Slashdot Mirror
Sony to Stop Producing Smaller CRTs
NerveGas writes "Sony is apparantly going to stop producing 17- and 19-inch CRTs, in favor of LCDs. It seems a bit soon to drop CRTs completely, seeing as how LCDs still have less than 30% of the market share. Maybe since their patent on Trinitron screens expired, they're not able to command ridiculous margins any more." Smaller CRTs? I've got a couple 19" Sony monitors here, and I've always considered them to be a good size.
I'm happy for 19" CRTs to be considered small -- anyone who would like to give me an LCD or nine, I take all sizes, even little tiny 17-inchers.
:)
Looking forward to the day that 42" plasma TVs are also small
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If you look at the prices of both 17" and 19" CRTs, you'll see that there isn't much room for profit in making that size monitor. Sony's resources are much better spent making LCDs and large screen TVs.
It's not the size of the CRT that matters...it's the resolution of the image!
At least that's what my wife tells me.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
That we'll get to see some companies pick up the details of the patent and start producing CHEAPER trinitron crt's? That would be awesome since sony crts are expensive.
Hopefully this will be an incentive to drive the cost of LCD monitors down.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I refuse to by a monitor that loses definition at odd angles, has a hard time with the color black, and is only sharp at one resolution. I especially refuse to buy them when they're twice as expensive. The only benefits are power use and desk space...two things that rank very low on the ladder of importance for me. I'm certain a LOT of other people feel the same way.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
IMHO they really are, as long as space is not an issue. The contrast, brightness, sharpness seems to be better than LCD. In addition LCD screens have limited viewing angle. I agree LCD screens look cool, consume less electricity and space. But thats not good enuf to completely dump CRTs, esp if they are *cheaper*
Easy solution to this problem: Copywrite Trinitron and lobby Congress to extend your rights for another 50 years.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Okay, I'm not gonna buy an LCD screen anytime soon and neither is anyone else I know (but I would like one). But consider companies that require large monitors - they DO exist. For example, petroleum and minerals companies need their employees to inspect large amounts of geographical data as quickly as possible. Quite often they have many 19" to 21" monitors, and one or two 25"+ beasts.
... I don't think they'd be too worried about losing CRT sales. And CRT sales are declining - it's not a growth market. In fact, in five years time you may not be able to buy brand-new CRTs any more. Why would you want to hang around in such a market?
Now, if they're going to have all of these huge monitors, they may still want to be able to use their desks. So LCD screens that take up a small fraction of the desk would be a great improvement upon CRTs. And besides, the trend in screen sizes has always been "bigger IS better". So perhaps Sony is going to restrict itself to the upper-end of the monitor market.
But let's face it, Sony can afford to do this. They have the PS2, MiniDisc, a reputation as a maker of top-quality stereo equipment
And if they get an early start on LCD monitors, they may end up in a similar situation ten years down the track to what they had with the Flatron. They may corner the market with some technological gimmick just like before. At least this way, they're giving themselves every chance.
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
I doubt any conspiracy theories are in order. It is more likely that sales of lower-end CRTs are dropping to the point where there's no point in making the effort.
I doubt that the big CRTs are going anywhere, at least until LCDs get cheap.
Remember that Sony can't "force" you to buy a higher price LCD as you can always buy another brand. The fact that there taking the smaller ones of the market means that they feel that they won't lose very many customers.
The cake is a pie
I just bought a 19" Sony E440 like 4 days ago. And while it was more expensive than the other 30 monitors sitting next to it on display, I could easily tell the difference in the vividness of color, and the sharpness of the resolution between the Sony and the other makes. And if your a computer nerd who spends all day infront of a computer, and only wants 1 monitor, wouldn't you likely get the nicest one out there?
Why stop producing these Sony? There are plenty of people out there who will pay the "premium" for the superior picture. Or am I the only one?!
For prepress and color-sensitive work, I would still want CRTs. Maybe 2-3 years down the line would sound OK, not now.
Reduced eye strain.
However, I prefer LCD screens for reading text. The square pixels and sharp edges lend themselves to that sort of purpose.
The interesting thing is that eventually everyone at home will be looking at my photos online with LCDs anyway, so it can't be ignored.
I just hope that as an artist I'll still be able to get CRT screens until LCD's have advanced to a point where they are acceptable, or DLP or other promising technology has taken over. I personally swear by the Sony 21" FD trinitron. We still use CRT's for everything in the effects industry, however I have seen the (very nice! IMHO) 22" Apple cinema LCD displays being used at a print studio facility in San Francisco that was producing the Macy's christmas catalog while I was visting. I asked them about the color and gamma shifting issue and he said "Yea, we just have to make sure and look at them dead center, and then it's okay." And in the final checking room, there were computers with CRTs and hoods on the monitors for fine tuning anyhow.
For now, my ultimate dream monitor is still the Sony FW-900 24" widescreen CRT display, and it's down to about $2k now.
--Mike
They're obviously stuck in a hopeless cycle of groupthink here.... thinking that big==good. This, of course, is hogwash. I have a 17" monitor sitting on my desk and it's perfect. I have a 21" Viewsonic Pro monitor sitting in the corner of my room holding up a bunch of boxes.
:)
But EmagGeek! Why not use the 21"!?
Because it's so damn deep, I can't put my input devices in front of it! I just happened to be at that stupid trendy (but cheap) quasi-swedish furniture store today measuring up desks. The standard depth was 28", on almost every single desk. That ViewSonic monitor I mentioned is 24" deep including cable relief - so unless I can find a 4" keyboard, I'm screwed..
Of course, chiming in with all the "conspiracy theories" that this thread seems to have spawned, I could conjecture that monitor manufacturers have teamed up with computer desk manufacturers so that no desk can accomodate the smallest CRT, forcing people to LCDs...
Now I won't be able to have a CRT display device double as a heater for my room. shucks!
I can tell you that those two things (well, one does, anyway) rank pretty high on a large organization's list. For example, I can tell you that any new computers which come with monitors bought by UCSD's CS dept have to be ordered with LCD monitors now. The power savings are pretty big, even though it may take a while to phase in the new machines and their flatpanels. A couple friends in various other large companies have also seen this trend.
My guess is that Sony is merely catering to business needs and pressures and not thinking of home users as much.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Another thing that comes to my mind in CRTs vs LCDs is that it almost impossible to find cheap lcds whatever the size, that can do 1600*1200 or over i prefer to have a 17in crt that can do 1600*1200 (ok its a little har to read :-) ). than a 19in or 21in LCD that can do not more than 1024*768 or 1280*xxx
after all My ** real desk space ** its those pixels !!!!
Overuse of the Pumping Lemma causes blindness
When they can charge 2250 bux for a 24 inch GDM-FW900 Wide screen monitor (2304X1440), compared to 250 bux for a 19inch monitor, its an easy to tell where the profit is.
BTW, We have these on triple headed sun boxes, man they are great. I'd love to have one at home, dvd, hdtv and games, oh yeah... Too bad its artificially priced high, you could buy 2 21 inch LCDs for the same price.
You know, I could have swore I hit submit on this...
Anyways, my LCD rocks. 17" LCD with built in TV tuner for 800 USD... and worth every dime. I live in a dorm room, so my deskspace is at a premium. I'm a computer geek and coder, so the lack of eyestrain is DEFINITLY worth it.
Refresh rate? 80 hz max, although I usually run it at 75 hz.
Resolution? 1280x1024. My biggest sticking point since I have a habit of running monitors at 1600x1200 if they are larger then 17".
Color depth? My god it is beautiful... I can't go back to a CRT because of how it looks.
Power? My UPS lasts a hell of a lot longer now...
The space saved is immense. I can play PS/PS2/Whateverconsoleyouwant games in a picture in picture if I so desired. My LCD rocks.
I just saw a LCD for 350 USD the other day. 17". Wow.
A side note: LCDs are measured in viewable sizes, so that 17" CRT is only really a 15.9" (or whatever) viewable, but that 17" LCD is really a 17" viewable.
--- Ãther SPOON!
I've got 17" monitors at work (3 of them) and a 17" at home. Not much point in getting anything bigger for what I do.
What I _really_ want is a 3840x1024 LCD display. Wide, wide, wide. Reference on the left, code in the middle, debug on the right. I'm probably going to get cancer from having three CRTs blasting at me all day.
I hate Trinitrons. Those lines thru the middle of the screen can really get annoying, like a dead pixel on an LCD screen.
That said, I don't buy LCDs except for space and computers I don't use alot. My 3 main monitors are CRTs. First, I run at 1920x1440 and 1600x1200 on my 2 main computers. To get a LCD that does that is well beyond my budget. Second, I play games, I like bright images, and clear colors. LCD's are great for places like entertainment centers where you don't want a clunky CRT viing for affection with the TV, but for something you need to look at for hours a day, a CRT is the way to go.
I do hope though, that in the future very high quality LCDs will be available at more reasonable prices. When I bought my first CRT, it did 1024x768 and cost more than my Diamontron 17in monitor that does 1600x1200 and is perfect flat. (I'm young. the monitors bought before the 1024x768 ones were purchased by the parents.) It seems like LCDs are at that exact point. The very cheap ones are 1024x768 and crappy quality. But hopefully the same way I can now get a nice monitor for that price, hopefully the same amount of time in the future the CRTs will be that good.
I do security
They worked nights and weekends on the project and when they finally had something to show, they schlepped the tube around to Motorola, Zenith, Sylvania, GE and one other American Television company. They chose those 5 companies because, combined, the companies dominiated the world television industry. None of the companies was interested. Discouraged, the group sold the rights to the tube to a European outfit. The Europeans gave the tube up as a lost cause because it was too hard to manufacture so the Europeans dumped it on a small Japanese electronics company. The company was Sony and that's how Sony ended up with the Trinitron. The name Trini - meant three for the three color guns and Tron, well because everything being built at Berkeley back then was a "-tron" - Calutron, Bevatron.
You're better off not lugging your computer home on breaks. Keep it at college, and keep an older computer at home. If you're a computer-oriented individual, you probably got your new computer well before your old one ceased to be functional. An extra 700 dollars is a waste (and if you're in college, you need your cash). Pick up a cheap CRT to keep with your old box, use an old keyboard and mouse (hell, if you don't have one you can get one free after rebate from any computer store). You shouldn't need much for a weekend (or even week) break, just net access. If you can't live without the latest game for Thanksgiving weekend, you should seek help (and get some hobbies/friends while you're at it).
GL
Its called "Reservation Price" and if you don't do it in business, you're doing the 'wrong' (profitwise) thing.
A persons reservation price, is the max $ they are willing to spend on an item. Lets say there are 5 (A, B, C, D, E) people in our world interesting in buying a shinny new FOO.
Bar INC. the maker of FOO does market research before releasing FOO and finds that some people (A and B) would pay $10 for foo, C thinks it is only worth $8 and D, E wouldn't buy it unless it were $5 or less.
So to make maximum profit, Bar INC. first prices FOO at $10 for a year, A and B pick up one each. Then they drop it to $8, C picks one, then after 18 more months, they drop it to $5 and D and E get there FOO's. Total revenue is 38$ for Bar INC. If they had just marketed at some average of like ~$8 they would have only made $24 because D and E would never purchase.
It is safe to assume that nearly all hardware companies practice this.
Failed the attempts to remove two black lines on all trinitron monitors, Sony finally announces discontinuing of the production line.
:)
"For all these years," said a Sony spokemen, "we thought we could finally fix this problem, the progress were not as expected."
"but we pushed the defective products to the market anyway, and told people these two black lines are a sign of high quality. We're glad we didn't get caught and now it's over!"
(For humor impaired, this is a joke.
Some pixel response times are measured in half-cycles and others are measured in full cycles.
My 25ms lcd's are FULL cycle. 25ms to clear and replace a pixel with a new colour.
Some manufacturers are advertising pixel response times based upon just the time from already cleared to fill, and as such report their times twice as good as they actually are. So be careful and definitely TRY BEFORE YOU BUY with LCD's. Also remember ot check for dead pixels.
lounge around on the blue couch
I used to be a Sony customer. I bought a 200-CD changer, a 19" CRT monitor. Now I promised myself to NEVER buy anything from them again.
Why? Because of their stupid anti-piracy politics. They are one of the main RIAA members, one of the main supporters in the lobby that approved DMCA, one of the main supporters of that stupid DVD zone, one of the creators of that stupidest "copy-protected" disks (they can't even be called CD's, according to Philips, that holds the CD patent).
So, even if their products are good, even if I can't find anything better, even it they are the last brand in Earth, I'll boycott Sony.
Will you ? Will you give money to a company that screws its users ? Will you support DMCA and RIAA ?
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
What I cannot understand is that most LCD have only 1024x768 resolution or maybe 1280x1024. With 19" CRT you can have a nice resolution of 1600x1200. Where are the cheap high resolution CRTs? HP Omnibooks have 1440x1050 and a 15" display size. And the screen can't be that expensive, because the whole Omnibook is quite cheap, but LCD panels at that resolution are really expensive.
- Raynet --> .
Having been an IT Manager in a big corp and also worked at SGI where 21" monitors are par for the course, and in military app development, I can think of many reasons to favour LCD screens:
(not in any particular order)
- less desktop space
- lighter (you'd be surprised the number of insurance claims for back problems come from lifting monitors, they get moved from deskto desk or returned for repairs)
- don't go fuzzy over time
- look more high tech
- less fire risk
- less electric shock risk
- less radiation risk
- no alignment problems
- less heat generated
- lower magnetic interference of nearby equipment
- able to withstand wider temp and pressure fluctuations
- less storage space for stock
This is offset by the dowsides ppl have mentioned like:
- limited viewing angle
- gamma/colour problems in cheaper LCDs
- fixed resolution
- images can look "harsh"
- cost
I'm sure Sony did their marketing homework before announcing this. Personally I love my 21" Trinitron...
pithy comment
Trinitrons are not that great. As a gratuitous example, consider those two horizontal lines that run across the screen at roughly each third of the screen. Annoying.
There are CRT flat-screen displays out there for far less money - why would you want a Trinitron?
OTOH you'd be better off going LCD in any case. No radiation, more usable desk space, sharper picture (at the expense of refresh rate and scrolling picture clarity) and easier on the eyes - LCD is the shit amigo.
you'll never go back.
Regardless of what Sony would have me do, I will replace my trusty 19" CRT only when a display with OLED technology become available at a reasonable price-point.
Vibrant colour, excellent resolution, quick refresh, cheap to manufacture and makes an LCD look chunky. Sony just wants to make money off LCD before OLED comes along and forces them to write off their LCD investments.
I've used LCDs (in the context of laptops) and CRTs. I'd rather have a CRT where the option exists.
-There's no chance of a dead pixel wiggling across the virtual screen when I scroll my 1600x1200 virtual desktop on a 1152x864 actual screen.
-No viewing angle problems. Period.
-All the colours are attractive. Have they finally made LCDs that do adequate red and brown?
-No scaling problems. I need 640x480. I want 1152x864. If my screen is tied to 1280x1024, I'd have either a viewing window the size of a postage stamp or terrible scale-up.
Fortunately, I already have a 19" tube. Only way I'm getting a bigger one is if someone chains one of those dirt-cheap 10-year-old 20" Sun or HP fixed-frequency monitors to the back of a Voodoo III.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
That is the only problem with trinitrons...but you'll only notice that on a white background, like when webbrowsing, and only when you first use the monitor...after about 5 days, it's a nonissue. And lets be serious: who needs a trinitron for webbrowsing?
Another plus for trinitron, appart from the !sharp! picture, is it's colour. Very important if you work in print, dtp, video, 3d or anywhere else where colour is important.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
It seems that the monitor world would be divided into 2 groups... people who buy the cheapest monitors, and people who buy quality/high end monitors. The people who buy the cheapest monitors aren't profitable, and the people who pay extra for quality are exactly the people moving to LCD's. The few high end CRT customers will be willing to pay for 21" or 24" monitors.
Personally, I use an NEC MultiSync 95 CRT as my main monitor, and I love it. But if you want to know how cheap CRT's are, I recently bought a 15" Compaq MV5500 for $150.. with a $150 rebate. Items that are given away tend not to be profitable.
I have blog like everyone else
I'll be the first to admit my utter ignorance when it comes to the wonderful world of home electronics, but I know how to spew things verbatim. :) The Samsung 50" DLP Widescreen HDTV-capable projection TV has zero problems with burn-in or convergence, since it doesn't have any CRT guns in it. My buddy just bought it for his apartment, and not only is the picture super-crisp and viewable at fairly wide angles without fading out, like some other big-ass TVs.
Oh, and did I mention it's only 17.5" deep and weighs all of 88lbs? That's just a smidgen heavier than my 21" NEC AccuSync 120 at work, and almost 3" shallower!
However, I prefer LCD screens for reading text. The square pixels and sharp edges lend themselves to that sort of purpose.
LCDs are better for reading text. CRTs quickly give you eyestrain. The CRT image aslo shakes, even if only slightly on the better models. When LCD producers have had time to put as much time, effort and funding into color as the CRTs manufactures, then there will be no need to keep the CRTs around.Right now, the best compromise is to have dual-head: one CRT for sensitive color work, one LCD for the other work.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
With the passing of the new millenium, I noted that the CRT was the only remaining, widespread, consumer use of vacuum tube technology.
We were so close to leaving those heavy, hot, power-gulping things behind with the 20th century.
(OTOH, I also note that it always takes about half a minute for my computer to power up, even the laptop with LCD. Same as when I was a kid and we had to "warm up" the television or radio in advance of a show.)
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You're superficially quoting something that admittedly is often quoted, but this is a very complex subject, and your summary of it is so simplistic as to be wrong.
For one thing, the "critical flicker fusion rate" is not simply a universal "60 frames per second". It depends on:
That's part of why movie theaters get away with a mere 48fps (24 unique frames, but each is double shuttered). They turn the ambient lights down to almost zero, and that helps a lot.
You're also mildly confused about tv, which in the US does use 30 unique frames per second, but by using interlace, increases that up to more reasonable 60fps...however most people will definitely see flicker on US tv at some times in some conditions. Sophisticated broadcasters usually try to minimize the issues on their end, but that's not always enough.
Europe of course has 25 unique frames, interlaced up to 50 total frames per second (to match the frequency of their wall current, just as 60 Hertz matches US wall current frequency), and TV's in Europe are often perceived to flicker, as opposed to rarely.
It also depends on which aspect of perception under discussion; cartoons sometimes use as few as 4 unique frames per second (each displayed repeatedly to end up with a total of 48 or 60 or whatever fps), because that's adequate for a perception of motion. But it's jerky motion.
And now we have come to the heart of the issue of why it can be desirable to have even higher rates than 60 to 80fps. We are strobing objects in continuous motion, and the faster they move, the more the strobed snapshot of them is subject to motion blur (potentially...never mind whether this happens e.g. Quake in particular).
In real life, objects being viewed are in a continuous domain, and our perceptual system does something similar to discrete sampling. That will never mathematically be identical to discrete sampling of a discrete sequence at another rate; there's always issues of aliasing. This is a huge issue for digital signal processing in every domain, whether audio, visual, or other.
At any rate, in theory, certain very rapidly moving objects should be perceived more crisply at (say) 150 fps than at 80fps, even though that's way over that critical flicker fusion rate --- there are more issues involved than just that.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary