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The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
- jsheard 10mo agoDon't sleep on that Shank Mods video linked at the end, it's insane that he managed to pull that off. He also made a second video (not linked) which shows off more of the actual hardware. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgkw3uu19V8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgkw3uu19V8
- HardwareLust 10mo agoThose two videos are the real story here.
- mercwear 10mo agoLink to the video where he goes to get the tv (diff channel, same creator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoWhat'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.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoI didn’t catch that in the video? The part about marketing photos in the restaurant?
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI'm really trying to read between the lines of what the previous owner said really, mostly because there's no other photos of the TV, and it was so rare people thought it was a fake flex product. I have a feeling they sold to very very few people.
- yftsui 10mo agoSony didn’t give it to the restaurant; instead the restaurant purchased it during Japan’s economic boom.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoSomething feels off about that, somehow it was the only photo of the TV. Its like if he was the only one interested in a big TV?
- Animats 10mo agoBeyond some size, antique items become less valuable, because of the sheer headaches of moving and storing them. This thing qualifies. Antique Teletype machines are not very expensive. People have bought Linotype machines for $200. Trying to find a home for a locomotive is very tough. (When the Pacific Locomotive Society lost their lease at Hunter's Point Naval Station, they had a big problem. Most of their fleet is now stored at Brightside on the Niles Canyon Railway.)
- tecleandor 10mo agoLike pianos. Unless they are very good, their value tends to go in the negative numbers with time, as you have to move them somehow. In my parents place, an apartment in a second floor, there's an upright Yamaha that my dad bought in the late 70s or early 80s. I think they brought them in through the stairs, but like 10 years ago an elevator was added to the building lobby, and I don't think there is enough space to move it around. I think the piano will remain with the apartment forever :D
- Macha 10mo agoPianos also have a shelf life. It’s usually a couple of decades depending on use and maintenance levels, but eventually maintaining it turns into just building a whole new piano in the same box
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
- mark-r 10mo agoThe video was posted on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093
- gbil 10mo agoPersonal anecdotes from my early mid teen years 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
- rayiner 10mo agoIn high school we used them as a high voltage source to make lifters: https://youtu.be/jrfBrrDfdEA https://youtu.be/jrfBrrDfdEA
- sevensor 10mo agoMy high school electronics teacher had a screwdriver that was permanently welded to the terminals of a capacitor he’d pulled from a TV set. “This is why you use a resistor to discharge one of these things,” he said.
- rayiner 10mo agoTIL. I always used a screwdriver to discharge those capacitors lol.
- vl 10mo agoIt was high voltage but low current. I touched high-voltage circuit in the back of TV accidentally while poking in it as a teen, and while it was quite unpleasant, all it did was burn a hole in the skin of my finger. It eventually healed.
- merpkz 10mo agoI still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes.
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- huflungdung 10mo ago[dead]
- loloquwowndueo 10mo agoTFA immediately slammed me with an intrusive cookie banner so I didn’t read it, here’s another option about this TV : https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/retro-gamers-save-one-of-the-last-45-inch-crt-tvs-in-existence/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/retro-gamers-save-one... at least ars technica didn’t cookie-gate me from the get go.
- 0_____0 10mo agoNot cookie gated for me. You can easily read the content without interacting with the cookie dialog.
- TechSquidTV 10mo agoI remember when the video came out. What, 2-3 years ago? What an event.
- telotortium 10mo agoOne year ago today
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- indigodaddy 10mo agoIn 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.
- rationalist 10mo agoThe real question is, did she return it after the football game? Apparently many people used to do that?
- indigodaddy 10mo agoNo, we kept it, until we didn't want to lug it around anymore or LCD came around..
- TacticalCoder 10mo agoI 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).
- Jolter 10mo agoPresumably the wife would at least be able to watch TV on that big screen.
- stuff4ben 10mo ago$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?
- rob74 10mo agoKeep 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...
- tacker2000 10mo agoyea, most people would have dumped the stock back then and not HODL'ed it through the 2000s until now...
- kergonath 10mo agoSome people found the faith and got onboard in 1998, though, when the iMac took the world by storm. If only I held for a bit longer… :D (I never had $40k to invest, though, so the returns would be smaller anyway).
- nancyminusone 10mo agoS&P 500
- kilpikaarna 10mo agoI 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. Change My Mind. Happy Holidays!
- rob74 10mo agoIt'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...
- cm2187 10mo agoA 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.
- sprayk 10mo agoall CRTs televisions were either 60Hz or 50Hz depending on where you are in the world
- cm2187 10mo agoYes 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.
- deadbabe 10mo agoIs 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?
- mikepurvis 10mo agoI 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.
- jsheard 10mo agoAnd 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.
- alnwlsn 10mo agoNot true, you can make one yourself by hand if you want to, it just won't be very high quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PzoAReMXOE 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.
- numpad0 10mo agoThe 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.
- ssl-3 10mo agoIndustrially, it's very nearly a completely lost tech. Last I heard the only new-production of electron guns for CRTs was one singular source in Russia, but that was before the war started. Even preservation of already-manufactured CRTs is difficult. The last CRT rebuilder in France closed years ago. Some folks purchased some of the equipment and tried to get it set up at the Vintage Television Museum in Columbus, Ohio, but ultimately failed. It's in the care of a dude in Maryland now but is not in production status. AFAICT, the singular remaining entity presently capable of working on existing picture tubes is Colorvac, in Germany: https://colorvac.de/service/ https://colorvac.de/service/ --- In the unlikely event that new CRT production ever ramps up again, it will be a lot like the reboot of Polaroid film was: So much institutional knowledge will have simply evaporated that even though the new product works, it will never work exactly the same as it once did.
- cgriswald 10mo agoIn 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.
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- jsheard 10mo agoThe 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, roughly what we'd now call 1440p, about eight years before the first 1080p LCDs arrived. Those were still sought after well into the LCD era for their high resolution and 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.
- sgarland 10mo agoI remember in the mid ‘00s having a 19” that did 1600x1200 at (I think) 85 Hz. Damn thing was a tank, but I loved it. So crisp.
- ck2 10mo agoWas 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)
- bluedino 10mo ago
- BubbleRings 10mo agoIf 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.
- asciii 10mo agoMy family bought our first one and we used it keep it on a carpet floor - boy was that an electrifying experience
- RedShift1 10mo agoNot just shock you across the room, but shock straight into your next life.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoSo we are all in post-tube life?
- Scubabear68 10mo agoWhen 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…
- preisschild 10mo agoYeah the tube is essentially a large capacitor :P I also learned electronics by shocking myself often
- nojvek 10mo ago
- api 10mo agoMy 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.
- qingcharles 10mo agoI had the 36" widescreen and I don't remember any issue with the power requirements, but I just calculated the screen area difference. The 43" 4:3 is 60% more area and the 45" 4:3 is 75% more area, so they are vastly bigger screens.
- bane 10mo agoSometime 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.
- eduction 10mo ago> 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.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10mo agoAlso ... > And news articles in 1990 said Sony dealers would not allow any bickering. [...] no discounts. ... that's probably "dickering", and an amusing typo. ("Hey, you can't squabble here!")
- dustractor 10mo agoMy 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.
- bitwize 10mo agoI have a 43-inch LCD monitor and even that's unwieldy (but still manageable by one man). A 43-inch CRT is the kind if equipment whose weight, bulk, and power draw warrant a brown M&Ms clause in a band's performance contract.
- mitchell_h 10mo agoway 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.
- racl101 10mo agoI remember owning a 27 inch RCA CRT. It was a pain to carry. I could not imagine this thing.
- qingcharles 10mo agoA few years back someone near me was giving away a (basically) brand new 40" Sony one with the stand. Took three of us a lot of effort to get that thing into my house.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoSo you have the other surviving specimen in the world?
- qingcharles 10mo agoNo, the 40" ones are common. They were sold in the USA. You can find them on Craigslist etc (where I found mine). The 43" and 45" are the rare ones. Here's a pic of one: https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/ce52bb/behold_my_first_dive_into_crts_the_40_behemoth/ https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/ce52bb/behold_my...
- actionfromafar 10mo agoOh no, another useless craving I didn’t know I had, unlocked. :)
- Tade0 10mo agoI think I saw one as a child in the mid 90s - it belonged to an upper-middle class Kuwaiti whose at the time preschooler daughter was approximately as tall as the device, which was laid on the carpeted floor. At the time there were a lot of private import items in Kuwait - particularly cars - so it's not impossible it was this particular model. I mean, what other TV could boast being the height of a four year old?
- stronglikedan 10mo agoMy buddy had something like this. All I remember is it took four people to carry it.
- vunderba 10mo agoSomewhat related but back in my university days, I spent practically all my savings from a summer part-time job to buy a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT. I absolutely loved that thing, but at the end of each year I dreaded having to lug it home and then haul it back to the dorms again. The elevators often didn’t work and climbing 10 flights of stairs while carrying a 70 lb (31kg) cube was brutal. It’s not often you buy a piece of electronics and get a complimentary workout regimen thrown in.
- postalcoder 10mo agoI think I’m legitimately traumatized by how heavy CRTs were. The memories of the pain carrying them induced is etched in my body. I dont feel nostalgic in the least about them.
- bob1029 10mo agoI am nostalgic about their operational principles, but I was already willing to give these up for the convenience of an LCD panel circa 2003. We had a lot of LAN parties to attend back in those days.
- xattt 10mo agoThe draw of the LCD in the 2000s was the idea that the image you were seeing was a pixel-perfect representation of the creator’s intent.
- smj-edison 10mo agoFunny that—I'm literally using a shader on my SNES emulator to get a sense for how the graphics would look on a CRT!
- xattt 10mo agoI think it was a time before the vintage feels for CRTs really. Sure, there were greybeards naysaying the coming of the LCD due to motion artefacts and smearing but the rest of users just wanted something high-res and flicker-free.
- thunderbong 10mo agoPreviously on HN What happened to the world's largest tube TV? [video] 689 points, 295 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42497093
- timzaman 10mo agoWhy write a story about someone else's story? Just go to the shank mod vid directly
- butlike 10mo agoThe text equivalent of a "reaction video" where they add nothing except pasting their face over 30-50% of the screen
- oofoe 10mo agoA very long time ago, sometime during the first geologic age, I worked at a facility on Queen Street in Toronto. On the street side of the building, we had two Flame suites (very high-end (for the time) realtime editing and effects, used for composing television commercials). Each one had a Sony Trinitron TV of about this size as the client preview monitor. They were amazing, but every time a streetcar passed outside, they would get involuntarily degaussed!
- haxtormoogle 10mo agoI want to call false on the claim that this is s the biggest crt ever made. I used to work in a computer recycling center in the monitor testing area bak in 2007. One day a giant 60 inch blue aluminum industrial sized sony trinitron was brought in by the fork trucks for me to test. There was 2 of them from a large conference room at xerox or kodak or used by a tv station. They were bigger than an average pallet and took a forklift to move them.
- jsheard 10mo agoThat was most likely a rear projection unit, they looked kind of like CRTs but it's different technology. Sony did make them although they weren't marketed as Trinitrons AFAIK.
- bitwize 10mo agoProjection displays were CRTs, but they were small (10" or so) and monochrome. Three of them—one each for the red, green, and blue channels, were each oriented and focused to project a clear image at the exact same spot on the screen, overlaying each other to form a single color image. Projection TVs were even prone to CRT "raster burn", perhaps even more so than single-tube TVs due to the brightness of the image required, which is why Nintendo instruction booklets had stern warnings not to use their consoles with projection TVs.
- db48x 10mo agoYea, but the screen you could see wasn’t a CRT tube. It was just a projection screen but unless you looked closely you’d be unlikely to notice.
- BuffaloEric33 10mo agoTell me you lived in Rochester, NY without saying so. Now I want a plate...
- vachina 10mo agoYeah. I remember growing up with a Trinitron flat CRT that I thought was humungous. TIL 43 inches is the upper limit for CRTs.
- belter 10mo ago2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471
- rconti 10mo agoFor fairly obvious reasons, most people were unaware this set ever existed. In the 90s (~1993?), my family replaced our old 1970s-era 19" Sony Trinitron with a HUGE new TV, a 35" Toshiba. At the time, a "big" CRT was a 32". I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available. (PVM-4300 stragglers aside). A couple years later (1995-6?), a friend's family bought a 40" Mitsubishi, which I _thought_ was the largest CRT made. But, again, Sony aside, it probably was.
- ilamont 10mo ago> I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available I helped friends move one of these old monsters out of an apartment in MIT's west campus 15 years ago. Don't remember the brand but it seemed even bigger than 35". It was shockingly huge and heavy and they lived on the top floor. As we were doing this, I was thinking, how come the original owner didn't get a projection TV? They have been available since the 80s, the separate components were easier to manage, and the screens were far bigger.
- ssl-3 10mo agoProjectors (front/rear/enclosed/whatever) could produce a huge image, but they had their own issues. In a bright room, the contrast was typically lacking. Even on relatively late versions like the Toshiba 57HX93 (a 57" 16x9 doghouse from ~20 years ago with an integrated scaler and a 1080i input), which I personally spent some time with both in Toshiba form and as $10k Runco-branded units. Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT. And viewing angle is an issue, too: Whether front- or rear-projection, one of the tricks to improve brightness (and therefore potential contrast) is to reduce the angle of light transmission from the screen. Depending on the room layout, this can mean that people in seats off to the side might get a substantially darker image than those near the middle. (This applies to all projectors; film, CRT, DLP, LCD, front, rear, whatever -- there can be a lot of non-obvious tech that goes into a projection screen.) And CRT projectors were fickle. Their color convergence would change based on external magnetic fields (including that produced by the Earth itself), so they needed to be set up properly in-situ. A projection set that was set up properly while facing East would be a different thing when rotated 90 degrees to instead face North: What once was carefully-adjusted to produce 3 overlapping images that summed to be pure white lines would be a weird mix of red, blue, and green lines that only sometimes overlapped. The CRT tubes themselves were generally quite impressively small for the size of the image that they'd ultimately produce. This meant pushing the phosphor coatings quite hard, which translated into an increased opportunity for permanent image retention ("screen burn") from things like CNN logos and video game scores. Plus: They'd tend to get blurry over time. Because they were being pushed hard, the CRTs were liquid-cooled using glycol that was supposed to be optically-clear. But stuff would sometimes grow in there. It was never clear whether this was flora or [micro]fauna or something else, but whatever it was liked living in a world filled with hot, brightly-lit glycol. Service shops could correct this by changing the fluid, but that's an expense and inconvenience that direct-view CRTs didn't have. And they were ungainly things in other ways. Sure, they tended to be lighter (less-massive) because they were full of air instead of leaded glass, but a rear-projection set was generally a big floor-standing thing that still had plenty of gravity. Meanwhile, a front-projection rig ~doubled the chance of someone walking by occluding the view and came with the burden of a hard-to-clean screen (less important these days, but it used to be common for folks to smoke indoors) and its own additional alignment variables (and lens selection, and dust issues, and, and). So a person could deal with all that, or -- you know -- just get a regular direct-view CRT. Even today where projectors use friggin' laser beams for illumination and produce enormous, bright images with far fewer issues than I listed above, direct-view tech (like the flat LCD and *LED sets at any big-box) is still much more popular. (But I do feel your pain. When I was a teenager, my parents came home from shopping one wintry night with a 36" Sony WEGA for me to help unload. Holy hell.)
- lizknope 10mo agoI had a 36" 4:3 Toshiba CRT that had component video inputs for 1080i signals. If you displayed a 16:9 aspect ratio signal you could turn on a mode to change the display area to make the electron beam display all 1080 lines in that area so the other system didn't need to add black bars. This way you got the full 1080i resolution in a 4:3 TV I used to go to a local high end home theater store and they had the Sony 40" XBR TV that weighed 300 pounds or something crazy.
- sholladay 10mo agoI have a Samsung SlimFit HD tube TV from 2005 or so. It’s such an interesting piece of retro tech because it is widescreen, supports 1080i, and has HDMI, but it is a CRT! It’s also quite a bit thinner than most tubes. Super unusual. I got it because LCDs always looked terrible to me and plasmas were still very expensive. https://www.crutchfield.com/S-WXftqFAhnMu/p_305TXR3079/Samsung-TX-R3079WH.html https://www.crutchfield.com/S-WXftqFAhnMu/p_305TXR3079/Samsu...
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- khalilravanna 10mo agoSuch a cool piece of technology. I will say though I enjoyed our 200 lb monster CRT of yore I’m thankful we have Mike Chi and the RetroTINK 4K now. Being able to play any old console on any modern TV while still having it look accurate it is a dream.
- lanthade 10mo agoPreviously on HN: The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471 Overview of the KX45ED1 / PVM-4300 (Worlds Largest CRT) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588259 Interestingly that first link is to the same URL as today's yet it's from June 22 2024. The linked article however has today's date as the publish date. There's no indication that the article was updated from what was published originally.
- tylervigen 10mo agoThis reminds me of my grandparents’ old, huge rear projection TV (RPTV). It was 4ft wide, 4ft tall (with the base), 2ft thick, and weighed 200lbs. This was the intermediary between CRTs and flat screens for me. They had it installed in their basement. However, later they remodeled the basement stairway to add a turn. With the new layout, it would be impossible to bring back up the TV the way it was brought down. There was no other way to access the basement (it only had storm cellar windows), so they left it there when they moved. I think about the new owners sometimes and wonder what they ended up doing. Perhaps they disassembled it, or maybe it’s still down there collecting dust.
- rendx 10mo agoIn the video, the guy is looking for some official contact at SONY to authorize an interview with a long-term SONY CRT designer and employee who already agreed to give it but can't do without official approval. Public channels all yielded no response. Leaving this here just in case! :)
- lrvick 10mo agoI have the second largest, and 25 others, hooked up in my garage, fed by a modular synth, a pc, retro consoles, and several DVD and VHS players. Would still probably trade it all for one of these. CRTs are literally precision particle accelerators in glass vacuum tubes we mass produced and put in peoples homes just to electronically reproduce entertaining images, and there is not a factory left on earth that can make them anymore. It is some of the wildest shit humans have ever done.
- femto 10mo agoThis place claims to still be a manufacturer, with no plans to discontinue. https://www.thomaselectronics.com/ https://www.thomaselectronics.com/ Edit: Reddit claims that Thomas aren't really a CRT manufacturer. https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/1c9t5sf/company_that_manufactures_crt_tubes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/1c9t5sf/company_...
- lrvick 10mo agoNo tube manufacturers exist, though some refurbish old tubes and pair them with new electronics.