Comment by ilamont
2 days ago
> I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available
I helped friends move one of these old monsters out of an apartment in MIT's west campus 15 years ago. Don't remember the brand but it seemed even bigger than 35". It was shockingly huge and heavy and they lived on the top floor.
As we were doing this, I was thinking, how come the original owner didn't get a projection TV? They have been available since the 80s, the separate components were easier to manage, and the screens were far bigger.
In addition to the reasons mentioned in the other reply, maybe you actually didn't want anything much bigger. People replacing (say) a 27" CRT might upgrade to the latest fancy 32". They wouldn't have seen the purpose of a 60" projector behemoth. Depth could have been an issue as well. CRTs are deep, but depending on the projector style, it might have been worse.
Projectors (front/rear/enclosed/whatever) could produce a huge image, but they had their own issues.
In a bright room, the contrast was typically lacking.
Even on relatively late versions like the Toshiba 57HX93 (a 57" 16x9 doghouse from ~20 years ago with an integrated scaler and a 1080i input), which I personally spent some time with both in Toshiba form and as $10k Runco-branded units. Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
And viewing angle is an issue, too: Whether front- or rear-projection, one of the tricks to improve brightness (and therefore potential contrast) is to reduce the angle of light transmission from the screen. Depending on the room layout, this can mean that people in seats off to the side might get a substantially darker image than those near the middle. (This applies to all projectors; film, CRT, DLP, LCD, front, rear, whatever -- there can be a lot of non-obvious tech that goes into a projection screen.)
And CRT projectors were fickle. Their color convergence would change based on external magnetic fields (including that produced by the Earth itself), so they needed to be set up properly in-situ. A projection set that was set up properly while facing East would be a different thing when rotated 90 degrees to instead face North: What once was carefully-adjusted to produce 3 overlapping images that summed to be pure white lines would be a weird mix of red, blue, and green lines that only sometimes overlapped.
The CRT tubes themselves were generally quite impressively small for the size of the image that they'd ultimately produce. This meant pushing the phosphor coatings quite hard, which translated into an increased opportunity for permanent image retention ("screen burn") from things like CNN logos and video game scores.
Plus: They'd tend to get blurry over time. Because they were being pushed hard, the CRTs were liquid-cooled using glycol that was supposed to be optically-clear. But stuff would sometimes grow in there. It was never clear whether this was flora or [micro]fauna or something else, but whatever it was liked living in a world filled with hot, brightly-lit glycol. Service shops could correct this by changing the fluid, but that's an expense and inconvenience that direct-view CRTs didn't have.
And they were ungainly things in other ways. Sure, they tended to be lighter (less-massive) because they were full of air instead of leaded glass, but a rear-projection set was generally a big floor-standing thing that still had plenty of gravity. Meanwhile, a front-projection rig ~doubled the chance of someone walking by occluding the view and came with the burden of a hard-to-clean screen (less important these days, but it used to be common for folks to smoke indoors) and its own additional alignment variables (and lens selection, and dust issues, and, and).
So a person could deal with all that, or -- you know -- just get a regular direct-view CRT.
Even today where projectors use friggin' laser beams for illumination and produce enormous, bright images with far fewer issues than I listed above, direct-view tech (like the flat LCD and *LED sets at any big-box) is still much more popular.
(But I do feel your pain. When I was a teenager, my parents came home from shopping one wintry night with a 36" Sony WEGA for me to help unload. Holy hell.)
> Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
You're right about that. A friend's dad was a gearhead and had one of those. It always seemed dim, practically unwatchable during the day and even at night it was flat which made darker films hard to watch.
But it was a mid-80s model and I figured 10 or 20 years later the tech had improved.
I also had a friend whose dad had a big, for the time, rear-projection set in the 80s.
It was in the room with the furniture that we weren't allowed to sit on, and we weren't allowed to think about using that TV. (I mentioned once when we were unsupervised that maybe we could turn it on and watch something, and the color drained out of his face like doing anything like that would surely result in a very painful death. After he calmed down, we went outside and played with bugs or something instead.)
As far as I could tell, the old man (who was much younger than I am at this point) only ever switched it on for watching football on Sunday afternoons. But once or twice I'd wander by and -- with permission, and being careful to touch nothing -- try to watch part of the game.
It was a miserable thing to view. Big, blurry, dim, and just broadly indistinct. I didn't see the attraction compared to the perfectly-good 20" Zenith we had at home at that time that seemed so much more vibrant and useful. But the speakers sure sounded better on the projection set, so I guess there's that.
The tech did improve. The brightness did get a lot better, and so did processing (including using tricks like Velocity Scan Modulation that sought to improve brightness, at the expensive of making geometry an deliberately-dynamic thing instead of an ideally-fixed thing), and the colors improved. Things like line doublers and scalers and higher-resolution electronics to drive the tubes did improve some aspects of the blur that was apparent, even with regular NTSC sources. But those same improvements were also made in direct-view CRTs; after all, they were both the same tech.
So CRT rear-projection was as good as a person could get for a bigger-than-direct-view for a long time, but the fidelity was very seldom particularly awesome on an absolute scale -- at any pricepoint.
Competing rear-projection systems like DLP and LCD began to dwarf it in the market not long after the turn of the century. Despite their hunger for expensive light bulbs (and single-chip DLP's own inherent temporal problems), these new players were often cheaper to produce and sell, came in smaller packages (they could often rest on furniture instead needing their own floor-space), had fewer setup issues, and fared pretty well in brightness and geometry.
CRT rear-projectors then got pushed completely aside as soon as things like plasma displays became cheap-enough, and big LCDs became good-enough -- somewhere between 2006 and 2009, on my timeline.
(CRT did last a bit longer in front-projection form, for people with very serious home theaters [think positively-enormous screen, tiered seating, dedicated space, and some blank checks], but LCD caught up there soon-enough as well.)