Crt tvs broke all the time.
I know, right? I’ve gone through like 4 in my lifetime and I haven’t owned any in over a decade lol
Rose tinted glasses.
Yep. In fact I just met an 80 year old guy today that spent his career repairing tvs. Sure were a lot of tv repair men and shops for tvs that never broke.
Remember when the tube started to go and you had to leave it on all the time or whack the side of it when you first turned it on for the day, until it warmed up?
The way CRTs work is absolutely amazing. You’re basically watching a ray gun shoot you and it’s so quick it looks like a picture. It’s an absolutely wild marvel of engineering.
I repair arcade games and often mention to curious onlookers: “Fifty years of putting miniature particle accelerators in every home and business!”
the only way to have your privacy protected these days is to be in the epstien files.
Spent a few days in an AirBnB with all LGTV’s throughout the house. We never turned them on but today I go on Amazon and its now showing me adverts for the Airbed we briefly talked about in front of the TV -_-
Shhhh, honey. The telescreen might be listening.
Having to update my remote before I can mute the TV is not a problem I ever expected to have
But here we are
CRT screens broke all the time.
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I truly despise that we stopped innovating on CRTs when flat panels came along.
There was some hype for nanotube display tech about 20 years ago that was closer to CRTs in picture quality and responsiveness. Unfortunately it seems like LCD/LED has won out over any other tech so far.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/motorola-builds-nanotube-based-display/
CRTs had flatscreens beat until less than a decade ago, which was nearly 20 years after being replaced by society.
Higher resolutions, refreshrates and lower latency until the 4k 250fps+ race began.
However, i doubt there is much more to gain due to CRT being well into the end of the development S-curve.
https://ca.pcmag.com/tvs/17188/yes-your-tv-is-spying-on-you-heres-how-to-stop-it
for anyone wanting to see where to shut down some features
I don’t miss trying to figure out the often undocumented frequencies so X11 wouldn’t nuke them, and some CRTs were horrible, but games made for CRT on a nice Sony are like nothing else. I regret getting rid of my collection for a move.
Yeah except CRTs had terrible resolution per price. Also CRTs asplode - was terrified of them setting the house on fire. Also they radiated. (Old joke that doesn’t translate well: They caused compli-, impli- and mutations). ALSO they’re not really manufactured anymore, so yeah!
I have an old flat screen tv that I bought from Best Buy in 2011. It is just a tv, no internet, no Bluetooth, just a tv, I still have it and it works perfectly. I finally decided to get a smart tv last summer that POS broke within a year and just after the warranty expired.
CRTs have fuses that go inside and cause weird picture problems.
You might hurt yourself pretty badly trying to replace the fuse (depending on the TV).
One advantage of modern TVs is how slim they are. It’s so crazy to me now how much space those old TVs took up. You just had a big TV stand sticking out from the wall.
And CRTs are unbelievably heavy in comparison, making them a bitch to move at all.
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Put some clothes on, please.
Thanks for pointing it out. I didn’t even notice.
That anger when the specs didn’t include the screen bulge in the depth measurement and now you can’t close the armoire door after carrying that shit 50 feet from the car.
The screen bulge alone in that pic is at least 3 times wider than my TV. It’s amazing what 2 decades of technology can do. Now, if we could just figure out how to make an LED TV than didn’t have a network card…
They do make non-smart TVs, you just have to know where to look.
Often the non-smart hospitality TVs don’t have the more advanced features you’d want for a home TV like HDR and the like, but I gotta admit that one looks quite decent. Can’t see any Dolby Vision support though.
Don’t look up Hospitality Mode, unless you want to end up on a list.
I distinctly recall Sony’s 40" Trinitron CRT weighing over 300 lbs. The 32" was ~200 lbs.
I have a 27" Trinitron and could barely get it into my car by myself. Probably my best curb find ever.
Edit: 108lbs. And 900 US dollars new, in the year 2000; equivalent to $1,750 today.
Yup. That was the last CRT I ever owned. Thing was a tank and took two people to carry it.
I’m pretty sure we had a 32". And that was MASSIVE for the time.
even Flatscreen CRTs were not that slim :/
I’m using an old console TV that I’ve modified to hold a flat screen. I literally have a home server and a sound bar built into it the space that was originally just the tube and there’s still enough space for my full grown ass to climb inside.
Yeah, but you could use them as a shelf.
Put stuff on top of them (just be careful when watering the plants).
You can also store cats on top of them, they like the warmth.
Just beware when you change to a flat screen and the dumbass cat still tries to jump onto it.
And if it breaks, it literally implodes.
Not always, sometimes it gives pretty {dangerous} purple lightning in the back of the tube.
Just in case anybody is stupid enough to believe this, there was nothing radioactive in old CRT-based TVs. And they sometimes had black cases but weren’t a “black box”.
They worked by bending a beam of electrons that hit phosphors in the screen, which is cool enough that saying stupid BS about “radioactive” is unnecessary.
CRTs can emit X-Rays, but they are properly shielded so they never leave the tube.
The X-Ray scare mostly came from a line of GE TV’s in 1968 that had improper shielding and had to be recalled.
Radioactivity and X-Rays are tangentially related, but they’re not at all the same thing.
One is from a decaying material and the other is from controlled electron beam, but they are both radiation emitters. People are just more familiar with the term radioactive and think it is the catch-all term for a source of radiation.
The electron gun in a tv and in an xray machine are pretty similar and without shielding, you will still get hit with radiation even if it isn’t strictly radioactive, but rather another type of radiation emitter.
One is from a decaying material
Specifically radioactive decay.
the other is from controlled electron beam
So, not radioactivity.
Radiation is a really vague term. It’s just energy moving in the form of waves or particles. Sunlight is radiation. Radio waves are radiation. Microwaves are radiation. Wifi is radiation.
Radiation can be dangerous in a few ways. Something can be very bright and blind you, or it can cause you to heat up too much. X-rays are an example of ionizing radiation, that’s dangerous because it can break apart molecular bonds, causing damage to cells. That’s why you can get skin cancer from ultraviolet radiation. X-rays are a shorter wavelength than ultraviolet light, so there’s more potential cellular damage per photon.
But, radioactivity is dangerous not just because of X-rays, but primarily because of alpha and beta particles, and because of even higher energy particles like gamma particles / rays.
So, just because there’s one type of ionizing radiation that can come from a CRT-TV that is also peripherally associated with radioactive decay doesn’t mean that there’s any connection between a TV and radioactivity.
That would be like saying that an atomic bomb causes a huge explosion, and a fertilizer bomb also causes a huge explosion, so a fertilizer bomb is a nuke.
Yes the humor was in the vagueness
This isn’t me arguing against you because I know very little about the difference. But when I started reading I thought this was a Unidan copypasta 😂
beam of electrons
Let’s say it cooler: they were particle accelerators you pointed at your face.
Also, massive glass vacuum bottles that could implode if mishandled.
And with massive capacitors that could electrocute you if mishandled.
And heavy enough to seriously crush your foot (and possibly implode and electrocute you) if mishandled.
And the static electricity felt really neat on the back of your hand if you put it close to the screen.
They were so fucking cool, and we took them for granted, and now they’re gone, and life is significantly less cool without them.
But by fuck was their capacity to put out a clear image mid. But their screen size on the other hand …extremely limited
TVs, maybe¹. CRT monitors, though? They were great. And mostly didn’t care about what resolution you threw at them.
- It’s a big maybe, though. Live TV? Sure, but that was more on the extremely low resolution signal than on the screen (HDTV would’ve looked great on a CRT). But games? They were fantastic for games, though. Artists designed their images with CRT’s natural blur on mind, and now we need complex filters and at least a 4K monitor to replicate the original look.

If you squint, you can make the right side look like the left side. Kind of amazing. Instantly increase resolution with this one weird trick.
They looked amazing for games designed for them, specifically because they blurred the pixels. If what you want is crisp lines or vivid colors, CRT works against you
What game is this?
First one is from Final Fantasy 6, second one from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
And heavy enough to seriously crush your foot (and possibly implode and electrocute you) if mishandled.
Sometimes. Other times they were little portable things.
I mean, sure. But even this little 4’’ “pocket” thing, for instance, still weighed 1.2Kg… that’s a damn dense (and expensive) brick to drop on a toe…

1.2 kg isn’t very much, especially for a dense piece of electronics.
If you look at the history of iMac computers, when they went from CRTs to flat screens they only dropped 6 kg from 15.7 kg to 9.6 kg. Since then they’ve focused on making them lighter and lighter, but it’s not like the CRT was the majority of the weight.
they did emit x rays but most of them was blocked by the leaded glass
Barium glass.
Leaded glass was only used for the rear of the tube (or amber monochrome displays), the front glass was barium infused for colour CRTs.
Radioactivity and X-Rays are tangentially related, but they’re not at all the same thing.
I like this comment except for the fact it seems needlessly hostile
Someone not knowing there’s a difference between “radiation” and “radioactivity” doesn’t make them stupid.
No, just ignorant. Very ignorant.
It’s the equivalent of knowing the difference between “poisonous” and “venomous”
For the vast majority of people it doesn’t matter. Maybe they learned in 8th grade, but they forgot, because it never came back up.
Not really. Radiation is something you encounter every day. Radioactivity is something you probably never encounter. Most people except Australians rarely encounter poisonous and venomous animals.
Poison is something you encounter every day, too. Not poisonous animals, sure, but poisonous substances.
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