
The Consumer Electronics Hall Of Fame: Sony Trinitron (2018) - proxybop
https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/the-consumer-electronics-hall-of-fame-sony-trinitron
======
walrus01
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.

~~~
flylikeabanana
For 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
The problem is the significant input lag most modern TVs have.

~~~
Grazester
Not on modern TV's and monitors. They have less than 2ms latency now.

~~~
p1necone
The vast majority don't, you _can_ get one that does but you have to do your
research. The "response time" listed in monitor/tv specs is not the same as
the input lag.

TVs are especially bad, in the default mode some of them have ~200ms input
lag. "Game Mode" usually brings it down to more like 20ms though.

Edit: did a google, don't know how accurate these are:
[https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-
lag](https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag)

~~~
mywittyname
Also, latency claims are often misleading. For example, the 2ms response time
is limited to grey-to-grey transitions.

A 20ms response time still means the signal is dropping every fifth frame in a
60 fps game.

~~~
aidenn0
response time has little to do with latency, it's purely a property of the
panel. At 60Hz refresh, an LCD will have a minimum of 16.7ms latency because
it buffers an entire frame before displaying. 20ms of latency would mean there
is additionally 3.3ms of lag, not that it takes 20ms for each frame (it's
already buffering the next frame in those 3.3ms, so the next frame will be
displayed 16.7ms later).

Many TVs buffer several frames for video processing in their default mode,
which is why they can have 100s of ms of latency when not in game-mode; the
response time is identical regardless of which mode it is in though, as the
response time is purely a property of the panel.

~~~
p1necone
Are you sure all LCDs buffer frames for a full frame duration before
displaying? I haven't heard that before. I was under the impression that they
basically start displaying them as soon as the GPU sends the frame - any
buffering being done on the GPU.

~~~
aidenn0
Thanks for asking. I'm pretty sure I was wrong. At 60Hz refresh rates it takes
16.7ms to _send_ a full frame to the display, so the minimum latency is 16.7ms
even with a CRT (Which has no buffering).

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gorgoiler
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](https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/q406.jpg)

~~~
cyberjunkie
You 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.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk)

~~~
mywittyname
I 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
His 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.

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StillBored
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.

~~~
deergomoo
Are 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
"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.

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ben1040
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.

~~~
Johnny555
Do 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
I 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
Most 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
Often it's just a case of tweaking the focus knob on the flyback.

~~~
jotm
Damn... I can't believe I didn't consider that. A thing to remember, thank
you!

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3fe9a03ccd14ca5
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.

~~~
mzs
Honestly RAMDAC was more the limiting factor.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Matrox 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_37RG...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/IBM_37RGB624CF22.png)

edit: link

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spectramax
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 :)

~~~
outworlder
> 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
Until 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_rootk...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal)

~~~
supernova87a
Also, 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.

~~~
bacon_waffle
Some 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.

------
mzs
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.

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WalterBright
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.

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gandalfian
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?

~~~
johncalvinyoung
There were a few Stateside too. I owned a ~30" widescreen flat CRT
(secondhand) for a while before I got a cheap LCD.

------
headsupftw
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.

~~~
copperx
Jobs loved Sony products. I'm sure they were an inspiration to create good
products.

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WalterBright
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.

~~~
TD-Linux
It'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)

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

