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Old 11th Sep 2020, 4:19 pm   #1
FERNSEH
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Default The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

There can't a single TV set made now that employs a cathode ray tube for the picture display. Apart from the Samsung "Slimfit" TV set introduced in 2005 the reckoning at that time was the game was up for the CRT. Anyway, the last of the CRT sets were pretty horrible things and every bit as unpleasant to repair as the early LCD and plasma TV receivers.
The truth is most flat screen TV sets are pretty reliable so the need for people to service such items has diminished. I rarely receive any requests for TV service anymore, not as I would want to do any servicing work on the things anyway.

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Old 11th Sep 2020, 4:55 pm   #2
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Well, Aliba have 19" CRT televisions for sale. Yours sir for $25 FOB.

They can supply a HD (1366 x 768) NTSC or PAL CRT TV minimum quantity 5-200 units, lead time 5 days.

Long time since I've been outside the EU but I do remember some very poor people in India and Nigeria where a dollar would take a day to earn. Doubt if much has changed.

Chris
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 6:59 pm   #3
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Well they have persisted here pretty well, all still CRT sets, the main set is a 32" Samsung 100Hz with a built in Freeview tuner, I have a 28" Sony set used in the dining room and a Panasonic 28" in the bedroom, all I hope from the period before the quality went right down.
All great pictures so I cant see a reason to change, not so good when you want to move them of course!
oh and a "Bush" black plastic portable in the kitchen,which although its just a no name set works well.
Steve.
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 7:19 pm   #4
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

I remember reading somewhere - "The Setmakers" perhaps - a comment from someone back in the days when the battle between mechanical- and electronic-displays was still a thing.

Something like "We really don't expect this bulky cathode-ray-tube - with its low brightness, dangerous high voltages, critical adjustments and susceptibility to magnetic fields - to last long as a practical television display".

I guess their opinion should be viewed historically in the same context as the IBM-person who said they only saw a global market for 10 computers, or Bill Gates's famous "640K should be enough for anybody".
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 8:00 pm   #5
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Whether it’s true or not I don’t know but I’ve seen “rumours” that Sony are planning to start producing CRT sets, i think mainly for retro gamers with closer specifications to the PVM/BVM range rather than their consumer sets. Don’t know if it’s true or if it is, when they’ll carry it out. There’s still the issues of the dangerous materials used to produce CRTs which in todays world will make it much harder for companies to produce them and comply with laws and rules.

Quote:
Long time since I've been outside the EU but I do remember some very poor people in India and Nigeria where a dollar would take a day to earn. Doubt if much has changed
There’s always new repair tutorials from other countries like India on youtube, so I’d guess they are still using them.

As music centre says, they’ve stuck around with me and will continue to do so for as long as possible. I personally don’t have any non CRT displays other than my PC monitor. The 90s and 2000s sets are also raising in popularity with retro gamers as those are the sets they remember from their childhood and are much easier to get a hold of and tend to be working.

There’s probably others out there, like myself, who are younger and interested in the older sets. They’ll probably always have a following which’ll grow and shrink.

The only cause of complete extinction in my eyes will be when the last CRT goes flat, and the whole technology gets forgotten, but for now they’re safe
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 8:03 pm   #6
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

When I needed a new day-to-day set, I got one of the last CRT models from Sainsburys. 28 inch, 4x3 Bush for £79 or £89 - at the time LCD was still expensive with picture quality mediocre at best. Its still working well (well, if that doesn't tempt fate ...!).

Over the time I've had it, I know a number of people who have got through quite a few flat screens.

TTFN,
Jon
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 8:19 pm   #7
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Smile Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

I think that there will be some very specialist niche markets for CRT's for a few years. In the latest bulletin, the valvemaking article states that Brimar stopped making CRT's last year for Tornado head up displays. Quite remarkable they were still being made for the MOD when you think about the advancement of technology!!. I presume there are still small batches of CRT's are still being made somewhere for service replacement. For domestic equipment I believe it is now all over.

I cannot see a company like Sony restart CRT manufacture even to sell at a premium price. The tooling and plant to manufacture the bulbs and electron guns, lay the phosphor screen, manufacture the shadowmask and assemble, bake and evacuate the CRT's would likely to have been long ago scrapped off. The price to manufacture and set up the plant would be rather astronomical.

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Old 11th Sep 2020, 8:32 pm   #8
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Ive seen them along with complete chassis kits available on alibaba so if one were so inclined they could produce their own set, I alternate between my various 21" sets and my Samsung flat screen. The Samsung has actually been pretty reliable though it gets used less and less now as ive got into the habit of just watching almost everything on my pc.
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 9:06 pm   #9
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Quote:
The truth is most flat screen TV sets are pretty reliable so the need for people to service such items has diminished.
I beg to differ, I have repaired quite a few that were between 18 months to 3 years old, in fact the 32" Polaroid (Vestel) set in my dining room was given to me after it died just out of warranty, usual shorted diodes in the PSU

The other CRT sets I have are going strong, including my 32 year old Matsui portable, the only TV I have ever bought new!

Just the other day I checked out the 4 colour portables stored in the shed, they have not been powered up for around 5 years, to my surprise, they all still work fine, despite the less than ideal storage conditions....


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Old 11th Sep 2020, 9:50 pm   #10
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Cold photocathodes I realise, and pretty specialist, but I think people are still making image intensifiers aren't they ?

Cheers,

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Old 11th Sep 2020, 9:59 pm   #11
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

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Originally Posted by GrimJosef View Post
Cold photocathodes I realise, and pretty specialist, but I think people are still making image intensifiers aren they?
My last contact with 'serious' image-intensifiers was something like 20 years back, in an astronomical context - and they were all solid-state.

https://ilrs.gsfc.nasa.gov/

http://sgf.rgo.ac.uk/

The 1980s versions of these involved cooling the sensors with Liquid Nitrogen; that stopped being a thing at the end of the last century, as solid-state sensors improved.

"Cold Cathode", for sure - but not in any way vacuum-state!
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 10:25 pm   #12
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

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... and they were all solid-state.
I last saw them being used in the late 1990s, coupled to streak cameras. But I left the field then, so the date doesn't mean the intensifiers were on their way out. The assemblies were being used to detect short (by which I mean picosecond) VUV and soft X-ray pulses. There were indeed very sensitive solid-state cameras as the final stage but I'm not sure these were very robust in the X-ray environment.

Cheers,

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Old 11th Sep 2020, 10:43 pm   #13
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

I saw a picture taken about 2 years ago in a shop in South Africa called Unicity which had many CRT sets on display.

Quite cheap if I had calculated the Pound - Rand rate correctly.
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Old 11th Sep 2020, 10:49 pm   #14
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

I well remember the death of the CRT - I went to the funeral . . .
However, the ghost of CRTs past is still with us.

Thomas Electronics across several areas of application:
https://www.thomaselectronics.com/

Then there's projection specialists such as Eismann:
http://www.eisemann-theater.com/#/crt-projectors/

My professional field in CRTs has been in high-end projection for flight simulation and the technology lives on in quite a few installations. Why? Contrast ratio, faultless motion blur performance and minimal artefacts. Night scenes on CRT projected flight sims are second to none - even compared to the double-modulator class of fixed matrix projectors. When properly maintained, they just look 'right' in night scenes - especially in raster-calligraphic form - but modern projection technologies look so much better for daylight scenes and have infinitely better alignment stability across multiple blended channels.

Me? I'm at this moment watching a cheapo 26" 'Goodmans' CRT TV I've had from new. There's a top of the line Samsung 4K LCD in the next room and an HD DLP projector on tap, but for day-to-day viewing in SD it's the Goodmans. The CRT life with dispenser cathodes has been stunning - it looks just the same as the day it was purchased from Comet all those years ago.

CRT? It's Completely Reliable Technology in my book. Contrast ratio, motion blur, aliasing (lack off) and just that 'viewability' is so hard to beat. Says he, currently working on stunning 4K projectors . . .

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Old 11th Sep 2020, 11:05 pm   #15
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

I've got flat screens in the lounges at both locations but four standard 14" portable CRT sets in the south [3 in office/workplaces]. One replaced a failed 32" FS in the kitchen [my daughters teenage TV/VCR combi] which we've now kept on in use as it's blue and "seasidy". Ironically it was in use there before we bought the now failed FS it replaced There's a 12" surviellance monitor in a bedroom [rescued when the local pub closed down]. It has a good picture via a Freeview Box! I've also got larger CRT sets including a brilliant B+O model and a Tevion 28" but they need work at present.

There would be many more CRT sets still around except that [as with the car scrappage scheme] thousands of sets were dumped in favour of the new technology. There was even, believe it or not, a specialist re-cycling centre for older TV's not far from here in the South East [Paddock wood?] that prided itself on recovering almost everything [including metals from the coating on the CRT]. I recall a post a few years back that warned us we wouldn't be finding long lost TV's in cellars and attics anymore as both they and the sets themselves, would be largely redundant

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Old 12th Sep 2020, 12:25 am   #16
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Quote:
Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
I remember reading somewhere - "The Setmakers" perhaps - a comment from someone back in the days when the battle between mechanical- and electronic-displays was still a thing.

Something like "We really don't expect this bulky cathode-ray-tube - with its low brightness, dangerous high voltages, critical adjustments and susceptibility to magnetic fields - to last long as a practical television display".
.
I think the person was "L. F. Broadway" and the book may have been "Here's Looking at You" by Bruce Norman.

On Page 76 there's this quote

"And it's curious, looking back on it, that at that time we believed the CRT as a display device was only an interim measure. We didn't really believe that this huge vacuum envelope, a cumbersome sort of thing, would last"

I remember reading the quote and book this year.

A PDF of the book appears to be here http://marconiintelevision.pbworks.c...at_you-ocr.pdf
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Old 12th Sep 2020, 1:41 am   #17
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

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On Page 76 there's this quote
I should add in the physical hard-back book, the quote appears on page 102.
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Old 12th Sep 2020, 7:56 am   #18
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Quote:
Originally Posted by GrimJosef View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
... and they were all solid-state.
I last saw them being used in the late 1990s, coupled to streak cameras. But I left the field then, so the date doesn't mean the intensifiers were on their way out. The assemblies were being used to detect short (by which I mean picosecond) VUV and soft X-ray pulses. There were indeed very sensitive solid-state cameras as the final stage but I'm not sure these were very robust in the X-ray environment.

Cheers,

GJ
Also in the late 90s I was involved with medical X-ray machines and glass Image intensifiers were still state of the art. Up to 16inch input screens and 1 inch output. The camera used a very high quality 1 inch videcon, cost thousands.

Peter
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Old 12th Sep 2020, 9:12 am   #19
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

I think it was McGee, one of the original EMI team when being interviewed in the mid 1960's, that stated that they never expected this massive evacuated bulb to have survived as a display device for so many years. I think the programme may have been to celebrate 30 years of TV in 1966.
Let's be honest, like the filament electric light bulb, an 'upgrade' in this case was inevitable but the ridiculously low price of new receivers has of course destroyed the repair business. Motor vehicles look to be going the same way as television receivers.
John.
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Old 12th Sep 2020, 9:24 am   #20
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Default Re: The cathode ray tube, do you really believe it would persist into 21st century?

Domestic TV's and 'scopes aside, the last CRT's I saw were displays at railway stations and airports.

I've seen a lot of domestic CRT TV's in South East Asia fairly recently. Presumably low income levels mean that sets get passed down the food chain when those at the top upgrade to FSTV's?

My last remaining CRT TV is a Samsung Slimfit which is no longer in use. I'm hoping a gamer will take it off my hands as I'm reluctant to scrap it.
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