Noodle Restaurant Demolition Death is a great band name.
“Yeah man, I’m going to the N.R.D.D. show tonight, you?”
pronounced “nerd”
This was pretty fun to watch. But also kinda hearbreaking. That thing isn’t going to last forever. The longer this goes the less excited I am about someone figuring out how to make CRTs as a boutique thing for nerds, but it’s also a thing that should happen, even if I’m past my personal vinyl moment where I would overspend like crazy for it.
CRTs have so many advantages!
…ish
Like yeah, a CRT suddenly makes it so all of the fancy filters you have configured on retroarch are no longer necessary, and neither is frame advance for input latency if you’re using native hardware or a mistr.
But is it worth it?
…gonna be that guy and say no, for me.
They don’t have to figure it out. It’s well documented.
My understanding is there are no new tubes/screens being produced anywhere. The figure out part is the industrial production, not the technology. But hey, if there are any production lines still in operation I’d be very curious to learn about them.
The same was the case with nixie tubes, until a guy in Czechia started artisanally hand-making them for deep-pocketed connoisseurs. Eventually, someone will undoubtedly try doing that with CRTs, though the question is how expensive each one will be and will they be able to match the quality of, say, a mass-produced Trinitron.
Yeah, the problem is you can’t exactly learn to artisanally blow cathode ray tubes in your garage. Damn things are industrial by definition. You need someone to ramp up (or maintain, as someone above mentions) a big industrial facility to be able to reliably make an electron gun attached to an oversized vacuum tube that wants nothing more than to implode and throw shards of glass inside somebody’s eyeballs.
400+ pound television? My spine spontaneously slipped three disks just by watching this video
Fucking Sony Trinitron man. Heaviest damn monitor I’ve ever had to deal with.
Felt like the glass was between 3-5” thick on those damn things. It was the closest to being stuck in a stairway I’ve ever been. Like call the fire department stuck.
My brain buzzed a bit when it was turned on too. That’s normal, right?
My first job in IT 20-some years ago began swapping their CRTs for LCDs and I got to take home a Dell rebadge of a 19” Trinitron. It did 1600x1200 at 75hz. It had a fantastic picture for gaming. I can’t for the life of me remember what happened to it.
After the divorce, my dad got a top of the line desktop with the biggest crt monitor is ever seen at that point. It must have been 19-20". He didn’t know shit about computers, but he knew he wanted the biggest ones when he walked into best buy.
He never did a damn thing with that powerhouse but watch porn, a fact I unfortunately stumbled upon when clearing all the malware from shady Y2K era porn sites.
Folks, never Ever learn your folks sexual preferences.
I love getting my eyes bombarded with the occasional ionization electron beam fired from the electron gun that make it past the phosphorescent screen.
I do not envy some of the ocular conditions some of the old long-time programmers in the industry had, although this is from personal experience. All CRTs generate Xrays, even if later on regulation would attempt to minimize the amount generated. and using them should still mean keeping your distance. The effects it has on your eyes are not instant, specially if you don’t use them as part of your job.
A lot of the excessive warning from screens came from this era, where there was an actual risk. Unfortunately, there are planty of antivax-like CRT-radiation deniers, but fortunately, it’s no longer a problem.
Sounds like CRTs do produce some radiation but the amount it produces is marginal. Modern CRTs should have leaded glass which should substantially reduce the amount of X-rays you would receive.
The above article says 0.3 microS/hour which is less than one tenth of the radiation you get from an hour of flight, or about 10 hours of sun exposure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight-time_equivalent_dose#Radiological_exposures_and_limits
So it looks like you will get radiation exposure from CRTs but it is not much higher than background radiation. Bring sedentary for hours in front of a CRT TV is probably worse for you than the radiation you would get from the CRT.
