from Hacker News

The Consumer Electronics Hall Of Fame: Sony Trinitron (2018)

by proxybop on 12/4/19, 8:22 PM with 118 comments

• by walrus01 on 12/4/19, 9:06 PM

  There's a whole community of "CRT enthusiasts" who search these out on Craigslist now, and buy them for retro video gaming setups. A big Trinitron CRT 27 to 36 inches in size, in good condition, is actually appreciating in market value now due to how many of them have been trashed.

  Sony PVMs (professional video monitors), such as used in a tv production studio have been increasing in market value. Similar tubes but with more advanced electronics.

  To the best of my knowledge there are zero remaining manufacturers of CRTs in the world.

• by gorgoiler on 12/4/19, 11:56 PM

  No mention in this article of the famous support wires found in Trinitron PC monitors.

  These wires were needed in all Trinitron products, but the more exacting demands of high resolution (1024 lines!) meant the support wires were quite visible horizontally, especially on uniform backgrounds like a gray Windows desktop. They divided the screen into three equal areas.

  Despite this apparent flaw, Trinitron still had huge market share amongst enthusiast PC owners. Maybe it was brand loyalty, or maybe they really were much better quality than any other CRT out there?

  At least as I remember it, if you wanted to take (or be seen to be taking) color reproduction seriously, then you had to have a 21” Trinitron. I guess the black horizontal support wires became just as much a part of brand signaling as the RGB lozenges in the logo. Lots of people I knew had amazing Trinitron CRTs and all they did was edit Word documents!

  Kind of like a Leica red dot, or the white spot on Dunhill pipes.

  https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/q406.jpg

• by outworlder on 12/4/19, 9:10 PM

  There's an interesting video about the history of Trinitron.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk

• by StillBored on 12/4/19, 10:31 PM

  Odd that they spend so much time talking about alignment, because all of my trinitron based CRT monitors over 20" needed to be adjusted seemingly on a daily basis to converge correctly across the whole screen. This was something that I rarely remember doing with the cheap shadow mask monitors (although frankly they were generally smaller screens) and at a lower resolution.

  The trinitron monitors I had were running 1600x1200 or better and with a small font the convergence would give white text a purple shadow/etc. Very 1980's apple ][, which a lot of people seemed to be OK with, or maybe its just because they ran much lower resolution TV signals or much larger fonts.

• by ben1040 on 12/4/19, 9:28 PM

  My mother-in-law inherited a mid-90s Trinitron TV when her father died in 2005. It's been the TV in their guest room since.

  Their flat panel TV died a couple weeks ago and they put that TV in their living room as a stopgap.

  The picture tube on that TV is still so good after all this time, they now don't want to bother buying a new TV.

• by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 on 12/5/19, 4:09 AM

  Here’s a comment from down the rabbit hole:

  >Back in the day I spent an afternoon configuring my old 19" CRT like that. I ended up with settings like 800x600x167Hz, 1024x768x133Hz, 1600x1200x89Hz and 1920x1440x73Hz. Many refresh rates were much higher than the stated documentation, and I ran it for years like that.

  I’m amazed at that those resolutions and refresh rates were achieved so long ago. LCDs were so thin as to ge unstoppable, but definitely came with trade offs.

• by spectramax on 12/4/19, 9:01 PM

  Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s with Trinitron TVs and Walkmans, seeing the SONY logo even to this date evokes a deep sense of trust, brand loyalty and pleasure in using their products. I think there is tons to learn from companies like SONY, Braun, Apple, IBM (old IBM that is). They innovated relentlessly, put excellence in design as part of the ethos, understood UX/UI, and deeply cared about the customer experience. Trinitron TVs were part of my childhood, a window into the world of imagination...in color :)

• by mzs on 12/4/19, 10:17 PM

  This only touches on the CRT portion of the TV. I had a 19" Sony from '82. While other manufacturers were trying to save costs with fewer and less heavy duty parts, because the quality of the picture was better, Sony could charge a premium and did not skimp on the rest. It's evident when you look at the tuner/RF, power, and chassis what a quality product it was. Coming from Soviet TVs that would start on fire when they worked, it was no comparison.

• by WalterBright on 12/5/19, 12:01 AM

  I finally got rid of my 1970's Trinitron TV because LCDs were so much lighter and sharper and didn't warm up the room. I used it for something like 25 years.

• by gandalfian on 12/4/19, 10:15 PM

  Someone paid £1400 for a 32" widescreen sony crt with digital tuner in 2006. By 2009 they ebay'd it to me for £32. A pound an inch. Shows how fast the market collapsed when flatscreens became common. (Good tv, only stopped using it last year when the lack of hdmi got too much).

  Incidentally why did europe get a last generation of widescreen CRT's but the USA basically went from humoungous 4:3 CRT's straight to wide flatscreens?

• by headsupftw on 12/4/19, 10:15 PM

  And Sony Walkman/Discman! To me Sony in the 80s/90s was like today's Apple. In 2000s I bought a small Sony box that could stream Comcast cable TV from my house to my PSP when I was out and about so that I could watch my own TV while playing poker at my friend's house.

• by WalterBright on 12/5/19, 12:33 AM

  Some people in the 1970's converted them into inexpensive color computer graphics monitors.

  I don't mean hooking up to the RF or composite video input, but directly connecting to the guts of it to get a crisp bitmapped image.

• by jimmaswell on 12/5/19, 4:07 AM

  My computer CRT uses the trinitron style of aperture grille. VX920, 19", 1600x1200@75. Still looks great today alongside my newer 1440p144 flatscreen.