Sometimes you see a project just staring at you with proverbial puppy dog eyes and you just cannot look away. In the case of a once rather nice Sony TV it was the smooth 32″ Trinitron CRT that gave [Happychoice] that look when he came across it along the side of the road. Naturally he had to beg the owner of the junkyard to please let him adopt the pupp^Wjunked TV and attempted an ill-advised repair.
Some later sleuthing revealed that this poor TV had been sitting on the side of that road for at least six years, exposed to the worst that the Italian weather and local fauna could do to it, so it was no surprise that all he got out of it even after cleaning and some repairs was a sad triple-blink of the power LED. This indicated that something on the control board was very unhappy about the status of the power supply.
Over the course of a few months this project went correspondingly from careful optimism down to the depths of depression, through the fields of bargaining and into the blue skies of acceptance of a likely far more involved repair session than originally assumed. That said, the CRT itself looks to be in pretty good nick, as do the PCBs barring the few sketchy resistors that already got replaced.
We would like to congratulate [Happychoice] on the acquisition of a fun new repair project and wish him all the luck on bringing this beast of a TV back to life.
Some years back I picked up a 36″ trinitron on craigslist for free… because it was dead. (I mean “picked up” as in “acquired.” I’m not sure Anatoly of youtube fame could actually lift one).
I dont know if this was another victim of “lead free” solder, but after reflowing 50-100 joints with a hot iron and the “good stuff,” the TV came back to life.
The picture it generated when connected to our Nintendo Wii was stunning… bright, pleasantly large, and you wouldnt kill it if a remote slipped out of a kid’s hand and smashed into the screen.
It was a beast… but unmatched as a game monitor.
It’s still a mystery to me why Sony made them so heavy, nearly double the weight of a comparable set from Philips or Grundig.
Bunch of old men always high on their own farts while the japanese economy was booming. They thought the solution to any problem is to overengineer it. In that state they completely missed the arrival of “good enough” era of cheap digital electronics. When they finally realized what’s up, they desperately tried to catch up using the old ways of engineering, leading to disasters such as the PS3.
Here’s an example
Forgive my doubts, but this sounds rather apocryphal. Are there reliable sources for this course of history with these details?
I worked at Nokia when the iPhone was first introduced. General opinion among our great leaders then was that it will not be a major rival, because people want clamshell phones with physical keyboards.
To be fair, the Sony Ericsson weren’t wrong about it shattering on a sidewalk.
…but the sheep who slobber over everything Apple didn’t care that the first one also could even send picture messages (MMX) and was as fragile as spun glass.
Sony have almost always been like that though – very siloed as a company, well engineered (you say over-engineered, maybe so), and making decisions that come back to bite them.
This is the same company that gave us Betamax, DCC, MiniDisc, MMCD, music players that refused to play MP3s, and MemoryStick.
They have also backed a lot of winners too, and even if their stuff is more expensive you generally won’t go far wrong buying a Sony version of a thing in terms of actual quality or performance.
Well, they were not wrong in the technologic sense, only in the business sense.
The business sense then even drove glass on the back side, which runs contrary to the now in EU required repairability.
I think the Sony guys were kinda right, though.
They were well aware of the PDA and cell phone market at the time, too.
Sony Vaio, Sony Clié.. The success of the Blackberry.
From a business point of view, making a PDA or MDA without any physical buttons was not smart.
Even Pocket PCs and Palm OS and Symbian devices had navigational buttons, at least.
Which was good for playing games and running NES emulators, by the way.
PalmOS devices had an additional field below the LCD for handwriting recognition with some shortcuts buttons.
What the Sony guys didn’t take into account was the mentality of the masses (outside Japan).
The iPhone was perfect for humans and primates that use their fingers to point on things they see.
To people like me, it’s still a mystery how babaric everything has become.
Using fingers to touch a screen instead of using a stylus
is like eating food with unwashed fingers instead of using knife and fork.
I wish we still had a few of those Fart Engineers who overbuilt everything. They seemed to make good stuff
a ‘glass trap’ that will shatter into a thousand pieces the very first time someone drops it on a sidewalk.
well, they were right on this one…
it is all in the tube. the trinitron system uses a grid under tension as the mask. and a lot of tension at that. they use a thick steel tube frame to keep in under that tension at all times, like a piano.
Probably 90% of the weight of my Trinitron was the CRT itself. The face of that tube was an inch or more in thickness.
If you want to make a giant glass vacuum vessel with a perfectly flat face I’m guessing it needs to be much thicker than a curved one to withstand the forces at play.
Friend was a high up in local TV engineering. He had a…30″? 32″? Trinitron at home. Took him and his grown son to lift it, and they were not small. Bedt picture ever, but I heard they were a real bear to align. I had a Sony TV…cost more but the pic was worth it. I had a Viewsonic monitor and it was pretty nice, too.
Never happier than when I got my first TFT monitor. Weighs nothing. Couldn’t get rid of those old CRT monitors fast enough.
“ Never happier than when I got my first TFT monitor. Weighs nothing.”
Also looked like absolute crap, especially in those early days. Only now OLED has become attainable we’re getting back into good quality screens.
CRT also weren’t good quality by todays standards. They only had their blur effect and strobing going for them.
Btw, why don’t OLED devices (TV, Phones) have this as a feature, to only glow the first 2/3 of a frame on low fps? Would even save energy and increase longetivity, alleviate burn-in. Could even work for LCD LED-backlight.
“…It’s still a mystery to me why Sony made them so heavy…”
I wasn’t only Sony. Most of the ‘big names’, and quite a few of the lesser ones used electronic designs/solutions which they’d used forever (as one prime example, read “linear power supplies”).
Quite some time ago, after years of squinting at 19″ and 24″ TVs, a relative gave me a beautiful, nearly-new 36″ thoroughbred unit (could have been a Sony).
It took one other fairly stout individual to help get the unit out of her house, into the van, and installed in its new home.
After that episode, I adopted a philosophy which served me admirably through the remainder of the large-CRT-TV era, and beyond…
“If you can’t lift it and position it easily, you don’t need it.”
p.s.:
…this maxim also works very well for lots of other things—like helping you make a decision as to how NOT to ‘go overboard’ when your local home-repair store has a killer sale on extension ladders. In this case, add to the last line “…and can’t use it.”
I repaired 2 (or maybe 3) TV’s in my lifetime. One of them was also a Trinitron. The problem was that the “beam current” was too low (or to high?). Because of that the thing turned itself off, and thus just would not start normally. A little bit of research (In the early days of internet) showed that the root cause was a worn out tube and there was no real solution.
So I added a simple resistor and a microswitch somewhere in the back of the thing, and attached a string to the switch. After turning it “on”, you had to pull the string for a second or so to get the beam current in an acceptable range for the protection circuit. This hacky solution was good enough to get about 6 more years of usage out of the thing.
As a young kid I was quite proud of getting that “irreparable” thing into a state that a significant amount of life could be squeezed out of it again.
In retrospect, the whole beam current detection thing looks more like a way of planned obsolescence. Instead of brightness slowly degrading as the tube wears out, the manufacturer decided to wreck the whole thing when it’s spec was slightly below “brand new and shiny”.
High beam current can produce (more) x-rays. That is why that circuit was there.
Beam current limiting prevents cathode poisoning.
The X-rays are shielded by the thick CRT envelope, usually made of lead glass.
I had one of these, still in great working order when I gave it away a couple of years ago to a retro game enthusiast. It was a good TV, but it was just too big and heavy and we used it rarely. Hopefully it’s not found its way onto the verge yet.
Once you saw the wires, you could never unsee them.
I wondered for a long time what the two visible lines were across my otherwise excellent Trinitron tubed computer monitor.
Once I learned about the wires, I could see the effect of their presence when the monitor was bumped hard enough. At least I think that’s what I was seeing.
Think the big contributor to CRT weight was the leaded glass on the front. Lead to protect you from X-rays and thick glass to keep it from becoming srapnel if the tibe imploded. I’ve picked up a few, and they are way heavier at the front, the rear weighs very little
Had one of those that the previous owner left in a house we moved into. The in-wall cabinets and shelving were very deep to accommodate big CRTs, so there was lots of extra space once the CRT was gone.
To remove mine single-handedly, I built a series of platforms from crates and scrap lumber, and could slide the CRT out, lower it a few inches at a time, remove a layer, and repeat—avoiding the crushed-foot phenomenon.
Having worked for a U.S. computer monitor company, I never wanted to pick up—or use—another CRT again.
I had one that a friend gave me, and getting it down the stairs into our house it slipped and almost crushed me as it slid down the stairs. Fortunately the stairs were carpeted so the TV was fine, and I only got slightly crushed. It was a good TV at the time, but LCDs had a much better picture.
You guys are making me feel extremely old.
About 50 years ago I was repairing colour TVs (with a CRT, of course) as a saturday job while I was a student at uni, and then went on to work for IBM developing colour displays.
I took home a big IBM 21 inch svga-capable rebadged Sony with a Triniton tube. That was gorgeous, and it never went wrong, but I was moving house every few years, and one of the moves it failed to move with me. It also weighed about 70lb and needed a serious desk to hold it.
The largest CRT TV I ever owned was a 27 inch Sony, which weighed enough to need two people to carry it in.
It makes you wonder how heavy the telescreen in Fahrenheit 451 (1966 film) was. It’s the whole wall in the bedroom and something is hurled at it. BOOM!