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What was the largest 4:3 monitor, period?

Agent Orange said:
Just a note: Back in the 90's the last CRT tv that I had was a 35" Philips rectangular tube consolette. The thing was very heavy to move but had a gorgeous picture and audio.

Also, 30" plus b/w tv's were available in the 50's but were pricey. My Mother's sister had one but she could just about afford anything.
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It's the only good thing about Dutch stuff..lol. Phillips still exists today..
 
NeXT said:
Projectors were always traditionally lower resolutions. 640x480, 800x600 and the much more expensive models were 1024x768.
The target market for those were people who wanted to do Powerpoint Presentations. Things you don't normally need a lot of pixels. ;)
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I use a 640 X 480 projector in my Bedroom onto an automatically retractable 120" white screen. Its what we watch late at night before falling asleep. Cant beat it and watching video the resolution is not a real problem.... The black balance is. (like most projectors)

They were throwing it away at work years ago. IT worked fine just needed a new bulb I found for $15.00. Been running fine since. I own 3 projectors just for this. But yeah, the 640 X 480 is the largest 4:3 "monitor" I own.
 
It was sometime in the 90's and being the sports nut that I am, I wanted to get a large screen projection tv. The Detroit Pistons were in the finals and I through it would be great to have the big tv - so I bought. It was a Toshiba rear projection with about a 46" inch screen. Comcast cable hadn't gone to hi def yet and the picture was not very good and it kind of remined of a CGA screen with a MDA card. I had bought the thing from ABC Appliances and unbeknownst to me, they didn't do the setup routine. I had an aftermarket warranty and called it in. The tech came out, looked at it and replaced a small transformer. Didn't fx anything. I mad another call and got a tech that knew what was going on. He said that he would put a 'mask' over the screen and then for me to forget the codes he was putting in the remote, and proceeded to do an alignment. Even with the low res cable, the picture was beautiful as the colors were now vivid and clear and we really enjoyed the VCR player. A friend wound up with the set and used it for over 15 years.
 
Can you still easily find the RGB tubes for projection tvs? I remember having to calibrate a bunch of them that we were selling at a store in the early-mid 90s. It would make a great TV today if the cabinet was NOT made of particle board.
 
VERAULT said:
Can you still easily find the RGB tubes for projection tvs? I remember having to calibrate a bunch of them that we were selling at a store in the early-mid 90s. It would make a great TV today if the cabinet was NOT made of particle board.
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Someone probably has some squirreled away. I haven't seen that setup in a long while. Had cousin that had a video projector setup in his basement and had some sort of reflective paint on the wall. It was like going out to the movies. We'd all gather there for football games.
 
I still remember when VHS was still the rage in the 90's and those big rear projection widescreen TVs were the best thing you could buy. Watching a rental tape that has been played 100's of times at 320x240 on a large screen with Dolby Pro Logic sound if you were lucky was the shit.
 
Unknown_K said:
I still remember when VHS was still the rage in the 90's and those big rear projection widescreen TVs were the best thing you could buy. Watching a rental tape that has been played 100's of times at 320x240 on a large screen with Dolby Pro Logic sound if you were lucky was the shit.
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I never thought of our tv broadcasts as "low quality" back in the 80s. ITs just what it was and I loved every second of it.
 
VERAULT said:
I never thought of our tv broadcasts as "low quality" back in the 80s. ITs just what it was and I loved every second of it.
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Nothing can be low quality unless you compare it to something much better that is now high quality. Just like nobody is poor unless somebody else has a vast amount more resources making them rich, it is all relative.

Broadcast TV was actually NTSC and you get a max of 525 lines of which 480 are visible (they are interlaced so you get half the screen at each cycle) at just under 30 hz. VHS was much worse than that at 240 x 320 and 24hz. Now if you rented a tape that was of a widescreen film you get letterboxing which reduced the screen resolution actually used for moving video even more. People used it because it was good enough and nothing better was available cheaply for the masses.

Compare the TV you had in the 80's with what you have now and then compare the computer (if you even had one back then) to what you have now, and I would say computers have evolved much faster.
 
All this talk of TV has me nostalgic. I think I'll turn a spare raspberry pi and my UHF band transmitter into a TV station. Albeit with a very short range.
 
The Dell P1130 has a 21" Trinitron tube that can do 2048x1536, though it is a bit soft when doing that resolution. When I had mine working, I ran it at 1800x1440 IIRC and it worked fairly well. Had to take it out of service because something went wrong with the analog board that caused a bright white retrace line to become visible. I'm not confident enough with analog electronics to know how to fix it, the analog board on that monitor is fantastically complicated and requires a special service tool to connect to this serial port thing inside the monitor.
 
The biggest monitors as CRTs were probably not 4/3 - I remember some truly huge high resolution monitors used in video games but they were all wider than normal.

The resolution in terms of the image they would handle is not as relevant as the dot mask pitch. Larger monitors often had quite coarse pitches in the mask, so even if you put them up to 1024x768, you may not necessarily have good s/n when the line pairs got too close. So while they may take 1024x768, the image quality may exhibit unreasonable amounts of "Analog Antialiasing" - ie, dot blurring.

Also, monochrome projection systems ( three tubes for color ) were capable of 4:3 images many meters across - The limit was theoretically where the image wasn't bright enough for satisfactory use. Sometimes they used these for back projection, and many would take VGA signals.

OK, to keep on track, the biggest I've heard of is the Mitsubishi 42" - A true monster. Same size as the 4K display I use now.

It had sync sufficient for VGA or other computer formats also.ref: https://www.docdroid.net/udRzslO/mitsubishi-am4201r-manual-pdf

I've seen similar sizes in previous jobs, but never one of these that I can recall.


David
 
Unknown_K said:
...
Broadcast TV was actually NTSC and you get a max of 525 lines of which 480 are visible (they are interlaced so you get half the screen at each cycle) at just under 30 hz. VHS was much worse than that at 240 x 320 and 24hz. ...
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VHS and Beta both have the same resolution as NTSC broadcast video in terms of number of lines and frame/field rate. 60Hz fields, 262 lines each field, interlaced to 525 lines at 30 Hz frames. (The PAL and SECAM variant has better resolution to in terms of number of lines).

Beta has better resolution in terms of pixels per line than VHS due to differences in the frequency modulation characteristics for the luminance signal as well as a different choice for the color-under chroma signal.

From the Wikipedia article, which has a really nice summary:
VHS horizontal resolution is 240 TVL, or about 320 lines across a scan line. The vertical resolution (number of scan lines) is the same as the respective analog TV standard (625 for PAL or 525 for NTSC; somewhat fewer scan lines are actually visible due to overscan and the VBI). In modern-day digital terminology, NTSC VHS resolution is roughly equivalent to 333×480 pixels for luma and 40×480 pixels for chroma. 333×480=159,840 pixels or 0.16 MP (1/6 of a megapixel).[59] PAL VHS resolution is roughly 333×576 pixels for luma and 40×576 pixels for chroma (although when decoded PAL and SECAM half the vertical color resolution).
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I remember servicing RCA with 35" tubes. Could have been the Philips chassis already mentioned. Took 4 of us to lift it. I think the anode HV ran about 30KV.
These were some of the last I remember just before we closed our doors, thank God my back was still ok after those days.

Larry G
 
We had two of those huge Trinitrons you could murder someone with growing up. One purchased, one discarded by my dad's work. Each took three people to move anywhere, but damn was the picture good. I seem to recall one had a DVI and maybe even VGA port on the back, we used this when we got a BluRay player and I seem to recall the higher resolution still looking pretty darn good, albeit letterboxed. Couldn't tell you the model of either, just late silver bezel era. One had a Sony MemoryStick slot and built in media viewer for it. Unfortunately it was full size MemoryStick, I had a PSP at the time with media on a Duo card, but no adaptor to the fullsize card. That's the one feature from that TV that I wish my little 20" Trinitron had...the big picture was nice but I'll take being able to carry my TV up a flight of stairs myself any day.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
The Dell P1130 has a 21" Trinitron tube that can do 2048x1536, though it is a bit soft when doing that resolution. When I had mine working, I ran it at 1800x1440 IIRC and it worked fairly well. Had to take it out of service because something went wrong with the analog board that caused a bright white retrace line to become visible. I'm not confident enough with analog electronics to know how to fix it, the analog board on that monitor is fantastically complicated and requires a special service tool to connect to this serial port thing inside the monitor.
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There was a common issue with Sony's later Trinitron monitors that would result in and excessively bright picture with retrace lines. The cause was that the G2 voltage was set too high. I'm not sure if it was drift in the circuit, or something inside the CRT, but reducing the G2 would fix it. Earlier models required you to use special calibration software software. It was also possible to modify the circuit to reduce the G2.

Many later models had a "color restore", or "color return"feature in the menu that would run a built in self calibration. Often that would immediately fix the issue. Some earlier models don't seem to have enough adjustment range, and it didn't help. Note that you have to wait about 10-20 minutes for it to warm up before it will let you do it.
 
andy said:
There was a common issue with Sony's later Trinitron monitors that would result in and excessively bright picture with retrace lines. The cause was that the G2 voltage was set too high. I'm not sure if it was drift in the circuit, or something inside the CRT, but reducing the G2 would fix it. Earlier models required you to use special calibration software software. It was also possible to modify the circuit to reduce the G2.

Many later models had a "color restore", or "color return"feature in the menu that would run a built in self calibration. Often that would immediately fix the issue. Some earlier models don't seem to have enough adjustment range, and it didn't help. Note that you have to wait about 10-20 minutes for it to warm up before it will let you do it.
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Sony trinitrons also had color issues in Australia - At the time, we were told that it was because they were calibrated for the Northern Hemisphere, though I don't know how true that is, but it did match experiences of the era and "common experience" at the time: eg - https://www.avforums.com/threads/moving-tv-from-northern-hemishere-to-southern-hemisphere.44559/

I had a nice 19" trinitron - I worked in a computer shop at the time, and a car came through the front window one night ( Common issue with a shop located on a T Intersection with no barriers and large windows that make it look like cars are coming from the other direction ). Several large Trinitron monitors got hit, and broken, and the boss claimed insurance. When the Insurance guy came to pay out, I had shifted all the damaged stock ( some destroyed, some just damaged, some of it cosmetic ) for them to claim and they asked if the shop wanted to make an offer on the salvage. The boss said it would affect his reputation to keep damaged stock so he wanted it gone, and I asked if I could make an offer on the salvage. The boss agreed I could and I offered $200 for the lot, which made the boss laugh out loud, and after the insurance company confirmed the boss didn't want to offer salvage they accepted it on the spot... I got about 5 trinitron monitors in that load, and a half a dozen computers that were all on display. Insurance company accepted it on the spot since they could see severe damage in some cases, and knew that if sold as a lot, $200 was a good price. It took me three trips back home to get it all home in my small car.

I loved the Trinitron despite the color consistency images, and degaussed it often. I still miss them, but the LCDs I got just a few years later were much sharper even if they were garbage by today's standards... LCDs were around for a long time, but took a very long time to come down to the price of large CRTs and CRTs got a lot cheaper from the competition.
 
My 19" Sony 420GS had that calibration feature and the color was great, but it eventually failed, and I junked it. Oddly enough my much older Sony 17" SFII still works.

While I have no issues digging around on a motherboard or GPU, I don't like working on power supplies and I hate doing much more then checking fuses on CRT monitors (LCD no issues).

The first desktop LCD monitors were expensive shit, no idea how people spent that kind of money for bad color and ghosting but eventually they got much better and much cheaper. While I still have maybe a dozen CRTs here, they are just for gaming, text is much better on an LCD.
 
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