5 ms·

CRT Manufacturing

130 points by throwup238 3y ago

phendrenad2 3y ago
I think that in about 20 years there will be enough demand for vintage computing that someone will be able to start up a new CRT plant. Getting all of the materials and specialized equipment will be hell even then.
thsksbd 3y ago
$200 000 for a crt plant? Thats $2.5 millions today. There's no way we could do that today.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Sunspark 3y ago
  The YouTube guy Linus Sebastian has a net worth of 85 million apparently. So he could do it as a hobby if he wanted to.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >The YouTube guy Linus Sebastian has a net worth of 85 million apparently. Any source on this? I know he said in a video he was offered 100 million to sell Linus Media Group, but I don't remember ever hear him talk about his net worth since he usually keeps this stuff private, as he's always playing poverty and acting cheap everywhere, even though you should drop this act when you own a multi million dollar McMansion with pool and a drive a Porsche Taycan.
    - ahartmetz 3y ago
      Many (edit: self-made) rich people have such habits. It's part of why they are rich.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Investments and assets make you rich, not being overly stingy with pennies, otherwise every coupon snipping grandma would be rich.
        ahartmetz 3y ago
        There's a correlation that might imply causation: many rich people have "overly frugal" habits. I'm thinking of Warren Buffett, Nicolas Berggruen ("wears shirts until they fall apart"), the Albrecht brothers (founders of Aldi), and others that I'm too lazy to look up now. I guess it's less common among people that became rich with software - I can't think of a case.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Warren Buffett and the others didn't get rich by wearing tshirts till they fall apart wtf. I also do that and I didn't become rich. Can we please drop this BS propaganda that Warren Buffett snips coupons and that the IKEA billionaire drives a 30 year old Volvo, propaganda made so that they can seem relatable to the average peasant, when the IKEA billionaire runs a multinational tax dodging scheme to not pay Swedish levels of taxation. That's how you get rich.
        nxobject 3y ago
        You could say they're being frugal through methods that only people making that level of money and business have access to, like setting up shell tax havens and not providing free snacks at work. But this just amounts to saying you need lots of money to make lots more money.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
rwmj 3y ago
This is quite an interesting corporate video about how black and white CRTs were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32yYfTVIzBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32yYfTVIzBE
tadfisher 3y ago
This is probably apocryphal: early CRTs had their yoke coils wound by hand, which became a lost art as winding machines took over for volume manufacturing.
Lammy 3y ago
> 9450 S. W. Barns Rd Portlandians: Are Barns Rd and Barnes Rd the same thing? Looks like a nice spot if so: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/45.50901/-122.77468 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/45.50901/-122.77468 That building is now a SFX agency: https://hellohinge.com/ https://hellohinge.com/ (No relation to the dating app) Also curious if the TEKsystems employment agency next door took its name from Tektronix.
- cmdpint 3y ago
  Quite likely. The Tektronix Industrial Park is only a mile or two from there. There's also a museum that may be of interest here: https://vintagetek.org/ https://vintagetek.org/
  - marshray 3y ago
    Yes, that's the same museum as the site with the article. If you ever find yourself in Oregon, it's a wonderful place to visit if you like electronics, manufacturing history, etc.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- sponaugle 3y ago
  Yes, that Barns without the e is a mistype, which is funny given it was the Oregonian. You can see a copy of TekTimes: https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TekTalk_Sept1958.pdf https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TekTalk_Se... They reference the building on 9450 Barnes Rd.. and indeed that building is still there today.
xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
I would buy a new CRT terminal in a heartbeat. It's a shame that there isn't really a market for them, and that this whole segment of technology is gradually being lost to time. I ended up trashing a few older CRTs that had pretty severe burn-in and bad contrast. As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  In a hundred years, the only ones left will be in museums… there won’t be anyone around who remembers using them first-hand.
  - observationist 3y ago
    Longer than that. There are still WWII vets around and it began more than 80 years ago. People will still be using and maintaining existing CRTs for decades - there are still a lot in operation run by hobbyists, old people, and hipster types that make use of them. I'd say we have at least another 30 years before they are entirely relegated to museums and collections, and at that point, who knows what life expectancy will look like. There could be people alive even now who'll be among the first to achieve immortality, if the rate of improvements to longevity starts exceeding the speed at which people age against their life expectancy. We live in interesting times.
- p1necone 3y ago
  With the latency + perfect blacks of modern OLED displays you could probably build a "fake" CRT with some purpose built image processing in to fake the look of subpixels etc. Stick it in a housing with appropriate inputs, have it curved behind a curved glass panel.
  - crtified 3y ago
    The recently released product 'Retrotink4k' is somewhat along these lines.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
MalcolmDwyer 3y ago
"A $200,000 plant..." Those 1954 dollars comes out to about $2.3 million today. That seems really low for a factory. Could you set up manufacturing for anything for $2 million today? (Besides Etsy shops...)
- skhr0680 3y ago
  It’s pretty cheap to build a factory when it basically a building with some tables inside
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    Perhaps, but CRT manufacturing is far more sophisticated than that.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Do it in China. It's way easier and faster. Guangzhou has like 15 manufacturers who can build CRTs for you with delivery mid-Feb. You'll have to do QC, though, because they have al sorts of image issues. But I think it would be way easier to get one of them to be good (for a price) than to build these yourself unless you're already an expert with access to the facilities.
  - nxobject 3y ago
    Oooh – I need to find a replacement for "standard" 9" tubes, for both industrial hardware and for compact Macintoshes... do you know who they would be?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pixl97 3y ago
  Depends where and what exactly you're doing. Based on someone else's post, the land value alone is far higher than the total inflation adjusted costs. As for how low the cost was, we'd need to see what they produced there, versus what parts they bought at other places and assembled into a product at that location.
mazingo 3y ago
[dead]
mattkevan 3y ago
My first job as a 16 year old was working in a TV repair shop. I learned how to test PCBs for dry joints, how to make an electrolytic capacitor explode and most importantly of all, how to discharge the anode before starting work. It was amazing how many bits there were inside an old-fashioned TV, but even in the mid-90s the business was on its last legs as modern TVs couldn’t be repaired.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  How often did they need repair after most of the circuitry went solid-state? I have a small CRT TV that was manufactured in 1998 and it still works perfectly. So does my slightly larger LCD TV manufactured in 2006. My parents' CRT TV from 1989 was replaced in 2010 by an LCD TV but it still worked too. I have never personally encountered a TV that stopped working.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    A lot of TVs and other electronics in the 2000s failed because of the capacitor plague.
  - saidinesh5 3y ago
    A lot of the time it is just 1-2 capacitors that pop and damage the power supply or something similar and once they are replaced, they work again for years. There's some "tv repair shop" channels on youtube that's interesting/nostalgic to watch.
    - mattkevan 3y ago
      On the older ones it was mostly checking the soldering - years of being warmed up and cooled down would cause cracking. A quick touch-up with some fresh solder would generally sort things out.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    Flyback transformers and electrolytic capacitors loved to die in that era. They were big components and easy to resolder so they were repaired relatively frequently. It's survivorship bias; most people only had one or two TVs every decade.
maxglute 3y ago
Are there good software filters to simulate CRT effect in desktop enviroments? I see some pretty compelling retrogaming emulations on OLED. I don't miss my trinitron.

130 points by throwup238 3y ago

I think that in about 20 years there will be enough demand for vintage computing that someone will be able to start up a new CRT plant. Getting all of the materials and specialized equipment will be hell even then.

thsksbd 3y ago

$200 000 for a crt plant? Thats $2.5 millions today. There's no way we could do that today.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Sunspark 3y ago
The YouTube guy Linus Sebastian has a net worth of 85 million apparently. So he could do it as a hobby if he wanted to.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >The YouTube guy Linus Sebastian has a net worth of 85 million apparently. Any source on this? I know he said in a video he was offered 100 million to sell Linus Media Group, but I don't remember ever hear him talk about his net worth since he usually keeps this stuff private, as he's always playing poverty and acting cheap everywhere, even though you should drop this act when you own a multi million dollar McMansion with pool and a drive a Porsche Taycan.
  - ahartmetz 3y ago
    Many (edit: self-made) rich people have such habits. It's part of why they are rich.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Investments and assets make you rich, not being overly stingy with pennies, otherwise every coupon snipping grandma would be rich.
      - ahartmetz 3y ago
        There's a correlation that might imply causation: many rich people have "overly frugal" habits. I'm thinking of Warren Buffett, Nicolas Berggruen ("wears shirts until they fall apart"), the Albrecht brothers (founders of Aldi), and others that I'm too lazy to look up now. I guess it's less common among people that became rich with software - I can't think of a case.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Warren Buffett and the others didn't get rich by wearing tshirts till they fall apart wtf. I also do that and I didn't become rich. Can we please drop this BS propaganda that Warren Buffett snips coupons and that the IKEA billionaire drives a 30 year old Volvo, propaganda made so that they can seem relatable to the average peasant, when the IKEA billionaire runs a multinational tax dodging scheme to not pay Swedish levels of taxation. That's how you get rich.
        nxobject 3y ago
        You could say they're being frugal through methods that only people making that level of money and business have access to, like setting up shell tax havens and not providing free snacks at work. But this just amounts to saying you need lots of money to make lots more money.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

rwmj 3y ago

This is quite an interesting corporate video about how black and white CRTs were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32yYfTVIzBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32yYfTVIzBE

tadfisher 3y ago

This is probably apocryphal: early CRTs had their yoke coils wound by hand, which became a lost art as winding machines took over for volume manufacturing.

Lammy 3y ago

> 9450 S. W. Barns Rd Portlandians: Are Barns Rd and Barnes Rd the same thing? Looks like a nice spot if so: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/45.50901/-122.77468 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/45.50901/-122.77468 That building is now a SFX agency: https://hellohinge.com/ https://hellohinge.com/ (No relation to the dating app) Also curious if the TEKsystems employment agency next door took its name from Tektronix.

cmdpint 3y ago
Quite likely. The Tektronix Industrial Park is only a mile or two from there. There's also a museum that may be of interest here: https://vintagetek.org/ https://vintagetek.org/
- marshray 3y ago
  Yes, that's the same museum as the site with the article. If you ever find yourself in Oregon, it's a wonderful place to visit if you like electronics, manufacturing history, etc.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
sponaugle 3y ago
Yes, that Barns without the e is a mistype, which is funny given it was the Oregonian. You can see a copy of TekTimes: https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TekTalk_Sept1958.pdf https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TekTalk_Se... They reference the building on 9450 Barnes Rd.. and indeed that building is still there today.

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago

I would buy a new CRT terminal in a heartbeat. It's a shame that there isn't really a market for them, and that this whole segment of technology is gradually being lost to time. I ended up trashing a few older CRTs that had pretty severe burn-in and bad contrast. As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
In a hundred years, the only ones left will be in museums… there won’t be anyone around who remembers using them first-hand.
- observationist 3y ago
  Longer than that. There are still WWII vets around and it began more than 80 years ago. People will still be using and maintaining existing CRTs for decades - there are still a lot in operation run by hobbyists, old people, and hipster types that make use of them. I'd say we have at least another 30 years before they are entirely relegated to museums and collections, and at that point, who knows what life expectancy will look like. There could be people alive even now who'll be among the first to achieve immortality, if the rate of improvements to longevity starts exceeding the speed at which people age against their life expectancy. We live in interesting times.
p1necone 3y ago
With the latency + perfect blacks of modern OLED displays you could probably build a "fake" CRT with some purpose built image processing in to fake the look of subpixels etc. Stick it in a housing with appropriate inputs, have it curved behind a curved glass panel.
- crtified 3y ago
  The recently released product 'Retrotink4k' is somewhat along these lines.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago

MalcolmDwyer 3y ago

"A $200,000 plant..." Those 1954 dollars comes out to about $2.3 million today. That seems really low for a factory. Could you set up manufacturing for anything for $2 million today? (Besides Etsy shops...)

skhr0680 3y ago
It’s pretty cheap to build a factory when it basically a building with some tables inside
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Perhaps, but CRT manufacturing is far more sophisticated than that.
renewiltord 3y ago
Do it in China. It's way easier and faster. Guangzhou has like 15 manufacturers who can build CRTs for you with delivery mid-Feb. You'll have to do QC, though, because they have al sorts of image issues. But I think it would be way easier to get one of them to be good (for a price) than to build these yourself unless you're already an expert with access to the facilities.
- nxobject 3y ago
  Oooh – I need to find a replacement for "standard" 9" tubes, for both industrial hardware and for compact Macintoshes... do you know who they would be?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pixl97 3y ago
Depends where and what exactly you're doing. Based on someone else's post, the land value alone is far higher than the total inflation adjusted costs. As for how low the cost was, we'd need to see what they produced there, versus what parts they bought at other places and assembled into a product at that location.

mazingo 3y ago

[dead]

mattkevan 3y ago

My first job as a 16 year old was working in a TV repair shop. I learned how to test PCBs for dry joints, how to make an electrolytic capacitor explode and most importantly of all, how to discharge the anode before starting work. It was amazing how many bits there were inside an old-fashioned TV, but even in the mid-90s the business was on its last legs as modern TVs couldn’t be repaired.

philipkglass 3y ago
How often did they need repair after most of the circuitry went solid-state? I have a small CRT TV that was manufactured in 1998 and it still works perfectly. So does my slightly larger LCD TV manufactured in 2006. My parents' CRT TV from 1989 was replaced in 2010 by an LCD TV but it still worked too. I have never personally encountered a TV that stopped working.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  A lot of TVs and other electronics in the 2000s failed because of the capacitor plague.
- saidinesh5 3y ago
  A lot of the time it is just 1-2 capacitors that pop and damage the power supply or something similar and once they are replaced, they work again for years. There's some "tv repair shop" channels on youtube that's interesting/nostalgic to watch.
  - mattkevan 3y ago
    On the older ones it was mostly checking the soldering - years of being warmed up and cooled down would cause cracking. A quick touch-up with some fresh solder would generally sort things out.
- throwup238 3y ago
  Flyback transformers and electrolytic capacitors loved to die in that era. They were big components and easy to resolder so they were repaired relatively frequently. It's survivorship bias; most people only had one or two TVs every decade.

maxglute 3y ago

Are there good software filters to simulate CRT effect in desktop enviroments? I see some pretty compelling retrogaming emulations on OLED. I don't miss my trinitron.