this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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This was pretty fun to watch. But also kinda hearbreaking. That thing isn't going to last forever. The longer this goes the less excited I am about someone figuring out how to make CRTs as a boutique thing for nerds, but it's also a thing that should happen, even if I'm past my personal vinyl moment where I would overspend like crazy for it.
CRTs have so many advantages!
...ish
Like yeah, a CRT suddenly makes it so all of the fancy filters you have configured on retroarch are no longer necessary, and neither is frame advance for input latency if you're using native hardware or a mistr.
But is it worth it?
....gonna be that guy and say no, for me.
I mean... Depends on goals.
If you want to prevent your TV from getting stolen just get a Trinitron, it's heavy as fuck and old enough where no thief would take thier time to steal it. Mine's 109lbs
I genuinely had to leave a Sony Wega behind when I last moved. It was my landlord's and I would have bought it off of him, but it was just not possible to move it. It was there when I moved in, it stayed there when I moved out. You could make an olive orbit around that gravity well.
Thank you for leading me down this rabbit hole of looking up Wega, which was a German manufacturer of hifi equipment bought by Sony. They apparently made tapedecks for the Sony Elcaset format, which became an even deeper rabbit hole... TIL!
"Oooh, so that's what happened to aiwa."
Is THAT what happened to Aiwa? I had never made the connection.
I didn't even know Wega was in reference to a company they bought. I always thought it referred to their flatscreen trinitons and nothing else.
That thing struggled to keep geometry, but come on, it was a humongous widescreen CRT with stereo speakers that could replicate the Tunguska crater. You gotta love it.
😂 thanks, that's the best reply so far
Displaying basically anything that isn't text.
They don't have to figure it out. It's well documented.
My understanding is there are no new tubes/screens being produced anywhere. The figure out part is the industrial production, not the technology. But hey, if there are any production lines still in operation I'd be very curious to learn about them.
The same was the case with nixie tubes, until a guy in Czechia started artisanally hand-making them for deep-pocketed connoisseurs. Eventually, someone will undoubtedly try doing that with CRTs, though the question is how expensive each one will be and will they be able to match the quality of, say, a mass-produced Trinitron.
Yeah, the problem is you can't exactly learn to artisanally blow cathode ray tubes in your garage. Damn things are industrial by definition. You need someone to ramp up (or maintain, as someone above mentions) a big industrial facility to be able to reliably make an electron gun attached to an oversized vacuum tube that wants nothing more than to implode and throw shards of glass inside somebody's eyeballs.
Just like floppy disks and VHS tapes. Every 3.5" floppy that will ever be made has already been made.
I thought there was like one place making them, but maybe they're only packaging and shipping old ones?
But yeah, man, it's weird that we resurrected vinyl but those things are just lapsing despite retro tech fans having become a fairly large group. I suppose it's easier to manufacture replacements out of new tech than it is to build the legacy stuff, so it's all Goteks and memory card adaptors for a lot of that stuff.
Maybe it's the matter of vinyl consumers being a larger group than floppy disk consumers?
I enjoy going to music concerts, and in the case of smaller scenes/bands i always buy a vinyl (and most of times a t-shirt) to support the band directly. I don't even have a vinyl player at the moment - long story - but I have a collection of 300+ records.
If I recall correctly it is also very cheap to produce in terms of tools and machines needed, the pipeline being all analogue and mechanical?
I am also a retrocomputer nerd, but I guess the number of indie game developers that target floppy disks as the distribution medium for their next game are fewer by number compared to the musicians distributing on vinyl?
Floppy disks are still used in industrial automation. If something works, you don't mess with it until you need to. The thing with floppies, is that there are lots of them floating around, and they last a long time. You can also write different information to them.
I've got a couple of 8" floppies near my desk that aren't used for anything anymore, but I bet they still work. So even though there are no floppies being produced, the existing supply of floppies will last a heck of a long time.
Yeah, that's the thing. Pressing a piece of plastic with some sharp grooves in it is one thing, but once you get into TVs or magnetic storage things get hard pretty fast.
And since most of that is digital anyway you can instead make a cheap adaptor to use a modern solid state device that will do the same job objectively better. There's just no upside to it beyond nostalgia.
I remember seeing the news, the last consumer CRT production facility stopped producing around a decade ago, but I'm having trouble finding the article. They're still being produced for commercial uses though (Boeing 747 cockpits use them for example).
I think those are being built out of existing tube stock, I don't know that anybody is making new tubes. But yeah, basically.
There's at least one company still producing them
Man, that gives one hope. But also, the "we're not going anywhere" general tone really paints a picture :D
I wonder how long until it makes sense for someone like that to start making absurdly expensive consumer displays as a side gig.
There's probably some military shadow contractor in a clandestine factory somewhere...
The technology is no secret but making them somewhat affordable and profitable is the issue. The Verge made a video about portable cassette players recently which talks about this challenge.