More people should watch Star Trek. - General Discussion Discussion

I just watched an episode yesterday, and for the sake of nostalgia, I watched it on my 19" Sears CRT TV that I've had since Christmas of 1988. I watched the "Who Mourns for Adonais?" episode, which has a little extra nostalgia for me because when I was a freshman in high school (1989-90) one of the teachers had us watch it in a class that was covering Greek mythology.

I'd already seen a lot of episodes at home by that point in time (they showed them every weeknight at 5:00 on channel 7 for several years), but that was the first time I'd seen that particular one, and I found the idea that the Greek/Roman gods were actually ancient astronauts fascinating.

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[–] samoanjoes (51179) 10 days ago

I'm assuming you've tinkered with a few of the TV's insides so ensure it still works after all these years.

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[–] MaximRecoil (4087) 10 days ago

Yeah, I had to fix that 19" Sears TV last fall, because when I turned it on for the first time in several years it immediately blew one of its two internal fuses. The first thing I did was replace all of the electrolytic capacitors (which is a good idea with old electronics even if they are working okay), but that didn't fix it. Then I replaced various other components such as the regulator, the horizontal output transistor, and the flyback transformer, but that didn't fix it either.

Then I remembered that I'd forgotten to resolder the yoke header pins on the chassis when I replaced the capacitors, something I like to do because they are under a lot of stress and I've had problems with them in other CRTs before. These ones looked okay (I've seen some of them that were visibly cracked), but I desoldered and resoldered them anyway, and that fixed the problem. Well, after about 6 months of working fine, it blew a fuse again, but I think it was because it was a fast-blow fuse and it probably calls for a slow-blow. It definitely wasn't blowing fuses every time like before at least.

In any case, about a week ago, in an effort to save myself from potential future hassles of lugging that not-exactly-light TV downstairs and taking it apart again just to replace a fuse, I replaced both of its fuses with circuit breakers connected to wires that I soldered to the end caps of blown fuses and inserted them into the fuse holders, which allowed me to have the circuit breakers on the outside of the TV (in the back where you can't normally see them):

https://i.imgur.com/adZgoPk.jpg

It hasn't tripped either of the circuit breakers yet, but if it does, it will be no hassle at all to reset them, nor will I have to buy any more fuses.

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[–] samoanjoes (51179) 10 days ago

I miss CRT's so much. Sure they were only 480i, sure they were 300 pounds, sure we could see the lines on screen, sure the audio was mono, sure they weren't flat screen, but I miss when the stuff I watched didn't have a "live" look.

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[–] MaximRecoil (4087) 10 days ago

Most of those things are true for the most common makes/models of CRT TVs during their heyday (though only the biggest ones, e.g., 36" and up, weighed 300 pounds or more), but there were plenty of exceptions to all of them. Some of them made in the late 1990s / early 2000s had flat screens and were 1080i, with an HDMI port no less. I have a friend in Montana who has one of those, made by Panasonic. Most, if not all, of those were stereo too, but stereo CRT TVs were fairly common by the late 1980s. The family across the street when I was a kid had a 20" stereo one that they got in '86 or '87.

My main CRT TV (32") is stereo too, but it's garbage like nearly all built-in TV sound systems. I don't use its built-in audio. Instead I use Logitech Z623 2.1 PC speakers with it. My 19" Sears TV in my bedroom is mono but I don't use its built-in audio either, especially since lately it makes a constant high-pitched sound. I haven't bothered to try to fix it because I use Logitech Z-340 2.1 PC speakers with it, the same make/model that I've used with my main PC for the past 23 years.

I would miss CRTs too if I didn't have a ton of them. I have about 30 of them in various forms (TVs, computer monitors, and arcade monitors). There are 6 of them in the room I'm sitting in right now: my main PC monitor (22"), my backup PC monitor (17"), the arcade monitor in my Atari Missile Command machine (19"), two arcade monitors in my Nintendo Super Punch-Out machine (19"), and my main TV (32").

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[–] samoanjoes (51179) 10 days ago

I didn't know that. I always hear people say that 2005 is considered the first year of high definition TV's. I don't recall ever seeing a 1080i TV in the early 2000s.

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[–] MaximRecoil (4087) 10 days ago

HDTVs existed in the early 1990s in Japan, along with an HD home video format (a 1035i version of LaserDisc):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc#MUSE_LD

The 1994 Winter Olympics were broadcast in HD by NHK in Japan, for example:

https://youtu.be/63flkf3S1bE

The first HDTVs on the market in the US, along with the first US HDTV broadcasts, were in 1998:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television_in_the_United_States#Proposals_and_introduction

And here's an example of a 1080i CRT TV, like my friend in Montana has:

https://youtu.be/MXBaqYSHjsY

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[–] samoanjoes (51179) 9 days ago

Okay I get it, Japan is awesome. Crazy to think they did this before it was the norm for households to have wireless internet.

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[–] MaximRecoil (4087) 9 days ago

Yeah, Japan's first HDTV broadcasting standard actually dates back to the early 1980s:

Original HD specifications date back to the early 1980s, when Japan developed the HighVision 1125-line TV standard (also called MUSE) that ran at 30 frames per second (frame/s or fps). Japan presented their standard at an international meeting of television engineers in Algiers in 1981 and Japan's NHK presented its analog HDTV system at Swiss conference in 1983.

I like plain old 4:3 480i (AKA: ~15 KHz) CRT TVs for watching my favorite TV shows (all of which are decades old) and playing classic video games (e.g., Atari 2600, NES, SNES) on though, because that's how they were originally meant to be seen and that's what looks right to me.

All of my arcade machines have their original, or an equivalent of their original, ~15 KHz RGB CRT monitors. Like classic video game consoles, my arcade machines (which range from the early '80s to early '90s) don't output 480i, but rather, ~240p. 480i and 240p are both ~15 KHz, so a ~15 KHz CRT doesn't "care" either way; it will happily sync to either one. I believe that the first video game console that was 480i by default was the Sega Dreamcast, but it also had a 240p mode as well as a 480p (~31 KHz, AKA: "VGA") mode.

For Hollywood movies I use a 1080p DLP projector along with Blu-ray or other forms of high-bitrate 1080p video files, because, again, a projector is how those were originally meant to be seen, and that's what looks right to me.

So I have no use for HD CRTs, except in the form of computer monitors like the one I'm using right now.

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[–] samoanjoes (51179) 9 days ago

I follow a lot of 80s and 80s nostalgia accounts on Instagram, and I just love seeing someone post a photo of a CRT TV displaying a VHS movie on it. Part of me would love to see it in person again, but part of me wonders how we were able to watch it.

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[–] MaximRecoil (4087) 9 days ago

As far as SD media goes, I prefer DVD to VHS, since a DVD can max out the quality potential of a ~15 KHz CRT, and a VHS tape can't. Even the cheapest CRTs can be capable of surprisingly good picture quality if they're still working properly.

For example, this is a picture I took of the screen of a cheap 12" B&W TV made in 1984 (same as this one, but not as beat up - https://i.imgur.com/NAHjLN9.jpg), the kind that sold for around $60 new and could be found at yard sales for about $5, even in the 1980s when they were still fairly new:

https://i.imgur.com/4QbGKmY.png

That's from an episode of The Twilight Zone. The source is a DVD-quality file playing from a flash drive on my Blu-ray player, outputting over composite to an RF modulator, which in turn is sending an RF signal over 75-ohm coaxial cable to a 75-to-300 ohm balun connected to the 300-ohm twin-lead antenna screw terminals on the back of the TV (which is the TV's only input).

Sometimes I play VHS tapes for the sake of nostalgia, but I usually prefer to have the best quality that my CRT TVs can deliver.

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[–] samoanjoes (51179) 9 days ago

Considering that's a photo from off a TV, the image looks pretty good.

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[–] MaximRecoil (4087) 9 days ago

Yeah, the idea that CRT TVs were "blurry" or "fuzzy" is a myth. Some of them could be that way due to factors like the focus pot on the flyback transformer being out of adjustment, failing components on the chassis, poor reception, low-quality video source (such as a cheap VCR with dirty heads and/or a cheap or well-worn tape and/or a tape recorded at less than the fastest [highest quality] recording speed, which a lot of people did because that's how you get 6 hours of recording time out of those "6-hour" T120 tapes), poor quality cable and/or poor connection between the cable and jacks, and so on.

For example, someone in another thread said, in reference to VHS:

We were also watching on the old tube tvs and it was all we had so we accepted it. I recall in the late 2000’s this guy I knew was watching a DVD on an old tube tv and he was complaining as he didn’t see what the big deal was all about.

There's a big difference between DVD and typical VHS on an "old tube TV" even when using the lowest quality connection (RF, which is the connection I used with that 12" B&W TV since it has no other option), so either something was wrong with the guy he knew's setup or something was wrong with his eyesight (or maybe both).