Skip to content

Comment on The Consumer Electronics Hall Of Fame: Sony Trinitron (2018)parent

Comments

A big Trinitron CRT 27 to 36 inches in size, in good condition, is actually appreciating in market value now due to how many of them have been trashed.

Yeah, not for very much. And certainly not for an amount worth dealing with the "You should take money off that because it doesn't have HDMI. Hurr-durr." crowd on fleabay.

When I see my Sony GDM-FW900 boat anchor actually selling for more than $1000, then I'll believe you.

There's a huge amount of variance in CRTs and the last Trinitrons made are the holy grail in terms of features and display quality.

Specifically the BVM-D24E1WU & BVM-D32E1WU. They usually go for a few thousand dollars un-calibrated, with tube issues, and without the required addon cards (broadcast trinitrons have add-on cards giving different features like PCs) and master broadcast remote control receiver. The RGB module for these specific models is practically un-obtainium, with less than 150 produced globally, and everyone looking for these monitors now needs one. They sold for over $20k when they were new twenty years ago.

If you're looking to get one fully-loaded and in proper shape, expect to drop 6-8k. And there's only one guy still doing routine service of these who has adequate spare parts & knowledge, he's in Southern California and he won't ship the best models because of the huge risk of damage.

There are companies which specialize in shipping extremely valuable and fragile stuff. Such as $300,000 core routers for ISPs, in special plywood crates permanently strapped to a pallet. You certainly can ship them, I imagine that there must be some subset of high income crt enthusiast who will pay $2000 for delivery...

Yep, but I've also dealt with some of those companies beraking that super fragile stuff too. Most of the things they ship are insurable and replaceable, but these items can't be insured for their full value and are NOT replaceable. They haven't been manufactured in 17+ years.

It's more a matter of the guy doing the service personally not being comfortable shipping these rare items.

I'm sure you could do it and indemnify him against potential loss/damage, but he goes out of his way to discourage you from using shipping.

That specific model of Sony, I have literally seen sell for more than $800 in the enthusiast market. Search for sold items on ebay.

Yes, it's up to $999 now. I bought mine in 2013 or 2014 for $900, in excellent condition, and the seller's next one got listed for $1K, so there's not much of an increase.

That's... Insane. I've got 3 Samsung CRTs and a Benq collecting dust for more than a decade. No one gives a flying fuck about them here, could probably get a dozen more for like 10 dollars each...

Oh yeah, almost anything besides that one is way cheaper, even a big 1600x1200 model. For what it's worth, doing the Pantone Color IQ test on that screen was a triviality compared to the same on the Dell U2410, which is pretty easy compared to performing the task on a cheap temporal dithering office LCD in 2014.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.