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.

14 of 508 comments (clear)

  1. the las vegas effect by timothy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:the las vegas effect by joe_bruin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      sorry, lcd's are still too slow to refresh. there is a visible lagtime (in milliseconds) when dragging windows and scrolling, especially when there is a big contrast difference between the surface that was visible and the one that replaced it (after-ghosts). i dunno about you guys, but i find it rather annoying. i'll be sticking to my 100hz crt for now.

    2. Re:the las vegas effect by PhantomHarlock · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Plasma screens have really short burn in times, if you put a computer desktop on it you'll have permanent ghosts where the static objects on your desktop are in notime.

      People who buy them as televisions have to be very careful to avoid burn it, that's why they have grey vertical bars instead of black when watching 4:3 television on a 16:9 display. The technology just isn't quite there yet.

    3. Re:the las vegas effect by Edgewize · · Score: 5, Informative

      You haven't looked at LCD recently, I guess. I paid under $280 for a KDS 15" LCD to replace a 17" (16.1 viewable) Trinitron and it has no smearing whatsoever. The only thing I have ever noticed is when quickly scrolling white text over a black background, the text is visibly dimmer (but still readable).

      There are plenty of LCD monitors with a total response time under 35 ms now, which is enough for 30 crisp, fully-contrasted frames per second. Quake 3 and other fast high-contrast games might lose some crispness, but the images are still clear and bright enough for the average joe. (Maybe even better-looking, since there's just the slightest hint of motion blur :)

      Of course some very cheap LCDs have serious issues with ghosting, but you shouldn't have any problems as long as you try before you buy.

  2. Oh come on... by dasmegabyte · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Oh come on... by Magus311X · · Score: 5, Funny

      Tell that to some of the people in my company.

      User is still using one of the older monitors (15" Trinitron tubes) and made a requisition, complaining for a better monitor. Well, they clamored enough for a while we were told to give her a 19". I set it up during her lunch, and set it to 1024x768.

      I thought I was being very conservative with that resolution, because everyone seems to complain about their eyesight.

      Next day I walked by it and she apparently set it to 640x480 with large icon and large fonts. She wears glasses too.

      -----

  3. LCD Cost by kmahan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hopefully this will be an incentive to drive the cost of LCD monitors down.

    --
    Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
  4. Stopping the 19"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?!

  5. pros and cons of LCDs by PhantomHarlock · · Score: 5, Insightful
    As a photographer and digital effects artist, I can't do anything mission critical on an LCD screen. The gamma is all wrong and it changes depending on your viewing angle. It's also very harsh on photographs, in terms of contrast and edges.

    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

  6. Aww! by SteakandcheeseUm · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I won't be able to have a CRT display device double as a heater for my room. shucks!

  7. 17" is plenty big. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  8. Back in the old days... by jmichaelg · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ...when color television was just getting going, my best friend's dad worked as a machinist at the Berkeley Rad Lab. That was the lab that E.O. Lawrence had started just before WWII. One day in the very early 60's a group of physicists invited him to be the group's machinist and moonlight on a project. They were going to build a new color TV tube that was going to beat every other TV then on the market. They figured that since they had worked on particle accelerators for years, they really ought to know a thing or two about TV tubes which are nothing more but scaled down electron accelerators.

    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.

  9. Reservation Price by vandel405 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. One thing to be careful with piuxel response times by StArSkY · · Score: 5, Informative

    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