My family had one of those 32" Sonys. Great picture, just about impossible to move.
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That’s forty thousand 1989 American dollars, $103,738.73 in 2024! The mind boggles.
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I mean, there are modern equivalents of dumb money for a television - and that 104k doesn’t even scrape the bottom end of the top ten list linked below (though two of them are just nice screens covered with gems and luxe stuff… so 
)
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Those things are awesome.
My wife and I successfully moved a washing machine out of our house down three steps and a heavy stove into the house up three steps with those straps.
One of the best helpers we ever bought.
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The very thought of a tube implosion of one of those in a domestic living space just gives me shudders…
1990 was my year out from university, working at Sony’s UK broadcast research centre as part of my degree. They had a demo setup with film scanning, production switcher, and screening room that at the time were jaw dropping in quality. 38 inch 16:9 CRTs, perfectly flat (as opposed to that trad curved one) that needed 6 people to carry them.
There was one of the 38" HDM-3830 monitors in the back of the warehouse, waiting for the insurance claim to be processed. It came with a handling kit consisting of 6 metal rods that screwed into the chassis (3 each side), then 2 scaffold bars that bolted on the ends of those. Handling instructions mandated a 6 person lift, but they tried to do it with 4… 
Happy times!
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Having started my career as an Avid guy by deliveriing hire suites to post production companies, I really don’t miss CRTs.
We would deliver three with each suite; two computer monitors and one “client” monitor for previewing output.
Lugging three hefty 21" CRTs up flights of stairs (because the edit suites were always in the cheapest rooms on the top floor) is not an experience I miss.
Interestingly, this article converges with something else I’ve been checking out recently: the largest High Definition CRTs. There’s some nice YouTube vids out there showing modern games running on monitors such as the Sony HDM-3830, and they look great. But it’s still mad to think that it would still look tiny and convex next to my current telly.
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My brother-in-law bought one of the final-generation of Sony CRTs, 16:9 1080 HD, when new. That thing weighed around 200 pounds.
He got a “great deal” on it compared to a comparably sized plasma, but 20+ years later all I remember is how ridiculously hard it was to move that thing.
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My husband found a 36" CRT at a yard sale for $10, and got two guys to help him install it in my office. It was a good TV, but eventually hubby died, and then the cable company went digital, so I cut the cord. The TV sat and obscured a window for years. It was too round to sit in a furniture dolly and too tough to bust with a sledgehammer. I finally moved it using a table-height rolling cart that we wheeled into a van with a ramp.
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I used to own a Loewe Aconda 38-inch HDTV Monitor, which according to Sound & Vision magazine “makes it the largest widescreen direct-view TV available”. I’m going to assume to consumers. It weighed 210 pounds. It took four of us to get it up and down the stairs to our second floor apartment. The second time it died I gave it away for free to whoever was willing to handle all the lifting.
But the picture… oh my god, the picture… it was amazing.
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Heh, that video shows my memory of its absolute flatness was a little off the mark - but still, a sweet display for the time!
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Yeah, “Flat” was very subjective back then 
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I sold a donated 36" Trinitron Kv-36xbr250.
It was in the donor’s bedroom which was upstairs and accessed by a grand staircase. With the donor, myself and 2 of his students we got that thing down and into my van. Thankfully I had pictures taken when it was plugged in before it was moved. I sold it very cheap to a very happy retro-gamer and let him and his wife take it from my van. I have never moved anything so unwieldy. We slid it down those stairs on thick cardboard but I could easily see that thing sliding down right through the floor to ceiling windows at the end of the staircase.
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There were flat glass HD widescreen CRTs towards the end. I think Sony’s biggest was a 38" model. Problem was that the glass on the front of the tube had to be super thick if it wasn’t curved so they tended to weigh twice as much as the curved glass models. The Sony one I saw on display at an A/V store once had a custom tube steel stand that sold with it just to take the weight and the stand alone was $700 retail.
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I’ve helped a lot of people move over the years, and I’m so glad CRTs are now an obsolete technology for almost all purposes. They are heavy, unwieldy, and at the same time fragile and very good at crushing and smashing things.
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Had a 19" viewsonic that i purchased sometime in 99. Man Quake deathmatches and counter strike were so much better at that size! I remember taking a bus to fry’s and having to take a cab home (it barely fit in the trunk - I think it had to stay open in order to fit)
The monitor served me well - I finally got an lcd sometime in 08. I’m not sure what happened to the crt but I remember that I had to throw the desk out due to the perma-bow it made in the top of the desk. Good times. Last year I picked up a 42" lcd for my gaming (and streaming) - it feels like id have to have 5+ to approach the weight of the 19"
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They are also bad for the environment because they are filled with hazardous materials. Like several kg of lead, baked right into the glass. That’s part of what gives it so much of its heft.
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My question is how quickly any of them fell victim to irreversible burn-in. I’m guessing in 1989 Sony didn’t have any specialized technology for preventing that sort of thing.
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I remember almost getting flattened by a big Sony Trinitron as we tried to slide it down a flight of stairs. It seemed like a good idea at the start, but I was below it and soon found that I didn’t have the grip or strength to do more than slow it down. Somehow I managed to stop it smashing the sofa to bits, and it was still in functional condition, and worked for years after. (This was in the mid-2000’s, so bigger, lighter LCDs were available, bu they weren’t free)
Of course, a few years later we had to move out and I had to get it back up the stairs 
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There are also a bunch of interesting things in the phosphors(depending on color and age). Not nearly so much as the metals in the glass; but at least being vitrified is a relatively stable(it will eventually leach; but it takes time and some amount of chemical hostility. Phosphor dust is pretty readily liberated.
The real classics have fun stuff like beryllium and cadmium compounds in lung-compatible powder form, the newer ones are more likely to skip that but have yttrium and europium and such. On the plus side(mostly unlike the leaded glass) some of those materials are of some actual economic interest to recover; which gives people the incentive to try; while leaded glass is not of much interest unless you need leaded glass for something in particular(which some people do, it has some desirable properties in places where it’s not forbidden; but it’s not an overwhelmingly large or lucrative market).
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Somewhat related:
A little while ago my son, who is getting into animation, was asking me how they got digital VFX onto film in the olden days. The answer is through the use of a “film recorder,” which is basically a film camera pointed at a CRT. But these were special high-resolution CRTs. They had some that were up to 5k resolution 50 years ago! Who knew?
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