"We are going to end production of cathode ray tubes at the end of March," a Sony spokesman said.

Sad, but I'm not sure if Sony has made a "true" Trinitron tube for awhile. I could be totally wrong on this, but I swear I've seen a few newer Sony's with a 3 gun in-line tube. I remember reading that they couldn't afford to produce everything in-house and have outsourced the last few years. I think the patent ran out on the Trintron, so some later non Sony sets do have a 1 gun triniton "type" tube.

Example would be my 2003 Toshiba. Exact clone of the 24" Sony Wega, with a tube made by Orion. :(

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I'd say they've had three guns but one lens for as long as I've been mucking with TV's. Only the earliest 5" ones had a single common series filament, but still three (cathodes) guns.

The FD Vega tubes still have the aperture grill, and the flat face which requires the greater amount of glass to support the structure, which makes these amongst the heaviest CRTs ever made. Ask any furniture mover.

This does obviously, exclude the Indextron.

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If OLED can truely offer 100% NTSC color reproduction, and can maintain its quality for as long as a good CRT can, I may not miss the death of the CRT that much.

For however heretic this sounds, I wouldn't mind something that's lighter and takes up less space then a CRT does, but LCD's still aren't quite up to par in terms of picture quality, and OLED is still very new and essentally unested.

I guess by changing the gun structure near the end, they began to go cheap on the product with the thinking they could make a product which was "transition" or meeting a "price point".

I wonder if they stopped making the gun assemblies themselves and farmed them out?

My 25" is a very high hour set (made in Japan), but the tube is still in great shape over 15 years later. My parents have a younger US made 27" and after about 5 years of significantly lower hours the emission tube is all but pooped. I'm afraid its not an isolated case.

Only crocodile tears here...the technology transfer should have never been allowed to occur in the first place.

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My friend that runs a TV shop has actually sold some CRT sets for decent money and people have been having their CRT sets repaired. He told me one guy told him "I can go to walmart and get the same set for $10 more". My friend said he didn't argue with him and let him go to walmart. The guy was back within the hour and was real eager to buy that CRT set. He discovered that the cheap CRT sets are being replaced by the high $$ flat screens. Of course, this spike in used CRT set sales will fall when flat panel sets get cheaper.

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