I have a 17 inch mv700 compaq, 10 years old this october. I absolutely love it. The slow time I took to get into dense videos is just happening this year. I decided to clean up the inside of the monitor.

Ewww.

It was so dirty it changed the electric bill. the mv700 Always very good in that respect, another reason to clean. CRT has a mystery and can challenge green computing. the .23 micron board is a long lasting one...and tough enough for some direct shots of 409 oven cleaner. Back to normal....

Worth mentioning as the crts built correct for the win98 machines (acpi- 98\) will run a very very long time to come..phyisics will sneak up over years and affect consumption.

Let me guess. You write Linux documentaiton for a living?

I can't stand how it's so hard to find a good crt these days. I Would do anything for a quality widescreen crt monitor, or a Trinitron of any sort.

A few years ago I bought a pair of IBM P260s. They are 22" (20" viewable) flat screen Trinitron CRTs. They could display 1600x1200 in a way you could use all day, the first monitor I had that could. I got them off eBay for £60 for both! There are still lots of large CRTs out there to be had for next to nothing as no one wants them anymore and the big ones are so big few people have the room for them. Sadly I managed to get water in one of them while watering the plants and it no longer works ï

Ummm, I don't think a widescreen CRT is really feasible. I think there's some sort of technical restrictions on the actual diagonal length of a CRT, due to how it has to bend the ions that are fired or whatever it does exactly. So, a CRT that's as close to square would probably have the most surface area, or the least weight per size.

So... because of that, I think the closest practical concept to a widescreen CRT would be two 8:9 aspect ratio CRT's side by side. This would at least give you more surface area. I'm terrible with trig, but I'm pretty sure an 8:9 aspect ratio 20"(viewable area) monitor would have a bit more space than a 4:3 20" one, and a lot more than a 16:9 one. And if you had two of those, you'd have the equivalent of almost a 28 inch viewable area monitor.

I've heard that a long time ago, there were these arcade game machines that had multiple monitors, and used these arrangements of mirrors to combine them into one viewable area. Maybe could be used to make a very nice 30" widescreen CRT. Would be extremely heavy though.

Sony had a few widescreen Trinitrons if I remember correctly.

I'm a LCD guy myself though. Got a Dell 2405FPW and don't miss my old Sony G420 one bit.

Sony definitely had some widescreen (16x9) HD CRT TV's, as did a few other companies.

Wide screen CRTs certainly do exist: I have one -- 24", runs at 1600x1024. It works fine at 1900x1200, but it is less clear. Yes, it uses a Sony tube, though it wears a Compaq label.

I have a Samsung 275T 27" LCD and my Siny G420S 19" Trinitron sits right next to it in daily use. They both have advantages. I like the screen space/resolution ratio on the LCD but oh if it only had the colour saturation, contrast and overall sharpness of the CRT.

A 27" widescreen Trinitron type CRT @ 1920x1200 would be ideal but I fear prohibitively expensive. I have seen a Sony widescreen CRT TV and the display is gorgeous! Untouchable by LCD or Plasma.

I've never seen a consumer CRT larger than 24". There may have been some bigger IBMs -- I don't recall -- but those were in the multiple thousands of dollars.

My 24" one cost $80, well-used of course, but fine otherwise.

My father-in-law has a 38" Loewe HDTV (not a PC monitor, but still). The only restriction of width was the ratio to the depth of the monitor. To have a large widescreen, you needed a longer gun path, and hence a deeper monitor.

NEC made 27" and 32" display monitors for presentation type use in displays and boardrooms but they were quite pricey, and not as high a resolution as their smaller siblings.

Yep. the big screen CRT's are quite deep with an appropriate rise in weight as well.

Everyone knows that Dell makes cheap monitors, but they also have really freaking nice versions of pretty much ever size they produce. If you've been loyal to a CRT for a long time I recommend you check out the high quality versions of Dell's line of LCDs.

Don't just buy the cheapest one, they're pretty poor. But their top of the line models (at least 20-30" ones that I've looked at) are pretty amazing.


Btw, how much power does a CRT use versus a same size LCD?

My old 21" CRT averaged 115 watts and maxed out at 130 watts or so at maximum brightness and still pulled 90 watts at minimum brightness and a black image displayed full screen. My several year old 21.3" LCD panel at maximum brighness pulls 47 watts regardless of what is displayed on the screen. The LCD thus works out to about 40% as much power draw per square inch. LED-backlit LCD displays are supposed to draw even less power, but at a little higher cost. Pure LED displays draw less power still, but are MANY more years down the road. Still, the potential exists that a 24" widescreen 10 years from now with pure LED technology would pull only 15-20 watts.

The last CRT monitor I saw had a black screen that was easily noticeable in a dark room. It was a old DELL CRT. I didn't have a LCD nearby to do a direct comparison but for me the picture seemed worse than the one at home on a Samsung LCD. And of course my eyes got tired more quickly. I did try to adjust the settings in the menu but the sharpness and colors were just not there. So I think it's not really accurate to make such generalizations. It really depends on the models you compare. Electronic components do deteriorate over time (specially capacitors) and they haven't manufactured CRT-s for a long time.

http://www.digitalversus.com/article-985.html



Strangely their product face-off page has a Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 930SB with much better results

http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.php? ... 5966&ph=13

But still they have LCDs in their database with better results.

Lately I took my last crt, a 19" model, to our local recycling center. They told me that nobody will want it, so it was discarded. And they are right, there just is no point to get a crt nowadays (apart the occasional exception, like always).

Remember crts even had their size reported wrong - my so called 19" had a real viewing area of about 18".

True blacks are something I miss and the input lag issue is ridiculous, but the benefits far outweight the cons. Oh, backlight voltage regulator buzz is annoying too...

I'd like to see oled or sed or some other new tech become mainstream though.