The quest to save the world’s largest CRT TV from destruction
440-pound 1980s behemoth rescued from an Osaka restaurant days before demolition.
You know what was great about the era of CRTs? We didn't know what we were missing. If you look at almost every 70s/80s scifi movie depicting the future decades from then, and there is a computer display of some sort, it will be a CRT. Even inside vehicles.
Star Trek is the only one where I saw flat panels (LCARS terminals). AND they were touchscreens.
CRTs have a huge advantage of not having fixed screen resolution. And my memory is not very good, but I think my eyes really did get tired much slower from them than from LCDs. I guess their size and their dangers were more important.
After all, space and health are very basic concerns in our world.
Back to the Future 2 had 16:9 flat screen TVs that were wall mounted. It's one of only two things it got right about the future, the other being that Japan would still be using fax.
Canada too, instill see loads of fax use here
They had terrific brightness. (At least until they started to wear out)
The resolution was a mixed bag. They couldn't handle the resolutions we have today, But when you were running 800 by 600 on a 1600x1200 they looked pretty crisp. It was a problem on LCDs before they got their pixel counts up because they were driven purpose built for a given resolution and anything else was a hack.
Nowadays 800 by 600 on a 4K screen looks pretty decent.
The biggest problem we're dealing with replacing CRTs with LCDs are the sharpness was crap so the content looked good soft. We have to throw shaders and all kinds of crazy stuff on ROMs to degrade the screen enough to make them look good. And then any light screen devices that use pixel scanning for location just don't work because newer technology doesn't work that way. The best in the light guns are going so far as to use camera sensors to detect location.
I like the future tech of Camerons Avatar better than the bulky consoles in Star Treck and the like.
These are so far apart though. Future tech in a movie from 2009 (where we already had LCDs and iPhones) compared to TNG in 1987.
Even if they could have been even more forward thinking in their design, they wouldn't have been able to film I back then. LCARS was just backlit scribs with some CRT displays undreneath in areas that needed to animate. You couldn't CG it then and have it look believable.
Reminds me of when me and a few friends moved another friend's desktop with CRT monitor accross Stockholm, during rush hour, in a snow chaos, using public transport.
I remember carrying the CRT monitor walking in a crowd when I feel myself slipping on the hard packed snow, I didn't fall but I did glide with little ways of stopping.
Haha, I remember taking my desktop and 19" CRT in my newspaper trolley to LAN parties in snow in Norway. The cover was great, but I also remember that my computer was driven to my house afterwards. I was too tired to drag it up the hill after not sleeping for days lol. Good times 🙂
That would be cool for playing console games on, but I sure wouldn't want to have to move it.
I'm almost certain I've moved a CRT or two that were heavier than that.
80s/90s kids remember being able to throw their controllers at the TV without fear. (Console games on a console tv to console the cold war anxiety)
My mother had a behemoth of a Panasonic console TV in her living room right up to the early 2010s. Still worked when we got rid of it, too, just finally decided it was time to upgrade. I remember, when we moved it, there was a half-inch-deep sunken area where it sank into the floor over the years, compressing the carpet.
I once had a 38" in my 3rd floor apartment and had to move to another 3rd floor apartment... No elevators present.
Motherfucker was the operative word.
I remember when my parents offered to trade me their 32" Phillips-Magnavox for my puny little 27" because they were "trying to downsize". I felt so fuckin cool playing Max Payne and Fable on my original Xbox.
My friends parents had a 32" CRT in their living room on a massive stand and us kids had to lay right in front of it when watching TV which was always a little terrifying because it would have crushed us to death had it ever fallen.
I really regret recycling my 32 inch Trinitron back in the mid-2000's...
I had a 30inch 1080i flatscreen crt.
I loved that thing, it cost $1000 and I used it all the time.
I still have this one!
The guy made a cool video about it
this just sent me down a nostalgia rabbithole.
in the late 90s and early 2000s my grandparents had two interesting Televisions in the house, one was a very large CRT TV that they kept using until the late 2000s or early 2010s. but the other was an ENORMOUS flatscreen that was so big it looked like a CRT on the back, I dont even know what kind of technology it was, Im assuming it wasn't a CRT though if this one here in this video is the largest, because the one they had was 2-3 times its size horizontally. (they had it in the late 90s, Im g oing to assume it was an early version of a plasma but im not sure really)
I'm guessing it was a rear projection TV, maybe a DLP
its probbly the rear projection. it looked like this, but my memory tells me it was quite a bit bigger https://i.redd.it/ig6k6bngyaca1.jpg
edit - its actually probably that same model i linked or a bigger version of the same line, its an RCA, I know they had a lot of those throughout the years, my grandfather ran a furinture, electronics, appliance and computer store in the early 2000s and the house was always full of Panasonic, RCA, and "Zenith" electronics. As well as the occasional thing from the more well known brands like Hitachi, Toshiba, and Sony.
but Zenith and RCA were dominant there
double edit - it appears RCA went defunct before I was even born, so if it was an RCA it would have been something he bought used, or had kicking around from before I was born.
I had inherited a similar one to that. Had to toss it when the audio stopped working, the color went beyond dim, the signal was all messed up, and it had magnetic damage (from the grand keeping his massive speakers on either side).
From someone who made the screen trippier and trippier as a kid until he Icarus'd it, strong magnets taped to a drill bit and spun at high speed around the screen can degauss it. But this type of information basically has no application anymore
Speaking of Icarus, the Parker Solar probe has made its closest approach to the sun this morning. It cut contact (as planned) on Monday and it's probably reconnecting on Friday. That little guy is great. 3.8 million miles from the surface at 430,000mph.
I did not know that. I just dealt with the psychedelic colors lol
