WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.110 --> 00:00:05.810 In 1960, the fledgling Sony company in Japan decided to get into the television business. 00:00:05.810 --> 00:00:10.539 Their first foray into television was a remarkable achievement in and of itself, being the first 00:00:10.539 --> 00:00:12.950 completely transistorized television. 00:00:12.950 --> 00:00:17.680 The TV8-301 wasn’t really a commercial hit, but it was a technical feat. 00:00:17.680 --> 00:00:22.280 And just a year later, Sony’s dealers were putting pressure on them to develop a color TV 00:00:22.460 --> 00:00:27.370 Sony was understandably reluctant as color TV sales at the time were abysmal in Japan, 00:00:27.370 --> 00:00:31.380 but the sales department managed to exert sufficient pressure on the engineering department 00:00:31.380 --> 00:00:33.160 to actually start work. 00:00:33.160 --> 00:00:39.210 Sony’s visit to the 1961 IEEE trade show resulted in a glimpse of the Autometric company’s 00:00:39.210 --> 00:00:40.250 Chromatron tube. 00:00:40.250 --> 00:00:44.080 This picture tube worked in a completely different fashion than the shadow mask picture tubes 00:00:44.080 --> 00:00:45.520 of the time. 00:00:45.520 --> 00:00:49.660 Rather than use three electron guns and a matrix of holes to create the separation like 00:00:49.660 --> 00:00:54.101 the standard shadow mask picture tube did, the Chromatron used a single electron gun 00:00:54.101 --> 00:00:59.040 combined with a vertical grille of electrically charged wires at the front of the tube. 00:00:59.040 --> 00:01:03.329 In essence, the Chromatron relied heavily on electronics to focus the electron beam 00:01:03.329 --> 00:01:04.940 onto the correct color. 00:01:04.940 --> 00:01:09.010 The beam was normally focused onto the vertical green phosphor stripes present at the front 00:01:09.010 --> 00:01:10.030 of the screen. 00:01:10.030 --> 00:01:13.970 But the deflecting wires, placed about a half inch behind the phosphors, could push the 00:01:13.970 --> 00:01:17.540 beam to either side, and light up the adjacent phosphor stripe. 00:01:17.540 --> 00:01:21.350 The pattern of these phosphor stripes on a Chromatron tube, sometimes called a Lawrence 00:01:21.350 --> 00:01:24.869 tube, were arranged as RGB - BGR. 00:01:24.869 --> 00:01:28.150 This was necessary due to the way the deflecting wires worked. 00:01:28.150 --> 00:01:31.090 Without a charge, the beam wouldn’t be a tightly focused and would light all three 00:01:31.090 --> 00:01:32.689 phosphors together. 00:01:32.689 --> 00:01:36.990 But by placing a charge between pairs of wires, you would get both a tighter beam and the 00:01:36.990 --> 00:01:40.690 ability to push it left and right to control the alternate colors. 00:01:40.690 --> 00:01:45.200 Placing a single green stripe between two reds and two blues made this easier to accomplish, 00:01:45.200 --> 00:01:48.979 as the direction the beam was pulled would reverse as it crossed each pair of deflection 00:01:48.979 --> 00:01:52.830 wires, as their individual voltage potential remained constant. 00:01:52.830 --> 00:01:57.729 Using an RGB-RGB pattern would require constantly reversing the wire grid’s charge, which 00:01:57.729 --> 00:02:00.770 would be a nightmare with the electronics of the time. 00:02:00.770 --> 00:02:04.700 Already there was a lot of added complexity, as with a single electron beam, it needed 00:02:04.700 --> 00:02:08.920 to be precisely modulated when producing a color image to ensure it fired with the correct 00:02:08.920 --> 00:02:13.050 intensity as it repeatedly changed what color component it was illuminating. 00:02:13.050 --> 00:02:17.140 The huge advantage of this chromatron tube was a much brighter picture than conventional 00:02:17.140 --> 00:02:19.200 tubes using a shadow mask. 00:02:19.200 --> 00:02:23.760 Even though it used just one electron gun, none of the beam’s energy was lost with 00:02:23.760 --> 00:02:27.270 this system, as all of it passed through the focusing wires. 00:02:27.270 --> 00:02:31.500 The Chromatron also benefited from minimal required convergence tweaking. 00:02:31.500 --> 00:02:35.110 This made the Chromatron tube much easier to configure in the factory, and less likely 00:02:35.110 --> 00:02:38.890 to experience convergence problems requiring adjustment over time. 00:02:38.890 --> 00:02:43.550 Remember, this was only seven years after the first color television was mass produced, 00:02:43.550 --> 00:02:48.800 so we’re dealing with brand new technologies with patents and licensing to go along with them. 00:02:48.800 --> 00:02:52.819 Sony saw both the better picture results of this tube and the possibility to skirt around 00:02:52.819 --> 00:02:56.800 licensing costs and leapt at the chance to take over the project. 00:02:56.800 --> 00:03:01.550 Sony bought the entire Autometric operation from Paramount Pictures, who was behind it. 00:03:01.550 --> 00:03:05.220 But they’d soon discover that while the Chromatron tube was a fabulous device once 00:03:05.220 --> 00:03:08.680 built, it was a veritable pain in the ass to produce. 00:03:08.680 --> 00:03:13.700 It took until 1964 for the first Chromatron television to actually be mass produced. 00:03:13.700 --> 00:03:16.120 And Sony sold each one at a loss. 00:03:16.120 --> 00:03:22.620 They were put on the market for a reasonable 198,000 Yen, but cost 400,000 Yen to build. 00:03:22.620 --> 00:03:26.640 That’s obviously not sustainable, but Sony had faith that if they just stuck with it, 00:03:26.640 --> 00:03:30.550 they could get the manufacturing costs down by perfecting the process as the production 00:03:30.550 --> 00:03:31.550 line matured. 00:03:31.550 --> 00:03:32.550 Well, they couldn’t. 00:03:32.550 --> 00:03:33.580 It continued to be a nightmare. 00:03:33.580 --> 00:03:38.909 So in 1966 Masaru Ibuka, Sony’s president and co-founder, led the way to find a replacement 00:03:38.909 --> 00:03:40.340 for the Chromatron. 00:03:40.340 --> 00:03:44.319 Part of the reason was that General Electric’s Porta-Color TVs had introduced an improved 00:03:44.319 --> 00:03:48.170 shadow mask design and new arrangement of electron guns. 00:03:48.170 --> 00:03:52.220 These picture tubes moved the electron guns from a triangle arrangement to an in-line 00:03:52.220 --> 00:03:56.580 arrangement, and shifted from the dot-pattern of the original CRT designs to the vertical 00:03:56.580 --> 00:03:58.730 triad design you see here. 00:03:58.730 --> 00:04:02.680 The result was a much brighter picture that was close to what the Chromatron was producing, 00:04:02.680 --> 00:04:08.040 and also eliminated many of the convergence problems conventional shadow mask tubes suffered from. 00:04:08.080 --> 00:04:12.180 So now Sony was stuck with a money-losing product that wasn’t that much better than 00:04:12.180 --> 00:04:13.310 the competition. 00:04:13.310 --> 00:04:17.159 The engineers at Sony would alter some of the ideas from the Portacolor and merge them 00:04:17.159 --> 00:04:19.239 with the Chromatron’s design. 00:04:19.239 --> 00:04:24.629 Susumu Yoshida asked engineer Senri Miyaoka if the three in-line electron guns could be 00:04:24.629 --> 00:04:29.509 replaced by a single electron gun with three individual cathodes, as this could decrease 00:04:29.509 --> 00:04:31.379 the cost of manufacturing. 00:04:31.379 --> 00:04:32.949 Turns out, yes you could! 00:04:32.949 --> 00:04:36.559 This initially made for focusing challenges, but they were eventually solved. 00:04:36.559 --> 00:04:41.060 The other big development in this new tube was similar to the Chromatron’s wire grille. 00:04:41.060 --> 00:04:45.219 The Chromatron’s electrically charged wires were altered into what’s called an aperture 00:04:45.219 --> 00:04:49.500 grille, which was fundamentally similar but didn’t require an electrical charge. 00:04:49.500 --> 00:04:53.150 The aperture grill was more of a single metal sheet with slits cut vertically through it, 00:04:53.150 --> 00:04:56.349 though it is sometimes still referred to as being made of wires. 00:04:56.349 --> 00:04:59.990 The grille separated the color components by blocking their path much like the shadow 00:04:59.990 --> 00:05:04.139 mask, but kept the vertical phosphor orientation of the chromatron. 00:05:04.139 --> 00:05:08.279 The aperture grill was very simple and very effective, but perhaps most importantly to 00:05:08.279 --> 00:05:11.650 Sony’s pocketbook, was unique enough for it to be patented! 00:05:11.650 --> 00:05:16.039 This new picture tube was called the Trinitron, and it was better than what any of the competition 00:05:16.039 --> 00:05:18.689 were producing by a wide margin. 00:05:18.689 --> 00:05:22.699 Introduced in 1968, these televisions were more expensive than the competition, but were 00:05:22.699 --> 00:05:24.689 universally well received. 00:05:24.689 --> 00:05:29.460 In fact, Sony received an Emmy award in 1973 for the invention of the Trinitron. 00:05:29.460 --> 00:05:31.690 But what made the tube so great? 00:05:31.690 --> 00:05:35.240 Let’s compare a Trinitron tube to a standard shadow mask tube. 00:05:35.240 --> 00:05:39.349 So, when you put a Trinitron display side-by-side with a conventional shadow-mask display, the 00:05:39.349 --> 00:05:41.469 most obvious difference is the shape. 00:05:41.469 --> 00:05:46.430 A Trinitron tube has a distinctive appearance due to the geometry of aperture grille vs. 00:05:46.430 --> 00:05:47.430 the shadow mask. 00:05:47.430 --> 00:05:52.469 A shadow mask tube has a near constant curvature across the face because the angles the three 00:05:52.469 --> 00:05:57.039 electron beams approach at to create the individual Red, Green, and Blue color components need 00:05:57.039 --> 00:05:59.649 to be consistent across the whole face. 00:05:59.649 --> 00:06:03.249 The center of the tube is aligned with the electron guns in the back, but the edges need 00:06:03.249 --> 00:06:07.379 to curve outwards to keep the inside face more or less perpendicular to the source of 00:06:07.379 --> 00:06:08.379 the beam. 00:06:08.379 --> 00:06:11.589 A Trinitron tube, meanwhile, only curves side to side. 00:06:11.589 --> 00:06:15.180 It doesn’t curve vertically, producing a distinctive, cylindrical shape. 00:06:15.180 --> 00:06:17.879 This is actually a requirement of the aperture grille. 00:06:17.879 --> 00:06:21.770 The aperture grille is fundamentally simpler than the shadow mask, as it only needs to 00:06:21.770 --> 00:06:24.529 block the electron beams in the X dimension. 00:06:24.529 --> 00:06:28.649 Three separate beams arranged in a line can be separated with just a slit. 00:06:28.649 --> 00:06:31.150 With the green beam in the center, it can pass straight through. 00:06:31.150 --> 00:06:35.129 But the red and blue beams can only pass through the left, and right, respectively. 00:06:35.129 --> 00:06:38.830 But this arrangement requires the slits in the grill to always be perpendicular with 00:06:38.830 --> 00:06:43.300 respect to the three beams’ linear arrangement, in other words the grille had to always stay 00:06:43.300 --> 00:06:48.280 completely vertical, as any tilt to the left or right could cause cross-over and you’d 00:06:48.280 --> 00:06:49.809 get messed up colors. 00:06:49.809 --> 00:06:53.030 We all know from Ghostbusters that you shouldn’t cross the beams! 00:06:53.030 --> 00:06:57.529 So, Trinitron tubes were designed to only curve in the X dimension, keeping the face 00:06:57.529 --> 00:07:01.840 of the tube perpendicular to the electron gun along its width, and the beam separation 00:07:01.840 --> 00:07:03.819 angle constant along its height. 00:07:03.819 --> 00:07:07.520 The other thing you’ll notice when comparing a Trinitron TV to a conventional one is a 00:07:07.520 --> 00:07:09.909 generally much brighter image. 00:07:09.909 --> 00:07:12.509 This was the signature “big deal” of the Trinitron. 00:07:12.509 --> 00:07:17.729 A shadow mask separates the color components through individual holes in a metal sheet. 00:07:17.729 --> 00:07:21.960 The earliest CRTs using a shadow mask would lose upwards of 80% of the beam’s energy 00:07:21.960 --> 00:07:27.360 to the mask itself, with only a paltry percentage actually making it through to excite the phosphors 00:07:27.360 --> 00:07:29.280 and make the screen glow. 00:07:29.280 --> 00:07:32.249 This was improved over time through the use of the in-line guns and the triad phosphor 00:07:32.249 --> 00:07:35.740 arrangement introduced with the Portacolor, but the beam was still blasting its way through 00:07:35.740 --> 00:07:37.110 tiny slits. 00:07:37.110 --> 00:07:41.169 This required very powerful electron guns, yet still resulted in a dim picture compared 00:07:41.169 --> 00:07:43.289 to conventional black and white TVs. 00:07:43.289 --> 00:07:47.289 The aperture grille, meanwhile, only needs to blocks the beam from left to right to separate 00:07:47.289 --> 00:07:48.860 the color components. 00:07:48.860 --> 00:07:52.779 Vertically there is no separation at all, and this allows much more beam energy to pass 00:07:52.779 --> 00:07:55.069 through it and reach the phosphors. 00:07:55.069 --> 00:07:59.569 This alone made the phosphors glow more intensely, but the tubes were further helped along by 00:07:59.569 --> 00:08:03.639 uninterrupted phosphor stripes rather than individual groupings. 00:08:03.639 --> 00:08:07.080 If you look closely at a Trinitron picture tube, you’ll see continuous lines going 00:08:07.080 --> 00:08:10.879 from top to bottom with no horizontal separation at all. 00:08:10.879 --> 00:08:14.229 When operating you see the stripes broken up, but that’s merely the result of the 00:08:14.229 --> 00:08:17.819 way the image is made via scanning in horizontal lines. 00:08:17.819 --> 00:08:22.169 As I’ve said now on two separate occasions, phosphor groups you see in a conventional 00:08:22.169 --> 00:08:24.360 tube ARE NOT pixels. 00:08:24.360 --> 00:08:28.689 This is analog video we’re talking and any Trinitron display helps to show how this is 00:08:28.689 --> 00:08:32.300 true by only containing stripes of phosphors. 00:08:32.300 --> 00:08:33.479 Now do you understand??? 00:08:33.479 --> 00:08:39.130 Anyway, a conventional tube’s phosphor groupings have black lines above and below each grouping. 00:08:39.130 --> 00:08:42.789 These lines further reduce the image brightness because, well, they don’t glow. 00:08:42.789 --> 00:08:45.060 I mean, that’s fairly obvious now isn’t it? 00:08:45.060 --> 00:08:47.410 But they also cause other problems. 00:08:47.410 --> 00:08:50.980 Conventional color picture tubes would display false patterns, sometimes injecting color 00:08:50.980 --> 00:08:54.910 where it shouldn’t be, when displaying an image with fine patterns. 00:08:54.910 --> 00:08:59.490 This happens when the displayed pattern is misaligned with the phosphor grid. 00:08:59.490 --> 00:09:03.279 Because a Trinitron doesn’t have a phosphor grid, is was less prone to this occurring, 00:09:03.279 --> 00:09:08.569 so in many instances a non-trinitron display would produce a Moire pattern or false color, 00:09:08.569 --> 00:09:10.270 and a Trinitron wouldn’t. 00:09:10.270 --> 00:09:14.470 Perhaps the only downside to the Trinitron tube is a fine stabilization wire needed to 00:09:14.470 --> 00:09:17.180 prevent the aperture grille from vibrating. 00:09:17.180 --> 00:09:21.310 If the tube was exposed to loud sounds, the aperture grille could vibrate and produce 00:09:21.310 --> 00:09:23.600 wild distortions in color. 00:09:23.600 --> 00:09:28.610 The stabilization wire would hold them together and prevent this, but the wire itself is visible. 00:09:28.610 --> 00:09:33.079 On smaller tubes like this only one wire is present, about a third of the way up from 00:09:33.079 --> 00:09:37.149 the bottom, while larger tubes would have a second wire the same distance from the top. 00:09:37.149 --> 00:09:40.819 To be fair, these wires are barely visible, since they are much finer than any of the 00:09:40.819 --> 00:09:46.220 scan lines, but they can be an annoyance when the tube is displaying uniformly bright images. 00:09:46.220 --> 00:09:51.380 In most cases the image displayed would contain enough variation to make the line essentially invisible. 00:09:51.420 --> 00:09:55.019 Now, the fact that this stabilization wire was necessary may explain the Chromatron’s 00:09:55.019 --> 00:09:56.329 ultimate demise. 00:09:56.329 --> 00:10:00.380 The charged wires probably suffered from the same vibration issues, particularly since 00:10:00.380 --> 00:10:02.860 they were so far behind the phosphors. 00:10:02.860 --> 00:10:06.371 And they couldn’t be stabilized as easily as the Trinitron’s aperture grill because 00:10:06.380 --> 00:10:11.060 a wire holding them all together would remove the required voltage differential between pairs. 00:10:11.200 --> 00:10:15.350 I’m willing to bet that the Chromatron would have experienced continually worse problems 00:10:15.350 --> 00:10:19.660 as larger picture tubes were manufactured, and it would have needed even more R&D to 00:10:19.660 --> 00:10:20.660 address it. 00:10:20.660 --> 00:10:24.949 The many advantages of the Trinitron picture tube made Sony the undisputed king of televisions 00:10:24.949 --> 00:10:29.130 (at least from a quality standpoint) for many years, and they were able to charge a premium 00:10:29.130 --> 00:10:32.649 for their televisions which many people were willing to fork over. 00:10:32.649 --> 00:10:36.540 These two TVs show how successfully Sony was with the product. 00:10:36.540 --> 00:10:40.709 These are obviously made many years apart, but the actual picture tube is virtually the 00:10:40.709 --> 00:10:41.709 same. 00:10:41.709 --> 00:10:43.339 It might even have the same part number. 00:10:43.339 --> 00:10:47.090 Sony was able to keep pumping out the same picture tubes, update the cabinets that held 00:10:47.090 --> 00:10:49.910 them and the electronics that drove them, and they’d still be better than what the 00:10:49.910 --> 00:10:51.160 competition offered. 00:10:51.160 --> 00:10:57.040 From 1968 until 1998, any other manufacturer who wanted Trinitron technology in their televisions 00:10:57.040 --> 00:11:01.640 would need to license it from Sony, and Sony was plenty happy with just making the TVs 00:11:01.640 --> 00:11:06.569 themselves and made it difficult to do so, though Apple was notably keen on using Trinitron 00:11:06.569 --> 00:11:08.329 tubes in their early color monitors. 00:11:08.329 --> 00:11:13.050 However, in 1998 the patent for Trinitron expired, allowing the competition to make 00:11:13.050 --> 00:11:16.680 their own Trinitron-like picture tubes without paying royalties to Sony. 00:11:16.680 --> 00:11:21.600 But, the name Trinitron was still a trademark of Sony’s, so they had to fudge the name. 00:11:21.600 --> 00:11:26.050 Most of these new picture tubes would have some sort of Tron in their title, like Mitsubishi’s 00:11:26.050 --> 00:11:27.050 Diamondtron. 00:11:27.050 --> 00:11:29.319 Sony’s timing was pretty good. 00:11:29.319 --> 00:11:34.630 By the time their patent had expired, LCD and Plasma TVs were beginning to take over. 00:11:34.630 --> 00:11:40.269 By the mid 2000’s, CRT displays represented a tiny fraction of televisions sold in mainstream 00:11:40.269 --> 00:11:41.269 markets. 00:11:41.269 --> 00:11:46.000 But for the entire 30 years that Sony held the patent, it was virtually second to none. 00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:49.959 Trinitron remained important for many years, and in some applications is still the preferred 00:11:49.959 --> 00:11:50.970 display device. 00:11:50.970 --> 00:11:54.870 I’ll tell you that for watching standard definition content, nothing beats it, and 00:11:54.870 --> 00:11:58.589 that’s why this TV stays here along with my menagerie of obsolete A/V equipment. 00:11:58.589 --> 00:12:00.390 Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed it. 00:12:00.390 --> 00:12:03.680 If you’re new to this channel, why not hit that Subscribe button? 00:12:03.680 --> 00:12:06.019 And I suppose I should suggest that you also hit the bell? 00:12:06.019 --> 00:12:07.160 I hear that’s important. 00:12:07.160 --> 00:12:10.250 I’d also like to thank all of my Patreon supporters out there. 00:12:10.250 --> 00:12:14.350 Patreon supporters are allowing me to spend less time in a normal job, and more time making 00:12:14.350 --> 00:12:15.399 videos for you. 00:12:15.399 --> 00:12:18.819 If you’re interested in helping out, please check out my Patreon page through the link 00:12:18.819 --> 00:12:20.430 on your screen or down below in the description. 00:12:20.430 --> 00:12:24.380 Thanks for your consideration, and I’ll see you next time.