Sony Trinitron KV2201UB

[ed731pdh]

Only issues we every had with Trinitrons.

1) Turned on the set once and nothing, not a peep. The british made LOPT had gone open circuit, a replacement genuine Sony Japan part restored operation and lasted until the set had to go because of.......

2) Convergence issues. For some reason this set turned into a bit of a bugger in it's old age when the convergence kept drifting no matter how much you tried to reset the blasted thing. In the end it condemned the set and a 80s black style 22" Toshiba replaced it.

But, the worst set I've had, a 42" CRT HD Thomson set (early 2000's build), a royal pile of cack that was replaced by our first Sony flatscreen. Hard to get parts for, used a special type of posistor that when it went futt the set could take anything up to a couple of minutes to start up. A royal pile of cack build quality wise, never again.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
After working for Sony for a number of years I was bitterly disappointed with the quality of the large screen CRT sets a few years after I left.
I worked in the SES (51% owned by Sony) in Glasgow and left in 1997, they closed their doors in 2004 and by then Sony had lost direction. Even now I don't really rate them, gone are the days of a well engineered product.

[Mike Watterson]

WS CRTs where poorer than a very large 4:3 CRT drive in WS aspect (Reduced height). So our last two CRT sets (living room and smaller kitchen) were 4:3 with true WS display mode.

WS should never have been introduced before HD.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
I think Michael that the problem wasn't so much the introduction of WS tubes but the cost cutting to enable them to be cheap enough. The Philips WS tubes had terrible gun problems, shorts, open circuit cathodes and low emission after a year or so. The Sony Trinitron WS tubes went low emission very quickly. Some of the Japanese CRT's though were OK.
Our Samsung Slimfit 32 CRT set lasted 8 years until it kept loosing it's memory, this was caused by flashover in the LOPT which was very common.

The early LCD sets were grim, terrible definition, blurring on anything other than a still and poor reliability. Things have improved picture quality wise now and HD terrestrial is better than pictures have been for a long time, although I'd still say a decent 4:3 set on 625 in the 90's would probably knock the pants off an HD picture now (probably not 4K though) although it's not easy to compare as the system is gone to do the comparison.

[Mark Hennessy]

Oh, I don't know - I can do the comparison...

We have 2 Sony CRT TVs in regular use (both 28" widescreen models), and when fed via RGB with a good DVD, they still look a lot better than any LCD TV I've seen. Even on Freeview they are pretty darn good from normal viewing distances. Until they break or go soft, I see no reason to change.

It doesn't worry me, but one of them has poorer geometry than the other - that one is a newer model, so probably a result of cost cutting. But as least it can go black and show motion

As you can imagine, we have a range of LCD sets at work here, both domestic and pro, and all of different vintages. Undoubtedly they have come a long way. But certain issues are intractable, and will always remain so.

HD isn't HD - it's "bigger pictures". But "HD" is more marketable

Widescreen felt like an excuse to sell TV sets. A bit like remastering CDs for no good reason. By the mid '90s, the good CRTs were astonishingly good and very reliable on the whole, so a reason to change was needed. DVDs helped, of course.

Sony had some very adventurous models that gave excellent results. A lot of them had very good sound systems as well. But like any manufacturer, they produced some dross as well. I've no idea how their modern stuff compares, but some of our better LCDs are Sony, FWTW.

[Mike Watterson]

I didn't even consider LCD till there were true HD, for analogue SD, you need HD LCD or Plasma (no problem with digital SD). Even then it was a while before the quality was comparable to CRT. We only bought LCD (a 40") when the quality looked similar to CRT, at normal range of viewing angles for the room.

I have a 4:3 computer CRT that can do 1920 x 1080, (actually lot more than that) and I can feed it at 50Hz 60Hz or 75Hz from media PC with HD satellite cards (Terrestrial HD is only 1440 wide usually). I had to figure custom timings for the graphics card as it only had computer resolutions and USA HD settings in the menu.
I'm happy that our 40" LCD is almost as good. It's not as good at non-native resolution, that's a big CRT advantage, the variable frame & lines. I have 4 x Dell and one Ilamya CRT that make domestic TV CRT look very poor...

[Mark Hennessy]

Yes, I have an ancient multiscan CRT monitor, and that'll lock to just about anything. I'm not sure what the highest resolution is, but it'll do HD with ease. Although you need to get quite close to it (and use reading glasses now that I'm a certain age ) to get the benefit. I forget the dot pitch, but it was certainly invisible to the naked eye when I got it 20 years ago (when my close-up vision was very sharp indeed). It's a Trinitron CRT, but the chassis is not made by Sony. The contemporary Sony monitors with identical CRTs were nowhere near as good as this one, despite being very expensive by comparison. Mitsubishi made some great monitors at the same time too...

The mistake most people seem to make is buying an LCD that is too big. In effect, they are sitting too close to the picture. In my small lounge, my 28" CRT (~26" visible) is about right. If you get closer, Freeview MPEG artefacts become apparent (though you can get closer when playing DVDs). I think that 32" might be OK with the better Freeview channels, and definitely DVDs, but then flicker will start to become an issue (100Hz CRT sets were universally terrible in my experience). The lack of flicker is an advantage with LCDs, and with larger screens - where more of it can be in your peripheral vision - benefit from flicker-free operation. But ironically, the flicker helps with motion portrayal. A few years back we bought some professional O-LED monitors that were very CRT-like, but everyone in the industry complained about the flicker. About 6 months later, Sony recalled them (FOC) to do an update which added a "flicker free" mode to address the complaints. But, the motion portrayal is worse in that mode. Can't win! But, in a monitor stack of 20 or 30 monitors, flicker is obviously a problem. Looking back, I don't know how I managed to sit in a TV gallery 20 years ago... I'm quite sensitive to flicker, and perhaps that's why I also notice problems with motion?

I guess I'll have to make the move one day, and perhaps 40" would be about right for HD. Shame it'll be too big for SD though. Though given that we're not big TV viewers, I'm hoping the CRTs will give us another decade at least

[ppppenguin]

When the TV systems were being designed there were assumptions made about screen size and viewing distance.

SD assumes viewing at around 6x or 7x picture height. 1080 HD assumes viewing at 3x to 4x picture height. Any further and you don't get the benefit, any closer and artefacts of the scan process are visible. Take an SD source, blow it up on to a big screen and watch from 3x picture height and it's not going to look too wonderful.

Of course the data compression adds another layer of artefacts, especially if it's pushed too hard. But remember the PAL artefacts - all the strobing colours on fine detail.

[Mark Hennessy]

Exactly.

And let's not forget that PAL decoders varied a lot in their quality. Funnily enough, the later ones seemed more variable to me than the TDA3560-based sets that I used to know and love (no real experience of the earlier 2/3-chip decoders). One of my 28" Sony sets is surprisingly poor - not a problem as I don't use PAL for anything - but I'm not sure how they managed to make it so bad. A previous Sony set - one from the early '90s - had a digital comb filter decoder, and that was excellent overall. I do have a slightly later one, bought new in 1996 IIRC, which is more traditional in its design, but is probably the best non-digital PAL decoder I've ever seen in a domestic set. 100% reliable and the CRT is still as sharp as a tack too - definitely one of Sony's better efforts. But the next generation (we bought one to put in the reception area) was a massive step backwards. All manufacturers have cycles - beware of buying on brand alone

My local recently replaced their TV with a Hitachi (IIRC). Who makes them? It's surprisingly good when I'm wearing my beer goggles

[ppppenguin]

A PAL comb filter decoder was a much harder thing to do than for NTSC. Which is why they didn't appear until later. There are now some very good professional PAL decoders that are used for copying archive material into a digital component format. I don't think they can ever be perfect - the spectra always overlap to some extent - but they give visually very satisfactory results.

Also remember that VCRs were once commonplace. The technical performance of VHS and Betamax was horrible but we accepted it as there was nothing better available. I suspect many people didn't even notice. Comb decoders didn't work at all well with VCR replay as the relationship between colour subcarrier and line length was lost.