That's only because LCD is even more sophisticated ;) With more screen layers, advanced molecular chemistry needed for efficient subpixels, electronics components printed directly in the screen surface and much more complicated control circuitry, not to mention advanced lighting like compact fluorescent or even mindblowingly hard to build properly marvel - white LED.
@@EustaH Yeah the reasons tvs were crt in the first place is because yeah cheap microcontrollers is what made lcd and o led tvs possible. Modern tvs basically have computing in them.
@@cosmicsvids That’s true, but my point is we made our current tech so cheap and so abundant that it seems easy and simple, so we are astonished how complicated and precise some things were 50 years ago. In reality the 1$ crap from china requires far more precise and complicated parts than this CRT - we’ve just got that good in making stuff. It’s like watching a true master playing an instrument - when he does it it looks effortless, while in reality a regular person wouldn’t be able to even position his fingers that way, let alone do it fast ;)
Definitely the most complete look at how colour CRTs were manufactured, and no surprise that it came from Philips. My family had a Philips TV from 1977 that was still working in 1997. Quality, engineering and craftmanship of which we will likely never see again.
I miss old Philips.. They had such a good run with the cassette tape, the cd, and many more innovative inventions.. Truly a company deserving the Netherlands' pride.. What happened? :(
And their TVs. They were one of the first to bring out modular sets. Those were the easiest to fix. There were 4 modules and in the service truck, we'd just carry the modules. Go into the house, analyze the issue, change the faulting module, take the old module as "trade-in" and head back to the shop. There, we'd pop the failed module into our jig, troubleshoot and repair the issue for the next call.
@@BlondieSL Aaah I love that! It's the best of both worlds. Efficient fast turnaround fixes, and serviceability that honors knowledge and expertise. Back when Philips wasn't on the planned obsolescence bandwagon. Good times!
@@pyeltd.5457 Philips completely got rid of their consumer tech department. They mostly do medical tech now, and right now they're in hot water due to that decision.
@@pyeltd.5457 Philips as it stands today, is only a shadow of its former self. It has sold the rights to its brand name to Chinese companies, which are the ones designing and manufacturing the TVs and home entertainment systems sold under the Philips name. The real Philips mostly produces medical equipment and LED lightbulbs (although I'm not entirely sure of the lightbulbs either). So it's a completely different company today, compared to the one in the 70s and 80s.
It is amazing companies like Philips have ever existed. Simply making a CRT like this is already incredibly labour intensive, but having also produced their own passive and active components, circuit boards from the ground up... even engineered their own plastics, building their products from ground resources to a full product. What a beautiful time it must've been
i worked in the tv repair game when valve colour sets came out , always wondered how they made the tubes and this was mazing to see . thank you very much for posing this marcel :)
This video only solidifies the fact that the CRT is one of the most complex and sophisticated inventions in human history. Every part, the tube, the shadow mask, the electron gun, the deflection yoke. All works of art. And they did it at a price and scale that nearly everybody could afford one. Now they're left to rot on roadsides and considered worthless. What travesty.
You'll be happy to know there's still a large group of retro gamers and enthusiasts rescuing, restoring and enjoying these CRT displays. I've got 5, with 3 in regular use and 2 as reserves 😊
Yo tengo tres de estas televisiones guardadas en mi casa ya que se las quiero mostrar a las futuras generaciones sobre esta tecnología extinta y que fue de ella.
Yo estoy aprendiendo a repararlas (tengo libros de circuitos) y este año me construiré el aparato para revivir los cátodos. Se pueden hacer funcionar hasta 10-15 años más con un mantenimiento de cátodos
Nice! I currently have 6 crt’s and my gf is super annoyed but that’s ok! A 27”, 19”, 13” and two 20” Sony Trinitrons. The 6th crt is a tiny little Panasonic Roadshow crt and vcr combo. 📺 To me, nothing beats playing SNES or watching a classic movie on a good ole cathode Ray tube television!
He kept saying "Our company". I had to wait until the end to find out it was Philips 🤣. Great video packed full of tech information, they didn't dumb down their promo videos in those days. On I side note I watched yesterday a video about 'old abandoned buildings'. The RU-vidrs were exploring one of the old Philips sites in the Netherlands.
high-quality color picture tube with a long service life and excellent image quality, it is no coincidence that several European manufacturers have installed it in their devices, e.g. Grundig, Siemens, Zanussi, etc
Between feb.1976 to aug. 1977 I was a technician in an Authoized Philips Service point at Brazil, where I could take the first color television service contact, that point was a Philco and Telefunken authorized service, also...
but all of this is useless now because imagine carying smartphone with picture tube... Last TV with picture tube stopped working back in 2011 by that time nobody from family was watching the TV but rather using an internet, thus haven't been watching TV since that time nor do need one at home.
I remember the first colour TV's in the UK during the 1970's. Although I had to know how a TV worked, I seldom had to work on them and I'd forgotten how much cutting edge technology went into colour TV. Phase modulated I & Q chroma, amplitude modulated luminance and some clever maths to get it all to work. I still remember 4.43361875 Mhz was the PAL subcarrier frequency and glass delay lines to cancel out any phase errors between adjacent lines. The system from camera to receiver needs a video of its own.
At 20:26 he says "from now on the shadow mask and the screen stay together for all remaining stages of production" and then almost immediately after at 21:02 "the screen and the shadow mask are separated".
They are not bonded yet but will be handled as a pair from now on. The shadow mask uniquely belongs to this screen and non other. You can't swap them as each have unique placement and the screen will get the florescent stripes to match. So they stay together, meant for each other but not yet married.
19:57 there is still the distance piece between the glass and the mask to remove, and coat the screen so obviusly the screen and the mask are separated but handled like a pair.
Watching the way of assembly, how Labour intensive it is just shows how far automation has come. And it's amazing how much the technology has come now we can build really large TV for indoor or outdoors and really thin practically like a wall picture frame amazing ! .
Manufacturing CRTs today would still be labor intensive, regardless of how far automation has advanced. This is because CRTs have many individual complex components that require great precision to manufacture. Modern TVs (LCD, OLED) are completely different technologies, which in many ways are much easier to manufacture. Light and cheap plastic defeated heavy and expensive glass. New TVs (LCD at that time) literally immediately gained an advantage over CRT in such characteristics as dimensions, weight and energy consumption. But in terms of overall picture quality (not just pixel detail), LCDs and OLEDs have only recently begun to approach CRTs. And in some aspects of the image, modern TVs still cannot surpass CRT. For roughly the same reason, PDPs (plasma) also left the market. It was a very high-quality, but too complicated and too expensive technology compared to new plastic panels (which are basically just a lot of tiny LEDs).
Insatlled quite a few of these when I was 17 - but only after "rejuvenating" the old tube had failed! They represent most of the weight of the TV set. Good old Radio Rentals would squeeze the last hours out of a tube before replacing it. Tubes were also dismantled and "re-gunned" to give them a second life. It's a good job this documentary was made on 16mm film which has outlived this whole technology. Now we can still watch that film, scanned to video and delivered down an old phone line to appear on you tube. A lot of very early video tape "films" are now lost and those that remain are very low resulution.
Sadly, a perfect demonstration of why there won't be any new CRTs made ever again. Recreating all this just isn't feasible within the industrial ecosystem today, and there's no way a single company could possibly manage it alone. CRTs are highly complex old high-tech.
Yeah but the only reason theres any need for them is cause old video game consoles don't display well on newer tvs. Yeah old game consoles look great on crts but new consoles look crap on them they are obsolete for everything except old consoles but emulating those fixes those issues.
Absolutely astonishing. So the saying goes: "they don't make em like they used too". Hopefully someday a CRT rebuilding station can be resurrected to operation for us vintage tv collectors. Sadly, construction of the guns will be obsolete if not already for the most part. Cool video. Thanks for posting.
Fascinating how it all came together!, I wonder if there's ANY company still producing CRTs in the world. I watched this and kept thinking: It's a lot of machinery to dispose of!
I think this video gives a pretty good answer to the question why TVs were expensive. What I don't get is how not every TV from the same era cost about as much. I mean, in this production line not much seems to change when you make a tube only half the size.
It's for market differentiation, exploiting the perception that a bigger tv costs equally as much to make, so larger tvs had more profit margins for shareholders
It's for market differentiation, exploiting the perception that a bigger tv costs equally as much to make, so larger tvs had more profit margins for shareholders
Wow I never knew shadowmask is used not only as a component but also as a tool to build the screen! That's very clever way to ensure perfect match between mask and subpixels for every tube. I love it :D
Mooie video. Nog opvallend veel handwerk. Jammer dat deze high-tech met de komst van de flatscreen binnen 15 jaar compleet verdwenen was. Nu staan er huizen op de plek waar dit ooit gefilmed is. Alleen de straatnamen herinneren nog aan de onderdelen van een beeldbuis
Het zou ook in Aken gefilmd kunnen zijn, ik weet eigenlijk niet wat er verder met die fabriek gebeurd is. Het handwerk is later wel wat meer geautomatiseerd, maar in Heerlen werd het in elk geval voor kleine series ook grotendeels nog met de hand gedaan.
O mae dy wallt mor deg ac rwy'n ei fwyta drwy'r amser gyda fy nannedd a llwybr treulio yn cael eu tagu a dwi'n pesychu peli o dy wallt ac o fy oh oh o o
did they say that that often to be funny, or was it an earnest attempt to make sure that everyone *knew for sure* that Phillips was at the top of the market? almost 50 some years later it just feels goofy lmao
When I was a kid, I looked at this tech as uninteresting. Now though, as an aspiring electrical engineer, I am captivated by these sorts of things. I really wish I had held on to our family’s old tv’s and such.
Una maravillosa obra de alta ingeniería producto de la inteligencia humana,asombroso,un acelerador de particulas,como funciona el cañón de la pantalla es sencillamente asombroso.Great Job, Greetings.
Would love to see one of these tubes made in this factory carefully disassembled and looked at (a failed tube of course) particularly in the area of the shadow mask and whatnot
It feels like yesterday but I heard it 20 years ago when I was shocked to find out that ALL manufacturers were going to end making TVs this way. Seems stupidly obvious now. But the way they described it during the transition was "soon everyone will stop making glass". Took me a moment to realise it meant all CRT tubes, for everything.
the second greatest invention was the remote control,before that we as kids had to get up and change the stations manually. those were good days made even better with the remote control.
I have learned that in the mid 80's and was 20 Years at this business as Radio and TV-Engineer.....time flies- meanwhile i develop Wiring harness at a germany car manufacturer. Good old repair times
,My family didn't have a. television until 66 and didnt have a color set until 77 a year after I moved out. I was the one who.bought it so my mom could watch All My Children in color.
Just found your channel and watched this. Brilliant! A big Philips fan and yes I used to service their sets for friends back in the early 80s when needed, The G11, 22 along with ITT CVC 7 and 9 and Decca series as well, they had excellent Philips tubes in them. I loved TVs for the tech inside them and this video answered a good few of my questions as to the production techniques of the Tubes. What I enjoyed most is the people who were properly skilled built these, not a robot in sight. Thanks very much for putting it up here.
Not shown in this video, all of the methods and materials R&D which took years and perhaps millions of dollars to perfect, as well as developing all of the automated equipment and training for the people.
Thx for sharing this superb, comprehensive documentary! My only question is why Philips chose to use crappy 16mm film to photograph a short documentary about COLOR PICTURE tubes? If Philips -- given their deep pockets in 1970s -- had used the best quality 35mm film (and camera systems), this documentary would have looked much more professional. Not like some college film project.
Arguably, it could be an issue with this scan of the film. 16mm isn't bad per se with a good scan, and direct projection would probably have been easier with 16mm
To think, that all of this was made possible by the development of the lightbulb. CRTs and all vacuum tubes are, in essence, very sophisticated lightbulbs.
