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

As one of my last monitors before LCDs took over, I had a 21-inch Sun, and boy was that sucker heavy (>30 kgs (>65 lbs)):

* https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...

* https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...

* https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...

I had that model too, acquired back when university classrooms were ditching them in favor of their first slimmer LCDs. I let it go during a move, and have missed it ever since.

All this old SGI and SUN equipment was super cool. It was all before my time but it was all super high end and really well built.

that looks a heck of a lot like a rebranded Trinitron. (I bought a super nice Sony Trinitron from BestBuy in fall 1994 to get a better screen for a second hand Sparcstation 1+ i had.)

all the sun displays were built by Sony afaik, so you're probably not far off.

I had a 21” Viewsonic in the late 90s, with an enormous (for the time) 1600x1200 resolution. It weighed around 60 pounds. My desk sagged in the middle from the weight of the monitor.

A neighbor gave me his aging Apple ColorSync 850 back around 1999/2000 - https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/applevision_colorsync/sp...

67.4 lbs, but 20" and 1600x1200, which was incredible 25 years ago. It was by far the best monitor of my friend group, despite the heft.

It took a long time to find an LCD to replace it with.

I had something similar, though it was maybe a Trinitron? The glass was also flat. It was a long, long time until it felt worth it to “upgrade” to an LCD screen.

Yeah the 21" sun monitors we had in school were trinitron. I remember they were heavy for a 21" monitor (shielding?) and the degaussing on startup would induct into an adjacent monitor. (I was a sysadmin for a Sun heavy CS department in the 90's.)

Wow. Just that image of the monitor brings back memories of reading Mac magazine because they used that same example pictures on all their ads.

I threw out a 17" Trinitron last year. It had outlived all of the flatscreens bought to replace it and was still working, but after ~23 years the plastic casing was dangerously brittle. It left a trail of little bits of broken plastic all the way to the dumpster.

Early LCDs had that dumb dead pixel thing too, which made the upgrade from CRT risky.

Modern screen may have the issue too, but pixels are so small I probably wouldn’t notice.

Nowadays you get dead lines, like blue or red, and with high resolution it's generally liveable unless you're super sensitive. I'm fairly intolerant and had a Samsung with a blue line, but didn't bother me much.

Yup, I had that one too.

I'm pretty sure Trinitrons are always heavier than other monitors of equivalent size because of the aperture grill design. It let's more light pass through, making them brighter, but boy do they get stupid heavy as the size increases.

This was my last CRT too. I bought mine from the local university's sale of scrap goods, a few months after spending $350 on a 19" LCD which paled in comparison.

I had three of them on a cheap plywood desk - that I had just picked up for nothing from the kerb outside a brokerage who were switching to LCDs. They were great, and I loved them.

The desk, not so much, it ended up, uh, ergonomic.

Yeah same here, bought cheap used 21" from some design studio around 2002 i think. Barely fit keyboard on campus desk in front of it, but Counter strike while smoking some weed was very absorbing.

One of benefits of CRT was they flawlessly handled lower resolutions in a way impossible for LCDs. Very much required for the hardware of that era.

An older guy at my first serious job bought himself a 21" to use at work, the weight was incredible.

Haha AppleVision

I think we had one of those in the Remote Sensing Lab at my university. You could fit an entire Civilisation 1 map on screen without having to scroll vertically (you still had to scroll horizontally - natch).

Yes, the aperture grille (hundreds of wires and a metal frame holding them in tension) is itself heavier than a traditional shadow mask.

However, aperture grilles also use differently-shaped glass from shadow masks. The screens are only curved horizontally like a cylinder rather than on both axes like a sphere. This requires thicker, heavier glass to hold the vacuum.

Later flat-glass shadow-mask tubes were much closer in weight to flat Trinitrons.

Yes though their displays were generally OEM.

In fact I'm pretty sure that Sun, SGI and HP all used the same OEM. They were really nice Trinitron displays though and this meant they were well interchangeable too. Which was great because by PC standard they used a weird DB25 with 3 composite RGB connector and sync on green iirc.

There's a dead pixel on my 4k monitor. It's so small that I think it's just a speck of dust, if I notice it at all.

The trinitrons were great, but way beyond my budget at the time. I seem to remember at work we had a nice Trinitron with a flat screen that had 13w3 and vga inputs. IIRC, it was bought as a "budget" monitor for a Sun workstation, but was still like twice as much as my Viewsonic.

I don't believe dead lines are a common problem with modern displays. I would certainly return one if it had a dead line.

SGI also used rebranded Trinitrons. My first job out of college I had an Indy with a giant (for the time) Trinitron on top of it. Don't remember the exact size except that it was bigger than 17", so probably 19" or 21".

Yup! I had 2 x SUN GDM-20E20 hooked up to my desktop in 1990-something. They were Sony screens and they were so clear & bright. They weighed a ton however and even broke a cheap desk I had.

> before LCDs took over, I had a 21-inch Sun, and boy was that sucker heavy

You should have seen Apollo 19" CRTs.

so was I, and HP and AIX a bit too (Urbana-Champaign college of engineering, for a couple years)