Sources: Wikipedia, home.bt.com, tech-faq.com, howstuffworks.com
I guess my first real post will be about these guys. They weren't abandoned too long ago, having been manufactured until surprisingly recent years (2015).
Everybody has seen one of these: They are still common in lots of hotels, and even in households on a lesser extent.
Most people would laugh at the thought of getting one of these nowadays, thinking they are just bulky and awful pieces of trash, but CRT technology is a lot more fascinating than most people would believe or imagine it to be. In fact, the two tube TVs in the image above are my own, and I got one last summer, the other one last spring. I promise, the image looks way better in reality on both of them than it does in my not-that-great photos :)
CRT stands for cathode ray tubes. Cathode rays were first discovered in 1869 in a primitive Crookes Tube. In 1897, the earliest cathode ray tubes were invented by german physicist Ferdinand Braun, and were known as the "Braun Tube". The first television using the fascinating new technology was demonstrated in 1925 by Kenjiro Takajanagi. It had a 40 line resolution, which could already rival the old, mechanical TVs. By 1927, he improved the resolution to 100 lines. That resolution remained unrivaled until 1931.
The first commercially available CRT TVs arrived in 1934, and were, of course, monochrome. The most popular line of these TVs was Sony Trinitron, which lasted from 1968 to 2008.
How a CRT TV works
"There is a cathode and a pair (or more) of anodes. There is the phosphor-coated screen. There is a conductive coating inside the tube to soak up the electrons that pile up at the screen-end of the tube. However, in this diagram you can see no way to "steer" the beam -- the beam will always land in a tiny dot right in the center of the screen."
To "steer" the beam of electrons, two electromagnetic coils are used, whose strength determines the position of the beam many times a second.
The less frames are created by this beam, the more flickering the screen will become. Most CRT TVs have a refresh rate of 60 frames per second, which is the NTSC standard, used in most of the Americas, and 50 frames per second, which is the Pal Standard, which we use here, in the EU. There is also the SECAM standard which was used by the Soviet Union, and surprisingly, when colour television was adopted here, in Romania, in 1985, it was the PAL standard that got adopted, not SECAM, which would have been the more likely choice. SECAM also uses 50hz.
NTSC, PAL, or SECAM?
While NTSC has a higher refresh rate, it was originally created with quite a few problems, the most prominent of which was the annoying manual tint control, which, if not adjusted correctly, would cause colors to display incorrectly. This was later pretty much completely avoided when transistor TVs took over.PAL was inspired by NTSC, but used phase reversal to cancel its hue errors. It also had a higher resolution, which was 576 lines, compared to 480.
The main area in which SECAM was different than PAL and NTSC (although it works pretty much like PAL), was in the transmission of red and blue colours. While NTSC and PAL transmitted colour concurrently, SECAM transmitted it alternatively, which resulted in fewer colour artifacts, but halved the colour resolution.
Benefits of having a CRT in 2018 (and beyond)
Well, now we're entering my area of expertise.There are so many benefits of having one of these bulky old TVs, especially if you're someone like me. CRT computer monitors are also a must if you're planning on getting a retro pc, but I'll talk about monitors in a future post.
The main benefits I can think of are the following:
-Older, 480p videos (like music videos, or old, not remastered movies) are best seen on one of these, because it's the TV's native resolution, and, just trust me, it looks HD, especially if you plan on watching cartoons.
-They are basically the only way to play retro video game home consoles (unless you're using a professional upscaler, like the Framemeister, because of the same previous reason. Even if you have an old NES, which has a 240p resolution, you're in luck: any resolution lower than the TVs is basically also "a native resolution". Due to the nature of CRTs (of not working using pixels), even resolutions which aren't exactly half of the CRT resolution, will still look gorgeous. (which is also true for monitors)
-They're cooler (in a way?...for some people...π )
-Oh, and also, although rare, 1080p CRT TVs do existπ
And, by the way, you would be absolutely amazed by the potential vividness of such a TV: You just have to know how to mess around with the settings. Many newer CRTs, like even the 1990 one you see on the right of the image above, have an on-screen menu which you can access from the remote. When I first got it, the picture looked like a modern smartphone in direct sunlight, but when I cranked up the colour, contrast, and adjusted the brightness and sharpness, I could swear the image started looking almost as vivid as my modern 4K television. The newer one on the left looks even better.
Just a short reminder :)
Isn't all of this wonderful? This is why we should never forget the electronic and mechanical wonders we have achieved in the past.I hope I haven't left anything important out of this post.
I want to remind everybody that what is considered trash today, was considered treasure once, and just because something is new, even if it is better, we should never stop appreciating what older technologies did for mankind.
Never ForgetππΊ
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