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.
CRTs update in a nice, predictable order, can have crazy-high refresh rates, and don't do anything clever (or slow) with their inputs. This makes them perfect for experiments that require showing stimuli precisely and promptly.
More recent displays do all kinds of weird trickery that either changes what's actually shown (e.g., motion blur) or presents it at some hard-to-determine time.
Since then LCD studios made huge progress, but maybe still can't compare with CRT.
OLED magnitude faster than LCD, I'm wondering how these compare.
Lag might still be an issue depending on the electronics, but the screens have a roughly 10us response time.
https://www.cnet.com/products/sony-kv-36fs12-wega-36-crt-tv/
(It's 222 pounds for those who don't want to click the link).
I used to lug around a 27" CRT by myself every time I moved, and it was a giant pain in the ass. It was worth it though for the picture quality.
Only as anecdata, I stil have and use daily a "huge" Sony 32" trinitron as TV:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16060031
that is 75 Kg/165 lbs, so 100 Kg or more for a 36" seems just right (as said on the other thread I have a special table/support for it).
And BTW the only reason why I changed my good ol' (as well trinitron) 20" inch computer monitor with a "flat" 22" screen is because aging I see better the screen at a slightly increased distance (i.e. thanks to the reduced thickness I can have the screen some 30-40 cm farther on my desktop).
You are probably pretty close based on the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FD_Trinitron/WEGA
When we moved from a 3rd floor walk-up to our house, one mover used several straps to strap it to his front and carried it down the stairs by himself. He was a beast, as broad as he was tall.
Do consider the OSSC (Open Source Scan Converter). It works line by line, so it adds virtually no latency to the chain. It is OSHW and FPGA based, getting regular updates.
It doesn't do s-video or composite, but otherwise it is imho much better than the closedhw framemeister, which buffers entire frames and is less flexible.
I have seen plenty of stores selling (small) CRTs in stores in Asia. They are usually quite small, and I bet they are quickly disappearing, but they are still around.
Are the products they sell different in some important way?
My back is going to make me pay as they are about 160-180lbs for the 32" models
Yeah, not for very much. And certainly not for an amount worth dealing with the "You should take money off that because it doesn't have HDMI. Hurr-durr." crowd on fleabay.
When I see my Sony GDM-FW900 boat anchor actually selling for more than $1000, then I'll believe you.
Specifically the BVM-D24E1WU & BVM-D32E1WU. They usually go for a few thousand dollars un-calibrated, with tube issues, and without the required addon cards (broadcast trinitrons have add-on cards giving different features like PCs) and master broadcast remote control receiver. The RGB module for these specific models is practically un-obtainium, with less than 150 produced globally, and everyone looking for these monitors now needs one. They sold for over $20k when they were new twenty years ago.
If you're looking to get one fully-loaded and in proper shape, expect to drop 6-8k. And there's only one guy still doing routine service of these who has adequate spare parts & knowledge, he's in Southern California and he won't ship the best models because of the huge risk of damage.
>Deeply cared about the customer experience.
>Cared
And then they started installing rootkits on their customers computers.
Eizo monitors are still very good and I use them. They are very ergonomic and their settings, especially preset values just work.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Of course we customers think image quality is important! Well, turns out, people are pretty cheap and were totally happy with sacrificing image quality of TV recordings in order to maximize the amount they could record on their, like, $20-in-1970s-money tape.
>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.
If the monitor had enough bandwidth you could push it past the standard VESA modes.
I used to run bespoke resolutions like 1600x1200 in the mid 90s on a big Trinitron monitor I bought at a surplus store.
IIRC the only limitation was that the resolutions had to be both divisible by eight.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/IBM_37RG...
edit: link
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
