Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/23/sonys-pvm-4300-was-the-biggest-crt-ever-made.html
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The picture was outstanding, but for various reasons it kept needing to be moved.
yes indeed! first lasting damage to a late model adolescent’s back was moving a ridiculously heavy huge CRT to a repair shop and back (“…couldn’t put any handles on this damn thing!?” “don’t forget to ‘lift with your knees’!” “if i do that this thing will be on the pavement”)
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In the late 1980s, Sony made a special 2K x 2K video monitor for computers. I remember it being about that size, but it had a flat screen and a square aspect. I remember working with it to display SPOT satellite photos for an exhibit at a computer museum in Boston. It probably cost about $40K and might just have been the professional version since it didn’t come with a cabinet. Sony really pushed the limits of CRT technology with their Trinitron technology. They owned the studio production market with their little $4K studio monitors.
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450 pounds? Time to break out the professional moving equipment.
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When I last moved house 8 years ago I gave instructions to the people helping me (I have CFS/ME, there was no chance I could do this) to KEEP the smaller 20" Sony CRT and get rid of the 32". I knew about the trends in retro gaming and had plans for the 20".
I went to lie down and recover for a little while, then went downstairs to find the 32" in my living room and the 20" lying in a skip in the pissing rain. I was not happy to say the least.
I eventually got rid of the 32", but I never replaced the 20".
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That’s probably okay, it’s not like someone was going to use this as a bedroom TV. This thing was going in your living room.
Sounds like it was big enough to be used as a bedroom.
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I had almost the same experience. As a teenager I had to move a fairly large TV down some stairs all on my own. The bottom had a sharp plastic edge that nearly severed my fingers while the top was completely smooth and slippery with no good gripping points other than a very shallow and streamlined flare behind the edge of the screen. It was the first time in my life I experienced back pain and nausea from exertion. The damn thing must have weighed as much as I did at the time.
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This reminds me of the old style PC LAN parties.
Moving the monitors was an absolute pain (and thats with 15-20" models).
Very heavy and worst still the wieght is very unbalanced to the front.
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It probably was a 45” tube. The tube is always bigger than the visible area and has a portion masked off making the visible area 43”.
Larger Sony CRTs had a two tungsten damping wires (those thicker horizontal lines you could see if you got close enough) to fix the geometry of the Trinitron aperture grill. I wonder if this beast had 3 or more?
The very last large CRT I owned was a 32” Sony Trinitron. It weighed 165 lbs. When I sold it, it took 3 of us to move it into the person’s car. The 37” LCD flat screen I replaced it with weighed 50 lbs (yeah, it was a long time ago). Not lightweight by any stretch, but at least I could move it on my own.
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Having spent many decades in the TV post production business, I remember the larger Sony PVM monitors well, though I’ve never encountered this particular one. It would sometimes take a hydraulic lift and two stout men and a boy to get them down from the top of an edit console to do any repairs.
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I worked in pharmaceuticals, and Clinical Studies needed huge monitors for scanning patient records and data entry. We had cube farms full of Sony 25" Trinitrons. They were too heavy for cube furniture without reinforcement, they used more power than the cube power distribution could handle, and their magnetic fields messed with each other. They were also really deep - the full depth of the cube corner desks.
We were early adopters of LCD monitors because the weight, power requirements, desk space and the ability to put them next to each other or back to back made them an immediate payoff.
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And it must have been seriously deep as well- the length of the tube was partially dictated by the need to deflect the beam enough so that it would hit the corners of the screen.
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The retro gamer in me is drooling over this.
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One of the only relatively smart things I did with my money in the Army was to buy a 32” Sanyo CRT for $330 ca. 1998. Years later, after leaving the Army and ingesting plenty of weed and LSD, I decided TV was evil, so in preparation for a canoe trip, I took it to a pawn shop and got $300(!!!) for it. Over 4+ years of ownership, it cost me a grand total of $30.
I still think about the young man who was working the pawn shop counter, as I imagine his boss was pretty pissed off. But the Fat Tire flowed free that weekend, my friends.
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I just figured out that the Fallout games are referencing the Simpsons with their Radiation King televisions.
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I have a friend who had a very unusual CRT HDTV. 16:9 aspect ratio and all. 150 lb, probably 30–35" measured diagonally. Eventually sold it for a buck a pound.
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That doesn’t look very tactical at all. Why I’d even say that looks downright strategic.
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