Obituary For the Sony Trinitron

An anonymous reader sends us to Gizmodo where, to honor the passing from production of the Sony Trinitron, they've done a timeline on the development of television. "After 280 millions tubes sold, Trinitron will be officially dead this month. Few Sony inventions have had the same gravitational pull as their Trinitron display technology... Trinitron became synonym of the best quality TV sets and computer monitors in the planet... Sony became the king of TV, with more than 100 million sets sold by 1994, to later fall under the weight of plasma and LCD technologies."

Comments

Memories

[pravinp]

I still have my 10 year old sony and it works fine :)

Re:Memories

[arivanov]

That is not surprising if it is consumer equipment. It tends to work for a very long time. I have a sony stereo that is nearly 9 years old now and it still works fine.

The same cannot be said about their computers which are deliberately designed to fail soon after the warranty has expired. I had to deal with a batch of Vaios my old company bought before I joined and all of them developed spurious keyboard problems over the years. Guess why - the keyboard was located right on top of a huge permanently hot heatsink. Once I disassembled the first one it became obvious that the kbd membrane within 2 years was grilled into a crisp.

Re:Memories

[jrumney]

Trinitron is dying because CRTs are dying, and Trinitron is the brand of a patented CRT tube design. Sony's new "quality" brand is Bravia.

Re:All those years and we're still sentimental foo

[compro01]

They were stabilising wires to prevent the aperture wires from vibrating in the presence of loud sounds, which would cause the image to flutter and distort temporarily.

Re:All those years and we're still sentimental foo

[pipatron]

You're right, these are "features", and if you had got a trinitron screen without them, I would have been very surprised.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron#Visible_Support_Wires

Those two lines vs eye strain

[msgmonkey]

Yes there where two visible lines, but (for me atleast) if you was actually concentrating on the job at hand, such as coding you never noticed them. To me having a much sharper display with less eye strain was worth it.

My 19" was the last Sony product I ever purchased, their LCD screens just seem expensive and not much better than the competition. I guess they do not manufacture their own panels.

Triniton monitors sucked

[sd.fhasldff]

I never understood why so many people loved their shiny Triniton monitors. Don't get me wrong, the technology made for GREAT televisions, at least at standard PAL and NTSC resolutions (and typical viewing distances), but as a high-resolution monitor, the two lines(*) across totally spoil it for me. It's like buying a shiny new LCD and having not just one bunch A LOT of dead pixels right smack in the middle third of the display.

I've accidentally ruined the experience for at least a few new Triniton owners who had not previously noticed the lines. When someone points them out to you, it's apparently quite hard to ignore them again. For me, the lines were always just too much of an annoyance.

(*)For anyone interesting in knowing *why* there are these fine lines across a Triniton display, but not on most other conventional CRTs... go read up on aperture grille vs shadow mask. I was going to whore myself for some informative karma, but the Wikipedia article with images shows it better than I can tell it, so go read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille

The fine lines are shadows cast by "tension wires", necessary to stabilize the hundreds of vertical wires that make up the aperture grille. Shadow mask CRTs don't require these tension wires because they don't have the vertical wires (or strips). Instead, basically a bunch of holes are made in a sheet. This results in:
  - More stable display (sheet with holes in it versus wires or thin strips).
  - Slightly more accurate geometry (greater symmetry)
  - Less overall brightness (the sheet with holes blocks more of the electron beam, resulting in a "duller" image).
  - No shadows from tensioning wires

The last point is, of course, the kicker... and the reason why Trinitons make for awesome TVs. In a computer monitor, however, the brightness isn't needed and the drawbacks of Triniton technology outweigh the benefits, IMNSHO anyway.

In a Triniton TV, the tension wires are basically impossible to spot from a normal viewing distance. On a large Triniton computer monitor with high resolution and a good graphics card (good DAC), the wires are basically impossible NOT to see.

Re:Obituary for the 2 horizontal lines

[lymond01]

Maybe the way CRTs work sits better with (and covers up the flaws better than) cheap LCDs when used with existing standard-def TV signals

We bought an HD CRT tv a few years ago. 34" widescreen weighing in at 200 lbs. We're always tempted to get a wallmountable plasma or LCD, but we do watch some standard-def TV every once in awhile, and you're right, standard def TV is pretty much unwatchable on the panels (IMHO). And the CRT we have gives a better picture than the plasmas and LCDs...black is, well, black, no "effects". HD is wonderful and standard def is watchable.

But if you want to buy it from me, you'll need to hire your own crane.