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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."
I still have my 10 year old sony and it works fine :)
-- pravin
Too few technologies have the -tron suffix nowadays. It works with everything, so why not use it? This is the future, dammit!
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
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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
c++;
As a "diehard CRT fanboy" I'd like to pay my respects.
About 9 months ago, I finally caved in, I fought tooth and nail to the bitter end, from forum to forum across the web, valiantly defending the honour of CRT vs LCD in the great debate, I held on long, much longer than most of the die hard CRT junkies, there's few of us left.
I am a man who had slowly given up PC gaming I finally bit the dust, accepted a good price for the sale of my old 22" trinitron (philips 202P40) and accepted the new Dell 2407 WFP HC model into my life also at a great price, it was a combination I couldn't refuse.
Sure I loved the desk space saved, I loved the crisp text in the native resolution, hell even in games I didn't mind non native resolution honestly, once you're playing, it doesn't matter.
Also the monitor was appealing to look at, it came with USB, CF, SD and other such ports, it was sexier, it was lighter etc etc!
Still.. to this day as a die hard CRT fanboy, I can not use that Dell 24" LCD in dark (DARK!) games, like Doom, like Oblivion, the black levels, despite what the 'forum people' tell me! are STILL not good enough.
I seriously do not exaggerate for a second, when I say widescreen Oblivion, the sides of the monitor - with it's huge width, tight viewing angle and so on, combined in to the 'perfect storm' of shimmery, nasty black levels, which made the walls in the caves of Oblivion quite honestly impossible to look at.
I felt as if 'sleep' as in my eye - I was constantly rubbing it to get the shimmery light sappy stuff from my eyes out.
Obviously though... it wasn't really in my eyes to begin with.
I love my LCD for so many reasons but for so many others, I still hate it.
Co-incidentally the night of this news article, it's in a box behind me now, being re-sold to someone else.
Sure I'm typing this on a 19" LCD but I don't intend to play games on it, I'll wait for something with REAL black levels, with REAL viewing angels, something actually, genuinely superior to the CRT I so foolishly sold for my the LCD.
(100hz at 1600x1200 no less!, it was a good CRT!)
Yes CRT has it's flaws, yes it's heavy, no it's not ultra crisp but that almost gives it a 'free AA' feel to be honest
Sure they are rare now but if one feature hasn't been surpassed it's by far the black levels, by a long, long way!
When you can plonk me down, in front of a widescreen LCD and I can say the picture surpasses my old CRT - then I'll be a happy man.
So long trinitrons, alas - we knew thee well.
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.
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!
The Trinitron
Be dead and gone
Though large and dense
As beard, no defense.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Jeez thanks a lot folks! I've got a 20" Dell Trinitron that I've had for LONG time (still just as beautiful and crisp as ever). Never thought of those 'wire' lines as a problem or, more importantly, ever really notice the damn things. Until now.
Well, those are reasons why it failed. After 35 years of Sony trying to push this technology on us, they're finally giving up. Yet another failure in the same line as Betamax, MiniDisc, UMD, MemoryStick, PlayStation 3, etc. I don't give Blu-ray more than 35 years either...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"The sets were both dense and large."
I"M dense and large, you insensitive clod!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."