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

[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: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 [wikipedia.org]

Respect

[El Lobo]

Yes, there was a time when owning a Trinitron set was just the awesomess...

I remember the day when I got my first Nokia monitor with Trinitron technology.... The screen was heavy and took a lot of space, but hell, the quality of the image was just incredible for that time... My games never looked so good.... Gotta love Sony.

Rip...

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.

Re:Memories

[Corporate Troll]

its had at least a hundred thousands of hours viewed on it.

Assuming a whopping 8h per day viewed: 100000h / 8h per day = 12500 days / 365.25 days per year = 34.2 years.

For a 25 year old TV? I doubt your statement.

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 [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.

Re:impromptu ask /.

[ZERO1ZERO]

press the source button to cycle throught the vid sources. On my 25" trinitron i have 2 s vids sources (indicated by an S-> on screen ) one is the round port at the front (source 3) and the other is my 2nd scart (source 2)

I would think that if you didn't have this then the answer would be no.

Still in use for Pro Video

[DTemp]

Trinitron tubes are still in use by pro video editors as monitors. My school's visual arts program uses trinitron tubes as monitors (besides two large LCDs used for the actual editing, timelines, etc), and with good reason: CRT technology is STILL just plain better than LCD tech for a couple tasks.

Re:Serendipity

[cluke]

I forgot about that noise too! And the "fdooiiinnng" when you degaussed it.
And they made some interesting clicks and pops too when you changed resolution, sometimes to the extent that you wondered if you were about to be showered in exploding glass.

Typo

[mismetti]

The year under the Watchman should be 1982 not 1992.

Re:Triniton monitors sucked

[gaspyy]

I never understood why so many people loved their shiny Triniton monitors

Because they rock! I am a graphic designer and photographer.
My last CRT was an IBM P78 I think, using the Trinitron tube.
Here's why I loved it:

• 
     
• Great contrast range; solid blacks, excellent reproduction of shades of grey;
• 
     
• Brilliant, accurate colors
• 
     
• At 100-125Hz, flicker was invisible
• 
     
• Very sharp (compared to other CRTs)

Like others, I caved in and got a fancy LCD (I brought my laptop to the store and asked the sale person to test the monitors until I found one that I liked).
LCDs suck at contrast. It's difficult to get nice black; many can't distinguish between very light shades or very dark shades; the color varies with viewing angle (not as bad as in the past, but it still happens); color reproduction is poor to fair (cheap LCDs tend to have blue-ish colors to appear brighter). I could go on...

If it weren't for the size and power consumption, I'd still be using my Trinitron CRT...

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.

Best image quality for price

[foxalopex]

I own a 19 inch professional / optically flat / CPD-G420 Sony Trinitron monitor and paid about $700 new for it in it's time. Sure it's heavy and sucks up some desk space but the image quality is amazing for a monitor. Runs at an insane 1440x1080 @ 90 Hz. I've had people comment that it seems like an LCD if you don't notice the size of it. I use it heavily for photography work. I think sadly most folks believe a CRT is terrible because they've never owned a high end series CRT.
Nowadays to get an equivalent LCD I'd probably need to sink my money into a +$1000 NEC professional LCD panel which is still weak on the response speed. (With LCDs usually fast panels mean poor colour and vice versa). I still haven't made the switch yet because I'm not too thrilled about paying more for less in some senses. And while an LCD may use less energy, I'm not so certain that the actual switch is good for the environment either. I remember reading a few years back that if you don't need to upgrade then don't because the environmental damage to build the new equipment is pretty extensive. (Not to mention disposal).
As a side note my dad got a 32 inch FlatTube Wega Trinitron TV for $350 on sale a month ago. For that price you can't even get an equivalent Plasma or LCD. It weighted a tonne to get it home but wow, is the image quality unbelievable. I'm personally sad to see this technology go. I still think LCDs or Plasmas are a compromise. Until OLEDs or even the patent burdened SED if ever becomes mainstream, I think we'll loose out on image quality.

Re:Triniton monitors sucked

[elrous0]

The great thing about the aperture grille for TV's was that it allowed the Wega line to do 16:9 anamorphic squeeze (giving you as much as 33% more resolution on anamorphic DVD's) back when no other U.S. TV line could do it (and at a bargain price too).

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

[Ellis D. Tripp]

It wasn't just for vibration damping.

The heating caused by the electron beams hitting the aperture grille would cause the grill wires to expand slightly. If they weren't mechanically fastened together, the grille would warp out of shape enough to cause problems with convergence and purity.

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.

Re:I want tougher LCD's

[the donner party]

That's not a technology limitation. You can get 15" 1920x1200 LCD's on some specialty laptops. They just don't sell them for desktop use because too much software is still pixel-based and would look tiny on a high-resolution screen. And because high-resolution screens are rare, little software works properly on them.