People now pretending that these box tvs were great is hilarious.
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.
And god help you if you are even in a car accident
Moving those CRTs from one place to another is arduous.
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.
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…
Their screen was curved the wrong way until they released flat screen TVs
4:3 resolution meant you lost some of the content from movies or you watched them with black bars
Except movies keep changing so now if you want imax at home you need 4:3.
Whatever isn’t available at home is what movies will change to to keep themselves unique.
Widescreen has been the movie industry standard for how many decades now? IMAX is its own beast but most movies aren’t filmed in real IMAX resolution and now there’s digital IMAX which is basically 19:10 which is the same as many TVs…
Movies used to be all 4:3 before tv. It’s called the academy ratio. Movies now do 1.85:1 and even 2.39:1. A few even do anamorphic 2.76:1. Anything but the dominant home format.
Major movie studios have mostly used widescreen since the 1950s and all the different ratios you mentioned except 4:3 are better watched on a widescreen TV than a 4:3 TV.
4:3 resolution also means that a lot of good shows will never be watchable in the proper 16:9 format
No, it means 4:3 IS proper format
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.
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.
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Thanks, that’s great and useful advice.
It would be cool if all TVs were just dumb displays + a standardized dedicated spot for a module for whatever internals you want to put in it.
Maybe I should petition the EU for this lol. cuts down on e-waste.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Old TVs could literally kill you when you try to take them up the stairs.
Televisions today are much cheaper than in the past.
Sponsored by spyware!
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.
remember all the broken flat screens back when the wii first came out?
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.
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.
“TV-sized” monitors are pretty expensive, no?
i call your 3ms response time and raise by the speed of light (over infrared)
Do TVs actually refuse to work if you don’t connect them to the internet?
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.
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.
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TVs used to have decent sound on their own, but the enshittification got to them.
Nah, the speakers that can physically fit in a TV of any type aren’t that big, aren’t put in enclosures tuned to the speaker, don’t have multiple speakers with a crossover to handle different frequency ranges, and don’t have quality amplifier components. They were always built cheap to what could fit in the box. I’m not talking audiphile shit here, but just the basics of a good sound system.
Well, I had a 48” flat screen in 2006 that didn’t need separate speakers. Every TV since sounds like absolute garbage.
Sure, my 2008 flat screen, I think it’s a Samsung, sounds decent enough too but it’s also 4" thick. The newer ones that are 2" or less simply don’t have enough depth in the body for decent speakers.
I would prefer a thicker TV with better sound than having to buy a sound bar or theatre system to go with it. My 2014 Samsung with shit sound is about 4” thick. That’s not the reason.
After 32” you’re going to want to have a friend help you move it anyway, so who cares how thick it is? It’s all a scam to get you to buy more stuff.
