R.I.P.......the last European CRT factory closes it's door this month.... :(

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R.I.P.......the last European CRT factory closes it's door this month.... :(

http://www.deondernemer.nl/deondernemer/645877/Laatste-beeldbuisfabriek-dicht.html

Here is a Google translated page: http://translate.google.com/transla...7/Laatste-beeldbuisfabriek-dicht.html&act=url

It's about this company: www.crt.nl

They didn't produce CRTs for TVs but for medical and aviation. There were still only 12 people working there (was 120 once...)

It was the LAST CRT factory in Europe and because a German company cancelled an order for airplanes which gave them the final blow.

Interesting is that the head of the company says there will be a market for CRTs the coming 20/30 years. This is because f.i. airliners are operated for decades screens will have to be replaced. He says LCDs are only slowly entering that market, not that that helps us much....

The guy was also interviewed on Dutch radio this morning. He said he was sad for the people working there, but also because it was the end of a craft and said making LCD's is easy and boring, where making CRTs takes skills and knowledge...
However, he also said it would be impossible that CRT manufacturing would ever return because of the parts not being available anymore.

I wonder if there is a sell-out of CRTs.......IMHO the whole factory should turn into a museum....but I guess the machines will be sold to China...and let's just hope they see a niche market there, like what happened with regular "radio" tubes.....
 
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My dad was a manager at an RCA factory manufacturing television picture tubes... hard to believe they'll be no longer produced at all now. :(
 
Time marches on. It sucks, but it's the way of life. Part of that, too, is that the coming generations won't have any appreciation for the old technology.

It reminds me of the old EM pinball machines. When you work on one of those, you see how genius those engineers were back in the day to get that shit to work... most people just shrug though, and go back to the newer machines.

Of course with CRT's, though, you can make a strong argument that they're better than their replacements.
 
I would say they are better, but my crt tv could last 30 years, many lcds already have pcb issues in the power assemblies, the burn in is just as bad, and pixelation just looks shitty. All hail crt!
 
The biggest and most important advantage that CRTs still have today is color. They simply look more natural and show the same colors whichever angle you look at it.
This is why they are STILL in use for color monitoring in TV studios.

I'm talking TV application here, of course this is less of an issue with our games that have only a handful of colors to display.
And indeed I believe CRT TVs and monitors will outlast LCDs by 4 or 5 times. The most common thing to die on LCDs is the back-lighting if they are cold cathode tubes. You won't believe the amount of LCDs being ditched just because of that, a relatively easy and cheap fix...
 
I just had a conversation like this yesterday with an old lady shopping my garage sale. I have about a half a dozen computers up for sale that I scabbed together from spare parts I've collected over the years. 3 of the them have CRT monitors. Some folks glanced right by them, but one lady commented on how nice the picture looked on one of the CRT monitors. "It's a nice monitor picture" she said, pointing to the CRT. Next to it was a 15" Dell LCD that in truth, did NOT look as good as the 17" CRT sitting next to it.

"It's already 15 years older than that LCD, and it'll last twice as much longer than it, too" I told her.
 
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