-phosphorus and the gains are eaten up by Jevon's paradox (or LLM datacenter buildout) anyway.
Even the past performance of AAPL feels like it's more to do with central bank funny money than the real economy. Numbers keep going up but in the rral world everything gets increasingly enshittified.
My gamer friend found a 23-inch CRT monitor on ebay and the box it showed up in was large enough to ship a washing machine. I can't imagine what it would be like for a 43-inch TV.
way back when, I had a 32" CRT from SGI attached to an o2. So heavy I had to buy a special desk to hold it. I can't imagine carrying that PVM-4300 anywhere.
In the mid 90s (feel like it was 1996 but can't remember) my grandmother bought us a 40" Mitsubishi right before the Super Bowl. The thing was insane. Took 6 people to move it.
> In Japan, it sold for 2.6 million yen, but in the United States, it retailed for $40,000, a significant markup. To be fair, shipping them across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States must have been expensive.
If they were going all the long way around to the Atlantic that would indeed explain the markup. Not sure why they would though.
My lord... this thing probably requires the power grid to do a generation dispatch when you turn it on.
When I was a kid I lived down in Southeastern Kentucky (Somerset) which gets a lot of its power from the local lake via hydro. My grandfather had this large (not this big but big) tube TV, the old wooden case kind. When you turned it on it'd take about ten seconds in which you could hear tube heaters tinkling, followed by a "grrrnnnnnzzzzz" sound as the tube came to life. I remember my uncle joking that the lake level started visibly falling.
Between LCDs/etc. and LED lighting, the amount of efficiency improvement we've done in home electronics is wild. I can now put my hand right on an equivalent to 100W light output light bulb and it's just... warm.
Is it true we just don’t really have the technology anymore to build a CRT? We’ll never see a new CRT ever again, unless it’s the passion project of some billionaire?
The tubes start generating X-rays above 5kV or whatever(some docs say 15kV), and you need leaded(literally Pb melted in) glass for the screen to block it, unless you could find a substitute material(Sn nanoparticles or something) or you're fine with <5kV brightness for the tube whatever that amounts to. So you can't pitch it as a nicely eco friendly product, and the glass can't be easily recycled(Pb removed from glass).
Otherwise they're not THAT complicated. They're a lot like lightbulbs. Certainly not as exotic as LCDs.
If you want a good one, you'll need the materials, machines and skills to make good ones. Probably not too likely unless you like building factories for fun and no profit.
I think it’s more that the production lines that existed to build them in volume have all been long dismantled, so it would be prohibitively expensive and all the people involved would be doing it for the first time.
And even if you found the money to resurrect the production lines, modern regulations probably wouldn't look too kindly on making new consumer goods with several pounds of lead in each unit. Better set aside your morals and enough money to buy some politicians while you're at it.
I wonder about the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) of that one: she's already not too thrilled about my vintage arcade cab and its 21" CRT. Arcade cab which has already been to three different countries with us and, no, the movers typically ain't that happy when they have to move it (I already moved it by myself but that's quite the endeavour).
He also made a second video (not linked) which shows off more of the actual hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgkw3uu19V8
1. Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….
2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.
CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!
EDIT: I meant to reply to the other thread with the dangers of CRTs
I was VERY smart and of course unplugged the TV before doing anything.
My flat head screwdriver brushed against the wrong terminal in the back, I was literally thrown across the room several feet, and my flat head screw driver was no longer usable as the tip had deformed and slightly melted.
I later found an electronics book that had a footnote mentioning grounding out the tube before going near it…
I happened to have noticed that they were trying to clear out any remaining floor models of CRTs. One of them was an absolutely giant Samsung, memory says it was >34", but I'm not sure how big...with a sticker on it for, and I'll never forget this...$.72.
Soooo two big TVs for the price of one!
Long story short, we were moving out of that house, CRT tvs were long since obsolete and that TV hadn't even been turned on for at least 5 years. So we decided to throw it away. I had never picked it up before and had forgotten how heavy CRTs could be. I ended up having to get two friends to come help me move it to the curb, it was well over 250 lbs. The trash company also complained when they had to pick it up and had to make a return trip.
I kinda regret getting rid of it, but it was among the heaviest pieces of furniture in our house.
Those were still sought after well into the LCD era for their incredible motion clarity, but I think LCDs getting "good enough" and the arrival of OLED monitors with near-zero response times has finally put them out to pasture as anything but a collectors item.
Now I have a FW900 sitting in a closet for decades because I can't lift it anymore
Also will never forget I was taking a walk in the woods years ago and in the middle of nowhere, no houses/apartments for miles, there was a FW900 just sitting there like someone must have thrown it out of an airplane but of course impossible as it was intact and inexplicable WTF (when got home made sure mine was still in the closet and had not somehow teleported itself)
https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-kw-34hd1
Even at 34", the thing weighed 200lbs (plus the stand it came with). I lived in a 3rd floor walk up. I found out who my true friends were the day we brought it back from the store. I left that thing in the apartment when I moved. I bet it is still there to this day.
https://www.mediacollege.com/equipment/sony/tv/kd/kd30xs955....
148 pounds! A total nightmare to get into our car and into our house.
WORTH IT.
I've never really experienced it because I've always watched PAL which doesn't have that.
But I would have thought it would be perceived as flashing at 60 Hz with a darker image?
https://youtu.be/3GJUM6pCpew
The only time the electron gun was not involved in producing visible light was during overscan, horizontal retrace, and the vertical blanking interval. They spent the entire rest of their time (the very vast majority of their time) busily drawing rasterized images onto phosphors (with their own persistence!) for display.
This resulted in a behavior that was ridiculously dissimilar to a 30Hz strobe light.
Positive news about e.g. solar PV shrinks away to some miniscule number when compared against the big picture, do nothing to address the myriad other things such as species loss or peak-phosphorus and the gains are eaten up by Jevon's paradox (or LLM datacenter buildout) anyway.
Even the past performance of AAPL feels like it's more to do with central bank funny money than the real economy. Numbers keep going up but in the rral world everything gets increasingly enshittified.
Change My Mind.
Happy Holidays!
If they were going all the long way around to the Atlantic that would indeed explain the markup. Not sure why they would though.
When I was a kid I lived down in Southeastern Kentucky (Somerset) which gets a lot of its power from the local lake via hydro. My grandfather had this large (not this big but big) tube TV, the old wooden case kind. When you turned it on it'd take about ten seconds in which you could hear tube heaters tinkling, followed by a "grrrnnnnnzzzzz" sound as the tube came to life. I remember my uncle joking that the lake level started visibly falling.
Between LCDs/etc. and LED lighting, the amount of efficiency improvement we've done in home electronics is wild. I can now put my hand right on an equivalent to 100W light output light bulb and it's just... warm.
Otherwise they're not THAT complicated. They're a lot like lightbulbs. Certainly not as exotic as LCDs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PzoAReMXOE
If you want a good one, you'll need the materials, machines and skills to make good ones. Probably not too likely unless you like building factories for fun and no profit.