People now pretending that these box tvs were great is hilarious.
What was wrong with them? They served their purpose just fine for many years
The weighed a ton, they were limited in size, their resolution was terrible, they sucked down electricity…
Their screen was curved the wrong way until they released flat screen TVs
4:3 resolution meant you lost some of the content from movies or you watched them with black bars
We had four channels and loved it!
And most people were lucky to have a TV. You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
Have you compared NES games on a CRT with the same games on a modern screen?
CRTs just look miles better.
Are you serious?
- Curved (the wrong way)
- Massively heavy
- Noise (just from the unit itself
- Very low resolution
- Noticably hot (might be a benefit in the winter)
- Small picture, especially relative to weight
- Depending how far back you go, no/shitty remote, only has 1 port for video
Very low resolution
For TVs, that’s just because they didn’t need any more resolution because the signal they were displaying was 480i (or even worse, in the case of things like really old computers/video game consoles).
My circa-2000 19" CRT computer monitor, on the other hand, could do a resolution that’s still higher than what most similarly-sized desktop flat screen monitors can manage (it was either QXGA [2048x1536] or QSXGA [2560x2048], I forget which).
And then, of course, there were specialized CRT displays like oscilloscopes and vector displays that actually drew with the electron beam and therefore had infinite “resolution.”
Point is, the low resolution was not an inherent limitation of CRT technology.
Stupid false nostalgia, just like the old c10 pickup trucks. They are rare now because they are SHIT and nearly all of them were scrapped like they deserve.
My ‘96, quarter-million-mile Ford fuckin’ Ranger is still running. I love it partly because it’s shit. It’s incredibly cheap, it hauls stuff, and I don’t have to care about it. Similarly, anybody coveting a C10 knows exactly what they’re getting into.
Also, I’ve still got a CRT TV in my back room and a couple of CRT monitors stored in the basement. I’m well aware that they’re not as good as my LCD TVs and monitors in every single way, except that they’re good for accurate retrogaming, so I keep them around for that purpose and that purpose only. (I’m also under no delusion of them lasting 50 years, contrary to the meme.)
My ‘96, quarter-million-mile Ford fuckin’ Ranger is still running.
FFR Member Checking in! 1993 SuperCab with the 4.0l V6 and twin sticks!
Okay, so technically CRTs implode, but the result of the implosion can be an explosion. What happens with a CRT implosion is that the the glass gets sucked into the back of the tube with so much force it’ll bounce off the back of the tube and come out the front. So they kinda implode and explode. Combine that with the glass being leaded and there’s a reason you really shouldn’t go out smashing CRTs.
I will not break for 50 years
Yeah as a guy who used to repair these with his dad as a kid, hells no. The average crt TV had a lifespan of about 10 years without breaking
Yup. A lot of survivor bias going on with the remaining crop of CRTs out there. Granted, there were probably a lot of perfectly good tubes that got thrown out back in the 2000’s. But the ones we have left still need repair now and then.
I am still rocking my old Apple color monitor and it has never needed a repair. It does need a slap on the top to get the picture right from time to time though.
That thing was my primary tv from the time I was 10 until I bought an hdtv in 2008 (so 13 years), and it was a monitor in a school for an Apple IIe before that. I had two badass old pc speakers I hooked into my ps2 for dvds and gaming back in the day. Now I have my classic consoles plugged into it. It hasn’t seen much use in the last 3 years, but it was constantly being used before that.
I know we threw some out from time to time when I was a kid, but we also had some in the family that lasted forever. We had this really pretty black and white floor model from the early 60s that we finally threw out in the early 2000s, but it worked just fine. No one wanted it any more I guess. I still have dreams about that tv for some reason.
This is your nostalgia talking. CRTs were absolutely awful. I think my family still had one of lying around in the mid aughts. It was heavy, ugly, big, with truly awful picture quality and sucks down on power. Even the cheap LCD TVs we upgraded to were so much better than that crap.
They’re might be awful to you, but those people at CRT gaming community would literally dive into a dumpster if they spot a Trinitron/Wega there.
I had to toss a Trinitron about a year ago. Was taking up too much space. I tried finding someone to pick it up with no takers, and had to junk it instead.
It’s not a large community.
Damn.
I’m happy with my old Apple color monitor for the IIe, but I would’ve happily taken it.
I had to give up an early 1080p CRT recently. It broke my heart, but I have toddlers.
They’re always messing with this 2lb giant flat thing. That would’ve crushed them if they had managed to knock it over. It needed a professional degaussing any way. Who the hell does that these days?
I had a monster sized CRT that would creak due to thermal expansion and would buzz when in use
Are you sure it was a CRT and not a projection TV? CRTs were limited in size, and they have a reputation for being between lcds and OLED in terms of picture quality (ignoring resolution). Projection TVs, on the other hand, had a reputation for being garbage and the only reason you’d buy one is because you wanted something bigger than a CRT could handle.
There were 40+" CRT TVs (my father got one thrown in for free when he bought his place some years ago and kept usings it because “waste not”) and those things had a big back and were pretty heavy, which makes sense because the entire screen area has to be covered by a single electron gun at the back, so bigger screen means it has to be further back as the angle of the electrons can be made to turn when they exit the electron gun is limited, plus it all has to be happenning in vacuum (so that gas molecules don’t stop the electrons on their way to the screen) so you end up with the whole screen assembly being a big thick glass vacuum shell, so very heavy.
Even the smaller CRT TVs had quite the big back, partly because of the whole electron gun and max angle thing but also because firing electrons in a vacuum requires more than 1000v, which have to be generated from mains on the TV, and high voltages means big chunky components (plus back in the day the components were naturally bigger than they are now for the same capabilities), so even the smaller screen ones were still quite large in the depth axis because of the space needed for high voltage electronics.
Meanwhile the screens for LCD, OLED and so on are basically sandwiches of thin film forming a grid of cells that get activated/deactivated with reasonably small voltages (depends on the tech but if I’m not mistaken they’re all less than 20v) with only the detail that those techs which do not emit light by themselves (such as LCD) need a bit more space for backlighting, all of which can be made way thinner than “enough depth for the electrons from an electron gun to reach the corners of the screen”, much lighter than “requires a vacuum shell for all that space” and then again smaller and lighter because it doesn’t have any high-voltage electronics inside.
CRTs are great for retro gaming because they made low resolutions looking better than any other tech can (by low resolutions i mean 240-360p)
One of the problems is survivorship bias.
The CRT’s that survive today are mostly the cream of the crop. Professional monitors that were used for decades at local TV studios. HD CRT’s from the 2000’s that were some of the last ones made, were prohibitively expensive at the time, and have been lovingly cared for by enthusiasts.
I think a lot of retro gaming enthusiasts who are in to CRT’s today are either too young to actually remember what the average CRT was like or are old enough that they were enthusiasts back even in the 90’s, only buying the absolute best of the best.
I would literally take my phone over the console TV I grew up with in my parent’s living room. I remember setting stuff down on it (it was pretty much a table), like an empty can, and the picture would go crazy. I think part of why we got rid of it was because my mom got new, wireless handsets for the landline phone that caused interference (and it was also around the time new technologies we’re replacing CRT’s).
At one point as a kid i got a 19" Zenith CRT in my bedroom. That thing was absolute garbage. Colors all over the place, the image noisy and warped. It was loud, deeper than it was wide or tall, and weighed probably 40lbs. The only two inputs were RF and RCA, but only mono because it only had one speaker.
I think most of the retro gaming community has just forgotten how bad the average CRT was.
However, I also wonder if this demand for CRT’s and that premium gaming experience is going to impact the market. Will there ever be enough demand for a Kickstarter to manufacture a few thousand high-end CRT’s? Probably not. Could there be new features or new technologies invented to try to sate this demand? Maybe. Projector glasses, retro gaming handhelds, TV’s and monitors with higher refresh rates, “gaming modes”. I wonder if some other new tech is going to come along to try to capture the benefits of good CRT’s in a modern package.
All I want is a dumb devices brand.
So sick of smart devices that don’t need to be smart. The more unnecessary things something can do, the more it can break.
I wonder if we’ll ever get reliable, long lived products ever again or if planned obsolescence has won forever.
Short of undoing decades of neoliberal globalism and free trade agreements that destroyed a litany of domestic industries by sending them offshore, and as a result, collapsing an economy of ‘repair, don’t replace’, we’ll never ever see the days of buying anything for life again.
Welcome to the future. It sucks.
Yeah, this disposable economy is in large part thanks to the destruction of the middle class. If the bottom 80-90% got their “fair share” of the economic pie again, people could actually afford quality (and save money in the long term).
I’m not as doomerish about the future. If people can be educated on what the real problems are, it can be fixed. As long as social media stays relatively free and unmanipulated, it is inevitable. What I’m seeing currently is an educational revolution, even if everyone likes to rip on social media.
AI is a wildcard however, not sure how it will change things, could go either way. Since open source models are just a few months behind at worst, things could go better than expected.
Another factor is that once technological development starts to slow down, companies have to compete on quality. The gap between cheap smartphones and flagships used to be huge, but since smartphones mostly don’t change anymore the gap has become really small.
Basically as technologies mature, the only unique selling point that is left is quality and reliability. Once we run into the physical limits of computation by the end of the century (unless efficiency growth slows down), devices will stop being so disposable. Then a device you buy 30 years later won’t be significantly better than the 30 year old one. In the past a 30 year difference roughly translates to a 30k times difference in performance. That’s why electronics are so disposable.
I think smart devices will eventually either mature to reliablity and minimum necessary features or we’ll return to dumb devices again.
It won’t break out of the blue, don’t use the features and if it works out of the box it will continue working without updates and worst case if something is problematic you plug it, update and unplug it.
TVs aren’t mechanical devices like a washer where they switched metal parts to plastic to save a couple of dollars here and there.
Heck, you can even just buy a PC monitor or a projector if you’re just against smart stuff!
i mean, i get his point. but most of these smart devices need an internet connection for any of their smart stuff to work. so long as you don’t give it your wifi pass, or wire it in, it’s just going to be a dumb device.
i have a newer LG TV i use with my PC. it’s just wired to my PC. at some point i connected it to internet to see how the IP Channel stuff worked on it. it would let me watch stuff for about 10 minutes before it prompted to download an app. that shit got disconnected quick. never again.
all this ‘smart’ stuff needs to be granted access to your network to serve ads and recommend apps. don’t connect it.
some ‘smart’ ones need the internet just to do a ‘setup’ when its first turned on.
An automatic software update straight up corrupted my TV, I have to use it with no internet connection like God intended or it keeps trying to go back to the home menu for an error message. Factory reset and updates won’t fix it either. It wouldn’t even forget my wifi, I had to change the password to force it to disconnect.
A friend of mine had an expensive LED TV set get bad RAM about 10 years ago after a firmware fix. You could watch TV for about 2 hours before it went blank. Only official fix via the manufacturer was to disconnect it from power, wait until the rechargeable battery went down, then it was fine again for another 2 hours. It seems like it’s overheating, but it’s not. Something to do with a memory leak and video buffering. It was a known issue among tech enthusiasts, there was a homemade wiki on how to replace the shitty low end RAM with a $30 stick of laptop DIMM and it worked! He still has it, I think.
