I would buy a new CRT terminal in a heartbeat. It's a shame that there isn't really a market for them, and that this whole segment of technology is gradually being lost to time.
I ended up trashing a few older CRTs that had pretty severe burn-in and bad contrast. As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.
I have one very nice 19" Dell CRT with one of the later stage Sony Trinitron setups (i.e. completely flat screen) that I use with my vintage computer collection (old SGI, Apple, NeXT, etc. systems).
I don't use it often, but I have a moment of terror each time I pull it out to fiddle with something and it takes a moment for the picture to display. So far, thankfully, I've been able to follow that moment of fear with a sigh of relief.
I should probably keep an eye out for a few more decent specimens just to keep in the closet as back ups.
It’s a shame the totally flat ones are so much more prone to geometry issues over time, though it’s an inevitability for all types.
I had a 20” Sony PVM for a while for retro games and still don’t think any display I’ll ever own will match it for that specific purpose. Ended up selling it on because it was starting to have geometry issues itself, and I don’t have the ability to maintain it nor know anyone who does—plus it was hard to find a good space for it anywhere I’d actually want to play games. I do miss it though.
I have a couple of SGI monitors, broadcast Sony BCM, and half a dozen if not more Commodore monitors. I figured it's still the only thing I will not be able to emulate for quite some time.. at least until 8k+ OLED + a decent shader comes through.
Longer than that. There are still WWII vets around and it began more than 80 years ago.
People will still be using and maintaining existing CRTs for decades - there are still a lot in operation run by hobbyists, old people, and hipster types that make use of them.
I'd say we have at least another 30 years before they are entirely relegated to museums and collections, and at that point, who knows what life expectancy will look like.
There could be people alive even now who'll be among the first to achieve immortality, if the rate of improvements to longevity starts exceeding the speed at which people age against their life expectancy.
With the latency + perfect blacks of modern OLED displays you could probably build a "fake" CRT with some purpose built image processing in to fake the look of subpixels etc. Stick it in a housing with appropriate inputs, have it curved behind a curved glass panel.
There’s a couple of high-end scalers for retro games that can apply a facsimile of various aperture grilles and shadow masks from popular consumer and professional CRTs.
In fact, the RetroTINK 4K will even use a HDR container to boost the brightness to offset the loss from drawing scanlines and other unlit areas over the image.
It’s a super cool effect and one of many signs how much a labour of love those things are, but it would never fool anyone into believing it was an actual CRT.
I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I’ve often thought the “CRT look” is as much biological as it is physical, it’s almost like the phosphor glow and persistence and the mask overlaid on the image convinces the brain to start filling in detail.
With the RetroTINK 4k and a good 4K HDR tv I think it might be good enough to emulate the CRT look. LinusTechTips did a video on it on YouTube and its really amazing how good it loonks.
It falls apart immediately in motion sadly. Though if combined with BFI/strobing it can indeed get “close”.
Source: I have a house full of CRTs and am continually trying to move away from them as I know I can’t keep them going forever (I can do basic repairs). I have a collection of consumer TVs, VGA monitors and broadcast monitors I use currently, including a 21” trinitron that still sits on my desk.
My endgame for “close enough” will be a reasonably size 4k oled with like 60hz strobe which will cover a large enough portion of legacy content.
Exactly correct. If you wanted "authentic" warping you could install a unity lens with warping around the edges on the face of the OLED. I built a simple hexagonal phosphor simulator module in HDL that one could use in an FPGA to reproduce the characteristics of any tube[1]. It has been suggested that I build a "retro" terminal kit out of it (but with selectable phosphor colors :-).
[1] My thought was that you could "restore" old test equipment for which tubes were no longer available without changing the interface the electronics in the gear expected.
Yeah, I don't miss the age of CRTs at all, and that's the biggest reason. Why anyone pines for those noisy squealing things, I have no idea; I guess they're all deaf. Even decades later, I can still hear that annoying sound the rare times I find myself in a place with a CRT TV.
> As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.
Adrian from the Youtube channel "Adrian's digital basement" has done several recent videos about replacing CRT TVs and CRT monitors' PCBs with new, still produced (and easy to order) chinese PCBs.
So there are still new (and cheap) parts being made.
As for the screen itself: they've been produced by the hundreds of millions and there many lying around in caves/garages/basement so it should be possible to at least find some for the foreseeable future.
There are a couple of companies that still make CRTs (Google turns up Thomas and Gassler for display rather than X-ray applications), but I expect your stock options will have to have done very well to afford their services on a small scale. Still, if someone were sufficiently motivated, I bet it would be possible to arrange a group buy of a limited run of tubes for some retro device.
Or you can take up glass blowing! This is, in principle, 125-year-old technology, and therefore possible to construct with non-esoteric tooling.
> This is, in principle, 125-year-old technology, and therefore possible to construct with non-esoteric tooling.
Tooling maybe, but I wouldn't underestimate the required know-how. For example, making good vacuum-grade glass-to-metal seals is a technology that took decades of research and experimentation.
And they definitely, describe in great detail in patent documents how to make their "secret sauce", right? No, wrong. Patents are often written in a way to give maximum protection and minimum information how to recreate the thing.
according to the law, the patent office has the job of rejecting patents that don't give enough information, and throughout the middle of the 20th century they seem to have done a reasonably good job of it. i've found reams of valuable information in patents from that time period, though not specifically about vacuum-sealing glassblowing
also, fusion (not online, but available in many university libraries) is the quarterly journal of the american scientific glassblowers society https://asgs-glass.org/fusion-journal-asgs/ and they also have had symposia which have published proceedings (not online)
and it's common for scientific papers from the period when this stuff was getting figured out to describe their apparatus in detail (rather than saying they purchased such-and-such a model from such-and-such a company), and those are online
I ended up trashing a few older CRTs that had pretty severe burn-in and bad contrast. As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.