The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

So what were “big screen TVs” (which my family never owned) that appeared in movies and tv? I feel like they looked more lightweight than this so I’m assuming they were like Plasma screens? Or maybe that technology was after the pop culture I’m referring to

Rear projection

They were projection TV's. Both front, or rear projection.

Late in the 90s we had a 27” CRT. That was absolutely sold as a big screen. I don’t think you could get much bigger.

Past that you had projection TVs. They could get way bigger but the picture was also dimmer and perhaps not as sharp? I only remember being around one a few times, we never had one.

Rear projection TVs were a neat party trick, but I always liked either a projector or screen, or just using a smaller CRT. Even the cheaper sets would give a brighter (and usually slightly sharper) image than even the nicer rear-projection TVs in that era.

They were projection TVs, that typically had three small CRTs (red, green, blue) with lenses that projected the image either onto the screen from the back (rear projection) or bounced off a mirror from the front(front projection).

Color plasma screens did not become a real thing until the early 2000s or so.

Typically there was a projector in the bottom that pointed up at a mirror. The mirror was mounted at a 45 degree angle and pointed at a screen consisting of a giant Fresnel lens and another piece of plastic.

CRT TVs up to 36” were widely available (although expensive) in the 90s. Projection sets usually started at 42 or 43”.

My impression is that projection TVs reflect/diffuse even more of ambient light than regular CRTs, making black areas of the image look gray (regular CRTs already reflect more light than LCD-like monitors, though CRTs could be tinted to improve contrast at the cost of brightness).

For big screen projected analog sources (aka, a video signal rather than film) there was this amazing piece of tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor

A mirror coated in a thin layer of oil that is deformed by electrostatic charges.

> Late in the 90s we had a 27” CRT. That was absolutely sold as a big screen. I don’t think you could get much bigger.

CRTs were 4:3 aspect ratio. I remember that a 19" CRT was about the same size as a 21" LCD with 16:9 aspect ratio.

Height, it was same height until you rotated LCD killing this nonsense argument :)