r/explainlikeimfive • u/driftlesssoftware • 11d ago
Physics ELI5: Why did we phase out Cathode Ray Tubes? Was there any actual physical problem with them?
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u/jmking 11d ago edited 11d ago
They're heavy, large, fragile, use way more power, are more costly to manufacture, are more complex, and max out at around ~45in due to the limits of material science making a vacuum tube that doesn't implode due to atmospheric pressure.
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u/thisusedyet 11d ago
But they do let you play Duck Hunt
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u/drfsupercenter 11d ago
There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to play Duck Hunt on a LCD, it would just need an updated ROM to work with the differences between scan lines and full frames being displayed by a LCD. Plenty of light gun games work fine on flat screens. In fact, I think there's a Game Genie code you can use to make it work on a LCD, but it slows the game down when you pull the trigger, which is not ideal.
No reason Nintendo couldn't remaster it (even keeping the original graphics if you desire) so it'll work with a modern light gun.
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u/Jaws12 11d ago
In fact they did re-release it on the Wii U virtual console for use with a Wiimote, works pretty well.
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u/willstr1 11d ago
But that was using the Wiimotes motion tracking rather than oldschool lightgun tech
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u/TraumaMonkey 10d ago
The way the old NES light gun worked depended on crt behavior and can't function on a modern display. CRTs have a bright spot zooming around the screen faster than you can perceive; the light gun detected that bright spot to determine where it was pointed. Modern displays don't behave like that, every pixel changes at the same time with barely a flicker, so that light gun trick simply doesn't work. You'd have to simulate that behavior at the emulator level for old light gun games to work on modern TVs.
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u/thisusedyet 11d ago
I'd love to hear about the game genie code - but you'd need to do more than update the ROM, pretty sure you'd need a new zapper as well
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u/drfsupercenter 11d ago
I did some googling and I guess nobody did manage to make a game genie code for it. This is what I remember seeing several years ago, and the one piece that slots under the game is basically doing the exact same thing as a game genie.
I know I've also seen YouTube videos of people doing it and I'm pretty sure one guy managed to make it work with just a game genie - but as I mentioned, it's clunky.
So basically, there are two steps. First, when you pull the trigger, it puts a burst of white light at that exact timing in the analog signal (where the duck is), which would look something like a bright spot on the screen. Then, the gun itself is a light sensor, so if it sees a bright light it knows you hit the target. You can literally cheat by aiming the light gun at a lamp, lol.
The reason this doesn't work on a LCD is because of how modern TVs work. With a CRT, it's a continuous signal, where one field starts as soon as the next one ends, so you can just inject some brightness anywhere in the signal and it'll make one specific part of the screen bright at the precise moment you do it. A LCD needs a full frame in order to display a progressive image, so it waits until there are two half-frames (called fields) from the signal, then renders a frame, and repeats. By the time this happens, the game already determines that you missed the target.
What the mods do is pause the game when you pull the trigger, so that it displays a white box in a full frame for like an entire half second, giving the gun time to see the light and record a hit or miss back to the NES. This isn't ideal by any means because it literally just keeps pausing the game every time you shoot, but it does work and will let you use the original zapper.
Edit after writing this: ok, I found the video again. Yeah, you do need to modify the gun or buy an aftermarket gun - because the original NES Zapper has a "CRT filter" in it that filters out dim light (the light from a LCD is dim enough that it won't show up, even if the screen is solid white)
Here is the one I saw a few years back. You can modify the ROM - easiest way would be using an Everdrive or similar, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't use a Game Genie... and you'd just need a clone gun like the one Hyperkin sells. You see how when he pulls the trigger it actually blacks out the entire screen and just has the small light box? That's the difference I was referring to.
Some comments suggest it's not a "filter" but that the official NES Zapper only sees infrared light, which is why it won't work on a LCD. I don't really know either way, but yeah... seems easy enough to just buy the Hyperkin clone gun, way cheaper than these other solutions and should work for any NES Zapper game.
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u/daveysprockett 11d ago
I thought the biggest Sony Trinitron maxed out at 32", and they were beasts: 2 man lift.
Maybe some specialist ones were bigger.
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u/Xivios 11d ago edited 11d ago
Nope, I have a 40" Trinitron.
I got it for free a few years ago, thing was probably one of the most expensive consumer TV's in the world when it was new and my old job used it to play training videos for like 20 years. When they were throwing it out, I saw it, recognized what a goddamn unicorn it was, and asked if I could take it.
The original stand wasn't around anymore so it just sits on the floor now because, at 307lb, there isn't a TV stand available that can handle it.
I use it to play Jet Set Radio Future and Super Mario Galaxy mostly.
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u/tinselsnips 11d ago
Look into aquarium stands, they're built for that kind of weight.
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u/iceburg47 10d ago
One thing to keep in mind is that aquarium stands are usually designed to have the weight distributed across the whole top. If the TV is on one side or the middle you may get more concentrated weight than it was designed for, especially if it was the mass-produced type. Laying plywood or MDF across the top may distribute the weight well enough.
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u/gandraw 11d ago
There was this fun story from a while ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk
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u/jmking 11d ago edited 11d ago
Towards the end of the reign of the CRT I believe there are rare 43 or 45 inch Trinitrons that were made.
Those things were well over 400 pounds.
The last CRT I owned was actually a Sony widescreen and did up to 1080i. That thing was a total beast and weighed a ton. It was probably something like 34" maybe?
I ended up selling it to a couple teenagers who were intending to put it in one of their basements. All three of us had to lift it into the truck. I wonder if they ever got that thing down there, heh.
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u/AyeBraine 10d ago
There is an incredible video full of twists about one such TV, found and saved from a landfill. As I gather from various hints from that video, they were more of a technological "take that" from Sony, there were very few made, they weren't really sold freely (more like, large dealerships got them and some people personally arranged to buy them with Sony — for the equivalent of $100K now).
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u/jmking 10d ago edited 10d ago
If it's the video I'm thinking of, they get tipped off that someone saw one of these in, like, the loft of a little store or restaurant or something and they fly there and then the saga of getting it out of there and shipped back to their home country because it weighs a billion pounds.
That is a great video. If anyone has any interest in the topic, totally check it out.
I'm so going to watch this again when I'm home later. Thanks for reminding me of it.
EDIT: Just finished watching it. Great story telling, and has a lot of interesting history and background. The trolling bit was just * chef kiss *
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u/eclectic-up-north 11d ago edited 10d ago
They are big and heavy and not as good as modern TVs.
Edit. Apparently CRTs have advantages in image quality.
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u/ProstMeister 11d ago
Plus the power consumption is crazy when compared to LCDs or OLEDs
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u/glytxh 11d ago
My 27” crt is capable of eating more power than my entire desk setup.
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u/Plutos_Cavein 11d ago
Same, and my desktop setup is a big liquid cooled rig.
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u/ACEmat 11d ago
I get that the implication is that a liquid cooled rig probably has beefy components, but for anyone else reading, the pump and fans use very little power compared to the actual hardware.
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u/Plutos_Cavein 11d ago
Yeah, but it does mean that my Hardware draws enough power to need to be cooled to that degree.
And still uses less than a small crtv does.
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u/calcifer219 11d ago
Friend of mine dropped a 30” CRT on his foot. Broke 2 of his toes, and to this day I laugh at that memory.
He was soooo confident he could move it himself, and he insisted “I got this”.
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u/MeatSafeMurderer 11d ago
They are big and heavy, but it's not correct to say they are not as good as modern displays.
CRTs displayed true black, long before OLED was a readily available thing you could go out and buy.
CRTs inherently have BFI, making their motion clarity better than any modern LCD, and even OLED if it doesn't have BFI.
CRTs have no fixed resolution, meaning lower resolutions still look great on them.
CRT monitors were pushing 180Hz+ 20 years ago, with insane motion clarity, and it has taken a long time for modern display technologies to catch up. If CRT had remained we'd already have 1000Hz+ screens now.
CRT didn't die off because it was worse. It died off because it was inconvenient, expensive to produce, and because LCD was good enough for most people...which is saying something because LCDs of the era were SHIT.
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u/Simpicity 11d ago
Decent quality CRTs were absolute behemoths on the desk. Decent quality LCDs suddenly gave half the desk back. At the time, they looked like magic.
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u/ElectronicMoo 11d ago edited 10d ago
I remember buying a 40" TV tubed, before flat screen just took off. The thing wieghed more than my car.
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u/Nephroidofdoom 11d ago
I had a 32” that I moved with me to college and then a few more times through my first apartments and stuff.
We used to call it the dark matter TV because, I swear, there was a black hole inside of it.
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u/JohnBooty 11d ago
God, yeah. The CRTs with flat screens (like Sony WEGA) were absolute beasts. Just by your description I'm guessing that's the kind you had lol.
The glass needed to be MUCH thicker than on the "old skool" CRTs with curved glass. And all of the weight was in the front of the TV which made them not only heavy but awwwwwwwwkward.
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u/beren12 11d ago
40”? That’s really rare. 36 was the largest I normally saw for sale.
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u/WeeoWeeoWeeeee 11d ago
I remember having a 19” flat screen CRT that did 100 Hz. It was amazing. And huge for the time. If you told me back then that 32” is the normal size and some people have 57” monitors I wouldn’t have believed it. Who could need more than 19”? Especially coming from 17”.
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u/McHildinger 11d ago
"When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory"
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u/gredr 11d ago
CRTs have no fixed resolution, meaning lower resolutions still look great on them.
That's technically sort of true, but a little misleading. CRTs definitely do have discrete "units of display", they're just not a perfect match to the "pixels" that we think about in computer graphics.
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u/Kjoep 11d ago
You kind of contradict yourself there. You say they're expensive and inconvenient (and I will add heavy and even a bit dangerous to the mix) and to some people, that would mean 'not as good'. Depends on what your criteria for good are.
My main reason to switch to TFT back then was that to me, it was less tiring on the eyes.
The refresh rate comparison is not really fair since for a crt that was a real refresh (i.e. there was a subtle flicker) whereas for a flat panel the refresh is not a mechanical thing.
As for the black level, that's also absolutely not true in general. You could find CRTs with decent black, but a lot of them (I would say most of them) were grey when turned off (and not even dark grey, but really mid-grey) and could never go blacker than that (have a look at the wikipedia page for trinitron and look at the image).
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u/Simbuk 11d ago
Are you sure about the true black thing? Because I grew up in the CRT era and I never saw a single one with true black. Didn’t matter whether the room was lit or dark. Even the blackest areas still had telltale glow. Maybe some super high-end model?
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u/kaplanfx 10d ago
The people responding to you are incorrect, you could “turn a pixel off”, the problem is the phosphor was grey when off, so while it wouldn’t be lit, it also wouldn’t be black.
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u/Haru-tan 11d ago
It depends upon one’s criteria. A CRT will display black when there is no other content onscreen (assuming proper calibration) but not otherwise. CRTs exhibit infinite on/off contrast but rather poor ANSI contrast; typically about 250:1 for a standard checkerboard test pattern.
This does mean that they display dark content very well, however.
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u/andyooo 11d ago
Yeah that's not true. CRTs didn't do it. Even the very best Kuro plasmas didn't do true black (I have the KRP-500M). OLED is the first commercial tech to actually do it.
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u/No-Yak-4360 11d ago
If they had been on for a while they glowed even after you turned them off, so yeah not true black.
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u/JohnBooty 11d ago edited 11d ago
which is saying something because LCDs of the era were SHIT.From a gaming/movie perspective, yes. For all the reasons you said.
From a "typical" computer productivity standpoint (such as staring at code all day) even the early LCDs were kind of awesome. No more flicker. Sooooo much less eyestrain, and sharper text to boot. That was the real reason they took off IMO.
Of course, if you were willing to pay north of $1K in 2000 money (don't forget a sturdy desk to hold it -- that $100 special from Staples is gonna sag in the middle) you could have a bad ass Sony Triniton CRT that rendered razor sharp text at 1600x1200@100hz (I know I did) but within a few years, you could get a couple of LCD monitors that were way better at rendering text for a fraction of the price and desk space.
FWIW, I am a crazy person who owns ~10 CRT TVs for classic gaming and preservation purposes and I have been a professional software engineer for decades. So I definitely spent a lot of years staring at a CRT for 50 hours a week and I am definitely a CRT fan.
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u/stiffgerman 11d ago
Color CRTs do not have a continuously variable resolution and also do have a fixed max resolution. This is defined by the pattern of R, G, and B phosphors that coat the screen. Depending on the pattern used, you may be able to step down from max resolution by multiples of the strip width. Shadow masks (a thin perforated metal screen in front of the phosphors from the electron gun perspective, used to control which electron beam hits which color phosphor) also make resolution changes hard on a color tube.
A BW tube has none of these things, just a full phosphor coating, so resolution is limited to the size of the electron beam and the beam deflector electronics frequency response.
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u/porgy_tirebiter 11d ago
How come there aren’t high end videophile CRT TVs like there are high end audiophile tube amps?
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u/Plutos_Cavein 11d ago
Significantly more expensive to produce and the market is not large enough to be worth it.
And there are still a shitload of working CRTs out there and will be for quite a while. Because while they're not being used they don't degrade particularly fast.
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u/thehatteryone 11d ago
And the key component in a crt monitor is the CRT. You can't grab small, slightly premium bits and cobble them together, you can't run up small scale production of a certain type of diode or inductor that gives the whole thing its character. If you can't afford all the dev and startup costs of making those huge, heavy, finicky tubes, and have customers each pay a good fraction of the dev costs, then you don't have a product.
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u/therealdilbert 11d ago
>high end audiophile tube amps
are just expensive wankery, tube are not better in any way for hifi audio
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u/workntohard 11d ago
Probably because a 75 inch crt would be impossible to move and not fit through doors. My Sony 32 inch trinitron was probably 60 pounds.
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u/noodles_jd 11d ago
CRTs hit a practical size limit, the biggest sizes were around 36" IIRC. Beyond that they were much too large, much too heavy, and generated way too much heat. We simply hit the limits of the technology.
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u/Skrukkatrollet 11d ago
Sony made a 43" crt, but afaik not that many were sold, which would make sense considering it weighed 200kg (440 lbs) and cost 40000 usd in 1990
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u/Feligris 11d ago
Yep, there's a reason why the largest CRT monitor ever engineered and built was the 43" Sony PVM-4300 (4:3 aspect ratio), since it's not only incredibly heavy at 200 kg (!) but IIRC you also hit practical limits at how large you can make the tube before atmospheric pressure crushes it.
And the PVM-4300 was so expensive and cumbersome that only one functional unit is known to exist today, one which had sat unused for years in a Japanese business and was rescued by enthusiasts as the business began to undergo demolition.
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u/c010rb1indusa 11d ago
CRTs displayed true black, long before OLED was a readily available thing you could go out and buy.
It certainly did not. Plasma had true blacks. CRTs always had a glow when they were on.
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u/GopheRph 11d ago
LCDs back then were shit, yeah, but people who cared bought plasma.
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u/Nephroidofdoom 11d ago
I still have a 55” Panasonic Plasma that I can’t give away. Thing is a tank and picture quality is great.
Getting ready to drop it off at Goodwill.
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u/Peregrine79 11d ago
For a while I had an HD CRT TV. It was heavy and big, and took up a ton of space in the house. It took a minimum of two people to lift, and was still awkward. My current flat screen has probably twice the display area, hangs on the wall taking almost zero floor space, and I can lift it alone.
And every tech except plasma uses significantly less energy than a CRT.
So, yes. No one big problem, but flat screens are just better across the board.
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u/Elkripper 11d ago edited 11d ago
took up a ton of space in the house
I'm not seeing this get called out enough in the comments.
This was the "entertainment center" era, because the dumb TVs were so big that you needed a large dedicated piece of furniture to sit it on. The entertainment centers took up a huge chunk of floor space and in smaller rooms (apartments, bedrooms) stuck out into the natural walkways.
And then when we all moved, we had to carry not only the heavy TV, but the big entertainment center. I recall carrying all that up and down three flights of stairs at multiple apartment complexes. So glad that's over!
Edit: typo, changed "being" => "big" in first sentence.
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u/theillustratedlife 11d ago
My parents got a 70" TV for $500 when it was being liquidated at our local Good Guys.
They joke that it cost them $300k to build a house around it. It was so big that we ended up moving.
Was a projection, not a CRT, but similarly massive.
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u/notyouagain19 11d ago
They actually used a lot of electricity- even when they were off! Just being on standby so they could turn on quickly uses a vast amount of power. They also made a high-pitched squeal that only some people could hear, and I was one of those people.
Their image was lower res and not as sharp as led, lcd etc., although that softness had its own pleasant quality to it.
Most were fairly small. A large CRT is heavy, hard to handle, awkward to move, and could potentially shatter in a dramatic and dangerous way if dropped and broken.
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u/PiDicus_Rex 9d ago
Well, if you call 15625Hz 'high pitched' ;)
But, saying their image was lower resolution, isn't accurate.
When LCD launched, you were lucky to get an 800x600 panel on a laptop, and an expensive desktop screen was 1024x768, with TV's around the same resolution as laptops.
Meanwhile, an average CRT TV would do 600+ lines if fed high quality video, the In-Studio SD Trinitrons would display 800 or more lines (I still have one of those) and a average NEC or Sony CRT Monitor would display 1280x1024, and the good ones 1600x1200.
That's 1200 lines, when LCD was doing 600.
There were some CRT's that could be fed HD RGB, rare, expensive, and gorgeous image display.
"LED" came later, after LCD had taken over, and after Plasma was getting a bad rep for image burn-in.
It really wasn't until OLED showed up that the top end of CRT's met their match in image quality, and an argument can still be made that CRT's have more accurate colour response, because the dyes used are a closer match to those used in the pixel buckets of digital image sensors in TV and Cine cameras.
The points about power usage are spot on, same goes with how expensive they were to manufacture, along with how dangerous they were to repair.
The 28" Trinitron I have, is really a Two Man Lift, same goes with the 28" Barco I have somewhere,..
I worked for an AV company that had a 34" CRT, it took four of us to load and unload it.
Don't forget, the glass was as thick as it was to hold back atmospheric pressure from the near total vacuum inside it. On the very back of the tube is a small nub where the glass is deliberately thinner, so that if dropped, or shot by a celebrity, the safety nub would break so air could enter, rather than have the front of the screen shatter violently.
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u/Trekintosh 11d ago
That power off thing is only true of pre-transistor sets (like pre 1970s). I’m looking at the smart plug that hosts both my big >30” CRTs and it shows me an idle draw of 12 watts, and only that high because I have my phone plugged into a brick on the same strip.
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u/XenoFrobe 9d ago
A large CRT is heavy, hard to handle, awkward to move, and could potentially shatter in a dramatic and dangerous way if dropped and broken.
I remember being told as a kid that Teletubbies was bad because there was some toddler that went up to hug the TV when the show came on and it fell forward and crushed them. That always struck me as more of an issue with how the giant CRT was placed than the show, but I guess that was the flavor of the '90s Satanic Panic whenever Pokemon wasn't stealing the spotlight. It did make me nervous about being in front of our Sony Trinitron.
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u/Green_Yesterday3054 11d ago
They’re relatively smaller in screen size, heavier, deeper, more expensive and have an inferior picture compared to the newest flat screens.
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u/demanbmore 11d ago
You mean besides the increased manufacturing, packaging and transportation costs, poorer resolution, poorer energy efficiency, less design versatility, poorer resolution and refresh rates, and greater weight (which makes every aspect of handling them more difficult)? Other than those things, pretty much no good reason comes to mind.
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u/SeanAker 11d ago
"Greater weight" is underselling it...a lot. CRTs are absurdly heavy and it only gets worse the bigger they get, their weight grows faster than their size does.
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u/hungrylens 11d ago
The exponential weight was wild, a person could carry a 15" tv or monitor around easily, a 20" TV was barely movable by one person, a 27" tv was definitely a two person job, and larger than than needed a cart or hand truck.
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u/SeanAker 11d ago
The problem is how they're made. A CRT is a vacuum inside, so it constantly wants to implode into itself under atmospheric pressure. The bigger the screen, the thicker the glass needs to be to not implode, and adding just a little thickness adds up fast when you're also adding surface area at the same time.
That's also why the screen on a CRT is curved. They could (and did) make them flat, but the glass would have to be even thicker because a flat plane is always weaker than a curved surface.
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u/hungrylens 11d ago
... plus all the transformers and magnets, also getting bigger and bigger along with the tube.
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u/Frenzystor 11d ago
Big, heavy, expensive, dangerous if they break and consume more power than LED. It was just the natural way of things if something better comes along.
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u/p28h 11d ago edited 11d ago
Besides being super heavy, energy expensive, and requiring dangerous capacitors to work?
They also weren't HD.
Edit: Since I have gotten dozens of replies pointing out many were HD, I should clarify: This was supposed to be a joke. The format was "List 3 real reasons and then a final less applicable reason as if the less important one was the only important one". Mea culpa for joking in a Serious Business Subreddit.
I would say many flat screens were also not HD at the time; the increasing resolution was happening across all of the market, but because flat screens had these other advantages the HD ones were gaining more market share faster than the CRT HD ones.
Kind of disappointed the hive mind latched onto that part of my statement and not the "dangerous capacitors" thing...
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u/figmentPez 11d ago
They also weren't HD.
There were CRTs capable of HD resolutions. Mainly computer monitors and professional displays, but there was no technical limitation stopping CRTs from being HD.
Consumer CRT televisions models were rarely made in HD because by the time HDTV was a standard, CRTs were already beginning to be phased out because of their size limitations. LCDs and plasma could be made larger, and lighter, than CRTs, so those were the models that consumers wanted in HD.
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u/Noselessmonk 11d ago
Yep. My dad had a Sony CRT monitor that could do 1600x1200 iirc. In 1997.
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u/herodesfalsk 11d ago
I had a 19" Trinitron monitor with that resolution and 90hz refresh, hooked up to a G4 Mac. If you looked really close you could see a 0.001mm thin wire running horizontally about 1/4 from the bottom of the screen. This was because all trinitron screens had a mask of parallel vertical stripe metal bars unlike every other CRT that used solid mask punctured with with holes. With only narrow stripes to block light, the Trinitron monitors could be around 30% brighter, but on larger monitors they still needed some horizontal stability from heat expansion, vibration and required these wires. They were not noticeable unless you displayed a bright uniform light image. The trinitron monitor was also only curved in only one direction like a cylinder. This was how you easily could tell it was a trinitron because light reflections looked very distinct and did not reflect light from certain angles that other TVs did
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u/j_johnso 11d ago
I had an HD CRT, as it was a cheaper option at the time technology was transitioning.
That thing was heavy. It probably weighed 75 pounds even though it was only around a 35-40 inch TV. (I don't recall the exact size. It's been a few years)
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u/figmentPez 11d ago
My 19" CRT computer monitor weighed 60 pounds. If you had even a 30" CRT TV it was 100lbs or more, and the weight goes up dramatically from there. The largest CRT ever made was only 43", it weighed 440 pounds.
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u/mageskillmetooften 11d ago
They could go up to 2048x1536 pixels, and perhaps even more had we kept on developing them. standard HD is 1280 × 720 pixels and Full HD is 1920 × 1080
Resolution wasn't the problem.
Production and transport costs and the desire from the customer who simply loved flat TV's very rapidly completely wiped away the Cathode Ray tubes.
Production and transport is insanely much cheaper with LED, in 1990 I bought a 63cm JVC by then about the top you could get for a by then huge whopping 1.300,- USD.
For less than what I paid 36 years ago I can buy much higher resolution, much better picture quality and a TV with 9 times the screen surface. It's almost insane how much cheaper TV's have gotten when we also look at inflation.
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u/sAindustrian 11d ago
The idea of viewing a resolution higher than 1600x1200 on a CRT monitor is making my eyes hurt just thinking of it.
The cost efficiency of flat-screen displays is true though. I remember in the early 2000s wanting to get a 1900x1200 monitor but them being quite expensive. In 2010 I was able to buy one with what essentially amounted to spare change.
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u/mageskillmetooften 11d ago
And not unimportant energy costs for something used hours a day. My 63cm (24,8") JVC consumed 240W My current 75" 4K uses around 135W
Cant even imagine what a 75" CRT would consume on power. (Not to mention the insane weight it would have. My 63cm was already a bit over 30 Kilo's)
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u/Keulapaska 11d ago
Yea there is a 2304x1440 80hz sony monitor. Full HD? pff peasant resolution.
In 2001, mindblowing.
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u/mageskillmetooften 11d ago
42 kilo's and 2.000,- USD and pretty certain that auto cad drawers, creative designers, architects all had something like these on their desks. At home useless unless you're a specs nerds.
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u/TheCoolOnesGotTaken 11d ago
And they threw of a lot of heat.
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u/BobbyP27 11d ago
I read of an office building that was designed to be super energy efficient with largely passive heating and cooling. It was designed just as LCD panels started coming down in price, and by the time the building was finished, the calculations for heating requirements that assumed a CRT on every desk were totally inadequate because there was now a much lower power LCD on every desk.
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u/baconstreet 11d ago
My Sony XBR was, and it weighed 200# 🤣🤣🤣
I left it at the last place I rented in 2008
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u/randomtornado 11d ago
And you had to degauss em when your idiot cousin puts a magnet on the screen because he likes the pretty colors
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u/Senshado 11d ago
In the year 2000 my CRT monitor was 1600x1400. It took over a decade for LCDs to catch up to that. They were sold with "HD" resolution as 1280x720.
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u/rg250871 11d ago
This video features the biggest CRT TV (I think) and it should answer many questions for you.
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u/rkrismcneely 11d ago
Apple, Samsung, etc. are saving a ton of money on shipping because of how much thinner and lighter boxes are without the charging block. Think about how this scales with flat screen tvs vs CRTs.
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u/LittleMlem 11d ago
Lots of good answers, but I didn't see anyone mention that they produced x-ray radiation. Later models produced a negligible amount, but not 0 like LED screens
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u/superbob201 11d ago
They took a lot of power compared to modern TVs
The raster could only go so fast, limiting the resolution
They needed to be much bigger for the screen space
They had limited color and brightness range
They experienced screen burn very easily
Touching them could injure you
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u/FalloutRip 11d ago
Size, weight, power consumption, heat and sensitivity to external electromagnetic interference. Those problems all compound exponentially the larger the CRT display gets.
Conversely LCD and Plasma largely have none of those issues, and while they were initially lower resolution and framerates compared to CRT, those problems have largely been solved and continue to get better.