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CRTs perfectly demonstrate engineering versus design. All of their technical features are nearly ideal - but they're heavy as shit, turn a kilowatt straight into heat, and take an enormous footprint for a tiny window. I am typing this on a 55" display that's probably too close. My first PC had a 15" monitor that was about 19" across, and I thought the square-ass 24" TV in the living room was enormous. They only felt big because they stuck out three feet from the nearest wall!
The heavy part truly cannot be overstated. I recently got a tiny CRT, not even a cubic foot in size. It's about the same weight as my friends massive OLED TV. Of course, OLED is particularly light, but still. It's insane!
And it's a vacuum tube. How does nothing weigh this much?!
Plasma screens weren't much better, at first. I had a 30" one circa 2006, maybe three inches thick, and it you'd swear it was solid metal. A decade later we bought a couple 32" LCD TVs, then a few more because they were so cheap, and the later ones weighed next to nothing. Nowadays - well, I walked this 55" up and down a flight of stairs by myself, and the only hard parts were finding somewhere to grab and not bonking any walls.
The vacuum itself might not weigh anything, but the glass strong enough to resist the implosion the vacuum would cause has to be pretty thick, which is where the weight is
And that scales nonlinearly with volume, so smaller monitors are even denser than big monitors.
🤣 that's so true, how much can a damn vacuum weigh?
it's all the magnetons