
Trinitron: Sony's Once Unbeatable Product [video] - sohkamyung
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFhzGEBQlk
======
neya
I urge every one in HN to give this masterpiece a read - "Made in Japan". It's
an autobiography of the founder of Sony himself and there is a section in the
book where he talks about the engineering and spirit that went behind these
TVs. In fact, he talks a lot about the engineering spirit that made Sony the
Apple of its era. If you liked Steve Job's biography, you'll certainly love
this.[1]

Cheers.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Made-Japan-Akio-Morita-
Sony/dp/045115...](https://www.amazon.com/Made-Japan-Akio-Morita-
Sony/dp/0451151712)

~~~
ousta
for me sony is not the apple of its era but much more. It is simply spoken the
greatest electronics company that ever existed and their peak was the AIBO

~~~
astrodust
No love for the PS2 which was the champion of its era?

By the time the PS3 rolled around Sony was getting a little too full of
itself, lacking the competitive fire that made products like the Walkman and
the Trinitron screen. It was a good console, but not one that redefined what a
console was.

~~~
laumars
> No love for the PS2 which was the champion of its era?

Champion perhaps in terms of sales, but the Dreamcast felt like the more
forward thinking console of that generation.

It introduced the console industry to online gaming, downloadable content (it
was free on the DC though), the idea of games being able to write portable
mini games. Ok, that was badly executed but the VMU still had other cool
quirks which was new for its era, like an LCD screen showing in game graphics.

The PlayStation 2, as nice as it was, was really just a hardware upgrade
rather than a paradigm shift

~~~
rbanffy
The Dreamcast ran a version of Windows CE. It's kind of a recurring pattern -
you partner with Microsoft, they learn from you, help you design just the
perfect API for your use case, then they launch either a competitor or
something that allows their licensees to compete against you.

At the time we called it a bacon and eggs partnership where they are the
chicken and you are the pig.

~~~
laumars
The Windows CE APIs were an optional interface rather than its primary OS. But
most developers chose to use Sega's APIs rather than CE.

~~~
rbanffy
Wasn't DirectX developed at more or less this time?

~~~
laumars
DirectX had already been out quite a few years by that point. I think I was
writing PC games in DirectX 6 or 7 (I forget which) around the time the
Dreamcast was released, so it was already quite a few versions along.

That all said, I don't recall DirectX being hugely popular - or at least for
games development - until around that era or not that long before. So it might
have felt like it was pretty new back then. Particularly with how some of the
new releases being quite a fundamental change from their previous releases (I
seem to recall one version of DirectX (possibly 7?) dropped the previous
version of Dx's DirectDraw APIs in favour of promoting Direct3D for all 2D
rendering).

------
jaclaz
I am probably too much an old-timer, but my TV is actually a Sony Trinitron
CRT, bought (for a very steep price) in 2002 or 2003 and still going strong.

For the record, it is a "beast", even if it is "only" 32" in size, it is
weighing around 70 Kg!

I bought it at the time with a specific table/support for it.

~~~
ksec
Considering you make it into 15 years of usage I think the price might be well
worth it?

CRT in the old days, especially Sony's Trinitron CRT were extremely well
designed and well made. Pretty much like ALL "Made in Japan" electronics sold
were designed to last. I have a LCD TV from Sony that is now on 12 years of
services, still going strong.

But as tech improves it seems the life expectancy of the product are taken
less into account.

I would bet the Sony CRT monitor will out last my Sony LCD TV. And OLED is
only going to be worst.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
One response to this is: the market has spoken, it's not interested in paying
for product longevity.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, but here we are.

~~~
adrianN
The market doesn't have enough information about product longevity to make an
informed decision. The only reliable data point I have as a consumer is the
warranty. The few brands that advertise longevity usually cost so much more
than cheap versions of the same product that it's hard to justify the
purchase. Why for example should I pay $150 for Patagonia jeans if I can get
ten pairs of El-Cheapo jeans for the same amount?

~~~
blowski
How many people get rid of TVs in perfect working order just to get something
with more features. I know at least 3.

~~~
ValentineC
If someone asked me for advice, I'd tell them to skip "smart TVs" and hook up
a Raspberry Pi with OpenELEC, or an Android TV box — resolution's probably the
only thing worth upgrading for.

------
doomlaser
Trinitron TVs definitely were the best. Famously, the Trinitron as a product
was a huge inspiration to Steve Jobs and influenced the design of the Apple II
casing.

My favorite trivia about them was that, for some engineering reason, every
Trinitron screen had a barely perceptible horizontal line artifact about 2/3
of the way down the display. This was true in every Trinitron, from
televisions to monitors even through the 1990s.

~~~
cjsuk
They were only barely perceptible until someone told you about them. Then you
saw them every time you looked at the screen :)

I do miss my 17" FD Trinitron monitor though. That was lovely. I didn't have
enough money or room for a 21"

~~~
taneq
I had the 19", saved up for it for my first computer. I used that screen for
years, it was wonderful. Permanently bent my desk.

~~~
cjsuk
Ah yes - mine had a notable bend in the shelf as well :)

------
KaiserPro
Up until quite recently sony's grade 1 CRTs were the only* thing you could
"grade" on. Even though they had stopped being manufactured in ~2006 there was
a strong second hand market up until at least 2011.

* well kinda, it was the only thing at the time able to properly display the anywhere near the dynamic range that 10bit log provide.

~~~
thinkythought
And there's still a very, very strong market for these as retro gaming
displays. I scored a few when they were dirt cheap used, and now people are
charging $400+ for an old 20in with a ton of hours on it, and even more if
it's a high end "broadcast" model

------
mschaef
One of my first large purchases of computer hardware was a Sony GDM-17SE1
monitor. This was in 1994, when a 17" display was unusual, and the display
went along with an 8MB 486DX/33 machine.

The display was expensive at the time ($2,300 in 2017 dollars), but lasted me
a good 6 or 7 years. By the time 2000 rolled around, I was doing most of my
computing on employer-owned machines and laptops, so my need for a desktop
display was minimal. (That didn't stop me, though, from a briefly owned 19"
Dell rebrand of a Trinitron display.)

Display quality on those CRTs was excellent, although the thin horizontal
wires were indeed noticeable if you looked.

~~~
Brockenstein
I ended up with a refurbed trinitron monitor in 2005 or so, it was 19 or 20
inches, 1600x1200, so sweet at the time. Thing weighed like 100lbs. After a
while you developed wire blindness, but people who saw it for the first time
would see the wires straight away... and would recoil in horror.

------
bcaulfield
I own and use a Sony FD Trinitron Flat Screen CRT every day. Works great. I
need a special adapter to connect it to my SHIELD. But it's outlasted several
DVD players and game consoles. It's my family's only TV. Hadn't thought about
how long I've owned it, but now realize it's been at least 12-15 years. I'd
thought about chucking it for a flat screen, but was waiting for prices to
come down. Then waited for HD prices to come down. Lately been waiting for 4k
prices to come down. Now, why wait? They're so damn cheap. But after all these
years, feels like I just... can't, and I just want to discourage too much TV
watching (rationalization). Should I hang on to this thing?

~~~
totalZero
My parents had a Trinitron when I was a kid; now they have a Samsung Quantum
Dot LED display. The Trinitron was nice, but I could spend hours watching
videos on the QLED. It's sharper, motion is crisper, and the colors are deep
and vibrant.

There's really no comparison in terms of picture quality. And the Samsung is
light enough that it can be easily mounted from the ceiling.

There are reasons why the market has shifted to some of these other
technologies. Apart from nostalgia and familiarity, you won't miss the
Trinitron if you upgrade.

~~~
bcaulfield
I mount my Sony from the ceiling I'll break the ceiling.

------
vanadium
I use a 14" RGB Sony Trinitron medical imaging monitor for retrogaming; PVMs
and BVMs are pretty much the gold standard these days, especially the
Trinitrons, for their quality and longevity.

If you think Trinitron quality is great in your average Television CRT, it's
_amazing_ in true RGB. Who knew SCART would keep bare-metal retrogaming alive?

------
pnut
Used to love degaussing mine at work, it was so strong it would have a
secondary effect on every monitor in a 6 foot radius.

------
Tade0
We had a Sony Trinitron and I remember them for being sturdy. Ours survived:

1\. An assault with a rock to the screen by my then three year old sister.

2\. Over 4000km in a shipping container.

3\. Putting a blank x-ray plate to the screen, which apparently created a
static shock powerful enough to disable the device(not sure about this one
because I was five when I did that).

~~~
exikyut
_You_ did #3?!

How'd you get access to a blank X-Ray plate? What do you mean by "device"
here?

~~~
Tade0
My father used to be a lecturer/chief technician at a university and his field
is medical equipment in general(the course he was responsible for was
something along the lines of "x-ray devices"), so we had a few of those lying
around in the house.

By "device" I meant the TV set. I remember hearing an obvious _zap_ as the
plate glued itself to the screen which went blank even though the TV seemed to
be still on.

~~~
gknoy
I'm really interested in learning why it would do that. I remember my screen
generating some static electricity (e.g. paper would stick), but I would not
have expected putting something on the screen to blank the tube. Is it a
special property of the x-ray plate? (Is it conductive?) This feels like
knowledge that will end up feeling obvious in hindsight. ;)

~~~
Tade0
To be honest I still have no idea. I know the plate(or actually _film_ ) was
made of some insulating material, because it accumulated a charge on its
surface the same way the screen did.

Unfortunately I never got an ELI5, even though I was literally five back then.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Was the xray plate like a thin film of plastic with a metalised coating; would
act as a large flat capacitor??

------
Nursie
I had a 17" Iiyama 'Diamondtron' (really trinitron) monitor through the late
90s and well into the 00s. It had amazing picture quality for the time, put up
with a fair amount of abuse and was still working perfectly when I gave it
away in '05.

But then flat screens hit and all of a sudden I could have more screen real
estate _and_ more desk space. No contest really, the future had arrived even
if the future was worse colour and response rates for a while.

I can't imagine the tonnage of CRT needed to recreate all the flat screens
around my home and office now.

~~~
tjoff
LCDs had _much less_ screen real estate compared to CRTs which could run much
higher resolutions. The first generations of LCDs were quite inferior on
everything but form factor and power consumption.

~~~
Nursie
> LCDs had much less screen real estate compared to CRT

Oh sure, in terms of resolution I went from the CRT being able to do 1600x1200
back to an LCD that could do 1280x1024 (IIRC). But the physical screen sizes
were bigger very quickly, that's what I meant.

CRTs were certainly superior in terms of image, response time and resolution.
But when I could buy a larger flat panel at 1280x1024 with a 16ms response
time for a couple of hundred pounds... buh-bye forever CRT.

~~~
tjoff
In practice CRTs went up tp 22", LCDs eventually matched that with the 20"
displays, but that didn't exactly happen overnight.

You are comparing an old and small CRT to an LCD of a different era. You could
have bought a better and just as big CRT instead if you had wanted to.

(Not saying that you should have, but I find it weird to state that LCDs were
bigger, that happened when the 24" widescreens arrived (at a ludicrous
price)).

~~~
Nursie
>> In practice CRTs went up tp 22"

Yeah but they were massive and still heavy. I'm not sure I ever met a CRT
monitor over 19". LCDs larger than that became cost effective sometime around
05-06 ish. It wasn't much after that I got a widescreen too.

~~~
rlonstein
> I'm not sure I ever met a CRT monitor over 19".

Many years ago I delivered and set up 22" and, I think 24", Cornerstone and
Sony branded monitors for banking, drafting, and medical use when I worked for
VARs. They were beasts to lift but beautiful displays. I personally bought and
used for many years a Mitsubishi Diamond CRT display with the NEC version of
the Trinitron tube because it had multiple inputs (and I had all kinds of
adapters) and would happily sync to nearly anything- Sun, Mac, SGI, pc,
composite.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I used to work on an Iiyama Pro 510 22".

It weighed more than 70lbs and literally bent my (very 90s) trestle desk.

The image was fine, but not memorably outstanding. I remember colour
calibration was a real problem.

I wasn't unhappy when LCD monitors took over.

------
Gregordinary
Not Trinitron (Edit: Yes it is), but I had a pair of Sony FW900 Monitors. I
got them free off of craigslist in 2010 when my laptop screen broke, I didn't
have an external monitor and I was unemployed.

Those things are beasts. A little over 90 lbs each, 16x10 aspect ratio, and
supported a resolution of 2304 x 1440 at 80 Hz.

[https://www.cnet.com/products/sony-gdm-
fw900/specs/](https://www.cnet.com/products/sony-gdm-fw900/specs/)

~~~
c3833174
Those are Trinitrons too

~~~
Gregordinary
Even says that on the page I linked. Thanks for pointing that out.

------
dmitriid
Trinitron TVs had a legendary near-mythical status in the USSR beginning
sometime in the 80s. It was _the_ TV to measure anything by. To the point that
"sonytrinitron" was common enough name everyone understood (much like "xerox"
or "jeep" became common names over there).

------
nsxwolf
But they have those damned horizontal tungsten wires going across the screen.
Once seen cannot be unseen.

~~~
abtinf
I had the same problem with these screens. Even after years of using Trintron
monitors at work, I was never able to ignore the lines. I've never heard
anyone else complain about them though - others seem to get used to them very
quickly.

------
b3b0p
In our house hold we had the infamous 40 inch XBR 700 (our neighbors had the
40 inch Mitsubishi equivalent, which was also very nice at the time). A 320 lb
glorious spectacle. We loved it. Eventually though it started to wear out and
because of it's shear weight and size, dad posted on Craig's List for free,
with the caveat the person(s) had to come get it without him helping. The
people who came were in for a rude awakening.

------
ksec
Do CRT monitor, given today's technology advance, still offers any benefits?
Does it still wins on colouring and latency when we have OLED?

~~~
badsectoracula
I have a cheap trinitron (here is hooked on a retro PC running Quake [1] and
here it is running a retro game i'm working on [2]). As far as colors go, it
has hands down the best looking image in any of my other monitors, including a
Dell U2713HM which i bought because all the artists in the (gamedev) company i
worked at used it and recommended it to me (and i also used it myself at work,
but wanted other opinions too), especially when it comes to contrast. Black
looks like black, not washed out gray and white looks like white.

The only issue it has is that it has been used a lot (i got it used) and the
guns are wearing out so it is a bit dim. I opened the case to calibrate it a
bit using a guide i found and it was mostly fixed, but i avoid using it for
too much because, well, things are only going to get worse. So i only use it
in short bursts mainly to play older 2D games, like Fallout, that look way
better in a CRT than any flat panel tech.

Which basically leads me to the main thing that CRT has over any modern tech:
native support for multiple resolutions. Pretty much any resolution between
320x200 to 1280x1024 looks as good as it gets (although 1024x768 is the best
resolution for this monitor due to size and refresh rate which maxes at 85Hz
in that). With flat panels you are locked at whatever the native resolution
and everything else looks blurry (if only Nvidia and AMD allowed integer
nearest neighbor pixel scaling so we could at least get some resolutions
crisper - that would also solve my main issue with 4K monitors, but that is
another story).

As far as OLED goes, OLED seems to have the potential to match and perhaps
surpass the best CRTs (and certainly my cheap one) but it first needs to come
in the form of a PC monitor - preferably one that doesn't get discolored areas
within the year. I have one of the first gen PS Vita handhelds which have OLED
monitors and the image quality is great, so i'd like a monitor that looks like
that.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/AdLcOGu.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/AdLcOGu.jpg) [2]
[https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg)

~~~
ksec
I know CRT is better than LCD, that is why i specifically mention OLED.

The prices of OLED will come down, expect the WOLED which LG current uses to
be around the same as Top Range LCD in 2019 or 2020.

MicroLED, will fix every problem OLED has. Or may be MiniLED which allows up
to 250ppi will be good enough.

Just wondering if there are anything CRT still wins, because even latency
problem is an non issues with OLED, HDMI connection and software issues aside.

~~~
badsectoracula
My problem isn't the price, it is that there is no actual OLED PC monitor.
There are OLED handhels, OLED mobiles, OLED tablets even OLED TVs, but no OLED
PC monitors. Dell was planning to release one, but a) it was way too big (30")
and b) they cancelled it.

So in terms of CRT comparison, CRT at the moment still wins when it comes to
colors and latency (since OLED doesn't exist yet for PC) and the ability to
support multiple resolutions. OLED (or any other *LED) will solve the first
two, but i doubt it'll solve the last one unless perhaps if we go to 500+ DPI
where the inaccuracies of fractional scaling wouldn't be visible. Assuming
Nvidia and AMD finally gives us the ability to scale without bilinear
filtering, of course.

------
baybal2
I was once a happy owner of last Sony's HDCRTs with hdmi input that I ordered
from Japan for almost double the price.

Luckily, I soon started my career and was sent as an exchange student to
Singapore. That put an end to my Quake 3 obsession,and lust for expensive
gaming gear.

~~~
Torgo
Did it have input lag or artifacting, to your recollection?

~~~
thinkythought
They did, but it wasn't worse than modern TVs. The paradoxical thing is
because everything went through the image processor,

digital input>processor>analog conversion>screen

was faster than

analog input>digital conversion>image processor>analog conversion>screen

There's a big thread on AVSforum with people whinging about this somewhere.
The upside is, they're still nice to play stuff like switch games on

EDIT: the processing of analog sources, like 480p dvds, laserdisc, etc was
superior to cheap modern TVs. They designed the scaler very well for older
formats and it really did look quite nice. I remember being totally
disappointed by my "high end" samsung tv in 2013~ or so in comparison. The
colors are handled especially nice even on like, VHS.
Artifacting/macroblocking/banding wasn't an issue with however they were
handling the effects/processing which was a noticeable advantage over the flat
screens of the era and even more recently

------
jdblair
I've had multiple Trinitron monitors over my career. Until LCDs got good I
would insist on having one. They had the least distortion and the best color.

2 monitors stand out in my memory:

In 1998 I bought myself a 19" name-brand Sony monitor, for $650! I used it for
10 years, until I finally replaced it with a pair of LCD monitors.

In the early 00s I worked for Sun Microsystems, and worked mostly from home. I
bought a 27" Sun-branded Trinitron monitor off an internal surplus equipment
auction and had it shipped to my home. It was so heavy it came on a shipping
pallet!

------
m3kw9
Had one of these at my parents and they just out lasted most of my friends TVs
and it was still working like new the day we finally was urged to switch to
LCD tv after they had it 20+ years

------
dsego
Previous discussion 1 day ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16048202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16048202)

------
busterarm
I still sorely miss my GDM-5010PT monitor. It gave up the ghost in about 2006,
losing the ability to display green. I didn't bother to service it and I'm
kicking myself because it was a reasonable repair.

That said, it really was a boat anchor as far as weight goes.

------
thirdsun
I think it's kind of sad that Sony's attention to detail and their status as a
premium brand has been fading in recent decades. There are few product
categories these days where Sony really is state of the art, although it seems
as if they're trying to position themselves as premium manufacturer again
(audio players, projectors come to mind) - a development I welcome, as I think
there's room for brands in consumer electronics that work with the care of a
small shop but can manufacture on a large scale.

edit: As other commenters pointed out there are some rather obvious categories
I seem to have missed, including cameras and gaming consoles.

~~~
ubermonkey
Sony's huge and complicated. Obviously they're still doing well as a purveyor
of gaming consoles, and their mirrorless cameras are AMAZING right now, but at
the same time their forays into other markets (computing, e.g.) haven't fared
well, and they went from market leader to also-ran in displays.

The thing that still shocks me, though, is the degree to which they blew their
market leading position in portable music players. They OWNED that market in
the 80s and 90s with the then-ubiquitous Walkman brand, which they extended
into the CD era with "Discman" players that seemingly everyone had when I went
to college in 1988.

Internal politics (I assume?) kept them from introducing a reasonable MP3
player until far, far too late for them to catch up. Some of their early
efforts literally required you to re-encode your music into another weird
format to use (ATRAC, I think?) -- and this while smaller players (Rio, etc)
had devices you could load by copying MP3s to a memory card. I assume this is
because Sony Music was afraid of the Mp3 revolution, but my understanding is
that Sony Electronics has always been far more profitable than Sony Music, so
it's hard to understand how that tail ended up wagging that particular dog.

(Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like
MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.)

And then, of course, Apple came in with the iPod and gathered up the high-end,
high-margin customers that were Sony's constituency.

~~~
dahauns
> (Oh, and there's also Sony's bizarre insistence on proprietary formats, like
> MiniDISC and MemoryStick -- that didn't help them, either.)

The Memory Stick was bizarre, no doubt about it. Minidisc (and with it,
ATRAC), however, was quite groundbreaking and had the potential to be huge.

As a lossy psychoacoustic codec, ATRAC predated MP3 for years in commercial
availability. Minidisc was both sturdy and flexible (esp. in comparison to
DCC), had adequate audio quality (and later ATRAC versions became really
good), and itcould have even been a contender for a 3.5" floppy successor in
both capacity and speed. Sadly, this was the worst days of Sony hubris, both
the physical format and the codec cost a lot to license, the use as a data
medium was needlessly crippled, and as such it never really took off globally.

I really wonder what would have happened if Sony and Philips could have
reconciled and worked together on this like they did with the CD, instead of
going all format war (with the DCC being the real head-scratcher here...).

~~~
ubermonkey
MiniDisc was definitely cool -- so cool that I bought a portable deck, and
dubbed some CDs down for travel because it was smaller than carrying a Discman
-- but it was also clearly doomed from the start. CD adoption was incredibly
rapid because it was so obviously better in every way than cassettes, and
offered (or could offer) superior fidelity vs vinyl.

Minidisk didn't have either of those going for it -- plus, Sony's complete (?)
control of it meant nobody else was making equipment. That nearly everyone
brought CD decks to market in the early/mid 80s meant that, over the course of
maybe 4 years, CD went from "rich dude toy" to "I got a CD boom box for high
school graduation".

You probably nail it with "Sony Hubris." To think they could recreate that
perfect storm of demand and success was bananas. People duplicated their music
libraries on CD, but no WAY were they gonna do that AGAIN after having bought
into "perfect sound forever" on CD.

(Well, at least "perfect sound for decades;" my oldest CDs are from 1987, and
the ones I still want to listen to still sound fine.)

------
_Codemonkeyism
Still remember the small Triniton Sony TV I've connected my Amstrad CPC to. It
had a glass in from of the tube and was portable with a handle.

------
jhoechtl
Is there currently a TV/panelntechnology to rule them all? I am very fond of
OLED technology - superb contrast and vivid colors, even on UHD.

------
homero
I mostly remember the two thin support wires crossing the screen. Loved my
Sony vaio desktop.

------
Digital-Citizen
I appreciate the quality of the screen, but I think the Mitsubishi flat
screens were a step up from Sony's Trinitrons. If I recall, the Trinitron were
a section of a cylinder (vertically flat) but the Mitsubishi 2040U (and later
short-neck version, 2060U or something like that) used a strategically
distorted picture to ultimately hit a flat screen (both vertically and
horizontally flat) and appear focused.

Sony would, in my opinion, ruin their name by mistreating people (both
customers and would-be customers) by publishing what we now call "fake news"
in the form of movie reviews by "David Manning" (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_\(fictitious_writer\))
for more) and distributing malware to Windows users on some audio CDs (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal)
for more).

The latter means that Windows users who may have legally acquired a copy of
the affected 58 known audio CDs (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Compact_Discs_sold_wit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Compact_Discs_sold_with_XCP)
for the list) and inserted them into their Windows OS computer may have
contracted software now identified as either spyware, a trojan horse, or a
rootkit called "XCP" that could not easily be removed even if the user refused
the EULA presented to them. Some of the software on these CDs appeared to be
copyright infringements from FLOSS as well. And to cap it all off, the
uninstaller for the malware only hid the software's entry in the Windows
add/remove software list without uninstalling the software. Even Sony BMG's
initial rootkit removal software exacerbated the problem further mistreating
users. Ostensibly this was all done in the name of preventing people from
making a copy of the audio tracks to their computers.

I don't recommend running Windows or any other nonfree software. But that's no
excuse for Sony's abuses. There's no good way to justify committing copyright
infringement against developers who are respecting a user's software freedom.
Nor is there good reason to justify Sony's choices to repeatedly subject users
to malware, stand in the way of a non-infringing use, or make malware hard to
remove.

I'm not keen to distinguish between the various arms of Sony, so I choose not
to do business with any of them. I also notice that despite all this malicious
behavior the people who run the various arms of Sony are apparently not keen
to distance themselves from the name "Sony".

------
dang
Url changed from [https://hackaday.com/2018/01/03/why-sonys-trinitron-tubes-
we...](https://hackaday.com/2018/01/03/why-sonys-trinitron-tubes-were-the-
best/), which points to this.

Generally we prefer to link to text rather than video, but there really isn't
much in that article, so it doesn't seem justified to link there. The HN
guidelines ask for original sources:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

------
kazinator
For the benefit of the kids, let me dredge up how these used to be lovingly
pronounced "tri nitron". :)

