Memes @sopuli.xyz

2y ago

TVs then vs TVs now

219 comments

People now pretending that these box tvs were great is hilarious.
- What was wrong with them? They served their purpose just fine for many years
  
  The weighed a ton, they were limited in size, their resolution was terrible, they sucked down electricity...
  
  They make a high pitched whine
  
  Are you serious?
  Curved (the wrong way)
  Massively heavy
  Noise (just from the unit itself
  Very low resolution
  Noticably hot (might be a benefit in the winter)
  Small picture, especially relative to weight
  Depending how far back you go, no/shitty remote, only has 1 port for video
  
  They were great until you had to move them. They were clunkier than a sofa because they had no place to hold and weighted as much as a refrigerator
  
  They did break, You know? My father fixed those things, it's that they were actually fixable back then and it was cool. Or maybe it was just russian tech that broke, we lived in one of those ussr sattellite countries.
- Stupid false nostalgia, just like the old c10 pickup trucks. They are rare now because they are SHIT and nearly all of them were scrapped like they deserve.
  
  Yes, but... Counter point:
  
  They are so god damn good looking.
  
  My '96, quarter-million-mile Ford fuckin' Ranger is still running. I love it partly because it's shit. It's incredibly cheap, it hauls stuff, and I don't have to care about it. Similarly, anybody coveting a C10 knows exactly what they're getting into.
  Also, I've still got a CRT TV in my back room and a couple of CRT monitors stored in the basement. I'm well aware that they're not as good as my LCD TVs and monitors in every single way, except that they're good for accurate retrogaming, so I keep them around for that purpose and that purpose only. (I'm also under no delusion of them lasting 50 years, contrary to the meme.)
- Moving those CRTs from one place to another is arduous.
- Mine exploded.
  
  Umm... How? There should be vacuum inside.
- The fear of having to walk under a mounted crt every time I went in and out of my room was real... 😂
- Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
  Do I think crt's are better? No. Do I miss them? Yes.

I will not break for 50 years
Yeah as a guy who used to repair these with his dad as a kid, hells no. The average crt TV had a lifespan of about 10 years without breaking
- Yup. A lot of survivor bias going on with the remaining crop of CRTs out there. Granted, there were probably a lot of perfectly good tubes that got thrown out back in the 2000's. But the ones we have left still need repair now and then.
  
  And a lot of them don't have the brightness they did back then. These aren't going to last forever, which is why good upscaling solutions for modern TVs are important.
- I am still rocking my old Apple color monitor and it has never needed a repair. It does need a slap on the top to get the picture right from time to time though.
  That thing was my primary tv from the time I was 10 until I bought an hdtv in 2008 (so 13 years), and it was a monitor in a school for an Apple IIe before that. I had two badass old pc speakers I hooked into my ps2 for dvds and gaming back in the day. Now I have my classic consoles plugged into it. It hasn’t seen much use in the last 3 years, but it was constantly being used before that.
  I know we threw some out from time to time when I was a kid, but we also had some in the family that lasted forever. We had this really pretty black and white floor model from the early 60s that we finally threw out in the early 2000s, but it worked just fine. No one wanted it any more I guess. I still have dreams about that tv for some reason.

This is your nostalgia talking. CRTs were absolutely awful. I think my family still had one of lying around in the mid aughts. It was heavy, ugly, big, with truly awful picture quality and sucks down on power. Even the cheap LCD TVs we upgraded to were so much better than that crap.
- They're might be awful to you, but those people at CRT gaming community would literally dive into a dumpster if they spot a Trinitron/Wega there.
  
  I had to toss a Trinitron about a year ago. Was taking up too much space. I tried finding someone to pick it up with no takers, and had to junk it instead.
  It's not a large community.
  
  Can confirm, I was just getting into it when someone was giving it away for free and arrived in time to see 2 people in a very heated argument that started to get physical... and I just got in my car and left.
- I had a monster sized CRT that would creak due to thermal expansion and would buzz when in use
  
  Oh man I'd forgotten about the weird hum some of them would make
- I agree, but the ones with the degauss button were fun.
  
  POINGngngngngng.
- Are you sure it was a CRT and not a projection TV? CRTs were limited in size, and they have a reputation for being between lcds and OLED in terms of picture quality (ignoring resolution). Projection TVs, on the other hand, had a reputation for being garbage and the only reason you'd buy one is because you wanted something bigger than a CRT could handle.
  
  There were big CRTs. They were just expensive. We had a Proton that was pretty big. Maybe 40"? There were bigger TVs, but we didn't have the money for them.
  
  There were 40+" CRT TVs (my father got one thrown in for free when he bought his place some years ago and kept usings it because "waste not") and those things had a big back and were pretty heavy, which makes sense because the entire screen area has to be covered by a single electron gun at the back, so bigger screen means it has to be further back as the angle of the electrons can be made to turn when they exit the electron gun is limited, plus it all has to be happenning in vacuum (so that gas molecules don't stop the electrons on their way to the screen) so you end up with the whole screen assembly being a big thick glass vacuum shell, so very heavy.
  Even the smaller CRT TVs had quite the big back, partly because of the whole electron gun and max angle thing but also because firing electrons in a vacuum requires more than 1000v, which have to be generated from mains on the TV, and high voltages means big chunky components (plus back in the day the components were naturally bigger than they are now for the same capabilities), so even the smaller screen ones were still quite large in the depth axis because of the space needed for high voltage electronics.
  Meanwhile the screens for LCD, OLED and so on are basically sandwiches of thin film forming a grid of cells that get activated/deactivated with reasonably small voltages (depends on the tech but if I'm not mistaken they're all less than 20v) with only the detail that those techs which do not emit light by themselves (such as LCD) need a bit more space for backlighting, all of which can be made way thinner than "enough depth for the electrons from an electron gun to reach the corners of the screen", much lighter than "requires a vacuum shell for all that space" and then again smaller and lighter because it doesn't have any high-voltage electronics inside.
- CRTs are great for retro gaming because they made low resolutions looking better than any other tech can (by low resolutions i mean 240-360p)
  
  Also, some Counter Strike players really enjoy playing on CRTs.
- Yeah they were all those things but they also made your hand tingly when you ran it over the screen and it smelled like a Tesla coil
- One of the problems is survivorship bias.
  The CRT's that survive today are mostly the cream of the crop. Professional monitors that were used for decades at local TV studios. HD CRT's from the 2000's that were some of the last ones made, were prohibitively expensive at the time, and have been lovingly cared for by enthusiasts.
  I think a lot of retro gaming enthusiasts who are in to CRT's today are either too young to actually remember what the average CRT was like or are old enough that they were enthusiasts back even in the 90's, only buying the absolute best of the best.
  I would literally take my phone over the console TV I grew up with in my parent's living room. I remember setting stuff down on it (it was pretty much a table), like an empty can, and the picture would go crazy. I think part of why we got rid of it was because my mom got new, wireless handsets for the landline phone that caused interference (and it was also around the time new technologies we're replacing CRT's).
  At one point as a kid i got a 19" Zenith CRT in my bedroom. That thing was absolute garbage. Colors all over the place, the image noisy and warped. It was loud, deeper than it was wide or tall, and weighed probably 40lbs. The only two inputs were RF and RCA, but only mono because it only had one speaker.
  I think most of the retro gaming community has just forgotten how bad the average CRT was.
  However, I also wonder if this demand for CRT's and that premium gaming experience is going to impact the market. Will there ever be enough demand for a Kickstarter to manufacture a few thousand high-end CRT's? Probably not. Could there be new features or new technologies invented to try to sate this demand? Maybe. Projector glasses, retro gaming handhelds, TV's and monitors with higher refresh rates, "gaming modes". I wonder if some other new tech is going to come along to try to capture the benefits of good CRT's in a modern package.

All I want is a dumb devices brand.
So sick of smart devices that don't need to be smart. The more unnecessary things something can do, the more it can break.
I wonder if we'll ever get reliable, long lived products ever again or if planned obsolescence has won forever.
- I gave up for a dumb TV, I just don't hook mine up to the Internet.
  
  Gotta hope that stays viable. But as we saw with Windows 11, if there's a financial incentive to push you online to harvest information and force-update trash onto your screen, they will eventually find a way to strong arm you into doing that.
  
  I'm doing the same right now, but the next TV I buy will be a commercial-grade Large Format Display
- Short of undoing decades of neoliberal globalism and free trade agreements that destroyed a litany of domestic industries by sending them offshore, and as a result, collapsing an economy of 'repair, don't replace', we'll never ever see the days of buying anything for life again.
  Welcome to the future. It sucks.
  
  Yeah, this disposable economy is in large part thanks to the destruction of the middle class. If the bottom 80-90% got their "fair share" of the economic pie again, people could actually afford quality (and save money in the long term).
  I'm not as doomerish about the future. If people can be educated on what the real problems are, it can be fixed. As long as social media stays relatively free and unmanipulated, it is inevitable. What I'm seeing currently is an educational revolution, even if everyone likes to rip on social media.
  AI is a wildcard however, not sure how it will change things, could go either way. Since open source models are just a few months behind at worst, things could go better than expected.
  Another factor is that once technological development starts to slow down, companies have to compete on quality. The gap between cheap smartphones and flagships used to be huge, but since smartphones mostly don't change anymore the gap has become really small.
  Basically as technologies mature, the only unique selling point that is left is quality and reliability. Once we run into the physical limits of computation by the end of the century (unless efficiency growth slows down), devices will stop being so disposable. Then a device you buy 30 years later won't be significantly better than the 30 year old one. In the past a 30 year difference roughly translates to a 30k times difference in performance. That's why electronics are so disposable.
  I think smart devices will eventually either mature to reliablity and minimum necessary features or we'll return to dumb devices again.
- Large Format Displays like those made by NEC are my secret tip, they usually don't have any "smart" garbage, they're great for wall-mounting and you can even get them with an anti-reflective coating
- Sceptre still makes dumb TVs.
- Buy whatever TV and don't plug it to the internet?
  
  how can anyone so completely miss the point?
  
  some 'smart' ones need the internet just to do a 'setup' when its first turned on.

An automatic software update straight up corrupted my TV, I have to use it with no internet connection like God intended or it keeps trying to go back to the home menu for an error message. Factory reset and updates won't fix it either. It wouldn't even forget my wifi, I had to change the password to force it to disconnect.
- Have you tried turning it off and on?
- Update thru USB?
  
  It updates, then it goes back immediately. Out of spite, I'm guessing.
- A friend of mine had an expensive LED TV set get bad RAM about 10 years ago after a firmware fix. You could watch TV for about 2 hours before it went blank. Only official fix via the manufacturer was to disconnect it from power, wait until the rechargeable battery went down, then it was fine again for another 2 hours. It seems like it's overheating, but it's not. Something to do with a memory leak and video buffering. It was a known issue among tech enthusiasts, there was a homemade wiki on how to replace the shitty low end RAM with a $30 stick of laptop DIMM and it worked! He still has it, I think.

The tech of CRTs seems almost futuristic to me. Bending electron beams with magnets to travel through a vacuum so they hit exotic materials at precisely the right locations seems much cooler than just miniaturizing LED arrays.
- That's nothing. Look into how vacuum tubes work to achieve logic gates, rectify AC-to-DC, and more. Compared to solid-state electronics, the fundamentals aren't even the same sport, let alone the same game. People really were living in a different world 80 years ago.
- I find this about a lot of old tech. Like precisely etching a piece of vinyl in such a way that it vibrates just right to get the music you want vs bouncing a laser off a reflective disc to read a bunch of 0s and 1s.
  
  We went from the end-product achieving something through great complexity, to the end-product being made with great complexity so it could active something simply.
- First of all, LEDs are bloody insane in how they work. And last, but not least, LCD panels bend THEMSELVES!

CRT sets weighed about 40 pounds, blurry picture, and cost as much as a mid range PC. Modern TVs are 5 pounds, cheaper than most phones, and have nice crisp picture. Smart TVs suck but so did the past. Nostalgia is a lie. Things are always bad, they don't get worse they just stay bad
- And most of them would not last 50 years without repairs. Maybe the 2000s single-chip ones could but not enough time has elapsed. TV repair shops used to be extremely common for a reason.
  And don't forget the eyestrain!
- My 34" Trinitron weights literally 200 pounds.
  While that very much sucks, CRT was a very mature technology that provided excellent products for what was needed at the time. It's still unmatched when it comes to motion in my book (some may disagree because of phosphor trails).
  The fact that my new fancy TV has to make the screen dark and flickery (and possibly add a little SOE) to look almost as clear as that clunker is pretty impressive.
- You clearly have never had a good CRT. It will cost you but its great for watching old movies and shows
  
  A lot of it was covering up mistakes. Watching TNG on a modern display, you get to notice how they didn't match the colors on the uniforms very well. It's particularly noticeable with the extras uniforms compared to the main cast, though even the main cast uniforms aren't all matched, either. Mostly happens with the remade uniforms from season 3 onward.
  For one example, look at Geordi and Data. I don't think this is just a matter of lighting.
  It probably didn't get noticed much on shitty broadcast quality TV back then, but once stuff got remastered for the digital age, it all popped out.
  
  I have a few PVM, I just recapped my pvm2030 and even then the electron gun is slowly dying which will require a brand new tube at this point. This is without even considering the amount of custom cables and modchip required to use an RGB signal on those.monitors.
  While I agree it's great specifically for old content, it's far from perfect and most people would get better enjoyment from something like an ossc plugged into a modern TV for the convenience alone.
  
  And old video games. They were designed for CRT and look better than on a new TV. Plus CRT has basically no latency. New tvs cause input lag because they have to process the picture. It makes many old games unplayable or very hard to play unless you have a very expensive screen made for gaming.

Pro tip: Never connect your TV to the internet, just use it as a screen. Its easier to buy a new cromecast or Kodi Box when you need support for the latest streaming.
- Better yet, go to your local indie used game store and buy used movies.
  
  My wife and I bought a DVD/blueray player a few weeks ago, because we have just found it easier to buy physical copies of movies/tv shows than try to figure out what service it's on.
- Eh, I have been running a pi-hole on my network for many years now. When I did it was purely because I find ads annoying, these days I'd consider it a basic necessity.
  also, I have a hard time complaining about privacy and recommending anything google, especially at the price point they sell Chromecast's for. If you're buying a consumer set top box, Apple TV is basically the only one that's anywhere near privacy conscious. Kodi box or self-built PC though if you really care, and even then I'd still want a pi-hole or similar even if you run it on Linux instead of Windows because the services themselves are doing all kinds of shady shit.

Also, hate how higher end features only come on screens over 55 or 60 inches. Have a small bedroom where 55 inches is just plain too big.
- Buy monitor and computer
  
  Opposite problem; now it's too small. Around 40-45" is about right for this room.
  
  Buying a TV and hooking up a computer is probably cheaper for larger screens.
- You could look at the 40-45" LG OLED TVs.

"To purée your boiled potatoes, this blender needs a valid email address and cell phone verification number, please update your personal information in the Settings option and try again."
(twenty minutes later, the bastards have your data and the boiled potatoes are still crammed inside the blender...)
"Error code prompt error general ### task failed successfully undefined command. FOR HOT SHINGLES IN [your street name] WAITING TO GET NAILED BY YOU [your name] CLICK ANYWHERE TO REGISTER NOW!"
- I'm just imagining that juice maker, that just smashed to plates together to pour juice from a bag. And it took forever to actually pour. There was absolutely no reason for it to be smart. Except so that it could make sure you knky bought juice from them.
  Video about it from critikal/penguinz0/Charlie.
  
  knky
  I read this as "kinky" instead of "only" and it made just as much sense in context. I'm not normally one to kink-shame, but you've gotta be pretty fucking weird to want a Juicero.
  
  AvE also did a teardown of that. It has a huge CNC machined plate that's completely unnecessary. Rolling the bag to squeeze it would have worked fine for a fraction of the price. As it was, they were probably paying over $1000 of manufacturing cost when it retailed for $400. This necessitated making up the difference on the juice packets--the razer blade and printer ink model--but that didn't materialize.
  That thing was a joke from so many different angles.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Video about it from critikal/penguinz0/Charlie.
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I just never agreed to the terms of my smart TV because their privacy policy is horrid.
Been fine 3 or so years and counting.
- Yeah just never connect these pieces of shit to the internet or even remove the wireless module if possible

Bro my TV straight up crashes sometimes And that is genuinely the most annoying concept ever

Hey man, 50 years ago we went to the store and bought new vacuum tubes when our TVs went pop and hiss – you couldn’t fix CRTs like that.
CRTs were witchcraft.

But could your old CRT you bought with your own money display advertisements in it's menus? Hmm? HMMMM? Could it? See? Modern Television wins again!
- I'll have you know that if you uninstall updates from the launcher, I think, and something else, then turn off auto updates. You can get rid of the ads.
  
  I just plugged in a Shield TV and replaced the launcher.

How does it even knows it needs update?
- It pings an update server
- A few times a day it rolls 3 dice (that's the rattling sound you hear) and if they all come up six an update is needed.

Old TVs could literally kill you when you try to take them up the stairs.

Mmmmm.... Radiation.

the camo wall is from when I was a kid. I painted it with my dad, and even though it doesn't really fit me anymore, I don't want to paint over it because I liked doing it.
Edit: also no, the steam deck is not powering the monitor. I put it there because I liked the juxtaposition between the 90s CRT and 2023 OLED steam deck. It's an old 2200+ AMD sempron. Also yes I know it's a PC monitor, not a TV. It's still a CRT, hush.
Edit 2: after fighting with spoilers, I give up.
- FYI, spoilers work differently, both in terms of markup and rendering, than they did on R*****. (It's unfortunate; I liked the old way better.)
  
  ::: spoiler this is spoiler label text
  this is spoiler hidden text
  :::
  
  I'm using sync, that's just how it's spoilering stuff, thanks for the heads-up though. shrug

Nevermind that the static "snow" that you see is cosmic background radiation*
*well a part of it

Televisions today are much cheaper than in the past.
- Sponsored by spyware!
  
  Don’t connect it to the internet. Problem solved.
  
  The cheapest ones usually come without any internet connection.

Do TVs actually refuse to work if you don't connect them to the internet?
- I’ve owned a lot of different brands and none have ever pestered me to connect to the internet.
  It could be the very cheap ones that make you do it. When I visited China I noticed that every TV showed ads so could be a jurisdiction thing too
- Depends on the TV. Most of them work without internet. Only a few of them fit the meme.
  Actually, I just realized that the TV wouldn't know to update if it isn't connected to the internet, so the meme falls apart.
- there's ones that lose money if you buy them, so they are extremely cheap. They make it back by you watching ads, selling your data etc.. I could imagine that those force you to connect to the internet.
  
  They don't
- i'm sure some do, but most will probably pester you about it until you update.

Teletext, remember teletext?
- ...we still have teletext on digital TV. Heck, we have teletext on the Internet now.
  
  Of course its Finnish
- And Ceefax.

Old TVs could also take a hit from a bowling ball without a problem, new ones can break if hit by a rubber band!
Old ones could also distort the image if you moved a strong magnet across the screen.
- Old ones could also distort the image if you moved a strong magnet across the screen.
  then you get the greatest sound of all time when degaussing
- remember all the broken flat screens back when the wii first came out?

just gonna say it, missed opportunity to put an ntsc filter doge and WIDE cheems on their respective screens.

What exactly is that shape supposed to be under the modern tv?
- Legs kicked out sitting like a dog in the doge meme.
- Cheems

i still don't understand why people buy smart TVs, just get a big monitor and connect it to a cheapo laptop
- Do 77 inch monitors exist?
  
  Yes. They tend to be sold as digital signage.
  
  43" is the biggest with a normal resolution I think? That's for computer monitors by the way so you still get the gaming functionalities.
- "TV-sized" monitors are pretty expensive, no?
- i call your 3ms response time and raise by the speed of light (over infrared)

blackbox
Nope. That's not the noun form. #millennialWordJoining strikes again!

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