If you’re old enough to remember Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) Televisions, you probably remember that Sony sold the top products. Their Trinitron tubes always made the best TVs and Computer Monitors. [Alec Watson] dives into the history of the Sony Trinitron tube.
Sony Color TVs didn’t start with Trinitron — for several years, Sony sold Chromatron tubes. Chromatron tubes used individually charged wires placed just behind the phosphor screen. The tubes worked, but they were expensive and didn’t offer any advantage over common shadow mask tubes. It was clear the company had to innovate, and thanks to some creative engineering, the Trinitron was born.
All color TV’s shoot three electron guns at a phosphor screen. Typical color TVs use a shadow mask — a metal sheet with tiny holes cut out. The holes ensure that the electron guns hit only the red, green and blue dots of phosphor. Trinitrons use vertical bars of single phosphor color and a picket fence like aperture grille. The aperture grill blocks less of the electron beam than a shadow mask, which results in a much brighter image. Trinitrons also use a single electron gun, with three separate cathodes.
[Alec] is doing some amazing work describing early TV systems and retro consumer electronics over on his YouTube channel, Technology Connections. We’ve added him to our Must watch subscription list.
Interested in retro CRTs? Check out Dan’s article on cleaning up the fogged plastic safety screen on the front of many CRTs.
“The (Chromatron) tubes worked, but they were expensive and didn’t offer any advantage over common shadow mask tubes.” Pardon ? He explains in length how it was better and brighter (even brighter than Trinitron) but way too expensive to manufacture.
Did I miss something ?
he was comparing the first aperture tube to the chromatron , this advantage went lost as soon as the new aperture grill technology came along (dot to rectangle)
I suppose it refers to new advances made during the years between the invention and when the tv set went into market.
I mostly remember the two thin support wires crossing the screen :)
Yeah, they weren’t too visible on TV’s but quite visible on computer monitors.
Once you saw them, you couldn’t ignore them.
+1
I hated the Trinitron computer monitors because of those support wires.
And the annoying high pitched whine from the transformer.
I remember being able to obtain a fairly large (and surprisingly heavy) 19”, fully functional trinitron monitor for free because of those, some friends of mine as well, people thought it was a defect :D
I had to lug a 36″ Trinitron TV up two flights of steps to my first apartment. “suprisingly geavy” is an understatement! When it came time to move out, I left, but that behemouth remained…
lol
I used to use those as “rulers”!!
they were great!
That’s exactly what I remember Trinitrons for. Nice screen, shame about those two quite obvious support wires.
I Always labeled trinitron as a failed and inferior experiment by Sony because of the lines (wires).
seriously?
I used to spend at least 10 ours a day in front of a monitor, the Sony glass was so much better for DTP work, those wires were hardly visible, they did make great rulers though.
It’s unfortunate that they’re no longer being produced, let alone considered to be reinvented; a niche market has recently taken rise (retro gaming & speedrunning) that consider trinitrons and the PVMs the holy grail in CRT TV’s.
A man can dream, I suppose.
I had that dream. For a long time. But CRT tubes age, and any trinitron on ebay just isn’t worth the risk of ending up with an old, burned out and dim tube. Then my neighbour was tossing out their ‘spare’ computer that they had gotten ages ago and that was sitting in storage ever since, still in its original packaging. Included: One brand new Dell Ultrascan P991 monitor. 19″ Trinitron tube that will even do 1920×1200. Now that little jewel is sitting in MY storage room instead, just as unused, too. Those CRTs are awesome for retrogaming, but soooo darn bulky. No idea how I did put up with that two decades back.
Back was stronger then.
I had CTX PR711FL, and cat lliked to sit on top of it and look at what I was doing.
Records have been creeping back into production after many years because there’s demand for a 12-inch grooved disc. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 20 years there’s new CRT in production.
You can get more cover art on them. Same with laserdisc.
I’m a retro gamer and I certainly don’t consider any Trinitron to be the holy grail.
That myth started with some display enthusiast called Fudoh who knows a lot about technology but he’s no gamer. His words got regurgitated into internet legend.
Trinitrons were OK back in the day for movies but they look horrible for old games.
The later models (especially the Wega line) are among the worst. Awful geometry and surprisingly poor convergence even on their $2000+ XBR models.
Old games look pixelated on aperture grille sets and it’s worst on the late model “fine pitch” tubes.
Those that don’t know better think those jaggies are extra detail but they’re an artifact and shouldn’t be there. You actually lose fine detail on Sony TVs compared to a decent curved slot mask tube.
Sony’s Wega line is also super sync fussy which makes them a poor choice for arcade games. Games with unusual refresh rates like Mortal Kombat, R-type and NBA Jam won’t sync on a Wega line and the image will roll.
The theory about extra brightness is just that. I’ve never found my Trinitrons to be noticeably brighter than my shadow mask or slot mask monitors.
My Ikegami curved shadow mask broadcast monitors are significantly better than my Sony BVM and PVMs. It’s not even close.
The real holy grail for retro gaming is a 25+ curved slot mask tri-sync arcade monitor (without screen burn). That will let you play any game from Pac Man to House of the Dead 3 at native res and refresh rate in RGB with decent geometry.
Caveat: I disagree with your opinion in it’s entirety.
Having said that: Sony was the pinnacle, vanguard, and ne plus ultra of CRT display technology. Watching an HD signal on a G90, or an XBR9xx etc. or especially a GDM-FW912 that is tweaked to perfection can be a heart-stopping experience. The clarity on those units is nothing short of hallucinatory. This is only from the experience of watching films, as a film-student: I don’t have experience with any of those units for video games.
I cannot even begin to understand what would make you say “The later models (especially the Wega line) are among the worst.”
Before Trinitron, color CRTs used a dot triad shadow mask. The electron guns were arranged in a triangle and fired at matching trios of holes in the mask, lighting up trios of Red, Green, and Blue phosphor dots.
Then came Trinitron, as explained above. Much brighter than the dot triad type.
The answer by The Rest of the Industry was the Slot Mask. Whomever first developed it essentially took the Trinitron grille and connected the vertical bars with a staggered array of horizontal bars. The cross connections eliminated the need for the Trinitron stabilizing wire across the middle of the grille. The phosphors were in vertical stripes like the Trinitron but Slot Mask still used three guns, arranged in a horizontal row. The result was a negligibly less bright image than Trinitron but coarser than Dot Triad.
The patents on Trinitron ran out not long before flatscreens tossed CRT onto the ash heap of history, but a few non-Sony TVs were made with Trinitron clone CRTs.
Slot Mask came before Trinitron? Huh…
They fired through single holes in the mask and hit three dots that are the inverse of the arrangement of the three guns.
The sad thing is that the Sun GDM5410 I have in my room here outperforms the LCD monitor I have at work on all metrics except power efficiency, compactness and weight. The LCD can do 1920×1080, the GDM5410 will happily accept 2048×1576.
I’d double check the power.
Yeah I’m sure it looks great on that 1280×1024 screen over VGA.
https://docs.sony.com/release//GDM5410.pdf
Sure, the GDM5410 might accept 2048×1576, but what’s the point? The phosphor pitch on that monitor is only the equivalent of 1600×1200 and the recommended resolution is a mere 1280×1024, presumably because you’d get moire artifacts from the interaction between the raster and the apeture grille if you ran at close to the phosphor pitch. It seems to have some kind of moire killer that can blur the picture to reduce this artifacting, but all of this is a far cry from the crisp digital 1920×1080 that you can get from reasonably-priced LCDs these days.
For general use, I always found 1920×1440 to be a tolerable middle ground.. a bit blurry, so not useful for pixel-perfect editing, but good enough for daily use. 2048×1536 wasn’t possible on any of mine at 60+Hz (iirc i could do ~57 hz)
A long time ago, I had a 21″ HP Trinitron which ran at that resolution. I remember watching TV at 1080i (no such thing as an affordable GPU that could deinterlace at that high resolution back then) and how it looked so nice.
Now for $150, you can get a whole media player that can not only deinterlace 1080i to 1080p but also do fairly well upscaling that to 4K.
Point me to a CRT that can display 3840×2160 or higher.
well, clearly that resolution wasn’t even considered back then because no graphic card would easly handle it but the sony FW900 boosted a 2560×1600@75Hz
While that’s not likely to happen, look into the IBM T220/T221 LCDs from the early 2000s. 3840×2400 at abysmal refresh rates, and requiring multiple digital signals to drive the entire panel. I would also appreciate a modern, high-resolution CRT, but I feel that the likelihood of getting one is basically nil.
A Iiyama Vision Pro Master 514, which is the most powerful currently-existing direct-view CRT (142KHz, 200Hz, 22″, 240µm, 4:3) supports the following resolutions:
5760x4320i@60Hz
5120x3840i@70Hz
4608x3456i@80Hz
4096x3072i@90Hz
3840x2880i@96Hz
3584×2688@100Hz
3200x2400i@110Hz
2880x2160i@120Hz
2560x1920i@140Hz
2304x1728i@150Hz
2048x1536i@170Hz
1920x1440i@180Hz
1792x1344i@200Hz
That is quite the CRT, but the aperture grille pitch is basically the same as the GDM5410 giving the same effective maximum displayed resolution of about 1600×1200 no matter how high your input resolution is. (Well, I guess technically you could get higher vertical resolutions, but what’s the point really?) It was intended to run at 1600×1200 @ 100Hz non-interlaced according to the manual which seems like a much more practical resolution.
“The monitor is specified for a maximum resolution of 2,048 by 1,556 pixels—equivalent to four times XGA. Unfortunately, its electronics are not up to the task of such high resolutions. In our tests using DisplayMate (www.displaymate.com) at the top resolution, screen geometry was clearly deficient: Circles looked squashed, even at the center of the screen. Screen-regulation tests revealed significant image size changes depending on the screen’s contents, and tests with fine lines showed that the bandwidth was not sufficient for this high resolution.
At the manufacturer’s recommended resolution of 1,600 by 1,200 pixels, image quality was slightly better, but geometry problems and bandwidth limitations were still apparent.”
The “perfect” resolution for a CRT is about 70% of the resolution defined by the dot pitch. That’s the maximum point determined by the Kell-factor for a typical CRT where moiré and other effects aren’t significantly affecting the picture.
1600×1200 for such a screen is tolerable, but not ideal. Something like 1280×960 would have minimized the distortion.
I miss my old 24″ trinitron crt, but by the time it died, it had so much burn in from 3d studio max, and maya, that it really wasn’t worth trying to resurrect. I got a good 10 years out of it. Theres something to be said for the professional grade CRT’s of the day. It took a long time for the LCD’s to really catch up to the color quality and performance of those displays.
What I absolutely detest in modern LCD (or more correctly TFT) TVs, is the artificial sharpening and Gamma cranking! This is supposedly to make the TV stand out in the shop and can be mostly, but not completely turned down in the settings. Samsung TVs are the worst in that respect. I can’t remember any longer how current LCD TVs compare to tube TVs, but when they were seen side, LCD TVs had a reduced colour palette, worse colours and noticeable lag compared to Tube TVs, which on the other hand seemed incredible fuzzy compared to LCD.
Other great Trinitron feature – when you screamed abuse at the work station screen the picture was modulated as the wires vibrated.
Cant do that to LCDs, need to hit them hard and permanently, I miss some things that don’t appear in datasheets..
Can’t hit them like you do a tube.
Being able to punch my computer monitor is something I definitely miss.
totally missed the company & tech that actually did Trinatron. DiaNippon Screen
Those sets were called the Sony Weighaton by those of us who were paid to carry heavy things around.
I’m a vintage tv repairman and I prefer shadow mask crt. Trinitrons tubes vas very subject yo failures.
The increased apparent failure rate of Trinitrons may have been due to people valuing them more and thus being more likely to repair them than they would replace when compared to an alternative tube.
It seemed to me that $ony would use a PNP transistor where most TV mfgrs would use an NPN (and vise-versa).
That made $ony TVs difficult for non-$ony repairman to work on or find parts.
I played a set at a maker event that incorporated the heavy wire ‘harp’ from a Trinitron tube (taken out of the glass) amplified through a piezo and played with mallets. It sounded doomy!
Praytell!
the one thing no one has mentioned yet…
some dumb assed, useless fool, deciding your very expensive trinitron monitor needed degaussing!
it was an Ikagami, 28″ studio monitor, $5k in the late 80’s
I was so angry, all it needed was the convergence done, there was even a dot/crosshatch generator living right below it!
I’m old enough to remember trinitron and I certainly don’t remember them as the best.
Trinitron tubes had wires behind the aperture grill presumably to reinforce them, but they left ugly horizontal lines on the picture. As TVs it wasn’t too bad, you got a brighter picture in exchange for lines that were pretty hard to see in normal TV content, but they were very unpopular, at least in my part of the world.
As a computer monitor the lines were very visible, very ugly, and nobody needed the extra brightness. The best CRTs of the era were the NEC multisyncs and later the Viewsonics. Trinitron was for people who didn’t know and didn’t care what they were buying.
Good video. Thanks.
I will never knowingly buy a Sony product because of their business practices, and goals of strangulating customers with needlessly proprietary standards.
I remember finding a Sony modular stereo, all propy connectors and a dense dot matrix display with digital tuned shortwave. It crashed and is long gone along with Merlin Network One, Dutch Radio, and other shortwave gems.
talking about Quality of CRT screen while demonstrating using NeverTheSameColor signal over Composite cable, Americans …
Everyone alive today and mature enough for this site know about CRT TVs. They were current until the early 2000s…
Don’t make thing seem older than they are.
looks at Xperia 1 mobile phone and laptop hp 17 omen 4k and Samsung 32 inch 4k monitor and Sony 65 inch 2016 4k model smart tv for ai light sensors that sees light and sun glare to kill all picture issues based on dark/light sun glare issues for wireless solar charging and for killing blurring and Nosie auto adjustments after fixing TecoGAF ai for 8k native like cable live tv and for youtube videos older cameras and for getting back the crt hz no limit for flat panels on all devices after fixing the a/v wireless data power sharing issues post nz wireless power tests. puts in temp sensors on screens for heat to battery recharging once ai cup hardware matures.