Analog tech was so cool, everything now is so perfect it’s boring
I’ve never had a CRT TV that lasted more than ten years.
All of mine did but got increasingly quirkier over time. Sometimes you needed to hit it on top to get the picture looking right. Audio got crackly. The component cables needed a fine touch to display the picture correctly.
That sort of fun stuff.
Sometimes you needed to hit it on top to get the picture looking right.
Ah yes, percussive maintenance.
It took skill to do it right. If you hit it too hard, it got worse, so the smack needed finesse.
My parents black and white set from the sixties was like that. They refused to replace it until the mid eighties.
Good old cracked solder joints and corroded switches.
The soup pot we used to whack the TV with when it cut to static has outlasted the TV and the channels displayed on it.
I’ve never had a CRT fail on me.
I got a CRT from 1983 a few weeks ago. Still works fine, just needed a little color adjustment.
Never having owned a CRT television (LCD was king when I became an adult) I have to say that that looks fucking sick. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a bulky one until now.
Retro games look better on them and there’s no emulator that has ever pulled off a sufficiently convincing simulation for me. They also render dark colors better than most high end TVs. If you play a lot of old games, it would be neat to have a small one. The big ones, however, weigh a metric ton and are at least as deep as they are wide, and they’re extremely front-heavy. Those aren’t worth it unless you plan to build an entire arcade cabinet around it.
True. This one is a 10" model and it already weighs a fuck-ton, and it’s quite deep and takes up a lot of space. But I really like how old games (especially PS1 and PS2) look on it.
I wouldn’t go higher than 14" models because of the weight.
Non-Sony models aren’t too heavy, especially 27" and below. My 27" CRT is more than managable for me to lift up by myself over my head.
Sony included thick steel magnetic shielding around their tubes, making them significantly heavier compared to other brands.
I always thought this one looked cool when I was a kid https://crtdatabase.com/crts/samsung/samsung-gxe-1395
In the late 90s to early 2000s they made cheap plastic crap, the circuit board could break if you pushed the power button too hard
And if it breaks, it literally implodes.
Not always, sometimes it gives pretty {dangerous} purple lightning in the back of the tube.
One advantage of modern TVs is how slim they are. It’s so crazy to me now how much space those old TVs took up. You just had a big TV stand sticking out from the wall.
And CRTs are unbelievably heavy in comparison, making them a bitch to move at all.
I distinctly recall Sony’s 40" Trinitron CRT weighing over 300 lbs. The 32" was ~200 lbs.
I’m pretty sure we had a 32". And that was MASSIVE for the time.
Yup. That was the last CRT I ever owned. Thing was a tank and took two people to carry it.
They are thief proof though.
Promise you no one stealing this tv unless they bring a crew.
That anger when the specs didn’t include the screen bulge in the depth measurement and now you can’t close the armoire door after carrying that shit 50 feet from the car.
The screen bulge alone in that pic is at least 3 times wider than my TV. It’s amazing what 2 decades of technology can do. Now, if we could just figure out how to make an LED TV than didn’t have a network card…
They do make non-smart TVs, you just have to know where to look.
Often the non-smart hospitality TVs don’t have the more advanced features you’d want for a home TV like HDR and the like, but I gotta admit that one looks quite decent. Can’t see any Dolby Vision support though.
Don’t look up Hospitality Mode, unless you want to end up on a list.
Put some clothes on, please.
I’m using an old console TV that I’ve modified to hold a flat screen. I literally have a home server and a sound bar built into it the space that was originally just the tube and there’s still enough space for my full grown ass to climb inside.
even Flatscreen CRTs were not that slim :/
Yeah, but you could use them as a shelf.
Put stuff on too of them (just be careful when watering the plants).
You can also store cats on top of them, they like the warmth.
Just beware when you change to a flat screen and the dumbass cat still tries to jump onto it.
Modern smart TVs: data pls 👉👈😊😊😊
I used to joke about my CRT monitor going “Pop” and breaking. The. It when POP and stopped working, guess the joke was on me.
Does anyone make CRTs? What would it take to make one? Is this beyond hobby level?
There are filters now that turn modern TVs into CRTs. Its interesting.
What do you mean by “turn into”?
I use this from time to time:
https://github.com/libretro/glsl-shaders/blob/master/crt/shaders/fake-CRT-Geom-potato.glsl
There’s also physical filters with HDMI input. Its cool that we have so many options.
Huh, ok. I don’t understand the appeal. So it obviously doesn’t turn a modern TV into a CRT because they’re completely different technologies and that’s not possible, it just visually makes your display sort of look like a CRT.
From what I’ve heard we are actually forgetting how to make CRTs. Not sure how valid that claim was though as I didn’t research it at all.
In any case if you’re thinking about getting a CRT you might as well get one while they’re relatively cheap. Here in Poland you can get a used CRT from anywhere between 50-100 USD for the hypercommercial models up to 200-500 USD for the enthusiast ones. And I doubt they’ll be getting any cheaper.
They’re really simple electronics, but there are likely a lot of little trade secrets that made them better. At the end of the day, it’s a cathode ray tube with a couple of electromagnets to divert a pulsing electron beam to hit different parts of the phosphor-coated end of the tube. The signal fed to the magnets is analog, and the beam sweeps the screen line-by-line every frame. (Or every other line for interpolated signals.)
Well beyond, I believe. Like, even trying to repair one can kill you
It’s really not that dangerous. There’s a big capacitor called the flyback capacitor which can store a deadly amount of energy. You disconnect the power (obviously) and then discharge that cap and everything else is relatively safe. To discharge a capacitor, bridge the leads with an electricians screwdriver. If you don’t like sparks, hold a resistor with pliers between the two leads. (It will go slower but also get hot AF.)
The capacitors are the same ones that are in every desktop PC power supply.
The flyback is a complex transformer with the thick cable sending the high voltage to the tube’s second anode.
The CRT itself can act like a giant capacitor. Eventually they figured out how to bleed the charge out when the TV is off.
1990s-2000s tubes: I discharge but don’t worry too much. 1980s-1990s tubes: I discharge several times, over the course of an hour or two. Those Sanyos that Nintendo used hold a nasty charge that comes out with a big SNAP!
That’s just basic electronics stuff. It doesn’t take a terribly large charged capacitor to zap you dead. IIRC, there are some high voltages in CRTs, but if you know how to discharge caps and to never ever work on electronics while plugged in (especially anything AC or DC over even 12v running), you’ll be fine.
Making them, however, is a whole additional technical and mathematical set of skills.
The outer envelope layer of a CRT itself is a capacitor, and depending on the tube size, can hold ~13,000 to ~25,000 volts. What makes it worse is that you can properly discharge the tube, completely remove it and put it on a storage shelf somewhere for months, then come back to it and the motherfucker done managed to recharge itself from the fucking atmosphere!
Any sufficiently big capacitor does this and that’s why you short them out for storage unless you want to die.
The biggest ones I worked with were 75 kg slices of stinkiness when they leaked and had to have two separate loops of wire on the terminals for safe disposal.
There’s one company still making CRTs, but only for industrial and medical equipment, not for consumers.
They use old tubes though. No manufacturing plant is tooled anymore to create new tubes and that’s why they probably won’t make new ones unless a super rich retro gamer funds the endeavor or something. The TVs would have to be expensive as fuck to cost justify that for niche retro gaming.
I will forever remember using the magnet that came with this old Klutz book near the TV in my parents’ room when I was around 10 and noticing the rainbow pattern it made in the picture. And then, after further investigation and experimentation, noticing those colors stopped going away when I moved the magnet away. And then, never speaking a word of it. For, like, 40 years.
When Bill Burr’s Netflix cartoon show put a similar bit in an episode it finally dawned on me that lots of kids must have messed up their parents’ TVs with those magnet wands.
Klutz books were truly amazing. I had that one and several others, and they were incredibly formative for me.
The TV wasn’t permanently messed up, you just needed to degauss it.
oh so thats what degauss does
Yeah Gauss a unit of measurement for magnetic flux density. It’s not just there to make a BOING noise and briefly mess up the picture.
Modern TVs are only just now barely able to compete with CRTs in image quality and they still haven’t reached parity.
What? Are You saying that a crt had image quality anywhere near a modern flat screen? Are You feeling well? I cringe at the thought of how shitty the quality on them was.
literally
blackbox[sic]
This wasn’t written by a 1950s device.
they will record you anyways and store the recordings and transcripts long enough that if a future owner of the TV ever connects it, it’ll upload all that shit it’s stored.
and they know what wifi networks and hardware addresses are nearby so those recordings will be associated with your location even if it uploads them from another physical location.
these things are all advanced wiretaps that should probably have their antennas permanently destroyed.
You just typed all that on the biggest wiretaps of all.
Summit for Lemmy on GrapheneOS is a wiretap?
Firefox with ublock, noscript, and privacybadger on cachyOS is a wiretap?
cuz I posted this from one of those two.
It’s all a wiretap at this point in my head. I think it’s just a matter of how much effort and time a (probably government) entity wants to take to track people down or grab someone.
Like the NSA didn’t build a gigantic data warehouse in Utah to not fill it with a database of every person they could.
I’m sorry you feel so defeated that you can’t even appreciate folks who are still fighting where they can.
NSA can’t warehouse data that never gets generated in the first place.
The AI 20 years from now cross referencing every possible point of data to deduce every single identifiable feature to pin you as the guy who forgot to pay for the gum is going to have a field day with this post.
I see you have decided to take LLM company CEOs at their word when they tell you how amazingly powerful their products are.
Calm down son, it was a joke.
There was a time when CRT TVs were so cranky and reliably in need of service that your local drugstore had a rack of replacement tubes and even a tube-tester machine. You could pull a bunch of tubes from your set, test them at the store, and buy a replacement for whichever one was bad.
I run a valve (tube) amp as my daily driver for audio and yeah, you do have to have a screw loose in this day and age. They’re a lot better with modern passive components but modern valves are pretty hopeless in terms of longevity. For EL84s you basically have to buy old Soviet military stock (thank fuck Gosplan was so hilariously inefficient) or your amp will burn through them fairly quickly.
On the other hand if you look after them will probably outlive you. The valves are consumable components but the transformer is literally a big chunk of iron and copper, and they’re dead simple to work on usually. Modern capacitors don’t dry out and turn into resistors nearly as readily too.
Having to update my remote before I can mute the TV is not a problem I ever expected to have
But here we are
That “where to armor planes” image just popped into my head for no reason at all.
