Reading Time: 7 mins read. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter. Are CRTs heavy? Tags: crt tv smash. Share Tweet Pin Previous Post Is Alice in Wonderland suitable for a 6 year old? Related Posts. Can Arceus beat Mewtwo? Is it worth buying Battlefield 4 in ? Is there a mew 3 Pokemon? Next Post. Discussion about this post. Trending Comments Latest. Who is the weakest avenger? Rear-projection TVs actually date all the way back to the s , when it was tough to manufacture traditional TVs that measured over 12 inches, but these TVs were only made for a few years before traditional TVs were able to be made larger.
Still, cathode ray tube CRT TVs had their limitations, as the tech maxed out at around 36 to 40 inches. Starting with a three-inch screen in , TV screens gradually got bigger and bigger over the decades to come, but in the s, this reached a fever pitch as basic cable began to enter more and more homes. Previously, Simon says that people might go to a theater to watch a boxing match with Muhammad Ali on a closed-circuit TV signal , but once they could get that in their homes, they wanted a big screen to help replicate the experience.
These big screens came about in a few different ways. There were regular projection TVs, where a projector would be housed in a coffee-table like structure on the floor and others where a front-reflected projection would hit the screen via a mirror in an open drawer.
Over time, though, the rear-projection TVs would prove to be more popular, most likely because they were more self-contained. Because of their prohibitive cost, Simon says that big-screen TVs mostly remained a luxury item, purchased by trendsetters like Hugh Hefner and sports bars that were buying them to attract customers.
He also says that, in the early s, one of the selling points of the Paley Center — then called The Museum of Broadcasting — was that you could watch television on these big screens. It has almost an equal number in storage. The company carefully preserves original, untouched cabinets for games like Centipede and Tetris.
Arcades generally have in-house teams of employees with varying levels of expertise. They initially repaired machines themselves, until finally hiring a full-time technician. Barcade employs two dedicated repair specialists, and a number of other staff can do some work on the machines.
These places may eventually have to start installing LCD monitors in cabinets, and the results might not be disastrous. Not all arcades are so dependent on CRTs, either. A wave of indie game developers have designed a host of cabinet-based games with modern displays, ranging from weird, arty experiments to traditional-looking two-player boxes.
Barcade, for one, will hold onto CRTs as long as possible — and Kermizian thinks that will be a while. And paradoxically, he says fear of an impending shortage could free up more tubes, as some competitors preemptively adopt LCD displays to get ahead of the curve. Not for us, anyway. But what if an artist has turned a mass-market television set into something truly one-of-a-kind and that television set is about to wear out?
This is the question that Chi-Tien Lui has built his life around, and one that few people are so well equipped to answer. When Lui started CTL Electronics in , he and his customers were working in the vanguard of film and video.
He had learned to fix TVs as a teenager in Taiwan, and he came to America working as an electrician in the merchant marines. He opened his shop just after Sony released its first Portapak system, a comparatively tiny video camera that attracted artists like Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik, the Korean-born father of video art.
Paik and others came to CTL for help with their work, and as their installations aged, shaping the future of media became less important than preserving its past. CRTs are tough pieces of hardware, but as they age, plenty of things can go wrong. The electron gun can weaken, giving screens a dim, yellowish tinge. An electrical transformer can blow out. The phosphor can burn away unevenly, leaving permanent, ghostly outlines of images behind.
Lui works with a German engineer who helps refurbish tubes — by installing a new electron gun to fix yellowing, for example. Much of his work involves sifting through the vast but shrinking pool of CRT detritus.
He scours eBay for old TVs and parts, snapping them up in bulk, and hopes that most of them will work when they arrive. He gestures toward a sizable Sony Trinitron, one of his prize finds. Certain TVs, everybody wanted to grab. Getting rid of the broken or unwanted CRTs, though, is a nightmare.
The tubes contain toxic metals that could leach into a dump site, and 18 states specifically ban sending them to landfills. When CRTs were still being made, that was a useful resource, but recyclers have struggled to find other uses. Companies could once export the tubes abroad, but as LCDs become more commonplace, CRTs are becoming less and less attractive. A lawsuit last year targeted a former partner of Recycletronics, which kept a staggering million pounds of glass in two Ohio warehouses.
A EPA-commissioned report estimated that over million CRT televisions not counting computer monitors had been sold in the US since ; the average CRT was used for 11 years and kept in storage long after that.
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