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Obituary For the Sony Trinitron

Posted by kdawson on from the chrome-parts-shining-in-the-sun dept.

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."

2 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. All those years and we're still sentimental fools by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can someone explain to me why geeks fall in love with their gadgets despite the flaws? Aren't we smarter than being brand loyal sheep? Hey I'm sure there were some great Trinitrons but there were also some very defective units shipped from what I've read. I only ever owned one - a 15" computer monitor that's lasted almost 15 years and is still working at my mother's house but on its last legs. It was the most expensive monitor I've ever owned and was greatly surpassed in quality by a cheap (at less than half the price) CTX 17" monitor about 3 years later. There are plenty of bits of equipment that are classics because they don't get outdone, but for me this monitor isn't one of them. This is just about blind brand loyalty and the triumph of modern marketing over common sense.

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  2. Where did they all go? by whichpaul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    280 million Trinitron displays equals how many billion tonnes of lead and other human-unfriendly substances?

    These products are dead and (soon to be) buried but they're not going anywhere. Rather than being mildly nostalgic we should take this as an opportunity to look forward to the next generation of displays and ask ourselves the questions that really matter; what impact does the manufacture have, what happens to these materials once they reach the end of their short life, do these valuable materials really need to be entombed forever?

    I don't want a Sony Trinitron cocktail when I take a drink from the tap!