One advantage of modern TVs is how slim they are. It's so crazy to me now how much space those old TVs took up. You just had a big TV stand sticking out from the wall.
That anger when the specs didn't include the screen bulge in the depth measurement and now you can't close the armoire door after carrying that shit 50 feet from the car.
The screen bulge alone in that pic is at least 3 times wider than my TV. It's amazing what 2 decades of technology can do. Now, if we could just figure out how to make an LED TV than didn't have a network card...
Often the non-smart hospitality TVs don't have the more advanced features you'd want for a home TV like HDR and the like, but I gotta admit that one looks quite decent. Can't see any Dolby Vision support though.
I'm using an old console TV that I've modified to hold a flat screen. I literally have a home server and a sound bar built into it the space that was originally just the tube and there's still enough space for my full grown ass to climb inside.
Just in case anybody is stupid enough to believe this, there was nothing radioactive in old CRT-based TVs. And they sometimes had black cases but weren't a "black box".
They worked by bending a beam of electrons that hit phosphors in the screen, which is cool enough that saying stupid BS about "radioactive" is unnecessary.
One is from a decaying material and the other is from controlled electron beam, but they are both radiation emitters. People are just more familiar with the term radioactive and think it is the catch-all term for a source of radiation.
The electron gun in a tv and in an xray machine are pretty similar and without shielding, you will still get hit with radiation even if it isn't strictly radioactive, but rather another type of radiation emitter.
Radiation is a really vague term. It's just energy moving in the form of waves or particles. Sunlight is radiation. Radio waves are radiation. Microwaves are radiation. Wifi is radiation.
Radiation can be dangerous in a few ways. Something can be very bright and blind you, or it can cause you to heat up too much. X-rays are an example of ionizing radiation, that's dangerous because it can break apart molecular bonds, causing damage to cells. That's why you can get skin cancer from ultraviolet radiation. X-rays are a shorter wavelength than ultraviolet light, so there's more potential cellular damage per photon.
But, radioactivity is dangerous not just because of X-rays, but primarily because of alpha and beta particles, and because of even higher energy particles like gamma particles / rays.
So, just because there's one type of ionizing radiation that can come from a CRT-TV that is also peripherally associated with radioactive decay doesn't mean that there's any connection between a TV and radioactivity.
That would be like saying that an atomic bomb causes a huge explosion, and a fertilizer bomb also causes a huge explosion, so a fertilizer bomb is a nuke.
TVs, maybe¹. CRT monitors, though? They were great. And mostly didn't care about what resolution you threw at them.
It's a big maybe, though. Live TV? Sure, but that was more on the extremely low resolution signal than on the screen (HDTV would've looked great on a CRT). But games? They were fantastic for games, though. Artists designed their images with CRT's natural blur on mind, and now we need complex filters and at least a 4K monitor to replicate the original look.
They looked amazing for games designed for them, specifically because they blurred the pixels. If what you want is crisp lines or vivid colors, CRT works against you
I mean, sure. But even this little 4'' “pocket” thing, for instance, still weighed 1.2Kg... that's a damn dense (and expensive) brick to drop on a toe...
1.2 kg isn't very much, especially for a dense piece of electronics.
If you look at the history of iMac computers, when they went from CRTs to flat screens they only dropped 6 kg from 15.7 kg to 9.6 kg. Since then they've focused on making them lighter and lighter, but it's not like the CRT was the majority of the weight.
Not really. Radiation is something you encounter every day. Radioactivity is something you probably never encounter. Most people except Australians rarely encounter poisonous and venomous animals.
All of mine did but got increasingly quirkier over time. Sometimes you needed to hit it on top to get the picture looking right. Audio got crackly. The component cables needed a fine touch to display the picture correctly.
Never having owned a CRT television (LCD was king when I became an adult) I have to say that that looks fucking sick. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a bulky one until now.
Retro games look better on them and there's no emulator that has ever pulled off a sufficiently convincing simulation for me. They also render dark colors better than most high end TVs. If you play a lot of old games, it would be neat to have a small one. The big ones, however, weigh a metric ton and are at least as deep as they are wide, and they're extremely front-heavy. Those aren't worth it unless you plan to build an entire arcade cabinet around it.
True. This one is a 10" model and it already weighs a fuck-ton, and it's quite deep and takes up a lot of space. But I really like how old games (especially PS1 and PS2) look on it.
I wouldn't go higher than 14" models because of the weight.
I think that's some major rose-colored-glasses thinking. They did break. A child with a magnet could also cause issues, at least on older ones (I say having been said child).
Circa late 1980s I remember our dad brought home a degauser from work, hey anyone remember what a degauser is? It was a magnetic box (VERY STRONG MAGNETS) with a tunnel to slide a cassette tape through, to erase the cassette tape. Well I don't remember which of us family members decided its storage place should be on top of the TV but what a fun science lesson that turned out to be 😄 If you moved the magnet around the TV in all different places, the distortion on the screen would follow wherever the magnet was, and IIRC the screen distortion wasn't permanent. The screen went back to normal when you removed the magnet from the vicinity.
IIRC It messes with the beam guides. I'm not sure if there are cases/designs in which it would cause permanent damage in color TVs, but I seem to think I managed to permanently tint our older one green somehow.
TVs have their own degaussing coil built-in, it's the short buzz you hear first when the TV is turned on.
If the metal frame around the front of the tube becomes strongly magnetized, that's when the distortion is "permanent", meaning it's not permanent but not really feasible to fix.
I had some unshielded noise speakers that would change the color when swiped across the screen in one direction. And cleared it when swiped the other direction. Fun times!
I will forever remember using the magnet that came with this old Klutz book near the TV in my parents' room when I was around 10 and noticing the rainbow pattern it made in the picture. And then, after further investigation and experimentation, noticing those colors stopped going away when I moved the magnet away. And then, never speaking a word of it. For, like, 40 years.
When Bill Burr's Netflix cartoon show put a similar bit in an episode it finally dawned on me that lots of kids must have messed up their parents' TVs with those magnet wands.
they will record you anyways and store the recordings and transcripts long enough that if a future owner of the TV ever connects it, it'll upload all that shit it's stored.
and they know what wifi networks and hardware addresses are nearby so those recordings will be associated with your location even if it uploads them from another physical location.
these things are all advanced wiretaps that should probably have their antennas permanently destroyed.
The AI 20 years from now cross referencing every possible point of data to deduce every single identifiable feature to pin you as the guy who forgot to pay for the gum is going to have a field day with this post.
It's all a wiretap at this point in my head. I think it's just a matter of how much effort and time a (probably government) entity wants to take to track people down or grab someone.
Like the NSA didn't build a gigantic data warehouse in Utah to not fill it with a database of every person they could.
Remember when the tube started to go and you had to leave it on all the time or whack the side of it when you first turned it on for the day, until it warmed up?
Yep. In fact I just met an 80 year old guy today that spent his career repairing tvs. Sure were a lot of tv repair men and shops for tvs that never broke.
Enjoy! I've also bought their Google TV stick (same brand, I think it's re-branded as ONN in the US though). It works well and I can just switch it in the future, without replacing the TV.
Your best bet would be a commercial display. Though it'll be double the price, at least, and you'll need an hdmi switch and a soundbar more like as not.
It is possible to put it in a VLAN that is unable to talk to the internet. This is fine, but I wish I could just get a TV that doesn't have this tracking functionality to begin with.
I have a Nvidia shield pro currently running Plex and Jellyfin (sometimes Jellyfin cannot decode the videos and trans-coding is off), I am thinking about moving away from that and go custom Linux build on a mini PC. For live TV I have the app from my internet provider, although I rarely use it. Because the shield runs AndroidTV you can basically just install Prime, Disney, Netflix, etc. apps to run those. For YouTube I use a modified app that has ad and sponsor block build in, can't remember which one it is, but there are enough to choose from. Everything is routed through a Pi-Hole with dns enforced on the router to use it, instead of external ones (in case an app gets smart and tries to use their own). Next to the Shield I also have an extensive DVD/Blue ray collection, most of which have been moved to the NAS that has the Jellyfin server. There are still enough things to do, but I don't have the time to do all the things I want to do.
Have seen Samsungs hostility TVs, but only resource on them I could find was their own official store pages which are woefully void of any info I actually care about
We have a mix of commercial samsung and sharp TV's for signboards. Both come with a proprietary signboard system but I use Pi5's and google slides to manage them all. Every great now and then I have to reset something.
You know there are more variables that contribute to the quality of the TV than the resolution? Like how bright it gets or how accurate it's colors are and what it's color space coverages are... Or how deep the blacks are or if the pixel response is decent. I guess people draw the line at different places and most probably don't care at all... I do, but I also consider my privacy as a variable here. I am in a niche group of people that are completely underserved as I have looked and have not found.. So if someone claims they know of some I ask them for their wisdom.
You can a modern tv way way easier. I do it all the time. And you don't risk electrocution or exposure, and it can be done in about 15 minutes for most issues.
There was a time when CRT TVs were so cranky and reliably in need of service that your local drugstore had a rack of replacement tubes and even a tube-tester machine. You could pull a bunch of tubes from your set, test them at the store, and buy a replacement for whichever one was bad.
I run a valve (tube) amp as my daily driver for audio and yeah, you do have to have a screw loose in this day and age. They're a lot better with modern passive components but modern valves are pretty hopeless in terms of longevity. For EL84s you basically have to buy old Soviet military stock (thank fuck Gosplan was so hilariously inefficient) or your amp will burn through them fairly quickly.
On the other hand if you look after them will probably outlive you. The valves are consumable components but the transformer is literally a big chunk of iron and copper, and they're dead simple to work on usually. Modern capacitors don't dry out and turn into resistors nearly as readily too.
I would love for CRTs to be manufactured again, but that instutitional knowledge is probably long gone, as is the equipment that produced it.. so making them again would, probably, be a trillion dollar ordeal.
I think there was an art exhibit or something where they manufactured some new CRT TVs a couple years ago so apparently it's doable on the small scale. Biggest problem is the current economy especially in the US simply couldn't support small scale manufacturers like that long term.
The way CRTs work is absolutely amazing. You're basically watching a ray gun shoot you and it's so quick it looks like a picture. It's an absolutely wild marvel of engineering.
Oof. Actual fire? We had a CRT TV that would flash red once in a great while. It was fine until my mom found my brother asleep in front of it, flickering all red constantly, with smoke pouring out the back!
I know now that it was likely just a failed transistor on the neck board. I've seen a lot of smoke and some plasma but never a fire from a CRT.
While it may not be related I have a CRT monitor that did something kinda similar and which I think I know what it is so I'll give a suggestion. It may legit just be one of the internal boards or whatever equivalent that controls power and may just need to be resoddered or otherwise replaced.
Let's not pretend that crts ware better than modern TVs. The picture was shit, the ratio was 4:3 and they had the size and weight of a small car. I can deal with a little upgrade once in a while. And that's not even true as I haven't seen a TV that needs upgrades yet.
Something I kind of wonder about this whole "every single modern TV is a smart TV that spies on you more comprehensively than the ones portrayed in "1984"" situation is this: there must surely be some overlap between "facilities that have well-protected state secrets" and the use case for TVs. Like, do they not have any TVs in, say, the pentagon, or CIA facilities, or other country's equivalents to those things? They might not need like entertainment generally, but displaying video information to a group of people seems like it'd be useful to organizations like that. There's also people who inherently have secrets surrounding them, like national leaders, and those people will also sometimes expect entertainment.
So, how do groups like that, who both have a lot of resources to get stuff done and an obvious reason to not want a poorly secured spy device sending information from their facilities and people to some random corporate server, deal with the modern TV situation?
Do they exclusively use old TVs? Do they modify off the shelf ones to kill the spying ability? Do they commission companies to make special models for them that aren't commercially available, or build their own hardware? Or is the inability to buy regular, non-spying new TVs exaggerated, and theres some generic supplier out there that they can reliably get them from?
I’d imagine defense contractors don’t buy hardware that’s made for the general public and givernments only buy from defense contractors or do in house work. You can essentially “rent” a factory in parts of the world and have your own products made there, the higher the “rent” the higher level of quality control. There’s likely an entire industry dedicated to things like this.
Cathode Ray Dude on YouTube recently released a video about top-secret class computing devices. They are generally purpose built for the government. He explains in depth here if you're interested, although it's mainly focused on a particular computer, he does touch on display devices.
Interesting, I dont have the spare time for a video that long at the moment but I did glance at his "detour" section about modern stuff and the bit about just keeping stuff used to talk about secrets in a room rigged up as a faraday cage with a bunch of shielding seems to fit the kind of use I was picturing being a problem in my head.
Our TV was from the early '70s and when you turned it on if you weren't at least 10 ft back the hair would stand up on your arms. I'm sure that thing was definitely giving you a suntan.
Projector is the best non-smart TV in 2026, the name brand projectors (ViewSonic, BenQ, Phillips, Optoma, Epson) are often either non-smart or just come with a streaming stick you don't have to use.
Spent a few days in an AirBnB with all LGTV's throughout the house. We never turned them on but today I go on Amazon and its now showing me adverts for the Airbed we briefly talked about in front of the TV -_-
I would say "mostly harmless"; a low but higher-than-background level of X-rays are expected from a properly functioning CRT TV. Flying in an airliner will expose a person to many times that amount.
Nobody calls sunlight "radioactive" either but it does expose a person to some ionizing radiation.
There was some hype for nanotube display tech about 20 years ago that was closer to CRTs in picture quality and responsiveness. Unfortunately it seems like LCD/LED has won out over any other tech so far.
The some reason is probably just that they have a Delorean and want to show it off. Damned near every museum I've been to has had at least one random shit exhibit, the natural history museum in my county has a whole ass exhibit dedicated to mining within the county because they just kinda started to acquire old mining equipment at some point.
Fucken A love me a Yugo, maybe if I'm ever that far over in the US I'll check it out. Though for the meantime I'll have to settle for the Twin Falls Idaho surplus warehouse and their halftrack.
The only thing that modern TVs beat CRTs on is weight.
I'd rather have my 200lbs behemoth CRT back, than to have a smart TV thats just gonna die in 3 to 5 years, just like the last one, and the one before it.
This is just stupid. Size, weight, picture ratio, picture quality, sound quality, compatibility, functionality. A modern TV is better at literally everything. Don't just blindly agree with something just because it's on a meme.
Size is also one. Modern tv can scale the length and height up without scaling much of the width. Dumb TV also doesn't need internet to update. Pretty sure smart tv doesn't need update as well. It's not that CRT is the best, we just forgot how to make a good LCD tv.
What? Are You saying that a crt had image quality anywhere near a modern flat screen? Are You feeling well? I cringe at the thought of how shitty the quality on them was.
More specifically, the (low power) x-rays that are created when the electrons hit the screen and slow down are ionizing. The tube used in an x-ray machine is technically just a simple CRT without the mask, deflection coil, phosphorus and shielding, with the acceleration voltage cranked up a lot higher.
With your normal CRT the voltage isn't high enough to be properly really though, and lack penetration power, so you can shield the tube quite easily. Which is also why it's not actually harmful for you to sit in front of e.g. a CRT monitor.
Which is also exactly what the CRT itself is – not all of the electrons pass through the mask. The difference is, that the actual CRT part has a longer field to accelerate the electrons, meaning the hit the mask or cathode with a higher energy leading to higher power x-ray photons. Modern tubes just had shielding so it wasn't a concern, the older ones didn't.
Technically x-rays are always generated when a particle accelerates. That's why you can get them even from a high power cyclotron where the particle has a constant force applied on it. The actual CRT creates higher energy electrons and thus will generate more x-rays than the rectifier, it's calculated simply from the voltage and the overall distance of acceleration. But if the TV had a tube rectifier it's true that that would generate low power x-rays as well.
We had upgraded our tiny crt TV to an LG Flatron crt early in 2000s. That boy was a fucki g machine. Over years only few rcas got wonky but this guy was still working as if we bought it yesterday. Original remote had all buttons working but had all markings erased due to use.
Father changed it to a LED 32" since it was slightly bigger and wide screen. But it would probably outlive me.
That's just basic electronics stuff. It doesn't take a terribly large charged capacitor to zap you dead. IIRC, there are some high voltages in CRTs, but if you know how to discharge caps and to never ever work on electronics while plugged in (especially anything AC or DC over even 12v running), you'll be fine.
Making them, however, is a whole additional technical and mathematical set of skills.
The outer envelope layer of a CRT itself is a capacitor, and depending on the tube size, can hold ~13,000 to ~25,000 volts. What makes it worse is that you can properly discharge the tube, completely remove it and put it on a storage shelf somewhere for months, then come back to it and the motherfucker done managed to recharge itself from the fucking atmosphere!
Any sufficiently big capacitor does this and that's why you short them out for storage unless you want to die.
The biggest ones I worked with were 75 kg slices of stinkiness when they leaked and had to have two separate loops of wire on the terminals for safe disposal.
It's really not that dangerous. There's a big capacitor called the flyback capacitor which can store a deadly amount of energy. You disconnect the power (obviously) and then discharge that cap and everything else is relatively safe. To discharge a capacitor, bridge the leads with an electricians screwdriver. If you don't like sparks, hold a resistor with pliers between the two leads. (It will go slower but also get hot AF.)
The capacitors are the same ones that are in every desktop PC power supply.
The flyback is a complex transformer with the thick cable sending the high voltage to the tube's second anode.
The CRT itself can act like a giant capacitor. Eventually they figured out how to bleed the charge out when the TV is off.
1990s-2000s tubes: I discharge but don't worry too much. 1980s-1990s tubes: I discharge several times, over the course of an hour or two. Those Sanyos that Nintendo used hold a nasty charge that comes out with a big SNAP!
The way they bleed the charge off when the TV is powered off is through a very high resistance resistor. This works perfectly well most of the time, but those resistors can and do fail. The same is true for microwaves, which also have flyback circuits. Always treat these things like the bleedoff resistor has failed.
From what I've heard we are actually forgetting how to make CRTs. Not sure how valid that claim was though as I didn't research it at all.
In any case if you're thinking about getting a CRT you might as well get one while they're relatively cheap. Here in Poland you can get a used CRT from anywhere between 50-100 USD for the hypercommercial models up to 200-500 USD for the enthusiast ones. And I doubt they'll be getting any cheaper.
They're really simple electronics, but there are likely a lot of little trade secrets that made them better. At the end of the day, it's a cathode ray tube with a couple of electromagnets to divert a pulsing electron beam to hit different parts of the phosphor-coated end of the tube. The signal fed to the magnets is analog, and the beam sweeps the screen line-by-line every frame. (Or every other line for interpolated signals.)
They use old tubes though. No manufacturing plant is tooled anymore to create new tubes and that’s why they probably won’t make new ones unless a super rich retro gamer funds the endeavor or something. The TVs would have to be expensive as fuck to cost justify that for niche retro gaming.
Huh, ok. I don't understand the appeal. So it obviously doesn't turn a modern TV into a CRT because they're completely different technologies and that's not possible, it just visually makes your display sort of look like a CRT.
Yeah except CRTs had terrible resolution per price. Also CRTs asplode - was terrified of them setting the house on fire. Also they radiated. (Old joke that doesn't translate well: They caused compli-, impli- and mutations). ALSO they're not really manufactured anymore, so yeah!
I don’t miss trying to figure out the often undocumented frequencies so X11 wouldn’t nuke them, and some CRTs were horrible, but games made for CRT on a nice Sony are like nothing else. I regret getting rid of my collection for a move.
I have an old flat screen tv that I bought from Best Buy in 2011. It is just a tv, no internet, no Bluetooth, just a tv, I still have it and it works perfectly. I finally decided to get a smart tv last summer that POS broke within a year and just after the warranty expired.
232 replies
One advantage of modern TVs is how slim they are. It's so crazy to me now how much space those old TVs took up. You just had a big TV stand sticking out from the wall.
And CRTs are unbelievably heavy in comparison, making them a bitch to move at all.
That anger when the specs didn't include the screen bulge in the depth measurement and now you can't close the armoire door after carrying that shit 50 feet from the car.
The screen bulge alone in that pic is at least 3 times wider than my TV. It's amazing what 2 decades of technology can do. Now, if we could just figure out how to make an LED TV than didn't have a network card...
They do make non-smart TVs, you just have to know where to look.
Often the non-smart hospitality TVs don't have the more advanced features you'd want for a home TV like HDR and the like, but I gotta admit that one looks quite decent. Can't see any Dolby Vision support though.
Don't look up Hospitality Mode, unless you want to end up on a list.
Put some clothes on, please.
Thanks for pointing it out. I didn't even notice.
I distinctly recall Sony's 40" Trinitron CRT weighing over 300 lbs. The 32" was ~200 lbs.
Yup. That was the last CRT I ever owned. Thing was a tank and took two people to carry it.
I'm pretty sure we had a 32". And that was MASSIVE for the time.
I have a 27" Trinitron and could barely get it into my car by myself. Probably my best curb find ever.
Edit: 108lbs. And 900 US dollars new, in the year 2000; equivalent to $1,750 today.
even Flatscreen CRTs were not that slim :/
I'm using an old console TV that I've modified to hold a flat screen. I literally have a home server and a sound bar built into it the space that was originally just the tube and there's still enough space for my full grown ass to climb inside.
Yeah, but you could use them as a shelf.
Put stuff on top of them (just be careful when watering the plants).
You can also store cats on top of them, they like the warmth.
Just beware when you change to a flat screen and the dumbass cat still tries to jump onto it.
And if it breaks, it literally implodes.
Not always, sometimes it gives pretty {dangerous} purple lightning in the back of the tube.
Just in case anybody is stupid enough to believe this, there was nothing radioactive in old CRT-based TVs. And they sometimes had black cases but weren't a "black box".
They worked by bending a beam of electrons that hit phosphors in the screen, which is cool enough that saying stupid BS about "radioactive" is unnecessary.
CRTs can emit X-Rays, but they are properly shielded so they never leave the tube.
The X-Ray scare mostly came from a line of GE TV's in 1968 that had improper shielding and had to be recalled.
Radioactivity and X-Rays are tangentially related, but they're not at all the same thing.
One is from a decaying material and the other is from controlled electron beam, but they are both radiation emitters. People are just more familiar with the term radioactive and think it is the catch-all term for a source of radiation.
The electron gun in a tv and in an xray machine are pretty similar and without shielding, you will still get hit with radiation even if it isn't strictly radioactive, but rather another type of radiation emitter.
Specifically radioactive decay.
So, not radioactivity.
Radiation is a really vague term. It's just energy moving in the form of waves or particles. Sunlight is radiation. Radio waves are radiation. Microwaves are radiation. Wifi is radiation.
Radiation can be dangerous in a few ways. Something can be very bright and blind you, or it can cause you to heat up too much. X-rays are an example of ionizing radiation, that's dangerous because it can break apart molecular bonds, causing damage to cells. That's why you can get skin cancer from ultraviolet radiation. X-rays are a shorter wavelength than ultraviolet light, so there's more potential cellular damage per photon.
But, radioactivity is dangerous not just because of X-rays, but primarily because of alpha and beta particles, and because of even higher energy particles like gamma particles / rays.
So, just because there's one type of ionizing radiation that can come from a CRT-TV that is also peripherally associated with radioactive decay doesn't mean that there's any connection between a TV and radioactivity.
That would be like saying that an atomic bomb causes a huge explosion, and a fertilizer bomb also causes a huge explosion, so a fertilizer bomb is a nuke.
Yes the humor was in the vagueness
This isn't me arguing against you because I know very little about the difference. But when I started reading I thought this was a Unidan copypasta 😂
Let's say it cooler: they were particle accelerators you pointed at your face.
Also, massive glass vacuum bottles that could implode if mishandled.
And with massive capacitors that could electrocute you if mishandled.
And heavy enough to seriously crush your foot (and possibly implode and electrocute you) if mishandled.
And the static electricity felt really neat on the back of your hand if you put it close to the screen.
They were so fucking cool, and we took them for granted, and now they're gone, and life is significantly less cool without them.
But by fuck was their capacity to put out a clear image mid. But their screen size on the other hand …extremely limited
TVs, maybe¹. CRT monitors, though? They were great. And mostly didn't care about what resolution you threw at them.
If you squint, you can make the right side look like the left side. Kind of amazing. Instantly increase resolution with this one weird trick.
What game is this?
First one is from Final Fantasy 6, second one from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
They looked amazing for games designed for them, specifically because they blurred the pixels. If what you want is crisp lines or vivid colors, CRT works against you
Sometimes. Other times they were little portable things.
I mean, sure. But even this little 4'' “pocket” thing, for instance, still weighed 1.2Kg... that's a damn dense (and expensive) brick to drop on a toe...
1.2 kg isn't very much, especially for a dense piece of electronics.
If you look at the history of iMac computers, when they went from CRTs to flat screens they only dropped 6 kg from 15.7 kg to 9.6 kg. Since then they've focused on making them lighter and lighter, but it's not like the CRT was the majority of the weight.
they did emit x rays but most of them was blocked by the leaded glass
Barium glass.
Leaded glass was only used for the rear of the tube (or amber monochrome displays), the front glass was barium infused for colour CRTs.
Radioactivity and X-Rays are tangentially related, but they're not at all the same thing.
I like this comment except for the fact it seems needlessly hostile
Someone not knowing there's a difference between "radiation" and "radioactivity" doesn't make them stupid.
No, just ignorant. Very ignorant.
It's the equivalent of knowing the difference between "poisonous" and "venomous"
For the vast majority of people it doesn't matter. Maybe they learned in 8th grade, but they forgot, because it never came back up.
Not really. Radiation is something you encounter every day. Radioactivity is something you probably never encounter. Most people except Australians rarely encounter poisonous and venomous animals.
Poison is something you encounter every day, too. Not poisonous animals, sure, but poisonous substances.
I've never had a CRT TV that lasted more than ten years.
All of mine did but got increasingly quirkier over time. Sometimes you needed to hit it on top to get the picture looking right. Audio got crackly. The component cables needed a fine touch to display the picture correctly.
That sort of fun stuff.
Ah yes, percussive maintenance.
It took skill to do it right. If you hit it too hard, it got worse, so the smack needed finesse.
My parents black and white set from the sixties was like that. They refused to replace it until the mid eighties.
The soup pot we used to whack the TV with when it cut to static has outlasted the TV and the channels displayed on it.
Good old cracked solder joints and corroded switches.
I got a CRT from 1983 a few weeks ago. Still works fine, just needed a little color adjustment.
Never having owned a CRT television (LCD was king when I became an adult) I have to say that that looks fucking sick. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a bulky one until now.
Retro games look better on them and there's no emulator that has ever pulled off a sufficiently convincing simulation for me. They also render dark colors better than most high end TVs. If you play a lot of old games, it would be neat to have a small one. The big ones, however, weigh a metric ton and are at least as deep as they are wide, and they're extremely front-heavy. Those aren't worth it unless you plan to build an entire arcade cabinet around it.
True. This one is a 10" model and it already weighs a fuck-ton, and it's quite deep and takes up a lot of space. But I really like how old games (especially PS1 and PS2) look on it.
I wouldn't go higher than 14" models because of the weight.
Non-Sony models aren't too heavy, especially 27" and below. My 27" CRT is more than managable for me to lift up by myself over my head.
Sony included thick steel magnetic shielding around their tubes, making them significantly heavier compared to other brands.
I always thought this one looked cool when I was a kid https://crtdatabase.com/crts/samsung/samsung-gxe-1395
I've never had a CRT fail on me.
In the late 90s to early 2000s they made cheap plastic crap, the circuit board could break if you pushed the power button too hard
And during their last years a lot of cheap CRTs were built, especially those VCR combo units, most of them all died very quickly.
I think that's some major rose-colored-glasses thinking. They did break. A child with a magnet could also cause issues, at least on older ones (I say having been said child).
I dropped mine down the stairs, the implosion from the vacuum tube was pretty impressive.
Oh I wish I experienced that
Circa late 1980s I remember our dad brought home a degauser from work, hey anyone remember what a degauser is? It was a magnetic box (VERY STRONG MAGNETS) with a tunnel to slide a cassette tape through, to erase the cassette tape. Well I don't remember which of us family members decided its storage place should be on top of the TV but what a fun science lesson that turned out to be 😄 If you moved the magnet around the TV in all different places, the distortion on the screen would follow wherever the magnet was, and IIRC the screen distortion wasn't permanent. The screen went back to normal when you removed the magnet from the vicinity.
IIRC It messes with the beam guides. I'm not sure if there are cases/designs in which it would cause permanent damage in color TVs, but I seem to think I managed to permanently tint our older one green somehow.
IIRC it does cause damage if done repeatedly, but doing it once or twice probably wouldn't do much.
TVs have their own degaussing coil built-in, it's the short buzz you hear first when the TV is turned on.
If the metal frame around the front of the tube becomes strongly magnetized, that's when the distortion is "permanent", meaning it's not permanent but not really feasible to fix.
We tried with magnet, no where as strong as the ones you've mentioned, but still, it messed up the image. It was fun.
I had some unshielded noise speakers that would change the color when swiped across the screen in one direction. And cleared it when swiped the other direction. Fun times!
I will forever remember using the magnet that came with this old Klutz book near the TV in my parents' room when I was around 10 and noticing the rainbow pattern it made in the picture. And then, after further investigation and experimentation, noticing those colors stopped going away when I moved the magnet away. And then, never speaking a word of it. For, like, 40 years.
When Bill Burr's Netflix cartoon show put a similar bit in an episode it finally dawned on me that lots of kids must have messed up their parents' TVs with those magnet wands.
The TV wasn't permanently messed up, you just needed to degauss it.
oh so thats what degauss does
Yeah Gauss a unit of measurement for magnetic flux density. It's not just there to make a BOING noise and briefly mess up the picture.
Well now I've got a plan for when I get a chance to time travel!
Klutz books were truly amazing. I had that one and several others, and they were incredibly formative for me.
they will record you anyways and store the recordings and transcripts long enough that if a future owner of the TV ever connects it, it'll upload all that shit it's stored.
and they know what wifi networks and hardware addresses are nearby so those recordings will be associated with your location even if it uploads them from another physical location.
these things are all advanced wiretaps that should probably have their antennas permanently destroyed.
You just typed all that on the biggest wiretaps of all.
Summit for Lemmy on GrapheneOS is a wiretap?
Firefox with ublock, noscript, and privacybadger on cachyOS is a wiretap?
cuz I posted this from one of those two.
The AI 20 years from now cross referencing every possible point of data to deduce every single identifiable feature to pin you as the guy who forgot to pay for the gum is going to have a field day with this post.
I see you have decided to take LLM company CEOs at their word when they tell you how amazingly powerful their products are.
Calm down son, it was a joke.
It's all a wiretap at this point in my head. I think it's just a matter of how much effort and time a (probably government) entity wants to take to track people down or grab someone.
Like the NSA didn't build a gigantic data warehouse in Utah to not fill it with a database of every person they could.
I'm sorry you feel so defeated that you can't even appreciate folks who are still fighting where they can.
NSA can't warehouse data that never gets generated in the first place.
I hear you, and I desperately hope I am wrong about my feelings on the matter to be honest with you. I fear I am not though.
Crt tvs broke all the time.
I know, right? I've gone through like 4 in my lifetime and I haven't owned any in over a decade lol
Remember when the tube started to go and you had to leave it on all the time or whack the side of it when you first turned it on for the day, until it warmed up?
Rose tinted glasses.
Yep. In fact I just met an 80 year old guy today that spent his career repairing tvs. Sure were a lot of tv repair men and shops for tvs that never broke.
Fun fact: These TVs also had a self-defense system built in. One wring move with a screwdriver and they'd throw you across the room.
The very first thing you have to learn for crt repair is how to safely discharge a capacitor.
Modern smart TVs: data pls 👉👈😊😊😊
CRTs did break. And they did suffer from burning.
Just buy a non-smart modern TV, you won't need a replacement and it won't connect to the internet.
Please tell me where I can get a modern high-res TV that is NOT smart. I have tried but cannot find them anywhere
I recently bought a Thomson TV that's HD and with no smart features at all. The only downside is that the image contrast is not the best.
Thanks for the tip, I might get one of those :)
Enjoy! I've also bought their Google TV stick (same brand, I think it's re-branded as ONN in the US though). It works well and I can just switch it in the future, without replacing the TV.
Your best bet would be a commercial display. Though it'll be double the price, at least, and you'll need an hdmi switch and a soundbar more like as not.
Just buy a tv, then don't connect it to anything. But likely that you are going to connect something smart to it, so it doesn't matter.
It is possible to put it in a VLAN that is unable to talk to the internet. This is fine, but I wish I could just get a TV that doesn't have this tracking functionality to begin with.
Dumb tv's are still a thing but they are priced insanely high
What are you using to watch on the tv?
I have a Nvidia shield pro currently running Plex and Jellyfin (sometimes Jellyfin cannot decode the videos and trans-coding is off), I am thinking about moving away from that and go custom Linux build on a mini PC. For live TV I have the app from my internet provider, although I rarely use it. Because the shield runs AndroidTV you can basically just install Prime, Disney, Netflix, etc. apps to run those. For YouTube I use a modified app that has ad and sponsor block build in, can't remember which one it is, but there are enough to choose from. Everything is routed through a Pi-Hole with dns enforced on the router to use it, instead of external ones (in case an app gets smart and tries to use their own). Next to the Shield I also have an extensive DVD/Blue ray collection, most of which have been moved to the NAS that has the Jellyfin server. There are still enough things to do, but I don't have the time to do all the things I want to do.
Give me one specific example of a non smart modern TV that has a decent quality panel please.
There are some that have very little connectivity. They are very expensive commercial units made by Sharp and even Samsung.
Have seen Samsungs hostility TVs, but only resource on them I could find was their own official store pages which are woefully void of any info I actually care about
We have a mix of commercial samsung and sharp TV's for signboards. Both come with a proprietary signboard system but I use Pi5's and google slides to manage them all. Every great now and then I have to reset something.
What's a quality panel? You mean you can't natively get clear resolution on your TV? Doesn't sound very smart to me.
You know there are more variables that contribute to the quality of the TV than the resolution? Like how bright it gets or how accurate it's colors are and what it's color space coverages are... Or how deep the blacks are or if the pixel response is decent. I guess people draw the line at different places and most probably don't care at all... I do, but I also consider my privacy as a variable here. I am in a niche group of people that are completely underserved as I have looked and have not found.. So if someone claims they know of some I ask them for their wisdom.
but CRTs could be more easily repaired. burn in is still a problem on modern OLEDs
You can a modern tv way way easier. I do it all the time. And you don't risk electrocution or exposure, and it can be done in about 15 minutes for most issues.
Don't buy CRT or OLED. Problem solved.
There was a time when CRT TVs were so cranky and reliably in need of service that your local drugstore had a rack of replacement tubes and even a tube-tester machine. You could pull a bunch of tubes from your set, test them at the store, and buy a replacement for whichever one was bad.
I run a valve (tube) amp as my daily driver for audio and yeah, you do have to have a screw loose in this day and age. They're a lot better with modern passive components but modern valves are pretty hopeless in terms of longevity. For EL84s you basically have to buy old Soviet military stock (thank fuck Gosplan was so hilariously inefficient) or your amp will burn through them fairly quickly.
On the other hand if you look after them will probably outlive you. The valves are consumable components but the transformer is literally a big chunk of iron and copper, and they're dead simple to work on usually. Modern capacitors don't dry out and turn into resistors nearly as readily too.
All I want is a brand new CRT that I can connect my PSOne to, so that I can play Point Blank 1-3 again.
Man of culture I see
I would love for CRTs to be manufactured again, but that instutitional knowledge is probably long gone, as is the equipment that produced it.. so making them again would, probably, be a trillion dollar ordeal.
I think there was an art exhibit or something where they manufactured some new CRT TVs a couple years ago so apparently it's doable on the small scale. Biggest problem is the current economy especially in the US simply couldn't support small scale manufacturers like that long term.
The way CRTs work is absolutely amazing. You're basically watching a ray gun shoot you and it's so quick it looks like a picture. It's an absolutely wild marvel of engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube
I repair arcade games and often mention to curious onlookers: "Fifty years of putting miniature particle accelerators in every home and business!"
"your TV needs to install an update, please connect to the internet", it says
how did it know it needed an update?
I am 60% sure I have seen this happen IRL
could be a timer set to go off after a month of no internet.
I have seen it mentioned in other threads that they may connect to open hotshots.
I don't know how true this is, but it would make sense.
I am 99.9% sure that is true, I just don't remember exactly which source I saw it in
Might have been in the latest LG news about how much they can access
Was it the gamersnexus video?
"if you go reaching inside me I might just decide to kill you" -CRT
"I accumulated a little bit of dust in me so I decided to start a fire" - my CRT 1996
Oof. Actual fire? We had a CRT TV that would flash red once in a great while. It was fine until my mom found my brother asleep in front of it, flickering all red constantly, with smoke pouring out the back!
I know now that it was likely just a failed transistor on the neck board. I've seen a lot of smoke and some plasma but never a fire from a CRT.
i finally got mine out of storage and set up
it turned on 3 times and the kids got to see the static. they got to hear the super high pitched wine
but now it doesn't respond to anything 😭😭
I'll try to get it fixed one day 😓
While it may not be related I have a CRT monitor that did something kinda similar and which I think I know what it is so I'll give a suggestion. It may legit just be one of the internal boards or whatever equivalent that controls power and may just need to be resoddered or otherwise replaced.
i hope so!
Cool setup!
this means i won the Fediverse for the weekend
I used to joke about my CRT monitor going “Pop” and breaking. The. It when POP and stopped working, guess the joke was on me.
First question I asked myself when I saw it was, "Why does my TV have an update?"
I bought a TV to watch videos, not the other way around. Promptly disconnected that shit from the internet and it will stay that way.
well sometimes it's a firmware update and it actually improves the picture quality. Like with the recent LG G6 that had some issues during release
Fair enough. I can see everything fine and even better than my old TV though 🤷
Let's not pretend that crts ware better than modern TVs. The picture was shit, the ratio was 4:3 and they had the size and weight of a small car. I can deal with a little upgrade once in a while. And that's not even true as I haven't seen a TV that needs upgrades yet.
There were hd crts towards the end too. Those are excellent for playing games on older hardware without an hdmi port.
Wii entered the chat.
To be honest, I prefer 4:3. I like how square-ish it felt. /srs
There were definitely many 16:9 TVs
Something I kind of wonder about this whole "every single modern TV is a smart TV that spies on you more comprehensively than the ones portrayed in "1984"" situation is this: there must surely be some overlap between "facilities that have well-protected state secrets" and the use case for TVs. Like, do they not have any TVs in, say, the pentagon, or CIA facilities, or other country's equivalents to those things? They might not need like entertainment generally, but displaying video information to a group of people seems like it'd be useful to organizations like that. There's also people who inherently have secrets surrounding them, like national leaders, and those people will also sometimes expect entertainment.
So, how do groups like that, who both have a lot of resources to get stuff done and an obvious reason to not want a poorly secured spy device sending information from their facilities and people to some random corporate server, deal with the modern TV situation? Do they exclusively use old TVs? Do they modify off the shelf ones to kill the spying ability? Do they commission companies to make special models for them that aren't commercially available, or build their own hardware? Or is the inability to buy regular, non-spying new TVs exaggerated, and theres some generic supplier out there that they can reliably get them from?
I’d imagine defense contractors don’t buy hardware that’s made for the general public and givernments only buy from defense contractors or do in house work. You can essentially “rent” a factory in parts of the world and have your own products made there, the higher the “rent” the higher level of quality control. There’s likely an entire industry dedicated to things like this.
Eh, that's industrial displays, and so long as it doesn't brick the thing, you can take any radio equipment out of a tv before you use it
Cathode Ray Dude on YouTube recently released a video about top-secret class computing devices. They are generally purpose built for the government. He explains in depth here if you're interested, although it's mainly focused on a particular computer, he does touch on display devices.
Interesting, I dont have the spare time for a video that long at the moment but I did glance at his "detour" section about modern stuff and the bit about just keeping stuff used to talk about secrets in a room rigged up as a faraday cage with a bunch of shielding seems to fit the kind of use I was picturing being a problem in my head.
They have air-gapped rooms with lead shielding so it doesn't really matter if a Spy-TV is in there if it can never connect to anything.
Having to update my remote before I can mute the TV is not a problem I ever expected to have
But here we are
Our TV was from the early '70s and when you turned it on if you weren't at least 10 ft back the hair would stand up on your arms. I'm sure that thing was definitely giving you a suntan.
i bought a crt some time ago for 13$ (50pln), mainly to use with some old computers but gaming on it is cool asf too
Projector is the best non-smart TV in 2026, the name brand projectors (ViewSonic, BenQ, Phillips, Optoma, Epson) are often either non-smart or just come with a streaming stick you don't have to use.
And how would You use one during the day?
Just set it up in a room that is or can be made not bright, doesn't need to be totally pitch dark necicarily
Spent a few days in an AirBnB with all LGTV's throughout the house. We never turned them on but today I go on Amazon and its now showing me adverts for the Airbed we briefly talked about in front of the TV -_-
Shhhh, honey. The telescreen might be listening.
They're not really radioactive, they emit some X Ray that is absorbed by the lead window that is in front, making them harmless.
I would say "mostly harmless"; a low but higher-than-background level of X-rays are expected from a properly functioning CRT TV. Flying in an airliner will expose a person to many times that amount.
Nobody calls sunlight "radioactive" either but it does expose a person to some ionizing radiation.
Are there open source TVs?
Not as far as I know. But there ARE TVs that with no smart features. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJh72_O4pXE
Technically, yes? But don't expect great pictures quality or performance. But this is a good excuse to link a Ben Eater video on the topic 😄 https://youtu.be/l7rce6IQDWs?is=oMqVPCiAFgPo1Yav
Can't believe my mother sold ours for a dollar 😭🙏
Analog tech was so cool, everything now is so perfect it's boring
I truly despise that we stopped innovating on CRTs when flat panels came along.
There was some hype for nanotube display tech about 20 years ago that was closer to CRTs in picture quality and responsiveness. Unfortunately it seems like LCD/LED has won out over any other tech so far.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/motorola-builds-nanotube-based-display/
CRTs had flatscreens beat until less than a decade ago, which was nearly 20 years after being replaced by society.
Higher resolutions, refreshrates and lower latency until the 4k 250fps+ race began.
However, i doubt there is much more to gain due to CRT being well into the end of the development S-curve.
the only way to have your privacy protected these days is to be in the epstien files.
That "where to armor planes" image just popped into my head for no reason at all.
must be the LG TV debacle, they are selling AI tvs now too.
In case anyone is a fan of CRTs near Columbus OH, I highly recommend the Early Televison Museum https://www.earlytelevision.org/
If you are in akron Ohio, the bomb shelter has an antique TV room. And a Delorean for some reason.
The some reason is probably just that they have a Delorean and want to show it off. Damned near every museum I've been to has had at least one random shit exhibit, the natural history museum in my county has a whole ass exhibit dedicated to mining within the county because they just kinda started to acquire old mining equipment at some point.
They also have a yugo and an early minivan. It’s a weird fucking shop and it’s great.
Fucken A love me a Yugo, maybe if I'm ever that far over in the US I'll check it out. Though for the meantime I'll have to settle for the Twin Falls Idaho surplus warehouse and their halftrack.
Oh shit, I wish I knew about that when I lived in Ohio
The only thing that modern TVs beat CRTs on is weight.
I'd rather have my 200lbs behemoth CRT back, than to have a smart TV thats just gonna die in 3 to 5 years, just like the last one, and the one before it.
This is just stupid. Size, weight, picture ratio, picture quality, sound quality, compatibility, functionality. A modern TV is better at literally everything. Don't just blindly agree with something just because it's on a meme.
and yet you continued to say it all anyway.
Sorry. What I meant is You are stupid.
Nah, its much more fitting the other way.
Size is also one. Modern tv can scale the length and height up without scaling much of the width. Dumb TV also doesn't need internet to update. Pretty sure smart tv doesn't need update as well. It's not that CRT is the best, we just forgot how to make a good LCD tv.
I'm sure manufacturers remember pretty well too, they just don't want to.
I said to myself i'll never have a tv
Modern TVs are only just now barely able to compete with CRTs in image quality and they still haven't reached parity.
What? Are You saying that a crt had image quality anywhere near a modern flat screen? Are You feeling well? I cringe at the thought of how shitty the quality on them was.
CRT screens broke all the time.
radioactive??
electron beams are ionising radiation, yes
More specifically, the (low power) x-rays that are created when the electrons hit the screen and slow down are ionizing. The tube used in an x-ray machine is technically just a simple CRT without the mask, deflection coil, phosphorus and shielding, with the acceleration voltage cranked up a lot higher.
With your normal CRT the voltage isn't high enough to be properly really though, and lack penetration power, so you can shield the tube quite easily. Which is also why it's not actually harmful for you to sit in front of e.g. a CRT monitor.
Incorrect. The X-rays from old TVs came from the HV rectifier, in the back of the set.
how exactly does a rectifier produce x-rays?
By being a vacuum tube with a metal target, much like an X-ray tube.
Which is also exactly what the CRT itself is – not all of the electrons pass through the mask. The difference is, that the actual CRT part has a longer field to accelerate the electrons, meaning the hit the mask or cathode with a higher energy leading to higher power x-ray photons. Modern tubes just had shielding so it wasn't a concern, the older ones didn't.
Technically x-rays are always generated when a particle accelerates. That's why you can get them even from a high power cyclotron where the particle has a constant force applied on it. The actual CRT creates higher energy electrons and thus will generate more x-rays than the rectifier, it's calculated simply from the voltage and the overall distance of acceleration. But if the TV had a tube rectifier it's true that that would generate low power x-rays as well.
Technically, every forward-biased rectifier emits EM of wavelength and intensity depending on materials.
1N4007 silicon rectifier emits a few THz photons when forward biased.
Use different materials and you have a LED, an inefficient rectifier but great light source.
Tube rectifier with high enough voltage
https://tubedata.jp/sheets/135/1/1DG3A.pdf
They are in the tube. Unless you are in the tube as well, I fail to see the problem. Do you also consider static electricity discharges radioactive?
the lead shielding can't block all of it, or the tube would not display anything. some x-rays go through.
We had upgraded our tiny crt TV to an LG Flatron crt early in 2000s. That boy was a fucki g machine. Over years only few rcas got wonky but this guy was still working as if we bought it yesterday. Original remote had all buttons working but had all markings erased due to use.
Father changed it to a LED 32" since it was slightly bigger and wide screen. But it would probably outlive me.
Does anyone make CRTs? What would it take to make one? Is this beyond hobby level?
Well beyond, I believe. Like, even trying to repair one can kill you
That's just basic electronics stuff. It doesn't take a terribly large charged capacitor to zap you dead. IIRC, there are some high voltages in CRTs, but if you know how to discharge caps and to never ever work on electronics while plugged in (especially anything AC or DC over even 12v running), you'll be fine.
Making them, however, is a whole additional technical and mathematical set of skills.
The outer envelope layer of a CRT itself is a capacitor, and depending on the tube size, can hold ~13,000 to ~25,000 volts. What makes it worse is that you can properly discharge the tube, completely remove it and put it on a storage shelf somewhere for months, then come back to it and the motherfucker done managed to recharge itself from the fucking atmosphere!
Any sufficiently big capacitor does this and that's why you short them out for storage unless you want to die.
The biggest ones I worked with were 75 kg slices of stinkiness when they leaked and had to have two separate loops of wire on the terminals for safe disposal.
It's really not that dangerous. There's a big capacitor called the flyback capacitor which can store a deadly amount of energy. You disconnect the power (obviously) and then discharge that cap and everything else is relatively safe. To discharge a capacitor, bridge the leads with an electricians screwdriver. If you don't like sparks, hold a resistor with pliers between the two leads. (It will go slower but also get hot AF.)
The capacitors are the same ones that are in every desktop PC power supply.
The flyback is a complex transformer with the thick cable sending the high voltage to the tube's second anode.
The CRT itself can act like a giant capacitor. Eventually they figured out how to bleed the charge out when the TV is off.
1990s-2000s tubes: I discharge but don't worry too much. 1980s-1990s tubes: I discharge several times, over the course of an hour or two. Those Sanyos that Nintendo used hold a nasty charge that comes out with a big SNAP!
The way they bleed the charge off when the TV is powered off is through a very high resistance resistor. This works perfectly well most of the time, but those resistors can and do fail. The same is true for microwaves, which also have flyback circuits. Always treat these things like the bleedoff resistor has failed.
There's one company still making CRTs, but only for industrial and medical equipment, not for consumers.
https://www.thomaselectronics.com/faq/
From what I've heard we are actually forgetting how to make CRTs. Not sure how valid that claim was though as I didn't research it at all.
In any case if you're thinking about getting a CRT you might as well get one while they're relatively cheap. Here in Poland you can get a used CRT from anywhere between 50-100 USD for the hypercommercial models up to 200-500 USD for the enthusiast ones. And I doubt they'll be getting any cheaper.
They're really simple electronics, but there are likely a lot of little trade secrets that made them better. At the end of the day, it's a cathode ray tube with a couple of electromagnets to divert a pulsing electron beam to hit different parts of the phosphor-coated end of the tube. The signal fed to the magnets is analog, and the beam sweeps the screen line-by-line every frame. (Or every other line for interpolated signals.)
They use old tubes though. No manufacturing plant is tooled anymore to create new tubes and that’s why they probably won’t make new ones unless a super rich retro gamer funds the endeavor or something. The TVs would have to be expensive as fuck to cost justify that for niche retro gaming.
There are filters/shaders now that turn modern TVs into CRTs. Its an interesting technology.
What do you mean by "turn into"?
I use this from time to time:
https://github.com/libretro/glsl-shaders/blob/master/crt/shaders/fake-CRT-Geom-potato.glsl
There's also physical filters with HDMI input. Its cool that we have so many options.
Huh, ok. I don't understand the appeal. So it obviously doesn't turn a modern TV into a CRT because they're completely different technologies and that's not possible, it just visually makes your display sort of look like a CRT.
The TV has already been fed/plugged in to electric socket. Don't listen to its BS
Ah, the old Radiation King!
This wasn't written by a 1950s device.
https://ca.pcmag.com/tvs/17188/yes-your-tv-is-spying-on-you-heres-how-to-stop-it
for anyone wanting to see where to shut down some features
Yeah except CRTs had terrible resolution per price. Also CRTs asplode - was terrified of them setting the house on fire. Also they radiated. (Old joke that doesn't translate well: They caused compli-, impli- and mutations). ALSO they're not really manufactured anymore, so yeah!
I don’t miss trying to figure out the often undocumented frequencies so X11 wouldn’t nuke them, and some CRTs were horrible, but games made for CRT on a nice Sony are like nothing else. I regret getting rid of my collection for a move.
I have an old flat screen tv that I bought from Best Buy in 2011. It is just a tv, no internet, no Bluetooth, just a tv, I still have it and it works perfectly. I finally decided to get a smart tv last summer that POS broke within a year and just after the warranty expired.
i love crt i just dont have space anymore :( i do have a few just nowhere to put it yet
I will, however, kill a houseplant placed atop me.
CRTs have fuses that go inside and cause weird picture problems.
You might hurt yourself pretty badly trying to replace the fuse (depending on the TV).
they were in fact not. they did produce a tiny amount of x rays.