Trinitron

~ the last words ~

Trinitron was a price tier before it was a technology to me. In Turkish shops through the nineties the Sony sets sat at the top of the wall, and the word printed on the glass did not read as an engineering claim to anyone my age. it read as the explanation for the number on the tag. I learned what it actually described years later, and by then the tell was already familiar.

The tell is two faint horizontal lines across the picture. you notice them once and then you cannot stop noticing them. more or less every argument in this grave comes back to those two wires.

Sony announced the thing on 15 april 1968 at a press conference in Tokyo. the research group had hand-built ten prototypes at that point, and the executives on stage promised full production inside six months anyway. The first set was the KV-1310, thirteen inches, in Japanese stores that October, which means somebody made good on the promise.

Color tubes before it worked with a shadow mask, a thin metal sheet drilled with holes that stopped something like 85 percent of the electron beam before it reached the phosphor. Trinitron threw the sheet away and used an aperture grille instead: vertical wires with open gaps between them, losing closer to 25 percent. one gun with three cathodes did the job three separate guns had been doing. the picture was brighter and it stayed converged, and the cost was that the grille wires needed damping, so a support wire or two ran horizontally across the front of every screen for the next forty years.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Sony took an Emmy for the tube in 1973, which was odd at the time because that award had mostly gone to programs and to people. By 1994 the hundred millionth set had shipped. at the top of the run the factories were turning out twenty million tubes a year, and by then the name had climbed off the television entirely and attached itself to computer monitors, where the whole professional argument about color accuracy was really an argument about whose aperture grille you had bought.

The patent ran out in 1996 after twenty years and Mitsubishi shipped the same idea under the name Diamondtron. that is normally where a brand's pricing power ends. Trinitron kept charging more for another decade regardless, which tells you the word had stopped describing a specification and started describing a default.

~ the fall ~

What killed it was not a better tube. LCD panels in the late nineties were worse than a Trinitron at nearly everything you would put on a spec sheet, and they won anyway, because a picture tube is fundamentally a large glass vacuum vessel with a gun at the back. a big CRT television was a two-person object that took half a room's depth. flat panels were worse and thin, and thin turned out to be the only feature being voted on.

Sony's answer was the WEGA line and then FD Trinitron, which put a genuinely flat front on the tube and used computer-controlled focus feedback to hold sharpness across it. It was very good work. it was also the last argument the format had, and it arrived while the shelves were already being cleared for something with a different shape.

~ the long tail ~

Production ended in pieces rather than all at once. The Japanese plants stopped in 2004 and sales in the United States and Canada ended in 2006. Singapore kept going until march 2008, feeding buyers in India and in parts of South America where a heavy inexpensive television was still the correct product.

Roughly 280 million units, which is a number nobody will put next to a display brand again. the part that stays with me is not the count though. for most of four decades the correct answer to what television should i buy was a brand name rather than a model number, and there has not been an answer that simple since. these days the aperture grille survives mostly in how people talk about old monitors, and a working GDM-FW900 reportedly sells for more than it cost new, which is not a thing that happens to televisions.

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