Sony's Breakthrough Color TV

[@peiwu979]

My dad purchased a 13 inch Sony TV. He brought it back from Japan to Taiwan. Our family was the first to get a color TV set in the neighborhood. It lasted 22 years. What a beasts of a set.

[@BrianG-x4u]

I bought a 13" Sony for my dad on Japan sent it home around 1972. I later had a 27" Sony and gave that to him when I bought a 35" CRT Hitachi set.

[@relwalretep]

Secret to success: Find a good engineer, fund a good engineer.

[@craigjones1428]

and Support a Good Engineer.

[@MePeterNicholls]

Invest. Invest.

[@doudyR]

Yes yes, re I-Phone engineer and a boss who understands the solution potential

[@sgttomas]

... and then force him to commercialize with a tremendous ferocity. don't forget that part, it's essential too

[@conor7154]

Means literally nothing if you can’t manage the development and sell the product

[@shadowj5639]

One of the defining characteristics of the Trinitron was the vertically flat tube. On top of the rest of the technology, that made it look more futuristic than the "bulging" look of shadow mask tubes. The picture geometry was never perfect, but it was good enough and still looked better and sharper than shadow mask.

[@AnnaVannieuwenhuyse]

The Trinitron really was that special child of TV's. What a good time!

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Being flat along a single axis allowed the use of an aperture grille, which was responsible for the higher brightness efficiency of the trinitron tubes.

[@ohger1]

And the geometry, convergence, and purity got worse in bigger sizes. Some of the last 36" Trinitrons were pretty bad.

[@TheDripSpotter]

Was a toy and not a good reproducer of the original.

[@frankpitochelli6786]

Being a TV service technician since 1978, I'm amazed at this video and how well it is done and animated...even more impressed that it's not AI narrated..!! Kudos to your tenacity. I worked on MANY of the early Sony tvs and found that Sony was the best TV ever made, unfortunately Samsung has taken over the market as of these past several years. I miss the technology of the 60s, 70s, 80s and the attempts at the Dlp, plasma, projection technology...now everything is LCD which has reached a pinnacle in TV technology. I look at the servicing technology in today's world and wish we had that equipment available when I was in the heat of the service bizz, the soldering technology today is phenomenal as is the test equipment and well made for little cost..! Also, the circuit technology is so brilliant and inexpensive as are the components used in design and manufacture.

[@atschirner]

I remember our late '70 Sony with remote control mechanical tuner, ker chunk, ker chunk, ker chunk when changing channels

[@DJ_Force]

The problem now is nothing is really serviceable. Who can afford to pay someone to fix a $400 TV? And what would they fix? The days of discreet components are gone, the entire TV circuitry is one board full of surface mount components.

[@frankpitochelli6786]

@DJ_Force ..you are 100 percent correct, only very high end equipment or antique restoration, or retro units/components, there is still a service industry especially for appliances, but, mostly as side work for extra money etc.

[@932stretch]

I also was a TV technician since 1971. I hated working on Sony TV's.

[@dannyb3663]

Its a sad time we live in, when normality is the exception. I'm so tired of AI narration.

[@sapphyrus]

We used only Sony Trinitron TVs in our house till LCDs became popular and for good reason, it was truly unmatched back then. Need to be seen to be believed.

[@RattledPan]

Just as this show was finishing up, I had a thought: I wonder if I could find an old Trinitron someone would gladly give me for the spot they would gain in their garage. I've been getting semi-serious for the last couple of years about getting a bedroom TV...of course, then I'm going to have to scrounge around on eBay for old TV Guides. Nothing has really changed in my wardrobe from back then...I'd have my style, man! I remember the first time I said that. A bunch of kids overheard me and started laughing.....

[@Famous_Mist]

@@RattledPan if you want to pick one in Lisbon, Portugal...

[@RattledPan]

@@Famous_Mist I've always hoped that my return airfare got lost and I could stay long enough to decide exactly where and for how long I'd like to stay. (then, perhaps, I might "find" my tickets back home). I was last in Europe back when there was an east and west Germany. That's given me about 50 years to think about this very question. As I recall, Spain was a lousy place to visit then, but Portugal? Where would you recommend? 😊

[@soumyadeepkundu6025]

My family bought a 21inch Sony Trinitron in 1997. 27 years later, it still works!

[@ggqbc]

Unreal!

[@lyhungtruong7289]

Im in Vietnam and back when I was a kid, people bragging about how they just got a sony tivi. A sony TV was alway the first thing people complement when they came inside. “Oh wow you have a sony TV?? Amazing”

[@Intelwinsbigly]

English spelling is TV

[@mip4422]

Tivi?

[@darkvander7621]

@@mip4422 yes. For easier pronuniation for English speakers, it's like tee-vee, as in T-shirt and Hum-vee

[@DlcEnergy]

You mean TV which is short for Tele-Vision. "Tele" means "transmission over a distance". (also used in Tele-Phone) In Britain we shorten "Television" to "Tele" but we spelly as "Telly". So if you hear about those "Teletubbies" you will now know the "Tele" refers to the Telly on their Tubby Belly. :}

[@lyhungtruong7289]

@@DlcEnergy nah it’s just me being stupid. In Vietnamese We been calling it “tee-vee” for so long that the written languages also become Tivi which sound like Tee-vee in Vietnamese. It just caught me off guard when I actually write what’s in my head out loud.

[@deuxsonic]

The electron gun assembly in the diagram is backwards. The pins connect to the TV's circuit board.

[@gryzman]

yup, been screaming this in terror for a while! what a glaring mistake

[@Shotblur]

​@@gryzman Asianometry is known for intentionally including glaring errors as a joke and to drive engagement in the comment section

[@timberwoof]

@@Shotblur To quote the old lady in Princess Bride, "Beww! Bewww!:

[@PaulinesPastimes]

@@Shotblur That's a mean thing to do to people who are detail focussed, and potentially misleading. 😕

[@_PatrickO]

It was a pictograph, not a diagram. The electron gun's orientation doesn't matter here.

[@seanmckelvey6618]

I had a trinitron in the early 2000s. I still miss that TV, probably the best TV I ever owned.

[@rudycramer225]

Me too and I agree with you. Putting it up side by side with any TV in the era and it was obviously the BEST!

[@EstorilEm]

Yup, flat screen 32" and it was beautiful - everyone was always impressed with the contrast/blacks. I'd say about 90% of the weight was in the first 3" of the TV lmao.

[@moottori_paa]

@@EstorilEm Tree months i went every pay day to local consumer electrics store to look that TV. Then the owner said to me:" We bring one to you're apartment today, you can pay part of it every pay day. You really love that TV." No outside funding or credit. That was best buy ever. When i went to flat screen model, my father still used that Sony many years.

[@Famous_Mist]

so... you didn t bought one since 30 years ago?

[@Famous_Mist]

@@rudycramer225 yes AT that time, but saying its the best he ever had... any modern tv is better than Any Black trinitron, i stil have a Sony FD Trinitron WEGA KV 32 working every day and it was good, but newer ones are 4k, back than what? 540i? its the idea that we have in our heads, but when you see side by side its not even on the same league, every time i enter my mother room its almost shocking, the problrm is its on the second floor and heights a ton

[@andrearoberts1953]

My father introduced me to Sony products in the 1980s and I've been a fan ever since. I had one color TV for 15 years before it finally gave out. My current Sony TV is about ten years old and still works like a charm.

[@ryanreedgibson]

My daughter has my 55in Sony TV that I paid 10k in her bedroom. It was one of the first flat panel LCD screens. It still works great for regular media as it's only 1080p.

[@Umski]

Same here - my Dad replaced our ancient Panasonic push button TV with a 21” Sony Trinitron in the late 80s and the brand somehow stuck with me - then inheriting the heavy lump when I started working in the early 2000s and finally buying my own 26” Bravia LCD which saw service until 2022 - it was only through wanting full HD to watch a Bluray that it was replaced by a 40” Samsung 4k from a charity shop but that was short lived as I was fortunate to be offered a 55” Sony to review and it’s my current TV - must be fate 😮

[@LilCow]

I still have our old 32" Trinitron from the mid 90's and that still works. I got a 24" Bravia in 2006, at some point something hit the screen and actually punctured the LCD panel leaving a white dot and a hole you can feel, and that still works too and is still being used. Sadly they're not puncture resistant anymore, something hit the 32" which purchased sometime in the early 10's and cracked the screen haha

[@petercarlsson6606]

For me, one of the biggest selling points or the SONY Trinitron - was the flat screen compared to other brands.

[@CrazyMonkeyCM32]

I used to have a Sony Trinitron 21" computer monitor. Thing was huge and heavy, but I loved it. could go up to 2kish resolution and over 300hz(in low res). Was also a "flat" screen on the outside. Because of that the front glass was super thick and heavy. Was at the very end of CRT monitors, but was way better then the LCD's at the time by far.

[@bernieschiff5919]

I think I have 2 of those, a 21-inch flat screen with a silver-grey cabinet. They have a switch for dual inputs and an up-down menu button, great design, easy to use with 2 computers and a sharp progressive scan picture.

[@andersjjensen]

@@bernieschiff5919 Retro gaming enthusiasts pay upward of $1000 for those these days. Hang on to them a bit longer and you may have your next car paid for....

[@ByWire-yk8eh]

Very informative. As a footnote, I believe Sony moved into the abandoned VW assembly plant (originally built by Chrysler) in Donegal (New Stanton), PA. in 1990. There, they made Trinitron CRTs (and TVs). These CRTs are heavy and perhaps somewhat fragile, so it's good to manufacture them closer to the consumer. One of the main customers for these CRTs was IBM who used them in their color monitors. These CRTs had higher definition than the common TV tube, and were the best tube (fat back) color monitor available. They were also the last CRT monitors IBM made. The screens were almost flat. And, if you look closely at Trinitron screens, you can see one or two fine horizontal lines, an artifact of the support wires to help anchor the grid.

[@jyy9624]

I had a 2000 Euro wide perspective super flat 120Mhz Trinitron 28" - the best image quality ever

[@erikziak1249]

Exactly! Those two faint horizontal lines were a trademark of high quality computer monitors. The first LCDs had horrible colors compared to CRTs. Currently I use a LED 4K monitor, properly calibrated. With this the colors finally match the quality I remember from CRTs. Took "only" 20 years.

[@GoldSrc_]

Those fine wires were not to anchor the aperture grille but to stop it from shifting and messing up the colors. The aperture grill is anchored to the screen on a frame with some thick and hard to move spring plates.

[@napoleonfeanor]

Could one make HD CRTs as well? Does any company produce CRTs at all anymore? I'm a retro gamer and some games look weird on LCD monitors/TVs?

[@dukecraig2402]

That plant was originally being built by Chrysler in 68 but by 69 it had stopped and they never finished it, later VW took it over and it opened I believe in 1978, I actually had several friends who worked there, in 1988 after their 10 year tax break the state of Pennsylvania promised VW expired they shut down the plant and went back to Germany, as the saying in the area went, in reality they'd moved the New Stanton assembly to Mexico. And yes, after sitting idle for a few year's Sony moved in and made picture tubes there but that wasn't until about 91, they'd bought into it in 90 but kept things quiet for a while, I knew about it before anything was made public only because a drinking buddy I'd see in a bar every day after work who worked for the railroad told me one day that he'd been working at the old VW plant putting in new spurs, knowing that something had to be going on so when I ask who was paying for it he quietly told me Sony and at the same time told me "But I'm not supposed to know about that" (meaning him) and that the only reason he knew about it was he'd had to go to the headquarters of his railroad company over something and when he was left alone in an office he saw Sony's name on paperwork pertaining to the spurs they were putting in. Funny story, I'm from south of the plant and at the time was working north of it in Greensburg, every day I drove past the old VW plant and the sign at the exit on the 4 lane road that had an arrow that pointed up the off ramp that said "Volkswagen Drive" as the road to the plant had been aptly named when it was built, one day when I drove past the sign was gone, removed from the posts it'd been mounted to for so long, the day after that I drove past it and a new sign had been put up with the new name of the road on it "Sony Drive", I don't think that the people who'd come up with that idea quite understood how much animosity still existed in an area where so many coal and steel industry jobs had been lost to imports from the very country who'd bombed Pearl Harbor and that the words Remember Pearl Harbor were still pretty powerful words in our area back then, because the very next day when I drove past it just 24 hours after it'd been put up that Sony Drive sign had more bullet holes in it than you could count, and they were big, .45 cal big, it looked like someone with a Thompson machinegun with a 100 round drum had cut loose on that thing from about 20 feet away and tried spelling their name, literally the next day after that, just 24 hours later again, I drove past it and that sign had been taken down, about 2 weeks later when I drove by a new sign saying Technology Drive had been put up in it's place, clearly a compromise had been met between our newfound Japanese investors and the locals because that sign years later never did show any indications of a civil uprising. I also had friends that worked for Sony making the picture tubes there, it shut down around 2007 or so and the concensus of opinion on that one was the rise of the flat screen TV is what killed it, also there was a new building built right next door on the same property that was some kind of high tech glass plant built by Corning I believe, I think they were who actually provided the glass tubes for production there but I'm not 100% sure on that as I'd become a union ironworker by then and spent some years traveling from city to city working and didn't spend much time in the area, then in 2008 I moved to Ohio where I lived for 11 years, so what I'd heard about what went on in there and it's shutting down again was just spotty 2nd hand rumors mostly, I know I hated to hear that yet another stab at using the place for jobs had gone belly up, ever since the late 70's when the coal and steel industries collapsed the area needs all the help it can get.

[@Superkuh2]

Having a 19" or 21" Trinitron was the height of cool at late 90s LAN parties. Those poor tables.

[@andrewfidel2220]

Those poor backs! I loved the fact that you could run them at 1600x1200 at above 60Hz so you didn't get flicker with florescent tubes and they had pretty good color, but dear Lord were they heavy to move around, especially the wide aspect ratio one.

[@MrMotorNerd]

I had a 19 . Good Times

[@zapador]

Good times! I was lucky to buy two IBM P260 21" monitors (yes, Trinitron) in 2001 from a drawing office company that has gone bankrupt. Paid around 110$ a piece.

[@stevebabiak6997]

@@zapador - I was fortunate enough to have SGI monitors with Trinitron CRTs as my daily SGI workstation display for a long time. My Windows box had a Dell LCD, the picture on the SGI was much more appealing.

[@wamp9175]

@@stevebabiak6997 Those SGIs were the holy Grail at the time!

[@joelstyer5792]

I worked extensively with Trinitron TVs in the USA from the 70s to the late 1990s. Beyond the tube, Sony had some other tricks up their sleeve to help create a picture more pleasing to many people. Overall, I think the 12 inch sets had the best picture of any. The early KV1200 was okay but still had some issue, just less than most other TVs. I seem to recall it had a vacuum tube for the horizontal output. The KV1201 was a step up in image quality and chassis design. The horizontal output was the Sony designed Gate Controlled Switch, an early device kind of like a power MOSFET but very fragile. Sony had an exact procedure for the components that needed to be replaced with it if one failed. If you missed one step, you blew everything out again. Both of these sets had CRTs with two high voltage connections. The KV1204 was a big step up in design, image quality and brightness. Prior TVs had "icky" yellows but the 1204 had the best yellow color seen to that date. It also only had the more conventional single high voltage point. To me, the KV1205 was the pinnacle and what to me was the perfect TV. A very bright and crisp picture with great color. The next generation KV1206 was not as nice but did introduce a comb filter for luminance and color separation. That was soon replaced by the KV1207 which was just as nice as the KV1205 but much more integrated. The 15 inch KV1515 was also fantastic. The portable 8 inch sets were nice, had a great picture but suffered from battery technology that just couldn't power a CRT TV for very long. The earlier 17 and 19 inch Trinitrons weren't as nice and suffered from a few problems. Many of the early 17 inch sets would arc inside the picture tube, some very prominently. The company i worked for replaced a lot of 17 inch tubes due to this. A few even blew out the electronics. That snap never ceases to scare the crap out of you when you are working on one. The larger sizes also had a lot more issues with convergence errors in the corners as well as loss of corner focus. Some were so bad the upper right or left corner looked totally fuzzy. But some models were better than others over the years. One model, I forget which had primary voltage regulators that didn't regulate very well, these used a module and many of those were replaced. These sets also changed picture size quite a bit with image brightness but not as bad as some other brands. The 26 inch KV2601 (which was huge when it came out) also had most of the above mentioned issues except the voltage regulator problem but had a really bright picture for the time compared to everyone else's 25 inch sets. The phosphor pitch also got quite wide on these larger sets too. Beyond the innovations in the CRT, Sony also did a few things like bending the color decoding axis for a more orange looking red which helped skin tones at the expense of absolute accuracy. The also peaked up certain frequencies in the luminance to give "better" definition to certain subjects (although I personally never liked this). Sony's circuitry was well designed and usually pretty straight forward, especially from about 1976 onward. Having worked with a variety of different brands, I still think Sony and RCA had the best electronics designs overall. The company I worked for designed video monitors based on Sony TVs (there were about four companies doing this, all used Sony brand TVs). When Panasonic came out with decent, low-cost video monitor and then Sony themselves introduced them, it was the end of an era for us and the others. I still have boxes of TV tuner modules and many other parts from Sony TVs. Thank you for this great look back on the Trinitron!

[@ntabile]

Back then, a faulty tv can be sent out for repair, or a Serviceman comes to repair a tv. It's really expensive to have a color tv in the 60s to 80s.

[@156dave]

The

[@156dave]

I remember that SCS switch in Line OP I blew one straight away the only time I ever cried fixing a TV.There was a mod to use a BU208 HV transistor but I couldn’t get it working

[@Psychx_]

For retro game enthusiasts, Sony Trinitron TVs and monitors are still the most sought after. Such a VGA CRT can go for over 1000 USD now.

[@siliconinsect]

Nice! Scored a filthy one for ten bucks at an industrial sale.

[@diegoantoniorosariopalomin2206]

​@@siliconinsect Only high end ones seriously go for that much. Although mid end ones are also increasing in price

[@bernieschiff5919]

@@diegoantoniorosariopalomin2206 I have 2 21 inch hi-def Sony computer monitors with dual inputs and resolutions that I got on E-Bay about 20 years ago. Still work great with my Macs and PCs.

[@PlayNeth]

I'll never get over how we completely discarded the CRT technology in general instead of keeping it around and making improvements to it. Only NOW we're getting on par with the best ones and even then not using phosphors is just very detrimental for motion and resolution handling. Being limited to just a single truly sharp resolution sucks.

[@uropig]

I love mine!

[@nagasako7]

I feel like Ibuka and Morita is something we won't see in tech companies anymore. Now it's either rule by committee or meme lord CEOs.

[@REOsama]

These people exist everywhere, in Universities and small companies and leading projects in big companies, you just don't see them

[@Quickshot0]

The developer of the blue LED was also some one from Japan that did some amazing engineering work all on their own to make it possible.

[@nutsackmania]

@@REOsama yes

[@vast634]

The older a tech company gets, and the more it grows, the more is shifts from being headed by engineering and design towards administration and accounting. You can observe that in a much shorter timeframe in game-companies.

[@demef758]

@@vast634 Steve Jobs warned about that very thing in his now-famous 2005 speech at the Stanford graduation ceremonies.

[@Uns_Maps_8]

All in all TV sets are one of the most difficult engineering feats. They were everywhere but very few could design them.

[@lucasrem]

I kept my Trinitron CRT TV They build a perfect wooden Cabinet, and a tube that lasted ages. Perfect combination with my Quad SS 5088 set, love this era.

[@cv990a4]

Quad audio? My dad had a set. He was an audiophile. Back when it was hifi, not wifi...

[@bernieschiff5919]

I bought a Sony KV-2680R in 1985, still works great. This was the first Sony stereo TV and could be used with stereo VCRs which came later.

[@neillthornton1149]

Sony continues to have a large presence in San Diego to this day! They were a flagship tenant of the "new town" of Rancho Bernardo and never really left.

[@joeg7849]

They made CRT tubes and TVs in the large building.

[@Joe_VanCleave]

I was a video service technician and was Sony-trained on Trinitrons, VCRs (yes, including Beta) and CD players. I always liked the Sony products from the 1980s, they had an original aesthetic design language that their later products lacked. But the bane of the early Trinitron design were the dreaded SG613 horizontal output transistors, a “gate controlled switch” that was prone to shorting out at the slightest provocation.

[@boblang409]

The dreaded sg613 gate, I am a tech also. been there did it all. thanks

[@seanmcgroty2248]

2:29 FYI the electron gun, or rather the back half of a CRT, in the diagram is backward

[@Peter_S_]

Also true with the later RGB electron gun illustrations.

[@stephenw2992]

And the picture supposedly showing the gun shows the deflection coils. This dude doesnt know much about CRT TV

[@bubaks2]

@@stephenw2992really?

[@wt29]

​@@stephenw2992Really?

[@gothesouthway]

I think they should have used a real gun for the diagrams.

[@durfkludge]

I had a 19" Trinitron PC monitor in the early 2000's, probably toward the end of their production life. Cost me nearly 400 bucks, but the image was gorgeous. Perfect for the Quake 2 era of PC gaming!

[@AdvantestInc]

The Trinitron's impact on the TV market was truly groundbreaking, such a perfect fusion of innovation and design.

[@oddball_the_blue]

I've got one of the last trinitrons in the UK (a WEGA line widescreen 32"), It's suck an over-engineered bit of kit but still awesome all these years later.

[@vincei4252]

One of the things I will never forget was seeing a Sony BVH-2500 single frame TV recorder at a broadcast show in the UK in the 80's. It was amazing as at the time I was very interested in computer animated imagery and the recorder was perfect for that.

[@matttaylor2009]

The research that goes into these videos is much appreciated as is the content that follows it

[@erictayet]

WOW! This goes back! I used to rock a 30+" Sony WEGA flat-screen CRT TV with subwoofer and a 20+" flat CRT monitor with Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube (I think NEC), so I've always been a supporter of the aperture grill CRT system rather than shadow mask. I still remember degaussing the grill is a thing for both my TV and monitor. I held on to the Sony TV for years until my wife forced me to get rid of it about 10 years ago. Then I found out people were buying back these TV for $1000! It still boggles my mind how engineers at Sony and Mitsubishi were able to align the beams so perfectly especially for those flat-screen model, especially when you consider the outer edges of the screen is much further away from the electron gun than the centre. How do they correct for the difference in geometry?

[@uksonune]

"Go Study Manhattan project" is best comment any Japanese can say

[@T-Ball-o]

Got a WTF out of me

[@b.griffin317]

I think the TV we had in our house as a kid was a Sony Trinitron. Never knew there was anything special about it. Fascinating to know the story behind a TV which gave me so much entertainment growing up. Thanks Asianometry!

[@Matt_The_Hugenot]

Unless you're old enough to have seen trinitrons hit the market it's hard to appreciate just how good they were in comparison to the competition.

[@JSB2500]

I used to spend hours per day setting up the colour convergence on pre-Trinitron colour TVs, as part of a small business when I was a teenager. When I saw the Trinitron I realized immediately that they had solved the convergence problem forever in a really elegant way, and the ~20 colour convergence controls would soon be a thing of the past.

[@nrnoble]

Yes, until HD LCD TVs\monitors, nothing came close to Trinitron.

[@xsc1000]

@@JSB2500 Quite soon RCA introduced In-line CRT and it solved convergence problems too.

[@Roxor128]

Your electron gun graphic at 2:23 is mirrored! You've got the pins for the tube that would have wires connected pointing like they're the output. EDIT: Done it again at 7:33! And again at 12:43. And yet again at 19:27.

[@bigbaddms]

I knew something was wrong with it. Thanks for pointing that out!

[@garyfrancis6193]

I bought one. A one electronic gun colour TV was ingenious. I was sold on it. It didn’t go easily out of alignment if moved like older three gun colour picture tubes.

[@jamillairmane1585]

"You needed something stronger..Namely, you needed silicon!" I knew it!!

[@WSS_the_OG]

This kind of patience is only possible without shareholders and boards of directors, and with dogged determination and a vision. It can't happen anymore in today's tech day and age corporate structures. :( Great telling of this story!

[@Sonnell]

Indeed. So sad. That is why most of the inventions today are coming from small startups. And they are bought by big corp.

[@cjc363636]

So true. To be fair to boards, etc: There is risk at continuing development forever---That's how RCA died in the mid-80s. But when the 'hail-Marry' works, a company will rule the market for generation(s).

[@Enraiful]

I would argue that it's a matter of career vs. founder CEOs, look at what Zuckerberg is doing with Facebook. Not a fan of the guy, but he's navigated through VR, the metaverse, and now AI pretty successfully all things considered. Most traditional career CEOs seem to be there only to steer a ship.

[@relo999]

Still happens, just not in America where speed is key and losses don't really matter as long as there are people funding the company.

[@WSS_the_OG]

@@relo999 Short term gain for a CEO / VP bonus over all else.

[@JacobButtnugget]

I have a 1997 Dell (Sony Trinitron) PC monitor on my modern setup, and usually watch Asianometry on it. This video fit perfectly and looked natural.

[@corrugateddesigner]

Nice. I have a very late (2002) SGI 21" flat trinitron. I just saw someone asking $1800 for a cosmetically poor one. Hold on to that thing.

[@michaelmoorrees3585]

My father bought the families first Trinitron (21") in 1976. It was only the 2nd color TV set we purchased. The first was a 25" Zenith in 1971. The Zenith disappeared by 1982, but the Trinitron was still working, when sent off to an e-waste center in 2009. Though it was replaced by a 27" Trinitron, in the living room, in 1994, due to the tube getting dimmer, as that's what just happens to all CRTs over time. The old set went to my Mom's bedroom, until disposal. Electronics was expensive back then. My father paid somewhere over $600 for the 21" Trinitron in 1976, but not from a store, but new, in the box, from someone's house. That was at a bargain price, and I guess "it fell off a truck", as they use to say. Good thing, it wasn't "a box of rocks", as that also often occurred.

[@stevebabiak6997]

In 1994, the Trinitron CRT could have benefited from a CRT rejuvenator. Might not be easy to find that service these days.

[@maxheadrom3088]

IEEE Spectrum! You're a VIP now!!!

[@weeliano]

What a great story! I didn't know how much Sony had to go through to develop the Trinitron! My Dad bought a Kirara Basso 29 inch TV back in the 80s and it was the best CRT TV we ever had!

[@bobstevenson3130]

Thank you for going in-depth on how these sets work! It's surprisingly hard to find documentation online on how the early Chromatron sets worked, and what exactly the differences are between that and the Trinitron.

[@jbalazer]

7:48 CRTs don't have pixels, in today's sense of the word. Small areas of red, green, or blue phosphor are called dots, and each group of three is called a phosphor dot triad or trio. A pixel, in today's nomenclature, is a discretely addressable element, which CRTs don't have. 15:28 The diagram labeled "The 3-gun Chromatron system" is actually showing a single-gun Chromatron. 18:41 The diagram labeled "The Chromatron arrangement" is actually showing a conventional shadow mask, not a Chromatron. Chromatrons all use phosphor stripes, not triads.

[@JSB2500]

Thank you!

[@andersjjensen]

Yet even QDOLEDs and WOLEDs don't have "actual pixels". Each addressable entity is still comprised of individual dots of each color. The holy grail is still to make a little square that uniformly shines the desired color.

[@TearmoonBroadcasting]

Trinitron CRTs did not have dots, they use aperture grille; it's specifically a Trinitron thing. Dot triads are used by shadow mask CRTs

[@stevengill1736]

Funny to think I was in junior high school when this was going on...my family didn't have a color TV till 1970 or so...half a lifetime ago, wow.

[@chrisstoddard1144]

My experience paralleled yours. Our Trinitron TV was purchased in 1970 and was our first color TV. It seemed like all my friends' families had beaten us to color but ours looked much better.

[@taiwanluthiers]

I used to have a Sony Trinitron 24 inch TV in my apartment in Austin, in 2015. It had been there forever. It does not work, and nobody wants to haul it to the dumpster because the thing weights like a ton. I realize a competent person could probably fix it but I never had any incentives to do so... just didn't care for those big heavy TV... When I was around 15 or so my mom bought a 24 inch Sony Trinitron... we were excited like a kid on Christmas... that was around 1995 or so. That old Sony TV looks to be the exact same model in fact. The only difference I noticed was that they made different sound when you turned it on compared to other TV's. I do see a CRT TV every so often but they're getting rare...

[@FreihEitner]

A great documentary on a great product. I myself have owned a Sony Trinitron PC monitor in the late 1990s and a Trinitron television in the early 2000s. For me at the time the appeal was the large, flat screen and generally good picture quality. I say large, but by today's standards 19 and 20 inches was very small--in those days they were large and heavy units.

[@ManoOne-Music-Production]

I still use a 24” Trinitron. It’s beautiful

[@MrDadyD]

Protect it with your life... Its the greatest piece of electronics ever produced

[@Telecolor-in3cl]

I do a 21" one.

[@rwdplz1]

9:05 I have one of these, with the case. It was broken when I got it, but now mostly works after re-capping it, 1/4 of the screen has a partial horizontal collapse I need to solve. The picture is remarkably good, you can feed a composite signal right into it with an adapter.

[@georgesenda1952]

My Sony Trinitron lasted for years and I once had an early Sony black & white portable tv around 1962, The Trinitron is the reason why today I will only buy Sony for my tv's. They last. I am watching this on my 2014 Bravia and it still works fine though I want to buy a 4k tv next year,

[@Adrian-uc4ox]

I had one of these, the big massive grey ones, one of the first tv to come out with a Flat Screen, 30 something inch, Xbox360 days, Gears of War, great times.

[@jjjapp]

My favourite piece of technology on my favourite channel. Let's grab my favourite drink and watch.

[@waa-art]

My parents got a Trinitron in '78, when I was 15. From the start I was mesmerised by the intense colours. I got hooked onto BBC nature documentaries. I'd take colour slides of the screen, and later at art school I tried to copy that feeling of these amazing colours in my paintings. I still think of the Trinitron a lot. Nothing ever came close.

[@Erik-rp1hi]

In 1968 my parents had the Sony Trinitron set in their bedroom. They had gone on vacation and we had some lady taking care of us. I was 9. The set was always on, no lag was a feature back then. Something shorted and started smoking real bad. I looked around the back and could see a little fire going on inside the set. Second level of split level home, 2 story from the street. I remember getting a glass of water and pouring it on the wood bench the set was on. Fire dept came with a big articulated hook and ladder. We were on a culdesac (dead end street). They remove the set and put fans at the windows to remove the smoke. Had to repaint the room. Those instant on TV's burned down a lot of homes back then.

[@stevebabiak6997]

The “instant on” was basically accomplished by just supplying power to the heating element in all of the vacuum tubes (including the CRT).

[@wrentubes1886]

@@stevebabiak6997 Gosh, wouldn't that ruin the cathode in no time though?

[@stevebabiak6997]

@@wrentubes1886 - sure, that’s a possibility, but the cathodes are already very weak, to the point where the brightness of the display is diminished. That is when a rejuvenation would be attempted - you wouldn’t attempt a rejuvenation if the display is still going strong. Interestingly enough, the other alternative is to regun the CRT to put a fresh set of cathodes inside. But there were no Trinitron electron guns available. Back in the late 1980s I had a Trinitron set that wouldn’t rejuvenate, so it needed a regun. It was regunned using an inline gun (which was readily available at the time since almost all brands other than Sony were using that). We ended up having to make a number of other modifications to that set after it was regunned, just to get it to look acceptable. I gave that set to my mother and it was working just fine until she passed about fifteen years ago.

[@wrentubes1886]

@@stevebabiak6997 That reminds me of a mitsubishi diamondtron in terms of how it works

[@stevebabiak6997]

@@wrentubes1886 - Mitsubishi used the inline gun, so that would be consistent.

[@richarddavis2605]

I love this channel, great topics, well researched (hopefully, tbh i don't fact check the videos!), well presented. I always learn loads of new details about the topic of the video

[@fjashfcsahds]

Beautifull to see so many people that still appreciate the Trinitron in the 21th century. More than 300 likes came in while I was watching this video!

[@BETTERWORLDSGT]

We didn't get our first color TV until 1975, a Zenith, but in 1993 or so I got a Sony Trinitron. It was a great TV, but I remember how heavy it was, when I moved I had to get a friend help Me carry it down the stairs. Those things were seriously heavy.

[@MagnusPaul1976]

I grew up with a Sony Trinitron KV-192SA and it was a good set, until it blew nine years from new. *After about four to five years of use, the picture took on an egg shaped form, rather than a round shaped form and the colour started to fade too.* Therefore, I cannot say whether Sony televisions were good or bad. Since the video concentrates on Sony Trinitron televisions alone, I will not mention the Sony Bravia, I owned in 2012.

[@Eidolon2003]

"My wife got the house, but I got the Sony." LOL Would you rather a) Sit in a fancy mansion with no Trinitron, or b) Sit in an empty apartment with a Trinitron on the livingroom floor. The choice is clear folks

[@Argelius1]

Your videos are simply superb. I especially appreciate that you aren't using an AI voice for narration.

[@stevewolfe6096]

Bought the 12” Trinitron in 1970. Almost indestructible except - about 5 days after the 1 yr warranty expired, it died completely. Contacted the store and they said to bring it in, gave me a spot on their service bench and a new fuse to solder in - they knew I was handy with a soldering iron and left me to it. The new fuse was a bit higher rating than the factory fuse and the set was still going strong when I sold it years later

[@robovac3557]

Wow, tell me more about this almost indestructible TV of yours that died after 1 whole year.

[@mattilindstrom]

The demodulated color TV signal was a pretty intricate construction, take a look on an oscilloscope and it looks terrible to decipher. For backwards compatibility it's divided into subcarriers of luminance and chrominance. The chrominance bandwidth is quite low, therefore the slight color bleed, usually in the trailing edge of the cathode ray sweep. In the 1990s I had one of the very late generation of CRT TVs, a 29 inch Trinitron. Got it at half price, the market was entering a transition period as HD TV with its new aspect ratio was rumored to be just around the corner. The thing weighed more than 60 kg and was a shape unfit for any comfortable carrying hold, no matter how many persons were lifting.

[@joelstyer5792]

The method RCA came up with was pretty ingenious, especially considering the technology of the time. NTSC (or PAL) looks like a mess on the scope until you know exactly what to look for and understand what is going on. Still, specialized equipment like a vectorscope is needed to really see what is happening with the color subcarrier. As I recall, the original quadrature modulated signals _I and Q were bandwidth limited to 1.3MHz for -I and I think about 0.7MHz for Q. But -IQ decoding was complicated, so most TV manufacturers switched to R-Y/B-Y decoding with equal bandwidths of about 0.5MHz. The full luminance bandwidth was about 4.2MHz although is would not really be achieved in over the air broadcasts. 4.2MHz yielded about 300 lines of resolution (horizontally), so 0.5MHz would only yield around 50 lines of color information, although it looked considerably better due to the fact that the chrominance and luminance were combined. If you look close at older, fully analog TVs, you can the color is more of a blob, or horizontal streaks. High saturation green to magenta color transitions were quite bad.

[@SuperLanyard]

Hey, thanks for all your work. You're the best! Owned a number of Trinitrons. Back in the day, my dad did a lot of work with the Japanese in Japan and brought one of these back before they were available in the U.S. All the neighbors used to come over to watch it. Fast forward to today. Just took delivery of a new Sony. What a disappointment! They've somehow got hooked up with Google and their "smart" tv software. I won't bore you with the gory details but his thing is an expensive joke.

[@CaffeineGeek]

To keep the aperture grille expansion when heated under control, thin horizontal tension/stabilization/damper wires are used to keep everything in place. Some displays came with removable stickers letting buyers know the wires may be visible on solid white screens and this is not a defect or crack. I once snagged an beautiful, barely used 21" Sony Trinitron monitor from one of my jobs. According to the person who gave it to me, "there are two cracks." Knowing they were the two tension wires, I gladly took the monitor home where it served me well for years. Sadly I got rid of it when moving from one US coast to the other as it was simply too big to haul along.

[@thirstyCactus]

@2:24 and @7:33 correction: The electron gun (left) is shown reversed. The end with the connection pins should be facing to the left in this diagram.

[@EstorilEm]

I bought a Sony WEGA FD Trinitron 32" HDTV in 2004ish when I left my summer job at Circuit City and went off to college, got a good deal on it but yikes was it still expensive. This was back when plasmas were fairly well established (at 3-4k) and LCD wasn't really a thing. I was so proud of that TV lol, all ~200+lbs of it as I recall haha. To this day I'll never forget the extreme contrast and dark blacks, most LCD's just can't compare even today - OLED is great but just too expensive for now.

[@mangjitnijjhar1390]

I got an open-box certified like-new 48-inch 4K LG OLED TV from Best Buy for about $638.

[@bobcoats2708]

Damn! RCA’s 1963 color TV at $550 is the equivalent of nearly $5700 today. No wonder buyers weren’t keen.

[@dukecraig2402]

It's also why TV repairmen used to exist, everytime someone whines about them not being around anymore I ask them if they also want to go back to paying $5,000 for a television, personally I'd rather pay $400 throw it away in 10 years and get another one as opposed to paying $5,000 for one, then paying someone $400 to fix it 8 years later then 2 years after that throw it away because it broke again and have to go out and spend another $5,000 and start the whole process over again. I don't care what anyone says, today's TV's have a much better picture, theatrical release formats fit on them instead of them having to be butchered up to fit on a TV screen and they're so cheap everyone in the family has one in their own room instead of everyone fighting over who gets to watch what.

[@bobcoats2708]

@@dukecraig2402 Yeah, no doubt we’re getting a lot of TV for our money these days. I certainly wouldn’t go back. That said, I hate to think that everything is disposable these days, as economically they usually aren’t worth fixing. Though if mine craps out, I might take a shot at repairing it myself, since my weekend labor rates are cheap, and I have the benefit of KZbin to help diagnose.

[@michaeltb1358]

I owned 3 SonyTrinitron TVs, plus a monitor with a Trinitron tube. The last TV was a 32" widescreen which had a flat screen and weighed a ton as the flat screen was achieved with a thick glass lens. Strangely the only problem was with the power switches. All were replaced while still working. Eventually I bought a Pioneer Plasma as the best flat screen TV for many years. Still working.

[@quantumleap359]

I studied the Lawrence Chromatron tube in the mid 1960s. One of the biggest drawbacks was the fact that a 3.58 mHz drive signal was impressed on the grille behind the screen. It radiated that RF with a pretty strong signal. The Trinitron was an engineering triumph.

[@AaronOfMpls]

From the time they got married in the mid 70s until the 2000s, my mom and dad bought mostly Sony electronics. And until the HD era, every TV they had (except for the small B&W in Dad's workshop) was a Trinitron, from a small bedroom TV to our 20- and 30-inch living room and home theater TVs. So growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was very much used to Trinitrons. Around 2000, we even had one of those late-model Trinitrons with a completely flat-fronted tube (as opposed to the usual cylindrical curve). Our largest CRT computer monitor was Trinitron-style too -- though it was branded as a Compaq and made after Sony's patents had expired, so I'm not sure who made the tube. (It got recycled ~15 years ago after it started to get vertical-deflection jitters -- and I was looking to get a larger LCD screen anyway.)

[@DanL57]

Great video. Glip Sarnoquon was one of the color TV engineers at RCA.

[@johnbewick6357]

I remember well the first Trinitron sold by the shop I was working as a tv engineert in 1971. It certainly was a game changer, Lighter in weight than any other colour tv and with picture quality / colours better than anything else we sold. Although every one coming in to buy a new tv wanted one, it's price was prohibively high for most at that time.

[@aeons80]

Had a 21 inch Dell Trinitron monitor which was a rebranded GDM-500PS in 1998. That thing was a pig, was huge for the time and weighed like 75 pounds. I absolutely loved that monitor. Was so bright and only now with OLED monitors coming out are we starting to see the blacks and brightness that we saw with that monitor.

[@bernieschiff5919]

Pure black with CRT's is the one thing that plasma screens couldn't match until the hi-end OLED monitors came out.

[@erikziak1249]

Precisely!

[@ADHJkvsNgsMBbTQe]

I was hoping you would do a video about this topic. I have the model shown at 0:30 still in the same place as it always was, still working great right up to when broadcast format changed to digital.

[@peterjaniceforan3080]

Had one and loved it for 20 years 😊

[@AndrewStinsonAPU]

I bought a big Sony Trinitron console television in 1984 at Sanger Harris in Dallas, TX. I was a flight attendant and moved with that set from Dallas to San Antonio to Phoenix to eastern Oklahoma then to Tulsa, OK to Fayetteville, AR, then back to Los Angeles where I moved around 5 or 6 times before finally putting out on the curb in Hawthorne, CA in 2014. It was still working when I set it out on the curb 30 years after I bought it and I never once had to have it serviced!

[@henryisnotafraid]

Always loved Sony Trinitron TVs and the way you could reset the image and make the wire shake. Such a good image though and my very first flat screen computer monitor was a KDS Trinitron.

[@EdgyNumber1]

Imagine that. Ibuka seeing his project outlasting him. Testament to the Trinitron concept, relatively unchanged. Having said that, I feel that if he could've been young again he would've been the kind of engineer that would've been very excited at LCD and various other new flat screen technologies.

[@JSroid]

Our first color TV (late 60s or early 70s) was a Trinitron. It's $525 price tag was more than the other options, but seeing them side-by-side in the local appliance store, my parents thought there was no competition.

[@ekwem]

2:01 ‘crack’ not cracked. Great video!

[@vintagecapgunsatyourmomshouse]

Lol yup😅

[@Hansengineering]

Still have a 22" trinitron monitor with RGB inputs. I don't use it anymore, though. It was my first truly amazing monitor.

[@joesterling4299]

I need to reference a Technology Connections YT video: "These Are Not Pixels: Revisited" The colored phosphor triplets in a color TV do not define the resolution of the image (although they will limit the max resolution). Pixels and the location of scan lines can vary wildly when the electron gun(s) sweep across the screen to produce an image. The video explains and illustrates in detail. Great (Asianometry) video, by the way. I learned quite a lot of history about Trinitron, my favorite TV tech of the last century.

[@RealBrotherGG]

I saw the title and my back hurt , someone had a 40 something inch flat-screen crt trinitron , probably one of the most modern crt's made by the trinitron product line. Myself and a strong friend grabbed that and we were struggling . We brought it to his grandmother's and swore the whole time that it was the most awkward ridiculous thing either of us ever moved.

[@filanfyretracker]

The Trinitron was basically the standard for a good color CRT. I still have a FD Trinitron computer monitor sitting in a closet as I dont us VGA or a resolution that low anymore. but afaik it does still work.

[@paulturner5769]

You forgot to mention that high-powered electron beams smashing into Aperture Grilles generates a lot of X-Rays, just like an X-Ray machine does. Hence the requirement for pounds of Lead in the glass front of the tube to protect the viewers. I bet not all old CRTs were safely disposed of, groundwater problems ahead probably.

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

I never had a Trinitron until 2007 when I got one used for 50 bucks. It fell and broke and I’ve never owned one since. They were high end TVs still when I grew up in 90s Europe. I’d love a video about TV manufacturing in the Nordic countries. We had a Swedish TV when I grew up but I can’t find information about it. I also remember Finlux from Finland. You made some great videos about computing machines from Scandinavia.

[@dinkc64]

At 2:34 the electron gun is backwards, it cannot fire electrons from the connection end.

[@Nerd3927]

Excellent documentary again! I am always happy when I see you post.

[@scottfranco1962]

A tie in with IEEE Spectrum and the final approach to 1m subs. I watched your channel grow You truly made it. Congratulations.

[@markprior1293]

I had one, And you could plug in a extra speaker for stereo sound, but it was a small screen

[@smurp_com]

4:12 Oh my god, the TV8-301, the little B&W TV, has such gorgeous industrial engineering!!!! I would delightedly use such a thing today. It would make a lovely auxiliary terminal.....

[@bobroberts2371]

1800 1806 " Ibuka feeling that the failure would be all his fault. " This is significant From what I understand of Japanese culture ( at least in an industrial setting ) , when there is a failure, everyone shares the blame however, if there is a success, the top person gets all the credit.

[@andarin2]

In the 90s top computer servers (such as Sun's) monitors were Trinitron. Amazing video and amazing channel, contrats!

[@ManoOne-Music-Production]

Thank you so much for all the hard work! Grateful for your content

[@Gary-Seven-and-Isis-in-1968]

I think the UK/Europe with it's PAL system produced a better picture with the shadow mask CRT then the American NTSC system. However, I do remember seeing my first glimpse of a Trinitron and recognising it did offer more definition. contrast and something a lot nearer a true black.

[@roberthindle5146]

The video suggests that the shadow mask approach (vs. the colorwheel approach) is what allowed both the bandwidth practicality and the backward-compatibility with black& white transmissions to be overcome. In reality, that was a completely separate development relating to the modulation of chrominance information on low-bandwidth sidebands of the carrier (exploiting the fact the humans are far more sensitive to brightness than they are to color).

[@EannaButler]

I was hoping the this would have been covered here! Such an epic story for an epic engineering achievement 👏👍

[@ronc9743]

The reference color monitor used in TV Stations in the 1970's & 80's was a Tektronix 12" Color Monitor featuring the Sony Trinitron CRT. The joke was slap a Tektronix label on a Sony TV and add $2000 to the price and TV Stations bought them like crazy. The PBS Station I worked for hade over a dozen of them.

[@shimanosv9143]

Have crt SONY trinitron KV-X 2121, from 1990, still works

[@MM.x.00]

Awesome video essay, great story. Thank you for what you bring to us

[@RaquelFoster]

I had a 17" Sony Trinitron monitor (VGA -> 5x BNC component cable!). Pretty awesome for the '90s. I later got a 22" NEC MultiSync DiamondTron CRT which was huge and awesome for Quake 3 Arena but not quite as well made as the Sony. It had two damping wires and it would still shimmer like crazy when you bumped into it.

[@fabiodeoliveiraribeiro1602]

In the 1970s, few Brazilian families had color TVs. In my house, TVs were black and white. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that my family bought a color TV. But no matter how hard I try, I can't remember the first color TV show I saw. That's not important here, by the way. What's important is that the technology created by the Morita/Ibuka duo didn't manage to destroy my interest in old black and white movies. Many of them (like Seven Samurai, which I first saw on TV around 1971) are artistically much better than color movies made and broadcast on TV in recent decades.

[@andersjjensen]

I remember when I got a 17" computer monitor from a manufacturer who had licensed the Trinitron tech from Sony. That was freaking awesome. Much flatter glass than any other tech available at the time and super crisp colors in gaming. Text clarity, whoever, was not it's strongest point, but still an overall improvement from the 14" random junk monitor I had before.