Tech Legacy - CRT Monitors (Part 21)

It has been a long time since I've used or have seen one of these. What used to be expensive tech has now become expensive rubbish with most having to pay a lot of money to people just to get them to haul one of these away. In an age of LCD and LED monitors the CRT Monitor is rarely used.

The cathode ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube that contains one or more electron guns and a phosphorescent screen, and is used to display images.[1] It modulates, accelerates, and deflects electron beam(s) onto the screen to create the images.

The images may represent electrical waveforms (oscilloscope), pictures (television, computer monitor), radar targets, or other phenomena. CRTs have also been used as memory devices, in which case the visible light emitted from the fluorescent material (if any) is not intended to have significant meaning to a visual observer (though the visible pattern on the tube face may cryptically represent the stored data).

If you look to get rid of a CRT monitor these days you'll need to take it to the dump and I believe it needs to be put in the 'hazardous waste' section as there are harmful components that are considered toxic. After CRT came plasma tvs but they didn't last very long and had many problems, I recall the major one being something called 'burn in' where the screen could be permanently damaged if you leave a static image on it for too long.

Despite being a mainstay of display technology for decades, CRT-based computer monitors and televisions are now virtually a dead technology. Demand for CRT screens dropped precipitously in the last half of the first decade of the 21st century. The rapid advances and falling prices of LCD flat panel technology -- first for computer monitors, and then for televisions -- spelled doom for competing display technologies such as CRT, rear-projection, and plasma display.[46]

I remember owning a slim CRT tv which was expensive at the time. All my friends were very impressed and it was absolutely great for playing video games as it had a huge screen. The only thing that could beat it in size at the time was a projection TV which I remember my friend having in his home. The projection TV just couldn't compete due to its grainy pixelation. Sure it was bigger but was it better? No way!

The CRT Monitor will forever be a part of our technological past as we move towards better technologies like advanced LED components.

Thanks for reading!

Source:

Wikipedia