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."

Memories

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

Re:Memories

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

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:Memories

I feel obligated to post at this time:

Although my fiance and myself have given up cable (Family Guy is broadcast, w00t!), she comes from a family where the TV is just ON. I hate it, but the typical procedure for 5 years ago went like this:

6AM - Dad wakes up, turns on TV, watches weather and traffic report, leaves TV on, takes shower
7AM - Dad checks TV again for report, Mom wakes up, views report on TV (report is discussed between Mom and Dad), takes shower, Dad leaves for work
8AM - Mom fixes breakfast (and lunch) for kids (who watch cartoons), gets ready for work.
9AM - Kids watch TV until time to leave, leave, mom takes them (leaves TV on)
10AM - Mom comes back, views weather/traffic, finishes getting ready for work, leaves for work, TV is turned off
2PM - Mom comes back from work, turns TV on, watches soaps, eats potato chips
3PM - Mom picks up kids (leaves TV on), takes kids home from school (kids watch Simpsons or whatever)
4PM - Mom watches something on TV, cooks dinner, Kids play games or HW, or whatever
5PM - Dad gets home (dinner better be on the table!), TV is on news while dinner is consumed
6PM-9PM - TV time with family, smoking, leisure time, possible do some home repairs (TV stays on, don't worry)
9PM - dessert (watch a movie?)
10PM - kids go to bed, Dad stays up and watches news
10PM-12AM - Dad falls asleep while watching news, Mom wakes him up at midnight to get him to come to bed, turns TV off.

So, the TV is off for 10 hours, daily (6 hours during the night, 4 hours as both parents work). 14 hours of TV, daily. No, I am not kidding at all. Yes, her parents smoke, drink, and lounge about the house gaining weight and killing themselves. Sadly, I am not kidding.

PS - weekends are actually worse, TV is on for 18 hours (6AM to midnight). Also, 2 years her mom quit her job (she doesn't like working), and added those 4 hours back in for a total of 18 hours daily. It is not even fair to compete under these circumstances.

PSS - the TV is on during Christmas (in case you wondered)

X-itron

Too few technologies have the -tron suffix nowadays. It works with everything, so why not use it? This is the future, dammit!

Re:X-itron

Hey! Don't give anyone any ideas!

// pipatron

Re:X-itron

Chair: Reclinatron
TP: Wipatron
Cup: Slurpatron
Lightcycle: Tronatron

All those years and we're still sentimental fools

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 [wikipedia.org]

I want tougher LCD's

Bitch about CRT's all you want, God knows I do. Those bastards are heavy, awkward, and should never be larger than 17". I had an old 21" I lugged around. Madness!!! But they were durable. You could bludgeon a hippo to death with one and it would still work. LCD's? The damn screens are too fragile. Put a layer of glass over the front for protection, I'll accept the weight penalty.

Those two lines vs eye strain

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.

Sumo TV

"...too later fall under the weight of plasma and LCD technologies."

As someone who just bought an LCD TV and is trying to figure out how the hell he'll get his 250lb 38" Hi-Def Sony CRT to his sister 400 miles away, I find this statement just a little ironic. The damn thing weighs more than most people.

Tipping my hat and a moment of silence.

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.

Triniton monitors sucked

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 [wikipedia.org]

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.

Where did they all go?

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!

Re:Where did they all go?

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

Do you live in some weird universe where 1000 ton Trinitron's roam the landscape and hunt down Magnavox's for breakfast?

Gravitational pull is right.

Few Sony inventions have had the same gravitational pull as their Trinitron display technology...

That's because a Trinitron weighed as much as a small neutron star...

Re:Obituary for the 2 horizontal lines

That's the one thing that bothered me with trinitron monitors as they got more obvious with time.

When I first got my Trinitron TV, I didn't realise that it was meant to have the faint horizontal line- I thought it was a fault and took it back. I got used to it pretty quickly though, even though I was also using it as a monitor for my Amiga (nice crisp picture with RGB SCART, although the dot pitch was coarse).

I've also got a Diamondtron-based monitor (a supposedly licensed version by Mitsubishi, although I was always under the impression that they made it after Sony's patent ran out). The faint lines (two in this case) aren't distracting in themselves under normal use. However, they *are* a minor nuisance when you're using Photoshop and you have to check to see if it's a genuine scratch on the image or just one of the bars.

I'm not sure what you mean by "they got more obvious with time", though. In what sense?

Re:Obituary for the 2 horizontal lines

Oh... and one other thing. The TV still gives a picture as good as the day it was bought after approaching 15 years of (almost) continuous use, and I've *never* had it serviced or repaired in that time.

Sure, it's *relatively* heavy and moderately bulky, but that's not the same problem with 14" portables as it is with those horrendous large-screen CRTs. I'd pay to have my TV repaired over one of those cheap LCD portables any day. There's something I just hate about the look of them, particularly the matt-finish ones.

Yeah, I know it cuts down on reflections, but it just looks horrible for TV, and I don't like the colour on cheap LCD TVs. 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- that could be because until recently most displays were CRTs, and the system was designed with that in mind.

Whatever.... that Sony's a damn good TV, even when (*especially* when) used with my digibox's RGB SCART signal.

Re:Obituary for the 2 horizontal lines

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.

Re:It's true.

The Trinitron
Be dead and gone
Though large and dense
As beard, no defense.
Burma Shave

Re:It's true.

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...

Re:It's true.

"The sets were both dense and large."

I"M dense and large, you insensitive clod!