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The Consumer Electronics Hall Of Fame: Sony Trinitron (2018)
- spectramax 7y agoGrowing 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 :)
- outworlder 7y ago> and deeply cared about the customer experience I'm guessing you missed the whole Betamax thing? That's tongue-in-cheek though. I think the Betamax experience is what motivated them to listen to consumers.
- bch 7y agoUntil their phone-home rootkit CDs[0]. Or is that also “listening to your customers?” /s [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
- supernova87a 7y agoAlso, the VAIO line of laptops, while stylish, came to me to represent a total lack of support or interest in the customer aside from selling them a cool-looking machine. Maybe it's related to the root-kit DRM, etc -- on looking back, maybe this reflected a mismatch of a company culture that was stuck in the hardware-focused customer experience (and where careful thought ended with the hardware), while the software was some add-on nuisance that would work itself out.
- OatMilkLatte 7y agoSony had a golden age in the 80s when they were making quality hardware for reasonable prices. It was unfortunately brief. By the late 90s, Sony was such a huge company with so many competing interests that I'm surprised they didn't accidentally sue themselves during the digital music fiasco.
- bacon_waffle 7y agoSome of those VAIO laptops really pushed the envelope, in terms of packing a lot of computer in to a small package. They were great when everything worked, but could be a real pain to repair.
- mywittyname 7y agoI think they were genuinely listening to their customers with Betamax, it's just a situation where the customers didn't use a product the way they said they would. Of course we customers think image quality is important! Well, turns out, people are pretty cheap and were totally happy with sacrificing image quality of TV recordings in order to maximize the amount they could record on their, like, $20-in-1970s-money tape.
- TheOperator 7y ago>80s/90s >Deeply cared about the customer experience. >Cared And then they started installing rootkits on their customers computers.
- agapon 7y agoI wonder if their change of attitude coincided with them becoming more of an American company rather than Japanese.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoChange of attitude may be when they bought movie companies and around the time the Playstation came to market. This put them in the middle of the conflict of interest between media producers and media consumers.
- nabla9 7y agoEizo Nanao Trinitron monitors where the absolute best. example: EIZO FlexScan T965 with FD Trinitron https://www.cnet.com/products/eizo-flexscan-t965-crt-monitor-21/ https://www.cnet.com/products/eizo-flexscan-t965-crt-monitor... Eizo monitors are still very good and I use them. They are very ergonomic and their settings, especially preset values just work.
- jotm 7y agoVAIO used to be a symbol of quality and status, as well. Really great laptops, how did Sony let them get so bad... They sold the brand, too.
- walrus01 7y agoThere'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.
- phkahler 7y agoI wonder if it's possible to wind a new yoke and make a vector monitor out of a Trinitron. That would be the ultimate gaming experience.
- mark-r 7y agoThe Vectrex was a video game that came with its own vector monitor built in. It was only black and white and relied on plastic screen overlays to get color in different parts of the screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex
- pryelluw 7y agoI dont own a trinitron, but own a huge and heavy crt for my snes gaming needs. It was free at a garage sale.
- flylikeabanana 7y agoFor Super Smash Bros Melee (released 2001), it's an existential issue. Many high-level interactions in the game move so quickly that issues playing on modern LCD TV's a non-starter. 1000 entrant tournaments need enough CRT TV's to support them. Tournament organizers often will keep a cache of CRTs specifically to host melee tournaments.
- aeyes 7y agoThe problem is the significant input lag most modern TVs have.
- outworlder 7y agoThere's an interesting video about the history of Trinitron. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk
- mywittyname 7y agoI love this guy. He's just wacky enough to be fun to watch by not so much that it's annoying. And his videos have the right amount of technical minutiae; detailed enough that you understand the important bits without having to pause the video for a while to chew on the explanation.
- willis936 7y agoHis content is most refreshing because he gives an engineer’s level of understanding. Most “tech personalities” don’t seem to dig very deep into the whys and hows of things.
- Tokkemon 7y agoYes! I was waiting for a reference to Alec's channel. So good!
- ben1040 7y agoMy 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.
- Johnny555 7y agoDo they only watch broadcast TV? Even DVD's look far better on my LCD flatscreen (though the TV or player may be upscaling to 720 or 1080) than on the old CRT in my parents house (admittedly not a Trinitron)
- jotm 7y agoI don't know what kind of nostalgic glasses people wear, but CRT TV quality degraded over time, became noticeably blurry. Had Panasonics, Sony, JVC, all looked like shit. Monitors with degaussing were fixable for a short time.
- TD-Linux 7y agoMost modern enthusiasts replace dried-up capacitors and retune the bias/constrast and focus voltages, which brings them back to stock condition as long as the tube isn't too heavily worn (a rejuve will sometimes fix that as well)
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoOften it's just a case of tweaking the focus knob on the flyback.
- jotm 7y agoDamn... I can't believe I didn't consider that. A thing to remember, thank you!
- 7y ago
- gandalfian 7y agoSomeone 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?
- johncalvinyoung 7y agoThere were a few Stateside too. I owned a ~30" widescreen flat CRT (secondhand) for a while before I got a cheap LCD.
- headsupftw 7y agoAnd 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.
- copperx 7y agoJobs loved Sony products. I'm sure they were an inspiration to create good products.
- mzs 7y agoThis 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.
- StillBored 7y agoOdd 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.
- deergomoo 7y agoAre they flat screens? Flat as in the glass is not curved of course, not flat as in thin. The flat ones are well known for developing a whole host of convergence/geometry issues that the curved ones either don’t, or take much longer to manifest.
- StillBored 7y ago"vertically flat" Yah, by the mid/late 1990's when I had a pile of them at work/etc they were mostly "flat" screens because that was sort of the default for a midrange+ monitor in that timeframe.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoDrifting convergence is usually caused by failing (if old) or poor-quality (if new) capacitors.
- gorgoiler 7y agoNo 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 https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/q406.jpg
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 7y agoWhen I worked at Best Buy circa 2000 we got lots of people who tried returning those because of the "lines" on the screen.
- cyberjunkie 7y agoYou could tap the monitor and all the strings would move in this wave-like manner. The two horizontal wires were so cool to have. They were the sharpest CRT monitors.
- WalterBright 7y agoI 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.
- WalterBright 7y agoSome 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.
- TD-Linux 7y agoIt's a thing people still do to this day, especially to use with game consoles modified to output RGB directly. https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=56155 https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=56155
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoAtari's early arcade cabinets used gutted consumer TVs around the same time.
- jimmaswell 7y agoMy computer CRT uses the trinitron style of aperture grille. VX920, 19", 1600x1200@75. Still looks great today alongside my newer 1440p144 flatscreen.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoHere’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.
- mzs 7y agoHonestly RAMDAC was more the limiting factor.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoMatrox could do it, later all-in-one Voodoos from 3DFX also, and anything with the shiny transparent blue chips where you could see the die from IBM [1], many better cards with chips from S3 had that. No blurryness at all. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/IBM_37RGB624CF22.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/IBM_37RG... edit: link
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoHad a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme and needed to do the same. Got it from a gamer who couldn't use it because most games at the times programmed the hardware directly, und thus anything you've set up with tools like Scitech Display Doctor/UniVBE/UniVesa got overwritten. Whereas i couldn't care less about that, happily enjoying two pages of DIN A4 in original size next to each other, crisp and clear on that highend monster :)
- gerbilly 7y agoI used to configure my own non VESA resolutions in the X windows config file. If the monitor had enough bandwidth you could push it past the standard VESA modes. I used to run bespoke resolutions like 1600x1200 in the mid 90s on a big Trinitron monitor I bought at a surplus store. IIRC the only limitation was that the resolutions had to be both divisible by eight.