Can CRT televisions make a comeback in the future?

[Jeffhs]

I have a flat screen and two CRT TVs. I intend to keep the CRT sets so that I will have a TV if or when my flat screen goes bad next year (I've had it for a year already; it has a 2-year factory warranty, which is just about when most flat screens bite the dust -- just after the warranty expires). I just read, online, several pages of complaints concerning Sanyo flat screens going bad within a year, and am so glad I did not purchase that brand when I bought my FS TV in August 2011.

My flat screen is an Insignia (house brand of Best Buy) 19" set that has worked (and continues to work) very well over the past year. Insignia says in its advertisements that, in paraphrase, they don't manufacture junk. I'll find out if there is anything to that claim when the warranty on my set expires next year. These TVs are made in China, mostly or entirely of LG parts; LG, which also owns the rights to the Zenith name and crest logo, appears to be a much better brand of HDTV and other video gear (I have an LG Blu-ray player) than many other flat screens on the market today, so I'll just wait and see if the company's claims are credible.

I probably won't like going back to a CRT TV, but knowing that my RCA CTC185, bought new almost 13 years ago and now in storage, still works well I'll just live with it if I have to. I'll just have the cable company (Time Warner in my area near Cleveland) put a cable box on the old set; hopefully, by then, they will have reduced or eliminated the rental fee for these boxes (I read online that these fees may be reduced or even dropped eventually). It won't be HD but I'll at least have a TV, and I will be watching a set that has outlasted, by many years, most of today's offshore-manufactured flat screens.

I've never (yet) heard of any brand of flat screen television lasting anywhere near a decade. I think the manufacturers planned it this way so they will sell more sets, but I do believe it is ridiculous to have to buy a new TV every couple of years -- and for most people that is a strain on their budget they cannot afford. Whenever I read in the blog posts on FS TV makers' websites of people having to do without TV when their flat screen goes, I wonder why they didn't keep the old CRT set (if it still works) as a backup, knowing that the flat set would likely go bad within a year or shortly after the warranty expires, whichever comes first.

[etype2]

Color TV broadcasting in the U.S. went 100% color, in prime time by the 3 networks in the 1965/66 season. By the early 70's, we can say color TV was mainstream after prices dropped substantially. Large screen flat TV's have been around for 14 years.

Today's average buyer, in their 20's and 30's, maybe 40's, will consider a big CRT TV as obsolete, to big, to heavy and not big enough. They were not around to appreciate the romance of the post-war televisions, black and white (I Love Lucy) and the dawn of color television.

Having said that, I suspect that most of us here, are technical types, and TV repairmen, present and former who grew up with CRT televisions and the romance of CRT televisions will remain fond and nostalgic for all of us.

[David Roper]

Small correction: 1966-67 was the first with every show in color. The previous season was a patchwork quilt of color and black & white shows.

[AiboPet]

I'll likely NEVER tire of I Love Lucy......and this show for some reason ONLY looks right fullscreen on big 'ol black and white CRTs and little paper speakers. Looney Toons and Tom&Jerry similarly belong in BIG and glowing color. I just wasn't around for cartoons being on the big wide theater screens.....so they belong on big 'ol Saturday morning TV sets :-)

[Sandy G]

I'm too damn STUPID to learn how to fix 'em, but I absolutely LOVE the old stuff..

[6GH8cowboy]

SandyG: It starts with a fuse, next time it's just a tube. Next time you check a couple suspicious lookin resistors, next thing ya know YOUR FIXEM UM.

[Chip Chester]

I agree that OLED is the 'next big thing'... to the consternation of the 3D folks. I've seen a small 15-inch-ish consumer set (Panasonic, maybe?) and while it was too small to evaluate resolution, the overall image, color, and contrast was pretty remarkable.

Our "ancient" Hitchai 55" plasma left for college this week with my son, so we'll be looking for something as a placeholder until Target has an OLED 65" for $800. (Not holding my breath on that one...)

I'd almost rather buy from a craigslist fixer/reseller, as you can actually try it before you buy it, and you know where to go when it needs fixing again.

What's more likely than a CRT comeback is some sort of "Instagram" for video, where the display generates its own oval-screen, cobwebby, slightly scratched overlay, (complete with lighting glare and dead fly in the corner) -- as a frame or skin thru which you view your content. Coupled with B&W/sepia tone color choices, film scratch simulation, and software to un-do pin-registered film-to-tape transfer accuracy. Just like the good old days! Patent pending, of course.

Chip

Chip

[CoogarXR]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

I've never (yet) heard of any brand of flat screen television lasting anywhere near a decade.

Now you can say you have. My 1998 Pioneer 50" Plasma is still going strong, and gets daily play. The thing is built like a tank though. I think it has 10 or more fans in it. The old commercial-grade stuff (Pioneer, NEC, etc) can still be found running. Now, consumer-grade stuff is another story

[Electronic M]

Had I been born a couple of decades earlier(in addition to other perks I could have had) I would have devoted a part of my career to building a thin large screen CRT based on an idea I've had floating in my head for the better part of a decade.

That idea being a "video wall CRT". The term and idea comes from something called a video wall which was a bank of CRT monitors arranged in a grid and each fed a part of an image so that the grid of monitors could display a giant image the size of their combined screen space. The drawback of the video wall of yore was that the image had a window paining effect because of the individual CRT edges and monitor masks.

My idea for a solution for this is to fuse the screens of the CRTs together into a kind of super CRT where each section of the screen is scanned by a different election gun/deflection assembly...In so doing cabinet depth would become an inverse function of not only deflection angle, but also number of gun/deflection assemblies used to collectively scan the whole of the screen. With the flat face CRTs that were made near the end of the CRT era as a base all that would need to be done is to take each electron guns scanning area and mask it off with a shield extending from near the phosphor screen in towards the electron gun so that an individual gun can't scan another guns phosphor section....something like a grid of square tunnels from near an individual electron gun's yoke to near the screen.

Some of the advantages of such a scheme would be(in addition to the obvious lighter weight bigger screen CRT that would result) EASE of incorporating MULTI PIP viewing in to such sets, ULTRA high resolution capabilities(given over eight gun assemblies with each gun scanning a section of phosphor with near NTSC resolution), mostly generic tried and true circuits with some kind of digital frame-store/image-segmenter converter (Might even be able to drive all the yokes with a single pair of deflection circuits and some networks between the yokes to allow for adjustment of sweep angle, centering and linearity), plus all those traits that make CRTs good.

With my idea if one scanned a 50" screen with a 10X10 grid of electron guns each sweeping 5" of screen the set would likely not be much deeper than a normal 5" color CRT set!
If CRTs had stayed longer I'd have kept this idea secret and tried to develop it, but it is a good idea whose time was about past when it was finally conceived, and it is close to worthless now except as a vision of what could be.

[Eric H]

Originally Posted by CoogarXR

Now you can say you have. My 1998 Pioneer 50" Plasma is still going strong, and gets daily play. The thing is built like a tank though. I think it has 10 or more fans in it. The old commercial-grade stuff (Pioneer, NEC, etc) can still be found running. Now, consumer-grade stuff is another story

Bet that thing cost 50 grand new! How about a pic?

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by Chip Chester

I agree that OLED is the 'next big thing'...

I sure hope not. With LCD, we finally got past burn-in and finite-life issues on video displays (within reason), but OLED, though it has viewing-angle advantages over LCD, is a big step backward in the longevity comparison. Thanks to Samsung's AMOLED displays, I have officially seen the first burn-in on a cell phone. Not for me, no way!

What we REALLY need is "regular", non-organic LED display panels. THOSE should be the end-all in video-display technology. Some day...

[AiboPet]

In around 2005 or so (about the time Stringer showed up and killed all things robot for Sony...and I left..for Kia...to be on the design team for funny little hamster cars), Sony came out with a little OLED set that would run you like $1600. It was VERY small. I think 11" or so.

Every single one of those that friends bought (employee discounts, etc)....are DEAD now. Almost every one of them have lost the blue OLED to age. One I know that was built into an Xbox thing.....is HORRIBLY dead and has a burn-in you ONLY see when it's on.

OLED looked REALLY beautiful.....but even the little "KIWI" computer in one of my cars with a tiny OLED display, is burned in. It always seems the blue is a problem still with longevity. They really HAVE to get past the longevity issues....and of course these are also still WAY too expensive.

So far....I'm having GREAT luck with a 55" Samsung LED backlit set I replaced a dead 37" Viewsonic LCD with (lost a backlight...since replaced and is a FlightSim monitor). That Sammy was like $2,500 about three years ago. I hope it lasts at LEAST five years for that kinda money, but would be of course much happier if I got closer to TEN years out of it before wanting the next thing. At THIS point.....I think LED backlit LCD is deffinately the CRTs killer. I have heard of several things that do go wrong with Samsung LED sets though. I hear ALOT about power supply caps.

[peverett]

I think what will happen to CRT TVs is somewhat like what happened with Steam engined trains. There will be some people like us who restore them and watch them(the VideoKarma group), but no new ones will be made.

As with the train Steam engine-no new ones will be made.

Technology has moved on.

[Eric H]

What is the Tech behind Apple's Retina display? Is it just very high resolution LED or?

[lnx64]

It's just a high DPI screen with a higher resolution in the same small space.