In case anyone is a fan of CRTs near Columbus OH, I highly recommend the Early Televison Museum https://www.earlytelevision.org/
All I want is a brand new CRT that I can connect my PSOne to, so that I can play Point Blank 1-3 again.
Man of culture I see
Just in case anybody is stupid enough to believe this, there was nothing radioactive in old CRT-based TVs. And they sometimes had black cases but weren’t a “black box”.
They worked by bending a beam of electrons that hit phosphors in the screen, which is cool enough that saying stupid BS about “radioactive” is unnecessary.
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CRTs can emit X-Rays, but they are properly shielded so they never leave the tube.
The X-Ray scare mostly came from a line of GE TV’s in 1968 that had improper shielding and had to be recalled.
Radioactivity and X-Rays are tangentially related, but they’re not at all the same thing.
One is from a decaying material and the other is from controlled electron beam, but they are both radiation emitters. People are just more familiar with the term radioactive and think it is the catch-all term for a source of radiation.
The electron gun in a tv and in an xray machine are pretty similar and without shielding, you will still get hit with radiation even if it isn’t strictly radioactive, but rather another type of radiation emitter.
they did emit x rays but most of them was blocked by the leaded glass
Radioactivity and X-Rays are tangentially related, but they’re not at all the same thing.
I like this comment except for the fact it seems needlessly hostile
Fun fact: These TVs also had a self-defense system built in. One wring move with a screwdriver and they’d throw you across the room.
they will record you anyways and store the recordings and transcripts long enough that if a future owner of the TV ever connects it, it’ll upload all that shit it’s stored.
and they know what wifi networks and hardware addresses are nearby so those recordings will be associated with your location even if it uploads them from another physical location.
these things are all advanced wiretaps that should probably have their antennas permanently destroyed.
You just typed all that on the biggest wiretaps of all.
Summit for Lemmy on GrapheneOS is a wiretap?
Firefox with ublock, noscript, and privacybadger on cachyOS is a wiretap?
cuz I posted this from one of those two.
The AI 20 years from now cross referencing every possible point of data to deduce every single identifiable feature to pin you as the guy who forgot to pay for the gum is going to have a field day with this post.
Something I kind of wonder about this whole "every single modern TV is a smart TV that spies on you more comprehensively than the ones portrayed in “1984"” situation is this: there must surely be some overlap between “facilities that have well-protected state secrets” and the use case for TVs. Like, do they not have any TVs in, say, the pentagon, or CIA facilities, or other country’s equivalents to those things? They might not need like entertainment generally, but displaying video information to a group of people seems like it’d be useful to organizations like that. There’s also people who inherently have secrets surrounding them, like national leaders, and those people will also sometimes expect entertainment.
So, how do groups like that, who both have a lot of resources to get stuff done and an obvious reason to not want a poorly secured spy device sending information from their facilities and people to some random corporate server, deal with the modern TV situation? Do they exclusively use old TVs? Do they modify off the shelf ones to kill the spying ability? Do they commission companies to make special models for them that aren’t commercially available, or build their own hardware? Or is the inability to buy regular, non-spying new TVs exaggerated, and theres some generic supplier out there that they can reliably get them from?
Eh, that’s industrial displays, and so long as it doesn’t brick the thing, you can take any radio equipment out of a tv before you use it
I’d imagine defense contractors don’t buy hardware that’s made for the general public and givernments only buy from defense contractors or do in house work. You can essentially “rent” a factory in parts of the world and have your own products made there, the higher the “rent” the higher level of quality control. There’s likely an entire industry dedicated to things like this.
Cathode Ray Dude on YouTube recently released a video about top-secret class computing devices. They are generally purpose built for the government. He explains in depth here if you’re interested, although it’s mainly focused on a particular computer, he does touch on display devices.
Interesting, I dont have the spare time for a video that long at the moment but I did glance at his “detour” section about modern stuff and the bit about just keeping stuff used to talk about secrets in a room rigged up as a faraday cage with a bunch of shielding seems to fit the kind of use I was picturing being a problem in my head.
do they not have any TVs in, say, the pentagon, or CIA facilities, or other country’s equivalents to those things
They have air-gapped rooms with lead shielding so it doesn’t really matter if a Spy-TV is in there if it can never connect to anything.
i bought a crt some time ago for 13$ (50pln), mainly to use with some old computers but gaming on it is cool asf too
One advantage of modern TVs is how slim they are. It’s so crazy to me now how much space those old TVs took up. You just had a big TV stand sticking out from the wall.
I’m using an old console TV that I’ve modified to hold a flat screen. I literally have a home server and a sound bar built into it the space that was originally just the tube and there’s still enough space for my full grown ass to climb inside.
And CRTs are unbelievably heavy in comparison, making them a bitch to move at all.
They are thief proof though.
Promise you no one stealing this tv unless they bring a crew.
That anger when the specs didn’t include the screen bulge in the depth measurement and now you can’t close the armoire door after carrying that shit 50 feet from the car.
The screen bulge alone in that pic is at least 3 times wider than my TV. It’s amazing what 2 decades of technology can do. Now, if we could just figure out how to make an LED TV than didn’t have a network card…
They do make non-smart TVs, you just have to know where to look.
Often the non-smart hospitality TVs don’t have the more advanced features you’d want for a home TV like HDR and the like, but I gotta admit that one looks quite decent. Can’t see any Dolby Vision support though.
Don’t look up Hospitality Mode, unless you want to end up on a list.
I distinctly recall Sony’s 40" Trinitron CRT weighing over 300 lbs. The 32" was ~200 lbs.
Yup. That was the last CRT I ever owned. Thing was a tank and took two people to carry it.
I’m pretty sure we had a 32". And that was MASSIVE for the time.
even Flatscreen CRTs were not that slim :/
That “where to armor planes” image just popped into my head for no reason at all.
And if it breaks, it literally implodes.
Not always, sometimes it gives pretty {dangerous} purple lightning in the back of the tube.
I will forever remember using the magnet that came with this old Klutz book near the TV in my parents’ room when I was around 10 and noticing the rainbow pattern it made in the picture. And then, after further investigation and experimentation, noticing those colors stopped going away when I moved the magnet away. And then, never speaking a word of it. For, like, 40 years.
When Bill Burr’s Netflix cartoon show put a similar bit in an episode it finally dawned on me that lots of kids must have messed up their parents’ TVs with those magnet wands.
The TV wasn’t permanently messed up, you just needed to degauss it.
oh so thats what degauss does
Yeah Gauss a unit of measurement for magnetic flux density. It’s not just there to make a BOING noise and briefly mess up the picture.
Klutz books were truly amazing. I had that one and several others, and they were incredibly formative for me.
Analog tech was so cool, everything now is so perfect it’s boring
There was a time when CRT TVs were so cranky and reliably in need of service that your local drugstore had a rack of replacement tubes and even a tube-tester machine. You could pull a bunch of tubes from your set, test them at the store, and buy a replacement for whichever one was bad.
I run a valve (tube) amp as my daily driver for audio and yeah, you do have to have a screw loose in this day and age. They’re a lot better with modern passive components but modern valves are pretty hopeless in terms of longevity. For EL84s you basically have to buy old Soviet military stock (thank fuck Gosplan was so hilariously inefficient) or your amp will burn through them fairly quickly.
On the other hand if you look after them will probably outlive you. The valves are consumable components but the transformer is literally a big chunk of iron and copper, and they’re dead simple to work on usually. Modern capacitors don’t dry out and turn into resistors nearly as readily too.
Ah, the old Radiation King!
I’ve never had a CRT TV that lasted more than ten years.
I got a CRT from 1983 a few weeks ago. Still works fine, just needed a little color adjustment.
Never having owned a CRT television (LCD was king when I became an adult) I have to say that that looks fucking sick. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a bulky one until now.
I always thought this one looked cool when I was a kid https://crtdatabase.com/crts/samsung/samsung-gxe-1395
Retro games look better on them and there’s no emulator that has ever pulled off a sufficiently convincing simulation for me. They also render dark colors better than most high end TVs. If you play a lot of old games, it would be neat to have a small one. The big ones, however, weigh a metric ton and are at least as deep as they are wide, and they’re extremely front-heavy. Those aren’t worth it unless you plan to build an entire arcade cabinet around it.
True. This one is a 10" model and it already weighs a fuck-ton, and it’s quite deep and takes up a lot of space. But I really like how old games (especially PS1 and PS2) look on it.
I wouldn’t go higher than 14" models because of the weight.
Non-Sony models aren’t too heavy, especially 27" and below. My 27" CRT is more than managable for me to lift up by myself over my head.
Sony included thick steel magnetic shielding around their tubes, making them significantly heavier compared to other brands.
All of mine did but got increasingly quirkier over time. Sometimes you needed to hit it on top to get the picture looking right. Audio got crackly. The component cables needed a fine touch to display the picture correctly.
That sort of fun stuff.
Sometimes you needed to hit it on top to get the picture looking right.
Ah yes, percussive maintenance.
It took skill to do it right. If you hit it too hard, it got worse, so the smack needed finesse.
My parents black and white set from the sixties was like that. They refused to replace it until the mid eighties.
Good old cracked solder joints and corroded switches.
The soup pot we used to whack the TV with when it cut to static has outlasted the TV and the channels displayed on it.
I’ve never had a CRT fail on me.
In the late 90s to early 2000s they made cheap plastic crap, the circuit board could break if you pushed the power button too hard
And during their last years a lot of cheap CRTs were built, especially those VCR combo units, most of them all died very quickly.
