It's a well done storytelling, but two odd thoughts/questions about it...
As I was watching it, there was the drama of whether it would be saved from imminent destruction, and it actually seemed unlikely that they could, but their approach was to be... secretive about it.
It turned out that they wanted it for themselves, and didn't that create a conflict of interest? By keeping it quiet, they increased the chance that they would obtain it themselves (and the YouTube story to tell about it), but increased the likelihood that the TV would be lost entirely (because other efforts wouldn't be brought)?
Fortunately the gamble worked out, and the TV wasn't destroyed.
There's also a possibly related matter, in how Sony stopped talking with them. Is it possible that Sony and/or Japanese government aren't very happy to learn that a possibly unique museum piece, of one of the heights of Sony achievement, was quietly removed from the country, to the US, by a YouTube influencer?
I applaud preserving this rare artifact, and compliment the storytelling, but did have these couple odd thoughts.
From the interview with the TV's original owner, this seemed like his ideal outcome.
The owner had seen discussions of the TV online and knew it was a big deal. But he still couldn't get rid of it until this guy came along.
The owner even said he wanted the TV to go to someone who would use, appreciate, and take care of it. The video clearly demonstrates all of the above. If the TV ended up in some museum, forever powered off, that would be even more tragic in some ways.
I didn't get the impression that anyone was bamboozled or cheated.
The sad reality is that there are countless more things in the world that belong in museums than there is museum space/staff to properly take care of it.
This was, sadly, a conscious choice made by Allen long before his death. Same as with his airplane and tank collection. He had plenty of time and legal advice to set it up with an endowment that could allow for its continued yearly operational budget and chose not to do so. His heirs don't care about his personal toy collection so it's been sold off.
The same thing basically happened with Malcolm Forbes' collections. It's perfectly normal for heirs to just not value things you've collected in the same way you did.
Would that really be better than letting your family sell it to the highest bidder? The only real concern I see if its value falls below the metal it contains or the mover breaks it. If a family cannot sell and does not value it then whats the point of keeping it?
If one believes that collection should be for the benefit of the public, proper organization would remove it from the estate that goes to the heirs.
It wouldn't matter if the heirs value it or not, because it wouldn't have been theirs. Because he let it remain in his estate, he left it to his heirs to decide what to do with it, and clearly, they did not care to keep it as a public collection, nor to endeavor to keep it together as a collection. I guess I should have visited it when I had the chance.
On any thread where the topic of various "collectibles" that surely someone wants comes up, there are tons of people who are "you can't just toss it" but somehow thy never want to take them off your hands themselves.
I totally understand the impulse but it's just not realistic to preserve everything.
> There's also a possibly related matter, in how Sony stopped talking with them. Is it possible that Sony and/or Japanese government aren't very happy to learn that a possibly unique museum piece, of one of the heights of Sony achievement, was quietly removed from the country, to the US, by a YouTube influencer?
I didn't read that as Sony being pissed off by. Occam's razor says it's more likely to be your regular corporate dysfunction. Japanese corporations do seem as a whole to be more concerned about preserving their history than US ones, and Sony did have a small museum called ソニー歴史資料館 (the Sony Archive), but that Museum closed down in 2018[1]. Meanwhile, Toyota has six different Museum dedicated to its history and the history of the industries it participated in (including textile — Toyota was a major textile machinery manufacturer before it was an automotive company).
Sony still seems to display some of the archive's content in its headquarters, but I'm unclear how much of it. In general, closing the museum shows that preservation is perhaps important, but not very high on their priority list.
But even if preservation was a top goal, you still can't expect every employee on the PR department to be dedicated to that. PR departments are generally more concerned with current events, and may view such an interview as a distraction that isn't worth their time.
With respect to keeping quiet about it: it may not have been selfless, but it may also have drawn so much attention to it that the owner of the set wouldn't have wanted to deal with it. After all, he had already dealt with one person who didn't follow through.
As for the Sony not talking bit, it can probably be chalked up to corporate policy. Large organizations rarely let staff speak on matters when it may be construed as being speaking for the corporation.
True. Although, would a call to a museum of Japanese technology/industry, or to Sony HQ, have had a better chance to preserve it? (More likely to save it, less likely for it to be destroyed in handling and shipping.)
As well as keep it in country?
Perhaps the current owners will be reached by a museum, and decide to repatriate it. I imagine that the right museum home could be a win for everyone.
The other parties you mentioned would probably have less motivation to preserve it, let alone restore it to a fully functional state. I find it rather bizarre that many posters here seem to think that it’s morally preferable for the TV set to rot in Japan rather than getting the proper care in the hands of an American collector, all because of some imaginary cultural baggage.
Heh it strikes me that while the stakes of this "relic" are kinda low, it echos the conversations about institutions like the British Museum possessing historic artefacts :) some claim there is moral argument for it keeping its artefacts, because Britain can best preserve them and protect them from damage.
Responsibility and autonomy to preserve one's own heritage (with the associated risk of failing to do so) is a longstanding ethical dilemma between cultures, and the answers aren't so clear imho! (This argument is much more compelling for museums, rather than Sony)
Yes, I am aware of those arguments and I am inclined to agree with you. Compared to cultural artifacts which are mostly neutral in terms of externalities, relics of the industrial era suffer more from the cobra effect.
Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair. Mechanics will tell you horror stories of rare car models being destroyed this way so the owners can claim a few hundred bucks from the DOT. I'm sure car collectors had a field day back then but with such a glut in the market they could not save everything that's worth saving.
Shank Mods was able to obtain a copy of the service manual in English from somebody in the US. This fact probably means that the TV was sold on (or imported to) the domestic US market for a while. (Sony have always allowed individuals to order parts through an authorised service centre, and the latter often insist on requesting a repair manual first even if you are 100% sure of the part number) It's very likely that a number of them existed in the US only to be unceremoniously thrown out by their owners when LCD TVs became more popular. I bet nobody batted an eyelid when that happened.
> Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair. Mechanics will tell you horror stories of rare car models being destroyed this way so the owners can claim a few hundred bucks from the DOT. I'm sure car collectors had a field day back then but with such a glut in the market they could not save everything that's worth saving.
But what else happened with that?
The glut ended. Used cars got more expensive relative to quality.
And now the cost of a 'reliable used car' is far more than inflation adjusted for the time passed.
getting back on topic...
> unceremoniously thrown out by their owners when LCD TVs became more popular. I bet nobody batted an eyelid when that happened.
IDK about all that, during the 'LCD Phase-in' everyone I knew either donated theirs and/or moved CRTs into smaller rooms when they replaced a working one.
Especially if it was 'Decent' TV, i.e. Progressive scan and component input...
Let alone if the thing cost as much new as a very nice car of the day. The sheer responsibility of it (thinking more, you really can't throw this thing out unceremoniously, at minimum it's part of a house or business space eviction proceeding...) has some weight, ironically.
> everyone I knew either donated theirs and/or moved CRTs into smaller rooms when they replaced a working one.
That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center. My city runs a annual kerbside collection program for large appliances and furniture, and I distinctly remember metal scavengers cruising the street gutting old CRTs people have left out for the copper coils, leaving whatever remains to be collected as hazardous e-waste. Around the same time, my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".
In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.
> That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center.That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center.
Maybe I just grew up poorer than you but it took longer than that in my world.
> my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s
Yeah meanwhile some of us had to deal with a Zenith TV that would 'jump' with a PS1 and other consoles on the RF/AV output because 'lord knows why'.
> and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".
Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.
Resourceful not-well-off people used to really appreciate repairable things, and the worst thing C4C did was get rid of a lot of not-fuel-efficient vehicles that were at least cheap to repair.
The video of that TV and the pair further underscores it. Everything on decently laid out boards. Nowadays an LCD tv, sometimes a part can go bad and it's so integrated that even 15 years ago it could be a 30 min solder job, nowadays it's cuck the whole shebang.
> In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.
Corporate maybe but I'd guess any smart corporation would try to load the 'disposal' costs of a 440 pound object onto the taker somehow. Similar for any rich household that wanted to keep wealth for more than a generation or two.
> Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.
Let me assure you that none of what I said was meant to diminish your point of view which I agree with mostly.
What I was trying to convey was that people’s mindsets were rather different during the last decade of CRT. CRT had been around since the end of WWII, it may have gotten bigger over the years but the form it took on largely remained the same so there was a sense of continuity as people handed down old TVs when they got something nicer.
When cheap LCD TVs came to the market it represented something more akin to a paradigm shift as people with limited space at home could now easily own screens 30 inches and up. My parents are actually rather frugal with my dad borders on being a tech hoarder who insist on keeping every single cell phone and laptop he ever owned somewhere in his garage. However even he was unable to justify the sheer bulk and running cost of CRT TVs back in that period. Even if he were to give it away there would have been very few takers of any.
Therefore it’s not inconceivable that this model could have been sold in the US or even few more places outside Japan. Most of them simply disappeared without a trace because at some point they were probably worth less than the space it occupies, and people were overly eager to embrace the flat panels without realising that they are not getting some of the utilities back.
I keep all my old cell phones too, but I had to get rid of a run of them from around 1998 - 2008 because the plastic started turning sticky a while back.
> not-fuel-efficient vehicles that were at least cheap to repair.
You don’t need to drive that much for fuel inefficiency to get really expensive. Even 10k miles/year which is well below average at 10MPH vs 30MPH @ 3$ / gallon is an extra 2,000$ / year, and adjusted for inflation gas is currently fairly cheap. Inflation adjusted in 2011 and 2012 gas was over 5$/gallon.
We might see consistent low gas prices intended to delay the EV transition (or the could spike), but these cars were already old 15 years ago when the program happened.
> Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair.
Those were wild times. I remember they also had a similar scheme in Germany. Absolute madness (and that's even if you ignore the useless damage to old cars.)
They should have just printed more money to juice the economy, instead of these wild schemes to give subsidies to specific industries.
> Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair.
So. Fucking. Stupid. As though Joe Consumer with a V8 Mustang he puts a few thousand miles on per year is the boogeyman of climate change, and not, hell just off the dome:
> "As though Joe Consumer with a V8 Mustang he puts a few thousand miles on per year is the boogeyman of climate change"
Scrappage schemes target the smokey, rusty shit-boxes that are worth next to nothing. Not Joe Mustang's prized V8, which would be worth far more than the value of the incentive anyway.
And when it comes to old cars, reducing local air pollution is often the major concern. Not just climate change.
Cash for Clunkers did exactly what it was intended to do: It screwed up the used car market for a very long time, simply by decreasing supply while demand remained.
People still needed cars, and everything is relative. When used car prices go up relative to that of new cars, then new cars become relatively inexpensive.
This helps sell more new cars. And back in the time of "too big to fail" auto industry bailouts, selling more new cars was kind of important.
edit: And remember, there were restrictions for Cash for Clunkers. The car had to be less than 25 years old, it had to run, and it had to have been registered and insured for the last 12 months. It was deliberately designed to thin the pool of functional used vehicles.
This program claimed revered cars like Audi Quattros and BMW E30s...along with V8 Mustangs. And once turned in, they were all quite purposefully destroyed: Sodium silicate replaced the engine oil and they were run at WOT until they seized, and then they were crushed just to be sure.
According to Wikipedia only about 677k vehicles were takes out of the market. In 2009 there were about 254 million registered cars in the US so did it really put a dent in the market?
That's the number of "registered vehicles" in the US, which is going to include everything from Joe Everyman's Mazda to every single truck AT&T uses to maintain what they assert strongly is a data network (sorry little snark there). A better thing to compare to would be the number of used cars sold. A quick google says about 35 million sales are known for 2008, comprising dealer, private, and independent sales. Taking the 677k figure at face value, that would amount to roughly 2% of the "moving" supply of vehicles being removed from the market, and worth noting, the taxpayer paid for that. Also worth noting that figure is going to be inherently conservative, because that's "all used vehicle sales" which includes things like rental companies unloading older inventory, logistics companies selling trucks, that sort of thing.
That isn't a ton but it also isn't nothing, and however you feel about it, that's 677,000 vehicles that were, according to the requirements laid out by the program, perfectly serviceable daily-driver vehicles that were in active use, that taxpayers paid to buy from consumers, strictly to destroy them. Irrespective of if it ruined the used market as the GP says, that's still a shit ton of perfectly usable machines that our government apportioned tax money to buy, and then paid contractors to destroy, on purpose.
maybe the used market salesman used it as an excuse to sell used cars more expensive.
how much did the price go up because of 2%? and all other factors excluded. even inflation is 2% a year. so thats one year. sorry but i dont buy it made a dent in the used car market. proof it to me with numbers etc please otherwise it sounds like the usual useless rant about „everything is getting worse without proof“
On aggregate, in a ridiculously-competitive market like commodity used cars that is generally free of collusion, salesmen do not get to determine sale prices.
That's simply not a thing when the other guy down the block will sell a similar car for $300 less and have his money today.
Any salesman can ask for whatever price they wish to ask for, and if it doesn't sell then there is simply no sale. (The annals of Ebay, to name one dataset that can be poked at, is rife with asking prices for things that simply did not sell.)
(This is one of the very few things that the "invisible hand of the free market" actually assures us of: Sure! A salesperson can ask $16000 for a car that is worth $6000. But if they sit on that car for years and years hoping for a bite that never comes, then maybe they can eventually sell it for $3000 -- losing money the entire time, for ever step of the process.
And while that's an example of how sales can happen, it is not an example of how sales both work and make money.
Used car salesmen do not butter their bread by losing money on sales. That's not a thing at all.)
hmmm i dont know. ancient artifacts sometimes highlight the technical and artistic possibilities of the time. In my opinion this tv represents very good consumer culture in the 80s as do amphitheaters in rome and greece their consumer culture.
Though I don't think anyone would have wanted it, I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy there. Maybe in theory there would have been a place for this in a curated space in Japan... if not for it being so massive at least.
Ultimately if it was a TV designed in Japan, having it on display at a local tech museum would be nice. I just don't know where it would go that could deal with the space and the weight.
Closest thing I could think of is the NTT museum, which is ginormous... but it's mostly about NTT's stuff. "Some other company in Japan made big TVs" is a bit less interesting than, say, some older tabulation machines they have there.
Japan's really ill situated for industrial museums. Land is at premium, summer steam is brutal, disasters are routine, and public support is weak.
It's also just one of the world's best for Sony - they make a lot of bests(with many asterisks too).
One thing I only understood after I've bought a 3D printer is, someone wanting an obsolete product is weird from creator perspective. I still fully understand consumer side sentiments, and also am aware of vital importance of reference data archives, but I'd rather want audiences to seek the latest and greatest than asking me about a shelf bracket that I stopped making some time ago.
So I think it's an okay outcome. The TV lives on. Someday Sony might buy it back, or it might get transferred to some other museums. That's good enough.
The only stretch goal left is an interview with its creators or their autobiography(s). But that would be a cherry on top.
> Japan's really ill situated for industrial museums. Land is at premium, summer steam is brutal, disasters are routine, and public support is weak.
Japan’s suitability for industrial museums can be debated, but saying “summer steam is brutal, disasters are routine” as reasons is ridiculous. This is the 21st century, not the Middle Ages. Besides, Japan already has plenty of industrial museums.
>Japan's really ill situated for industrial museums. Land is at premium, summer steam is brutal, disasters are routine, and public support is weak.
This makes absolutely no sense. Japan is full of museums of all kinds, including really weird ones you'd never see in America. Not far from me, there's a museum of miniatures, a museum about sewers, a museum about tap water, a museum about subways, and a museum with an indoor recreation of an entire village from ~300 years ago. And the summers here are better than most southern US states like Florida or Arizona, and disasters much less routine than Florida.
To be quite honest I don't think there are many museums that would want that CRT. CRTs are notoriously a massive pain in the ass. Retro computing museums and the like have their CRTs, but they don't really have the space for it.
It probably does make sense in the house of a massive hoarder.
They posted on Twitter to find people who wanted to get involved
> With no time to lose, Shank posted a call for help on Twitter, hoping someone in Osaka could investigate. Enter Abebe, a stranger who volunteered to check the location.
The restaurant was about to be demolished.
I don’t see any problems with this process or outcome. I think you’re comparing this outcome to an imagined alternative reality (going into a museum) that wasn’t even an option.
If I was in charge of a big corporation that still made displays, I would not want to preserve CRTs because it could hurt the narrative that modern technology is strictly superior to old technology. If people thought about CRTs in a positive light they might realize that no modern display can match them in latency and motion quality when it comes to displaying 60fps content (as found in console and arcade games). I'd prefer that all CRTs were destroyed and forgotten.
I don’t think any large screen manufacturer would give a second thought to this, the average consumer will still want the 4K, HDR, flat screen that is wall mountable.
The market the CRTs would steal is practically non existent, surely. I’d love this in my house for retro gaming purposes, but I’d still have my LG C/Gx or Samsung N95x or whatever the newest, fanciest models are for movies and modern use cases.
As much I appreciated the experience of no input latency CRTs they always gave me headaches after some hours due to the refresh rate flicker. LCDs were an immense relief even despite having very noticeable input latency for the same Hz (eg: cursor movement, which one gets accustomed to).
And the elephant in the room (literally): A moderate-sized CRT weighed a TON, burned through power, and took up substantial desk real estate.
They definitely have their perks but I only own one CRT for retro gaming, and I wouldn't trade any of my newer monitors or TV's for a bulky old tube if you paid me. Hardest conceivable pass please.
I’d compare this to large format film cameras. By raw resolution, large format film cameras are still far and above what is achievable digitally. Yet, of course, no one would argue that they pose a threat to the practicality and efficiency of digital, and few people appreciate/care about/need so much resolution.
I know I moved into the LCD monitor era kicking and screaming because the CRTs I used with my computers were far superior for text sharpness and didn't cause me near the eye-strain when doing long programming sessions.
There's no need for this. If you want to make sure consumers don't want to return to CRTs, all you have to do are the following:
1) point out how heavy they are. Give them a facsimile to lift to show them, after making them sign a waiver that they may permanently injure their back doing so.
2) show them how deep they are, and how far away from the wall they must sit because of this.
3) show them two power meters, showing the power consumption of a CRT and a modern LCD for comparison. Also show the actual costs for that power, and how much typical usage of these displays will cost per day and per year.
The last one alone should dissuade most people from wanting to go backwards.
Most people don't give two shits about latency, and modern LCDs with >= 120 fps capability already exist.
I nearly collapsed while moving my CRT out of the house. I have no recollection of the size, but putting it on my shoulder by myself was a terrible idea, and I’m very lucky I didn’t injure myself.
Nothing could persuade me to voluntarily go back to CRTs.
The only really good reason I can see to use a CRT is because you want to fix/rebuild one of the old 1980s vector arcade games (like Tempest or Star Wars) and want it to be a truly authentic reproduction.
Yeah, I left out the price aspect. Forget a 43-inch CRT: how about a 85-inch CRT? You can get an LCD (or better yet, OLED) TV this size easily for not that much money. But it's basically impossible to even make a CRT this size, and even if you could, it would be so expensive, heavy, and large it would be completely impractical. Lots of people now have 50-85" TVs in their living rooms, but those are all impossible for CRT technology.
However, the OP was trying to claim CRTs are superior because of latency and refresh rate for gaming applications, specifically, so I was just focusing on those aspects. The refresh rate part is silly; high-refresh-rate LCDs and OLEDs are common now. The latency part might have some validity, but compared to all the other factors it's really not that important.
For maximum motion quality the refresh rate needs to match the frame rate. Modern gaming LCDs can beat CRTs in refresh rate, but only a minority of games support such high frame rates. For any given refresh rate the CRT will always have better motion quality.
not really true anymore as the latest oled tech surpasses crt in almost every spec. And the spec it does not the difference is detectable by devices not human senses so practically makes no difference.
i don't get the skepticism, yes a youtuber did a thing but without them probably no one would have cared and the TV would've ended up destroyed in the rubble of the building
he even went to the lengths of calling up different CRT experts trying getting them to fix it
all this negativism just feels like older people being all "zoomers bad" because the medium is not what they prefer. maybe we should just be happy to pass the torch and glad that younger generations even have interest in this sort of thing
The negativity struck me as jealousy. I honestly don't get it though. The YouTuber went through significant effort to save a very cool artifact, and then shared it with the world via a well made video. Bravo I say!
(nit) Please don't use "conflict of interest" that way (casually). It should only apply to situations where there are actual legal or ethical obligations in opposition. Nobody owes the online CRT community anything.
Point understood, but do you think there's no obligations to communities or societies, other than those codified in law, contracts, or some (professional?) ethics?
If those other obligations existed, could we say "conflict of interest" about them, or is there a better term or phrasing?
Not who you were responding to, but I think there is no conflict there. If he was a known member of some preservation society, then maybe there would be a conflict of interest of the ethical variety, but as far as I know this person is just an enthusiast. They serve their interests and no other, with respect to this particular space.
The email he shared that he was sending to Sony was obnoxious “this is a chance for some wicked awesome free PR for Sony..” so it is kind of no wonder they stopped talking to him. Other than that, he never said he was doing it for the good of humanity or anything, he just wanted it and found a way to make it happen, I admire the pluck.
It might be pretty on the nose but I don't see why that would make them stop talking to him. Wouldn't that be the reason they'd approve a corporate interview in the first place? I doubt they'd do it for no reason
> It turned out that they wanted it for themselves, and didn't that create a conflict of interest? By keeping it quiet, they increased the chance that they would obtain it themselves (and the YouTube story to tell about it), but increased the likelihood that the TV would be lost entirely (because other efforts wouldn't be brought)?
Based on the timeline there was limited time to act.
Additionally, given they did some public 'reach-out' posts (that wound up finding them the thing) there were theoretically others that could have tried to handle it via their own channels.
Per the YT video's 'sponsorship', I'll note that shipping a ~450 pound TV and ~150-200 pound stand overseas in general is not a cheap, or easily logistical task given the timeframe. Esp if it's on the 2nd floor of a building to start (can't just do a simple hand hydraulic lift for the hard parts.)
> There's also a possibly related matter, in how Sony stopped talking with them. Is it possible that Sony and/or Japanese government aren't very happy to learn that a possibly unique museum piece, of one of the heights of Sony achievement, was quietly removed from the country, to the US, by a YouTube influencer?
Overthinking it perhaps. Sony has a lot of divisions and it's hard to get live assistance from them even if you are a current user of their products, at least speaking from personal experience with a couple different lines.
-----
That said, the YT video drew things out way too much for drama's sake and it made me glad I have ad-free.
Arcade collectors are practically liquidating Japan of many valuable arcade cabinets and PCBs. Nobody cared about much of these items 10-15 years ago. The YouTube and Reddit subcultures have grown a new younger audience for retro gaming, who often have a lot of money to throw around buying up rare items. There are also IG accounts of folks in places like Dubai, who clearly have wealth, amassing large collections of Japanese retro game tech.
If Japan, Sony or any other individual wanted to save this CRT for themselves, it would have been snatched up by now. The fact stands that the creator of the video is the only person on earth who did the detective work and put boots on the ground to make it their own rare CRT. Good work, I say!
>Arcade collectors are practically liquidating Japan of many valuable arcade cabinets and PCBs
Funny you say Japan when same thing is happening to US Arcades :) Here an interview with Euro importer:
'453: Resurrecting Arcades: Meet Europe’s Biggest Arcade Importer - The Retro Hour EP453' - The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast) 1 Nov 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzfVLY5Ag3s
One of the stories is him buying out half of Las Vegas rare arcades auction for pennies because he was the only one willing to sit all night clicking on bids.
Eh, what standard are we holding people to? You ever shop for a used car(maybe even some rare spec of a sports car)? When you finally found a good deal did you shout in the streets and put out an ad to make sure no one else is around to make a greater offer?
~~Plus, who plays out a mental moral dilemma with a historical museum any time they want to buy something?~~
Actually I think this might be a false equivalency OP, because this isn't just any old used car. I think it's fair to at least stop and question whether this should go to some greater good or not.
I also had an odd feeling avout several other enthusiasts travelling to the guy's place presumably at their own cost, spending a lot of time to repair / tune up the thing, and in the end, our hero just adds it to his collection.
If I were passionate about something, I would fly in to play with it and tweak it on my own dime. Did you get the impression that somebody was swindled in this process?
Being able to physically mess around with something I’m passionate about, and learn and share info about it - without any of the overhead of actually storing the thing or the logistics behind it or whatever is something I actively seek out. Heck, legit museums charge entry for that.
No actually, he just didn't mention any favors going the other way. Well, I don't really know how that community works, but I remember reading about the restoration of an old pinball machine where parts, money and favors were exchanged, not just given / taken.
It's interesting that they say they had such a hard time finding help, I have never heard about this entire endeavor until now, and the video mentions them desiring contacts at Sony with the display division, which I happen to have, and would have helped if I had known about it.
It's not too late! I recommend that you reach out to him on Twitter or Facebook. If he really could secure that interview, I am sure he could release a follow-up video, or update his original video to add a final chapter.
> This is the same for a lot of supposed “theft” by museums.
Not to mention that in many countries art pieces predating a certain era are simply destroyed (on the ground that they're older than a particular religion).
And most of the pharaohs' tombs were pillaged and unique pieces were melt by actual thiefs for their gold.
These evil, evil, museums displaying these around the world for any visitor to see when you think these could have been melt for gold by thieves or simply destroyed because they were impure!
Evil western civilization. That western civilization is so evil it must be replaced!
Western societies took advantage of multiple other societies to plunder their treasures. Those same societies didn't have the infrastructure and/or care to preserve these things themselves.
Not necessarily true- the majority of people don't know about 3-2-1 backup strategy and I've seen hundreds of "help! my { phone | SD card | computer } died and I lost all my family photos" posts
Conservation or not, that TV has been given out by its owner so there is no theft involved. Neither has it been moved out of the country by colons or illegaly.
And it is a damn TV. A big one for sure but it isn't Moctezuma II headdress nor are those Devatas carved from Banteay Srei cambodian temple.
This example is what makes much of the "stealing" claim bogus, both for this and many artifacts. The Japanese owner wanted it gone and considered it trash. It wasn't some beloved item. Even Sony didn't care.
And so much of what is considered "stolen" was given away by someone in that culture as trash.
I have no information that you don't, but it looks to be blogspam of it -- it always refers to Shank as a separate party, it doesn't claim to have had any involvement in what happened.
As a child in the early 90s (maybe 1993), I nearly got crushed under one of these trying to connect my Nintendo to the AV cables on the back. It was against the wall in an alcove and the only way to access was to rotate it slightly and lean it forward to reach the connections on the back (which I couldn’t see, only feel). It tipped off the shelf and onto me, partially supported by the shelf and partially by me.
I didn’t want to get in trouble because it was so nice, so I just kind of squatted there pinned under it trying to lever it back. Thankfully my dad walked by, noticed, and kept into action. And here I still am today.
I also almost got killed by one too. I was a baby playing around it, the unit was a communmist era black and white monstruosity 30 something inch and it sit on a floral lace and that on a very smooth wood table, the cable was dangling around it and plugged in front of it, I pulled by the power cable and made the tv slide until it fell of the right by me.
Yes. This was more like continuously jerking my weight backwards with all my might while holding a front corner to maneuver the TV inch by inch into a diagonal orientation, until on the last jerk it went an inch too far.
As the video mentions this model is so incredibly rare that previously there were only two known photos of retail units in the wild - and one of those photos was of the very unit that the guy in this story eventually managed to acquire.
The other photo is a mystery, nobody knows who took it or whether that unit is still intact.
And yet, common enough that a random guy in the forum claimed to have had several in his store and gave them a copy of the service manual. And that was in the same city as the collector in the video. A decent amount of these were probably sold, and almost certainly all disposed of as soon as they became obsoleted by plasmas.
Wow, goes to show how people are gullible to their "memories", never stopping to question them. This could explain the "communism was better" ramblings you get from old farts quite well...
I... just don't get it. What I remember from my young is not that much but it all definitely happened and does not need any artistic license.
It's a great understatement to say that the end of the Eastern Bloc could have been handled a whole lot better, especially from the perspective of people who would have been established or even happy with their lives under Communism: age 40+, educated, successful career at the Trabbi factory, just got to the top of the waiting list for an apartment, etc.
* This comment is not an endorsement of totalitarian governments
Crushing was probably not the only danger you were in there - even if the thing would have just fallen and imploded next to you, that could have been pretty dangerous as well...
It is very difficult to break a CRT from the front, even deliberately. The neck is fragile but a CRT TV falling on its face (which is what tends to happen as they're very front-heavy) is far more likely to break the case or the boards inside than the tube.
Am I overthinking it or is this blog post heavily AI-edited? The way the text is very similar to what modern GPT models would give you.
This paragraph was the last straw that made me think so:
>This story isn’t just about a TV; it’s about preserving history and celebrating the people who make it possible. Shank’s journey serves as a reminder of the lengths we’ll go to honor the past and connect through shared enthusiasm.
Also
>Shank Mods’ video is not just a celebration of retro tech but a love letter to the communities that keep these technologies alive. From the daring extraction to the meticulous restoration, every moment of this story is a testament to what can be achieved with determination and collaboration.
> "Shank Mods’ video is not just a celebration of retro tech but a love letter to the communities that keep these technologies alive. From the daring extraction to the meticulous restoration, every moment of this story is a testament to what can be achieved with determination and collaboration"
Not just a X but a Y
From the A to the B
GPT LOVES this kind of verbose garbage - it's the non-fiction equivalent of purple prose and reads like a 6th grader desperately trying to pad out their MLA-formatted 5 paragraph essay.
> The fact that some people can’t tell is actually scary.
It really is, and I see more and more of it in Reddit comments, and even at work.
I had some obvious AI writing sent to me by a lawyer on the other side of a dispute recently and I was pissed - I don't mind if you want to use it to help you (I do myself), but at least have the decency to edit so it doesn't read like ChatGPT trash.
> It really is, and I see more and more of it in Reddit comments, and even at work.
I have a morbid fascination with how bad Reddit has become. LLMs have supercharged the problem, but even before ChatGPT became popular Reddit was full of ragebait, reposts, lies, and misinformation.
The scary and fascinating thing to me is that so many people eat that content right up. You can drop into the front page (default subreddits or logged out) and anyone with basic adult level understanding of the world can pick out obvious lies and deliberate misinformation in many of the posts. Yet 1000s of people in the comments are getting angry over obviously fabricated or reposted AITA stories, clear ragebait in /r/FluentInFinance, and numerous other examples. Yet a lot of people love that content and can’t seem to get enough of it.
I have posted about this before on HN. I push back against this sentiment. I had a post-doc roommate who was a native German speaker, who regularly used ChatGPT to improve his English grammar and phrasing while writing papers. He told me that ChatGPT was an excellent tutor to improve his English. A few times, he showed me the improvements. I agreed: It was pretty good.
If you're below-average, AI writing looks great. If you've above, it looks horrible. That goes not just for writing but anything else created by AI --- it's the average of its training data, which is also going to be average in quality.
I didn't notice that this was AI myself. I tend to start skimming when the interesting bits are spread out.
There's two variations of this that are very common:
* Watering down - the interesting details are spread apart by lots of flowery language, lots of backstory, rehashing and retelling already established points. It's a way of spreading an cup of content into a gallon of text, the same way a cup of oatmeal can be thinned.
* High fiber - Lots of long-form essays are like this. They start with describing the person being interviewed or the place visited as though the article were a novel and the author is paid by the word. Every person has some backstory that takes a few paragraphs. There is some philosophizing at some point. The essay is effectively the story of how the essay was written and all the backstory interviews rather than a treatise on the supposed topic. It's basically loading up your beef stew with cabbage; it is nutritive but not particularly dense or enjoyable.
Both are pretty tedious. AI can produce either one, but it can only hallucinate or fluff to produce more content than its inputs. As such, AI writing is a bit like a reverse-compression algorithm.
I doubt it, because it is a style that people who’re bad at writing already use. Like, our magical robot overlords did not make it up wholesale; plenty examples of that particular sort of stylistic suck were already out there.
(I am semi-convinced that the only job that’ll really be impacted by LLMs is estate agent copywriters, because estate agents already love that awful style.)
What's worse is that this obvious AI writing is going to become a part of new AI training datasets, as it gets scraped, so we'll end up with some kind of ouroborus of AI slop.
It's in the third person and is frequently mentioning the third party in most sections and it appears (to me) to be written by that same party. The third party is presented as a human entity but not particularly human. There's nothing in the article about that entity which one should expect in such a format.
Feels like it's written as if it's a press release. Normally a press release would have notes for editors with biography and additional info. Feels off.
You can clearly see lots of similarities, especially the "Why it matters" section. Of course the substack post fed the actual video transcript to the model to write or refine the contents, but it's still very obvious.
I really enjoy reading this blog in general, but I do agree with you that it absolutely has that AI-assisted-writing style.
Looking at this and other posts, they often feel like if one prompted ChatGPT with something like "please write a timeline of the Walkman". I think they may want to dial it back for a more natural feeling.
It has that "stretched to maximize Youtube engagement revenue" feel.
There is apparently an SEO advantage to "long form" Youtube videos. You also have to hit 4,000 viewing hours per year before Google pays out.[1]
So there's an incentive to bloat videos with background material. That's why so many Youtube videos have a collection of stock photos and clips at the beginning giving a history of something, before they get to the new thing.
Now we need local crap blockers which will delete that crap. Good AI problem.
Solving problems caused a tech company using measurements that were turned into requirements by using AI to get around the effects of them is hilarious.
I love the upcoming tech arms racing which is just going to be developing new technical solutions to problems cause by technical solutions. It's more convenient because it removes the inconvenience created by the thing that makes your life more convenient?
At what point is it not worth it any more and people just avoid it all and start reading books again? I think something like that is a probable (though hyperbolically illustrated) outcome.
Yes, I immediately noticed that it's likely AI written and I thought that this really discounts an otherwise great story.
What I mean is that if the author does not put in the least effort to make it not AI sounding, how much does the author actually care about his/her content?
I see lots of passages that scream AI. Some selections:
> Retailing for $40,000 (over $100,000 today), it pushed the boundaries of what CRTs could achieve, offering professional-grade performance.
"Professional-grade" huh? There are professional TV watchers? It's not a studio reference monitor. It's just a regular TV but bigger.
> The urgency was palpable.
Where does one palpate urgency?
> Against the odds, Abebe found the CRT still in place, fully operational, and confirmed that the restaurant owner was looking for a way to get rid of it.
We establish later that it wasn't fully operational at all. And what odds? We didn't establish any. The TV is rare, and we later establish that the original owner knew it.
> What follows is a race against time to coordinate the TV's extraction, involving logistics experts, a moving team, and a mountain of paperwork.
> Abebe, the man who made the rescue possible, turned out to be the director of Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon. His selfless dedication during the final months of the game’s development exemplifies the power of shared passions.
Cool detail, but irrelevant, even if followed by breathless admiration fluff.
> This story isn’t just about a TV; it’s about preserving history and celebrating the people who make it possible.
I don't recall anybody being celebrated. They got a cool TV. Cool.
>I don't recall anybody being celebrated. They got a cool TV. Cool.
The original video gives plenty of appreciation to the people who made moving it possible, the shop owner, and the people who restored it to perfect working condition.
The TV was bought and used by a business, it doesn't get much more "pro" than that (someone should remind Apple's marketing team). But we could argue about semantics all day, humans make vaguely inaccurate statements all the time.
I had one of the 36” Sony Wega Trinitron CRTs for years. Weighed well over 200lbs, which combined with the shape, made it a really “fun” thing to move.
The geometry was a killer when trying to move it because you couldn't wrap your arms around the thing. When faced with moving one by myself down the stairs to my apartment, I was forced to (carefully) roll it downhill.
When I was about 14, my mom got a new TV and I got the 27” Trinitron. I was simultaneously excited and terrified. I would have to move it.
My arms were too short to get around it. Somehow we made it down the basement stairs without help. By “we” I mean the TV and I. I got it across the room and onto the TV stand.
33 year old me would definitely need an Advil after.
I'll add my voice. I bought one from a friend for $36 (a dollar an inch) while waiting for flatscreens to come down in price. It bent my TV stand and I ended up keeping it a couple extra years because I didn't want to move it out of the house. Eventually we put it on Craigslist for free (with a warning about the weight) and two very large men showed up and carried it away.
Me too. It was an anchor. I had a couple of movers nearly drop it once. Getting it out of my house was a great accomplishment (I felt like a great weight had been lifted). At the time it was a definite improvement in video quality (IIRC my first real 1080p, coupled with HDTV) and I still find it crazy I can buy larger, better screens that are lighter and cheaper. Clearly, you can scale up tubes but it's just not going to win against LCD or LED.
It wasn't actually 1080p but 1080i, meaning it interlaced each field. It worked well for CRTs because of the way they operated, but it is a different standard.
Fun fact: it had a special "anamorphic" mode. You know how widescreen movies on 4:3 displays are cropped? Someone had the idea that maybe instead of cropping them, you could use all of the resolution must just direct the electron beam to display it on middle 3/4 (vertically) of the screen. There, an extra 33% better vertical resolution and brightness for free?
There weren't a whole lot of DVDs mastered that way, but when you could get one, and your DVD player supported it, and your TV supported it, it looked freaking fantastic.
That’s actually not true, the majority of widescreen DVDs were mastered in Anamorphic format. The players themselves were then responsible for squishing down to letterboxed or doing an automated form of “pan and scan” which most people thought was terrible. If you were lucky though, you had a TV capable of doing the anamorphic adjustment and then you’d get the higher resolution as you stated.
I use a 55" 4k curved TV. The upper portion is too high to do computer work but I move unused windows up there. It's on a desk opposite the couch so I also use it as a TV.
Ignore the other commenter, there is no such thing as too big as long as there are enough pixels!
> there is no such thing as too big as long as there are enough pixels!
4K is absolutely too few pixels for 55” for me. To go 55”, I’d need at minimum 2.5x that many personally. As such a thing doesn’t exist, I use two 27” 5K monitors and endure the bezel divider.
32 is enough that you need to rotate your head if you want to see all parts of the screen. I have a 32" 4k screen and its a bit annoying, I get cricks in my neck, so I tend to only really use a centre 1080p sized area on the screen, with my winXP era wallpaper showing through around it.
Tbh I'll prefer 27" 4k.
43 might be a bit better because you can move the screen a little farther away.
Surely it depends on the sitting distance? I have 2 27" 19:10 screens next to each other and do not need to move my head to see all parts of the screen.
I found a 32" on the curb, heaved it into the back of my truck, and got it home.
It worked great, I thought about how much of a pain it would be to drag into the house and up the stairs to the gaming room, and decided I'd just find a 19-27" to use for old consoles.
We inherited one of these from my in-laws, it was a beast. After about a year, it finally died so my son and I loaded it up and took it to Best Buy for free recycling. (this was about 15 years ago.) When the clerk come out with a trolley to collect the tv, we offered to help, but he said he would get it and that was that. I was impressed.
My BIL had one of those. He asked me to help bring in his new bazillion inch LCD so I drove over. Turned out the first task was to move that old CRT into his basement...
Amazing story, got sucked into watching the whole video despite not knowing much about the hobby. A random little bit stood out to me, when the president of Sony made a personal promise to fix the TV after it stopped working (a while back). Now that's dedication to quality and customer satisfaction.
Another day, another LLM generated blog post on the front page.
I'm not opposed to AI tools on principle, but why does this article exist?
It's not because the author had anything interesting to say. It's not because the AI had anything interesting to say. It's a summary of a Youtube video because... clicks or something.
Counterpoint (as someone who watched the 30 mins video originally): some people may not have time to watch said video and can read the AI-generated summary quicker and then decide if the video is worth watching.
I am not a CRT collector, but as a NES dev I keep a small 13" around and use it reqularly for dev purposes and for showing off my games at conventions. 13" is the perfect size in my opinion. Does not take up too much space and is easy to lug around to shows.
I fear the day that mine dies because small 13" models in good condition are getting harder to find for a decent price. Seems like some people caught on and are selling them on FB Marketplace for high prices and advertising them as "Retro Gaming TVs".
The glass optics on these and other large screen CRTs is something that always impress[es|ed] me. From the older screens that had more of a circular image all the way to these "flat" CRTs, there were lots of improvements in everything except weight. It took a lot of glass to get the flat front, but was far from flat on the inside.
It seems this TV is more rare than special. Sony was again making up to 42" models in the 2000s. Not quite at 43" however those were 1080i, 16:9 flat screen CRTs with a plethora of analog and digital ports in the rear.
The later CRT models you are describing here are not coveted by retro gaming enthusiasts (which the people involved here clearly are) since the digital nature of them meant they introduced a ton of processing that negates the near zero input lag all earlier analog CRTs benefit from. Many of the later digital models can actually be had for much cheaper these days than the full analog ones despite looking more powerful on spec sheets.
I used to have a Samsung 27” HDTV CRT. I think I brought it, in the late ‘90s. Back then, LCD/plasma monitors of similar size, cost thousands (my, how times have changed).
Big, heavy honker, and suffered from chronic fringing, around the edges.
I gave it away, in the mid-oughts, which required a pickup truck, and two strong men.
I don’t miss it, at all.
My job was for an imaging company, and we had a massive HDTV CRT in our showroom. I think it was around 32”. It was a Sony. That was in the early ‘90s.
I worked for a stereo store in San Francisco in the late-90s. We didn't have to deliver these, but we did have to deliver the 36" Sony XBRs, which weighed over 200 lbs and were just a delight to drag up 4 flights of stairs with two people.
My first college roommate brought the largest CRT I've ever seen. It looks a LOT like this one. He passed away this last year, otherwise I'd ask him how large it was.
It took FIVE adults to carry up the two stories to our apartment! But man, that thing was awesome back in 2007.
CRTs used to be cheap because they were made in high volumes and had a large ecosystem of parts suppliers. If you were to make a CRT today, you'd need to fabricate a lot more parts yourself, and the low volume production would require charging very high prices. You'd also have to deal with more stringent environmental laws, as CRTs contain many toxins, including large amounts of lead.
It's much cheaper to emulate CRT effects so that they work with any display technology. Modern LCDs and OLEDs have fast enough response times that you can get most CRT effects (and omit the ones you dislike, such as refresh flicker). And you don't have to deal with a heavy, bulky display that can implode and send leaded glass everywhere.
Unfortunately, the flicker is essential for the excellent motion quality CRTs are renowned for. If the image on the screen stays constant while you eyes are moving, the image formed on your retina is blurred. Blurbusters has a good explanation:
CRT phosphors light up extremely brightly when the electron beam hits them, then exponentially decay. Non-phosphor-based display technologies can attempt to emulate this by strobing a backlight or lighting the pixel for only a fraction of the frame time, but none can match this exponential decay characteristic of a genuine phosphor. I'd argue that the phosphor decay is the most important aspect of the CRT look, more so than any static image quality artifacts.
There is such a thing as a laser-powered phosphor display, which uses moving mirrors to scan lasers over the phosphors instead of an electron beam, but AFAIK this is only available as modules intended for building large outdoor displays:
But why would the flicker be considered "excellent motion quality"?
In real life, there's no flicker. Motion blur is part of real life. Filmmakers use the 180-degree shutter rule as a default to intentionally capture the amount of motion blur that feels natural.
I can understand why the CRT would reduce the motion blur, in the same way that when I super-dim an LED lamp at night and wave my hand, I see a strobe effect instead of smooth motion, because the LED is actually flickering on and off.
But I don't understand why this would ever be desirable. I view it as a defect of dimmed LED lights at night, and I view it as an undesirable quality of CRT's. I don't understand why anyone would call that "excellent motion quality" as opposed to "undesirable strobe effect".
Or for another analogy, it's like how in war and action scenes in films they'll occasionally switch to a 90-degree shutter (or something less than 180) to reduce the motion blur to give a kind of hyper-real sensation. It's effective when used judiciously for a few shots, but you'd never want to watch a whole movie like that.
Sample-and-hold causes smearing when your eyes track an image that is moving across the screen. That doesn't happen in the real world: if you follow an object with your eyes it is seen sharply.
With strobing, moving objects still remain sharp when tracked.
You're correct, but sadly most games and movies are made with low frame rates. Even 120fps is low compared to what you need for truly realistic motion. Flicker is a workaround to mitigate this problem. The ideal solution would be 1000fps or higher on a sample-and-hold display.
> Flicker is a workaround to mitigate this problem.
Isn't motion blur the best workaround to mitigate this problem?
As long as we're dealing with low frame rates, the motion blur in movies looks entirely natural. The lack of motion blur in a flicker situation looks extremely unnatural.
Which is why a lot of 3D games intentionally try to simulate motion blur.
And even if you're emulating an old 2D game designed for CRT's, I don't see why you'd prefer flicker over sample-and-hold. The link you provided explains how sample-and-hold "causes the frame to be blurred across your retinas" -- but this seems entirely desirable to me, since that's what happens with real objects in normal light. We expect motion blur. Real objects don't strobe/flicker.
(I mean, I can get you might want flicker for historical CRT authenticity, but I don't see how it could be a desirable property of displays generally.)
>Isn't motion blur the best workaround to mitigate this problem?
Motion blur in real life reacts to eye movement. When you watch a smoothly moving object, your eye accurately tracks it ("smooth pursuit") so that the image of that object is stationary on your retina, eliminating motion blur. If there are multiple objects moving in different directions you can only track one of them. You can choose where you want the motion blur just by focusing your attention. If you bake the motion blur into the video you loose this ability.
I guess it just comes down to aesthetic preference then.
If there's motion blur on something I'm tracking in smooth pursuit, it doesn't seem particularly objectionable. (I guess I also wonder how accurate the eye's smooth pursuit is -- especially with fast objects in video games, surely it's only approximate and therefore always somewhat blurry anyways? And even if you're tracking an object's movement perfectly, it can be still be blurry as the video game character's arms move, its legs shift, its torso rotates, etc.)
Whereas if there's a flicker/strobe effect, that feels far more objectionable to me.
At the end of the day, my eyes are used to motion blur so a little bit extra on an object my eye is tracking doesn't seem like a big deal -- it still feels natural. Whereas strobe/flicker seems like a huge deal -- extremely unnatural, jumpy and jittery.
You should be able to emulate close to CRT beam scanout + phosphor decay given high enough refresh rates.
Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.
You essentially draw the frame over and over with progressive darkening of individual scan lines to emulate phosphor decay.
In practice, you'd want to emulate the full beam scanout and not even wait for full input frames in order to reduce input lag.
Mr. Blurbuster himself has been pitching this idea for awhile, as part of the software stack needed once we have 960+ Hz displays to finally get CRT level motion clarity. For example:
> Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.
Many retro signals are 240p60 rather than 480i60. Nearly everything before the Playstation era.
Is there actually a fundamental physical limit in modern (O)LED displays not being able to emulate that “flicker”, or is merely that all established display driver boards are unable to do it because it isn’t a mainstream requirement? If so, it would still be much cheaper to make an FPGA-powered board that drives a modern panel to “simulate” (in quotes because it may not be simulating, instead merely avoiding to compensate for by avoiding the artificial persistence) the flicker than bootstrapping a modern CRT supply chain?
The reason why this is a difficult problem is that physically emulating the flicker requires emulating the beam and phosphor decay, which necessitates a far higher refresh rate than just the input refresh rate. You'd need cutting-edge extremely high refresh rate monitors. The best monitor I found runs at 500hz, but pushing the limits like that usually means concessions in other departments. Maybe you could do it with that one.
My LG has something like that, OLED motion pro. I believe it displays blank frames given the panel runs at higher than 24fps. Medium is noticeably darker but oleds have plenty of brightness for my viewing space and it makes slow pans look much nicer. High is even darker but adds noticeable flicker to my eyes
But the refresh rate needs to match the frame rate to get the best motion quality. If you display the same frames multiple times you'll get ghost images trailing the motion. Lots of games are locked to lower frame rates, and there's barely any 72fps video.
Looking at that Dallibor Farney company and how hard it is for them to get new nixie tubes to be a sustainable business, I shudder to think how much more effort it would be to get new, high quality CRTs off the ground. It would be cool though. A good start might be bringing back tube rebuilding more widely.
I think it's one of these things that people like to talk about in the abstract, but how many people really want a big CRT taking up space in their home?
Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you. A lot cheaper than restarting the production of cathode-ray tubes.
I recently bought a big CRT to take up space in my home.
Yes, of course, "objectively" speaking, an OLED display is superior. It has much better blacks and just better colors with a much wider gamut in general. But there's just something about the way a CRT looks - the sharp contrast between bleeding colors and crisp subpixels, the shadows that all fade to gray, the refresh flicker, the small jumps the picture sometimes makes when the decoding circuit misses an HBLANK - that's hard to replicate just in software. I've tried a lot of those filters, and it just doesn't come out the same. And even if it did look as nice, it would never be as cool.
Retro gaming has to be retro. And to be honest, the CRT plays Netflix better as well. It doesn't make you binge, you see? Because it's a little bit awful, and the screen is too small, and you can't make out the subtitles if you sit more than two meters away from the screen, and you can't make out anything if you sit closer than that.
Does that mean we have to restart the production of cathode-ray tubes? Hopefully not. But you can't contain the relics of an era in a pass-through device from jlcpcb.
If the display is working and the input layout isn't changing, you shouldn't accept any jumps at all. If the sync signals are coming at the same rate, the display should remain steady. (Well - as steady as you get with a CRT.) If they don't: it's broken.
> Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you.
OLEDs are still behind on motion clarity, but getting close. We finally have 480 Hz OLEDs, and seem to be on track to the 1000Hz needed to match CRTs.
The Retrotink 4k also exists as a standalone box to emulate CRTs and is really great. The main problem being it's HDMI 2.0 output, so you need to choose between 4k60 output with better resolution to emulate CRT masks/scan lines, or 1440p120 for better motion clarity.
Something 4k500 or 4k1000 is likely needed to really replace CRTs completely.
Really hoping by the time 1000 Hz displays are common we do end up with some pass-through box that can fully emulate everything. Emulating full rolling CRT gun scan out should be possible at that refresh rate, which would be amazing.
1000Hz is enough to match CRT quality on a sample-and-hold display, but only when you're displaying 1000fps content. A great many games are limited to 60fps, which means you'll need to either interpolate motion, which adds latency and artifacts, or insert black frames (or better, black lines for a rolling scan, which avoids the latency penalty), which reduces brightness. Adding 16 black frames between every image frame is probably going to reduce brightness to unacceptable levels.
The brightest CRTs were those used in CRT projectors. These had the advantage of using three separate monochrome tubes, which meant the whole screen could be coated in phosphor without any gaps, and they were often liquid cooled.
Direct-view color CRTs topped out at about 300 nits, which is IMO plenty for non-HDR content.
For smooth and fast motion, yes. Although I don't have such fast displays for testing, you can simulate the effect of sample-and-hold blur by applying linear motion blur in a linear color space. A static image (e.g. the sample-and-hold frame) with moving eyeballs (as in smooth pursuit eye tracking) looks identical to a moving image with static eyeballs, and the linear motion blur effect gives a good approximation of that moving image.
You should probably watch one of the old films about how CRTs were made. It's not a simple process and basically would require setting up a whole factory to mass produce them.
Hobbyist-level production of monochrome TV tubes is possible, but a big effort. Some of the early television restorers have tried.[1] Color, though, is far more complicated. A monochrome CRT just has a phosphor coating inside the glass. A color tube has photo-etched patterns of dots aligned with a metal shadow mask.
CRT rebuilding, where the neck is cut off, a new electron gun installed, and the tube re-sealed and evacuated, used to be part of the TV repair industry. That can be done in a small-scale workshop.
There's a commercial business which still restores CRTs.[2] Most of their work is restoring CRTs for old military avionics systems. But there are a few Sony and Panasonic models for which they have parts and can do restoration.
A practical thing about costs is likely shipping. There aren't many consumer products that would be more costly to move around, so you're looking at something as messy as a fridge to sell at the high end.
I imagine one could target smaller CRTs as an idea though.
I know there have been conversations here about simulating crt subpixels on hidpi displays. There are some games that used subpixel rendering to achieve better antialiasing. With hidpi you at least have a chance of doing it well.
OMG. I have one of the original SGI 24” 1080p flat screen CRTs (went with the onyx2) in storage. One wonders what that’s worth :) fundamentally a better tube ..
When vacuum tubes have high voltages applied to them, they generate x rays. The glass envelope is impregnated with lead so as to reduce the amount of x ray radiation that is emitted. The primary source of x ray radiation from TVs had been from their other components other than the tube itself but the tube was still a source of ionizing radiation.
Oh interesting. I'm like 90% sure my shop teacher had one of these!
He had a giant ass CRT in his home (took up like half the living room in his tiny house). He got it from a facilities friend at a university that he was friendly with in like ~00s. They were getting rid of all these because flat-screens and projectors were much more in vogue at the time and these behemoths were simply dated.
In 2006 or so I bought a house at the top of the real estate market (whereupon it quickly crashed and we enjoyed the wild ride of refinancing and property value swings until we finally unloaded the place at cost - at least it was a really nice neighborhood).
The real estate agents, as a token of their thanks for allowing them to claw back 6% of an outrageously priced house, gave us back some of the money in the form of a $2500 gift card to BestBuy.
Of course, I immediately used it to buy a state of the art Samsung DLP rear projection TV with more inputs than you could shake a stick at including then new HDMI and VGA. I still have that TV, it looks pretty good for 720p and 46" or so, and has a chromecast dongle permanently stuck in its HDMI port to make it useable. It works amazing as an impromptu VGA monitor, and old games console system as well. The cost, with stand, was something like $2400 plus some change and I was left with a few dollars at the end.
I wanted to finish off the gift card so I looked around the store. There, off in the corner was an absolutely massive Sony CRT tv with a yellow sticker on the side. "$1.72". I gasped.
"Is that TV really $1.72?"
"Yup, the future is these DLP or these Plasma TVs, we're getting rid of our CRTs"
Instant purchase, closed out the card, set the delivery dates for both and waited.
A week later two guys showed up "we got two TVs, one of them if fcking heavy, where do we put 'em?"
The DLP went of course into the living room without any fuss, but the Sony...well that was the heavy one. It took two guys, working hard, to move all 39" of it up a flight of stairs into an upper bedroom. It sat in its place until we sold the house and decided to move. That's when I learned what a monster it was.
For absolutely foolhardy reasons, I decided to junk it, so I had to take it to the curb. I tried to lift it. No go. I was like trying to lift Mjolnir or free Excalibur. I had a friend come over. It took us about an hour to move it down that flight of stairs and drag* it on piece of plastic to the curb.
The trash people, even prepped for an unusually heavy pickup, had to make three attempts at it before they could get it. During that time it was at the curb, two cars stopped and tried to pick it up before giving up.
Looking up the specs now, it looks like it was probably somewhere north of 300 lbs (136 kg). I see on Ebay that today it's probably worth around $600-$1000. But damn, if it wouldn't cost that much to move it within the same county. I still have a 24" I'll keep until I'll die for old gaming reasons, but man, that other monster was too big.
A guy at work the other day moved a 72" TV by himself, like it was nothing. There's a reason some tech falls away.
It's a little sad to see CRTs withering into nothingness. The devices just don't last. The glass is obviously fragile. But even if you keep it padded and safe, the coils of the deflection yoke are thin magnet wire operated at high voltage, and after decades of thermal cycles and the resulting rubbing eventually the barrier between two drops enough and they short, catastrophically.
And you can't really repair that in any feasible way. There are hundreds or thousands of windings, which have to duplicate exactly the configuration from the factory (and then probably be calibrated by processes that are lost to history). A dead CRT is just a useless hunk of glass, forever.
> But even if you keep it padded and safe, the coils of the deflection yoke are thin magnet wire operated at high voltage
The coils in the deflection yoke are run at 24-100V.
The acceleration voltage is the high voltage one.
> There are hundreds or thousands of windings, which have to duplicate exactly the configuration from the factory (and then probably be calibrated by processes that are lost to history).
Tubes are very not exact compared to solid state devices— to replace a deflection yoke, it has to be of similar deflection angle and inductance, all the rest of the adjustment has to be done anyway.
It’s hard but pales in comparison to the impossibility manufacturing a new CRT vacuum tube.
> The coils in the deflection yoke are run at 24-100V.
They aren't the kV scale killer voltages, no. My memory was closer to 200, but sure. That's still "high voltage" for magnet wire, and a short will rapidly destroy the coil. I've had three different monitors go to that kind of failure. One day you turn them on and... nope.
Like 2/3 of the weight is that front glass. It's _thick_.
When I was younger and dumber (well, at least younger) I tried breaking one. Took a running swing at the screen with a wrecking bar. It bounced off and all I got for my trouble was a sore shoulder.
The fun way to do it is to pull the deflection yoke off and shear the neck of the tube. I was pretty far away the only time I experienced somebody do that, but it sounded like a rifle round.
I believe the thick front (leaded) glass is to try to block the produced x-rays.
People were starting to get scared of the cancer those xrays might produce, and I suspect CRT manufacturers predicted a huge court settlement for cancers caused by TV's with insufficient shielding.
So far, it seems that hasn't materialized - not, I suspect because those xrays didn't cause cancer, but because it is simply impossible to produce any kind of evidence of cause/effect.
Only the oldest CRTs used leaded glass for the front, because leaded glass gradually turns brown on exposure to X-rays. More modern CRTs used glass with barium and strontium for X-ray shielding in the front. They still used leaded glass for the back and sides, presumably as a cost saving. I don't see any reason why you couldn't use the barium-strontium glass for the whole thing. Alternatively, CRTs could be made with ceramic bodies like Tektronix used to do.
The energy of the X-rays produced is limited by the CRT's acceleration voltage. The electrons get almost all of their energy from the field produced by the acceleration voltage. Electrons can produce photons when they hit matter, and one electron produces at most one photon, so by conservation of energy the X-ray cannot have greater energy. Smaller CRTs typically use low acceleration voltages, which means the X-rays are low energy and thus easy to block.
AFAIK, the shielding was also just very effective. "Soft" x-rays (below 50-100 kV or so) are rather easy to shield and what screens had was pretty overkill.
In the YouTube video they explain that CRTs have a layer of safety glass in front of the actual screen to protect viewers in the event that the screen implodes. You were actually trying to break through multiple pieces of glass! I've taken a crowbar to a broken CRT before for fun and can confirm that it takes a lot more effort than one might think.
It depends on the CRT. Some use steel bands wrapped around the edge of the faceplate and tightened to keep the glass in compression where it's strongest.
CRT phosphor chemistry was very sophisticated and mature, and there were many phosphors to choose from by the 1970s depending on the application. Maybe someday a flat panel screen will be produced with some warm and slow characteristics of CRTs without the drawbacks.
"…scanlines were used to blend “pixels” together, plus “pixels” on a CRT tend to bleed color slightly and artists would also use that to their advantage."
For competitions, the performance benefit is zero time lag between controller inputs and the screen output.
Also, it's very very difficult to get the "look" right on an hdtv. The original graphics were intended to be displayed on a slightly "fuzzy" CRT, and if you care about the aesthetic, just transferring those same graphics to an hd-tv display often doesn't look right in a bunch of different ways. (Pixel aspect ratio, aliasing, frame blending effects, color bloom effects, interlacing artifacts, etc.) It's a very deep rabbit hole you can go down.
Aside from the visuals (4:3 to 16:9, etc), converting the analog console signals into digital formats for your flatscreen creates lag, enough to often ruin the gameplay.
Even though I have a CRT and NES, I bought one of the NES minis when they released.
I played some Mario Bros 3 and... I kept dying. Jumping too late led to running into holes and enemies. It was so bizarre, I couldn't believe how bad I'd gotten. Tried the next day, same deal.
Then I had a thought re delays. Pulled out my NES and hooked it up to the CRT and all that stopped
There was sufficient delay in the NES mini and modern TV it made a huge difference.
I'm sure I could retrain myself, but it was honestly stunned at how much of a difference it made
It’s difficult to overstate just how little lag there is in such setups. These systems had no frame buffer whatsoever - everything rendered on the fly. You could potentially affect a frame after it already started.
That said, if you ever get an urge to play Mario on modern hardware, try run ahead emulation. It’s quite magical.
I've always found the litmus test of choice for measuring lag is NES Punch-out - your performance in that game is heavily dependent on lightning fast reaction time and any additional latency towards the later stages will 100% get you KO'd.
The whole time I was reading this article, I just wanted to know the history of the soba restaurant that was being demolished. I bet there’s an interesting story there too.
tbh probably not. There are a lot of soba restaurants, and a lot of demolitions. Buildings are typically demolished after 20-30 years to make way for new ones.
The problem with ICE isn't being able to buy them, it's buying them in huge quantities. You'll probably be able to buy them for sports cars or some other low volume commodity.
Of the existing plans to ban the purchase of gas vehicles in the future, do any have exemptions for low volume production of enthusiast vehicles? California's plan (which 17 other states follow) seems to only have exemptions for heavy duty vehicles.[1]
My guess is that enthusiasts will get around these laws by modifying old vehicle frames. New emissions and safety standards tend to grandfather old vehicles in, so as long as the VIN says it was made before a certain date, you can avoid having curtain airbags, backup cameras, tire pressure monitoring systems, electronic stability control, etc. (There requirements are why new cars have so many computers in them.)
OP implied buying engines as single units, an item unto itself - "you'll probably be able to buy them for sports cars". The California executive action is explicitly for the sale of new vehicles.
As I was watching it, there was the drama of whether it would be saved from imminent destruction, and it actually seemed unlikely that they could, but their approach was to be... secretive about it.
It turned out that they wanted it for themselves, and didn't that create a conflict of interest? By keeping it quiet, they increased the chance that they would obtain it themselves (and the YouTube story to tell about it), but increased the likelihood that the TV would be lost entirely (because other efforts wouldn't be brought)?
Fortunately the gamble worked out, and the TV wasn't destroyed.
There's also a possibly related matter, in how Sony stopped talking with them. Is it possible that Sony and/or Japanese government aren't very happy to learn that a possibly unique museum piece, of one of the heights of Sony achievement, was quietly removed from the country, to the US, by a YouTube influencer?
I applaud preserving this rare artifact, and compliment the storytelling, but did have these couple odd thoughts.
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