alt Hacker NewsThe biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
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Sometime in 2006 we bought a house and our realtor gave us a gift certificate for $2500 at Best Buy (weird, but...those were the days). A brand new, state of the art 720p DLP projection TV was just a hair under that - we still have it and it works great. But I had a couple dollars to burn off on the card.
I happened to have noticed that they were trying to clear out any remaining floor models of CRTs. One of them was an absolutely giant Samsung, memory says it was >34", but I'm not sure how big...with a sticker on it for, and I'll never forget this...$.72.
Soooo two big TVs for the price of one!
Long story short, we were moving out of that house, CRT tvs were long since obsolete and that TV hadn't even been turned on for at least 5 years. So we decided to throw it away. I had never picked it up before and had forgotten how heavy CRTs could be. I ended up having to get two friends to come help me move it to the curb, it was well over 250 lbs. The trash company also complained when they had to pick it up and had to make a return trip.
I kinda regret getting rid of it, but it was among the heaviest pieces of furniture in our house.
If you like playing with old hardware, be aware that old CRTs have a gotcha that can getcha: they hold a charge that can shock you across the room, and they can hold that charge for weeks or more. Google how to discharge it before poking around in a CRT.
Somewhat related but back in my university days, I spent practically all my savings from a summer part-time job to buy a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT. I absolutely loved that thing, but at the end of each year I dreaded having to lug it home and then haul it back to the dorms again.
The elevators often didn’t work and climbing 10 flights of stairs while carrying a 70 lb (31kg) cube was brutal. It’s not often you buy a piece of electronics and get a complimentary workout regimen thrown in.
This reminds me of my grandparents’ old, huge rear projection TV (RPTV). It was 4ft wide, 4ft tall (with the base), 2ft thick, and weighed 200lbs. This was the intermediary between CRTs and flat screens for me.
They had it installed in their basement. However, later they remodeled the basement stairway to add a turn. With the new layout, it would be impossible to bring back up the TV the way it was brought down. There was no other way to access the basement (it only had storm cellar windows), so they left it there when they moved.
I think about the new owners sometimes and wonder what they ended up doing. Perhaps they disassembled it, or maybe it’s still down there collecting dust.
In the 90s I was tasked with fixing our CEOs computer and entered his office to see the largest CRT I’ve ever seen in my life. (It was not a PVM-4300, though. This one was sat on a metal table.) The size of it was shocking. I was more shocked, however, to find out he used it at 640 x 480. I never saw him use it so maybe he played games on it… from the moon.
It's fascinating that the biggest CRT ever made had a 43" diagonal, which is at the low end for modern flatscreen TVs. But yeah, I can see why the market for this beast was pretty limited: even with deinterlacing, SD content would have looked pretty awful when viewed from up close, so the only application I can think of was using it for larger groups of people sitting further away from the screen. And even for that, a projector was (probably?) the cheaper alternative...
I think I saw one as a child in the mid 90s - it belonged to an upper-middle class Kuwaiti whose at the time preschooler daughter was approximately as tall as the device, which was laid on the carpeted floor.
At the time there were a lot of private import items in Kuwait - particularly cars - so it's not impossible it was this particular model. I mean, what other TV could boast being the height of a four year old?
Previously on HN:
The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471
Overview of the KX45ED1 / PVM-4300 (Worlds Largest CRT) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588259
Interestingly that first link is to the same URL as today's yet it's from June 22 2024. The linked article however has today's date as the publish date. There's no indication that the article was updated from what was published originally.
In the video, the guy is looking for some official contact at SONY to authorize an interview with a long-term SONY CRT designer and employee who already agreed to give it but can't do without official approval. Public channels all yielded no response.
Leaving this here just in case! :)
I have a Samsung SlimFit HD tube TV from 2005 or so. It’s such an interesting piece of retro tech because it is widescreen, supports 1080i, and has HDMI, but it is a CRT! It’s also quite a bit thinner than most tubes. Super unusual.
I got it because LCDs always looked terrible to me and plasmas were still very expensive.
https://www.crutchfield.com/S-WXftqFAhnMu/p_305TXR3079/Samsu...
For fairly obvious reasons, most people were unaware this set ever existed. In the 90s (~1993?), my family replaced our old 1970s-era 19" Sony Trinitron with a HUGE new TV, a 35" Toshiba.
At the time, a "big" CRT was a 32". I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available. (PVM-4300 stragglers aside).
A couple years later (1995-6?), a friend's family bought a 40" Mitsubishi, which I _thought_ was the largest CRT made. But, again, Sony aside, it probably was.
Such a cool piece of technology. I will say though I enjoyed our 200 lb monster CRT of yore I’m thankful we have Mike Chi and the RetroTINK 4K now. Being able to play any old console on any modern TV while still having it look accurate it is a dream.
I want to call false on the claim that this is s the biggest crt ever made. I used to work in a computer recycling center in the monitor testing area bak in 2007. One day a giant 60 inch blue aluminum industrial sized sony trinitron was brought in by the fork trucks for me to test. There was 2 of them from a large conference room at xerox or kodak or used by a tv station. They were bigger than an average pallet and took a forklift to move them.
A very long time ago, sometime during the first geologic age, I worked at a facility on Queen Street in Toronto. On the street side of the building, we had two Flame suites (very high-end (for the time) realtime editing and effects, used for composing television commercials). Each one had a Sony Trinitron TV of about this size as the client preview monitor. They were amazing, but every time a streetcar passed outside, they would get involuntarily degaussed!
In the mid 90s (feel like it was 1996 but can't remember) my grandmother bought us a 40" Mitsubishi right before the Super Bowl. The thing was insane. Took 6 people to move it.
Why write a story about someone else's story? Just go to the shank mod vid directly
I remember owning a 27 inch RCA CRT. It was a pain to carry. I could not imagine this thing.
My buddy had something like this. All I remember is it took four people to carry it.
Previously on HN
What happened to the world's largest tube TV? [video]
689 points, 295 comments
My gamer friend found a 23-inch CRT monitor on ebay and the box it showed up in was large enough to ship a washing machine. I can't imagine what it would be like for a 43-inch TV.
I remember when the video came out. What, 2-3 years ago? What an event.
TFA immediately slammed me with an intrusive cookie banner so I didn’t read it, here’s another option about this TV : https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/retro-gamers-save-one... at least ars technica didn’t cookie-gate me from the get go.
I had a 36" 4:3 Toshiba CRT that had component video inputs for 1080i signals. If you displayed a 16:9 aspect ratio signal you could turn on a mode to change the display area to make the electron beam display all 1080 lines in that area so the other system didn't need to add black bars. This way you got the full 1080i resolution in a 4:3 TV
I used to go to a local high end home theater store and they had the Sony 40" XBR TV that weighed 300 pounds or something crazy.
My lord... this thing probably requires the power grid to do a generation dispatch when you turn it on.
When I was a kid I lived down in Southeastern Kentucky (Somerset) which gets a lot of its power from the local lake via hydro. My grandfather had this large (not this big but big) tube TV, the old wooden case kind. When you turned it on it'd take about ten seconds in which you could hear tube heaters tinkling, followed by a "grrrnnnnnzzzzz" sound as the tube came to life. I remember my uncle joking that the lake level started visibly falling.
Between LCDs/etc. and LED lighting, the amount of efficiency improvement we've done in home electronics is wild. I can now put my hand right on an equivalent to 100W light output light bulb and it's just... warm.
way back when, I had a 32" CRT from SGI attached to an o2. So heavy I had to buy a special desk to hold it. I can't imagine carrying that PVM-4300 anywhere.
Is it true we just don’t really have the technology anymore to build a CRT? We’ll never see a new CRT ever again, unless it’s the passion project of some billionaire?
2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471
> In Japan, it sold for 2.6 million yen, but in the United States, it retailed for $40,000, a significant markup. To be fair, shipping them across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States must have been expensive.
If they were going all the long way around to the Atlantic that would indeed explain the markup. Not sure why they would though.
I wonder about the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) of that one: she's already not too thrilled about my vintage arcade cab and its 21" CRT. Arcade cab which has already been to three different countries with us and, no, the movers typically ain't that happy when they have to move it (I already moved it by myself but that's quite the endeavour).
$40k invested in AAPL in 1990 would be worth about $40m today. $40k is about what $100k is today. So what stock would you invest $100k in today, that in 35 years would give you a similar return?
Don't sleep on that Shank Mods video linked at the end, it's insane that he managed to pull that off.
He also made a second video (not linked) which shows off more of the actual hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgkw3uu19V8