Heard a guy at the parts counter say 'they dont make em like they used to' about a 1980s Sony Trinitron.

I was picking up a flyback transformer at the local electronics shop in Portland yesterday, and this older fella was holding a Trinitron board, shaking his head. He talked about how those old sets had individual adjustments for every single color gun, not like these modern boards that just swap out whole modules. Has the trade lost something with all these sealed boards and surface-mount components?

3 comments

3 Comments

harperg7615d ago

NO WAY. They really adjusted each color gun individually back then?

adam_patel15d ago

Oh man yeah that was a whole thing. My dad had this late 70s Sony Trinitron and he'd spend half a Sunday with the service manual just tweaking the red green and blue guns until the skin tones looked right. Such a pain but the picture was gorgeous when it was dialed in.

leo_fisher15d ago

Actually I'm gonna push back on that. I had one of those Trinitrons and honestly the whole "tuning the guns" thing was WAY overblown by the old school guys. They acted like it was some sacred ritual but really you could just set all three to mid range and it looked fine for 99% of shows. People were watching scrambled HBO and local news not calibrating a studio monitor you know? Plus all that tweaking probably just wore out the tube faster. I think the whole mystique around those old CRTs is just nostalgia talking. A modern $200 LCD with factory settings beats those things in every way and you don't have to mess with magnets and convergence strips.