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."

All those years and we're still sentimental fools

[syousef]

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.

CRTs

[jd]

Well, I'm personally not impressed by LCD or plasma. I'm old-fashioned, perhaps, but I question whether you can achieve the same resolutions, the same refresh rates, the same dynamic ranges for the same screen size, once you pass a critical size. CRTs can work with distributed tubes, it's just the logical inverse of an array of receivers. You can't parallelize plasma so easily and I'm not convinced you could parallelize LCD well enough. Ultimately, I think CRT will survive in the very high-end market, the same way thermionic valves have, because their replacements have limited range.

Sony won't cry over dumping Trinitron for a long time, but eventually the videophiles will be paying the kinds of money the audiophiles are, for home theater with the greatest CRT technology. If it's not derived from ideas used in Trinitron, I'd be surprised, which would leave Sony to wonder why they didn't go for it first.

Where did they all go?

[whichpaul]

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:Memories

[Dogtanian]

Trinitron is good stuff, it might not be 100Hz but it does makes 50Hz allot more enjoyable!

What about Trinitron-based computer monitors? There must be some of them that run at at least 100Hz. Besides which, I'd assume that there's nothing inherent about the basic Trinitron design that limits its frequency range, only the specification of particular components and non-core details of specific implementations.

Re:Triniton monitors sucked

[pimpimpim]

Hmm I'd say you're a bit trolling here. The overall viewing quality compared to other CRTs is much higher, and compared to LCDs, text is more easily readable, it easily gets blurry on an lcd. Watching a movie with a lot of black in it on an LCD still sucks like hell, I could reason that I cannot understand why people pay for that, it's like going to the cinema where the screen is made out of aluminum foil.

I still use my IBM P200 (with 13w3 connector!) day in day out, I know about the wires, and I don't see them when I'm not looking for them. Easy as that. It was the last in line, and I was amazed to see it in a normal computer store. I waited a long time, but eventually paid the 450 euros for it back in the day (1999 I guess) when there were no euros yet, and coupled it to my pentium I, which was worth about 50 euros at that time ;) I am still using it, and carrying it around every time I move :) but at some point it will go and make place for something sleek, and a beamer for the movies. Sigh.

Re:Tipping my hat and a moment of silence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trinitron is a relic of the elder days when the Sony brand name was synonymous with quality. The unfortunate departure of the Trinitron is, in my mind, symbolic of the company who developed it. Long was the year I had to say Sony was absolute crap, "except for their Trinitron televisions and upper-end video cameras." One more to go.

The rapid development of technology we are so keen to enjoy is, to a large extent, paralleled by the greater reduction in quality many have learned to accept.

"And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"

Re:Serendipity

[theheadlessrabbit]

you wondered if you were about to be showered in exploding glass.

you've obviously never blown up a CRT. The inside is a vacuum. The glass falls in, it doesn't blow out. (unless you are holding the monitor above your head when it explodes)

they make a REALLY great noise when you smash them. *sigh* I miss working in my schools electronics lab.

Re:Memories

[TobyRush]

So could someone enlighten me as to how I could design a PC to die in exactly one or two years so I can make a fortune in warranty repair costs?

I always understood it to be the other way around: company designs a product, tests it to figure out how long it tends to last before going south, and then sets the warranty for just under that amount of time.

Love my 21" CRTs!

[Bruinwar]

Got 2 Trinitron 21" tubes on my desktop at home & work. Wife has one also. Got the 3 at home used, dirt cheap. People giving them away because they got their LCDs.

Personally I prefer the image on CRTs over LCDs. They are great for CAD & IMO gaming as well. Plus I require the screen to be the same distance from my eyes so the only thing an LDC buys me is clutter space behind the monitor.

So keep buyin your LCDs & I will keep a lookout for people dumping their Trinitrons! Now if I can only find the storage place for all these monster monitors....

You can have my trinintron...

[thezig2]

...when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Or when it craps out, whichever comes first. I've had a 21-inch Diamondtron (Gateway-branded) since 2002, and it continues to be the best monitor I've ever seen in terms of picture quality. It's the first CRT I've ever owned that could display fully-black blacks AND appropriately bright colors without having to manually change contrast levels. I barely notice the little gray wires; unless the screen's displaying something fully white I can't see them at all. LCD/plasma displays are still coming into their own. Plasmas have problems with burn in and are dreadfully expensive, and LCDs have lousy black display, but these problems are phasing out. Still, I won't be giving up my 60lb behemoth until it gives me a good reason to.

Has it been that long?!

[TigerPlish]

The Trinitron was:

1. The first TV I noticed had better everything that most others, if not all. Better picture, better glare / reflection resistance, better stability, etc.
2. The first TV I aspired to buy. It took a long while, but in 1995 it happened.. after a few Toshibas and Sanyos.
3. The last TV I had. When I went front-projector with lcd, I sold the 35" trini to a co-worker, who still uses it.
4. The densest, most massive thing per given volume I've had the "pleasure" to move.

The Trinitron is what I'll think of, when I think of an old-school CRT tv.

You shall be missed. But only in the nostalgic way. These days I don't measure my screens in inches, I do so in feet ;o)