Why are there no tube televisions anymore?

So out of curiosity I changed my picture setting on my TV to Cinema.  I find I like the picture better on this setting.  Live and learn.

Ha! Back in the old days a few of us audiophiles in my neighborhood in fact noticed that the analog with the tube video amplifiers were better able to bring out detail. Of course, you have to have the convergence set right... Zenith and Setchell-Carlson made some of the better TVs in those days, before the Feds got in and limited TV power draw to 75 watts. Then the fun was over... no way they hold up to modern sets though.

I love my eye popping colors and razor sharp 4k picture. That’s part of the entertainment. If I want realistic colors and contrast I’ll walk outside. And another thing- you can buy a $500 pair of speakers with perfectly flat frequency response and a $500 receiver with top rate THD specs and wide frequency response. Set them up in a hemianechoic room so that you have no reflections and standing waves. On paper it is the perfect stereo; in real life it is completely useless.  I know.  I tried that once. 

@larsman I guess that’s it ... anyone can see the difference, and/or it can be objectively measured. Unlike with audio, where someone can claim he/she hears an improvement after installing expensive accessories like cables, fuses, or floor spacers which have no scientific base for any effect ... no one can verify that claim.

If someone likes the ’warmth’ and the distortion of tubes, or the higher noise floor, the crackling, the limited dynamic range and the wow and flutter of vinyl ... then that’s a matter of taste. Just like with a TV set where only few people use the ’movie’ setting which has optimum color representation ... many have it on ’standard’, which blows up the contrast and colors ... also a matter of taste.

@rudyb - Possibly because it's easier to be objective about video than audio. You can look at two images and tell if one is sharper than the other, and I can't think of a reason why anybody would want a less sharp one. With audio, it's all about individual preferences as to what 'sounds good' - some people like one type of sound, some people prefer another, etc, and too many are convinced that they are right and others are wrong if they disagree, hence the sometimes heatedness! 

@mirolab The discussion ran in all kinds of directions, while I was merely wondering how come in the audio world ...

A. There still is a desire to cling to (very) old technologies like vinyl and tubes.
B. There’s a broad range of components and accessories on the market that are (very) expensive and at the same time are questionable because no one knows why or how they work, but buyers claim to hear an improvement.
C. Debates on these subjects often get heated.

... while in the video world there’s a lot less of all three of the above. New technologies are embraced as improvements and there are far less accessories like ’video fuses’ or esoteric cables on the market ... you get yourself a proper HDMI cable and that’s about it, with far less debates.

Well ... maybe the frame rates discussion and whether people can really see the difference between 120 or 240 Hz. And it’s also interesting why movie lovers prefer a 24Hz sampling frequency when watching a screen, while I assume they prefer ’analog without sampling’ while watching out of the window?

Let's all remember that old ANALOG video still had a sampling rate. It was exactly 29.97 frames per second!  (or 25 in Europe).  And what about those scan lines?  UGGHH!   Any comparing of video to analog audio is ridiculous.  I'm pretty sure OP was just baiting us into this.  

Even more analog would be film... that's real analog pictures at a discreet frame rate of 24fps.... which is analogous to a digital sampling rate. There's some really great YouTube explanations on why 24fps is more beautiful and artistic looking than faster frame rates.  I agree.  I do not like faster frame rates. They DO look more real, but disturbingly so.  

Tube TV's were built to be repairable, manufacturers today don't want  anything to be repaired or be backwards compatible. Read 'The deals that made the World' Jaques Peretti. No conspiracy theory just fact on how we continually get shafted in every aspect of life.

Guys

I had a 31" Mitsubishi for years and moved on to projectors. I briefly craved a 35" Mits, there was one on the floor at JL Hudson's in the Twelve Oaks Mall, Novi. I was puzzled though, it wasn't plugged in. Hmmm.

I asked for demo and the guy said "if we switch it on it blows circuit breakers" LOL......I'm guessing they didn't sell very many.....plus the thing was near 200 lbs and it would take movers to get one home.

I loved those big old CRT/tube televisions. But that boat sailed long ago.

Video always was like audio in that some "videophiles" actually cared about the look, verisimilitude, and lifelike appearance of certain TVs and formats. I was one of those few. That meant investing in high end television monitors that weren't mass marketed (my pick was a 27" model from NAD; and later, a fine 32" Panasonic CRT). I also embraced a VHS format with ~2X the resolution of standard VHS (Super VHS). No one else did seemed to adopt this excellent format (I had multiple expensive SVHS recorders).

When high definition TV came in (now known somewhat derisively as standard Hi-Def), I got the most acclaimed flatscreen then available circa 2008: the Pioneer Kuro 42" plasma, an amazing television. Still have it and still appreciate its exception reproduction of colors and greyscale. Later on I got a 50" Panasonic plasma, one of the last ones made in 2012. That Panny is still busy reproducing lifelike colors for me on cable TV signals.

3 years ago I invested in the new video wonk’s favorite format, OLED (77" TOTL LG) for a large alternate living room. The big LG cost a ton but is far and away the best television I’ve ever seen. The color purity and black levels/greyscale are pretty amazing. I watch only streaming or blu-ray/4K HDR blu-ray on it, so burn-in isn’t even possible. OLED can't produce the extremes of brightness that LCD/LED can, but in a low-light viewing environment, the best that OLED can do is totally satisfying for these eyes.

Is it worth it to spend big $$ on the best possible video? If you’re me, the answer is "Hell, yes!" Just as it is in audio, which for me in recent years means desktop audio & headphones. I’m cursed by the ability to hear and see the quality that $$ can bring, especially from audio and video formats that emphasize signal purity and quality.

I don't miss tube tv's. Size, weight, heat, reliability, low resolution.
    TV's could be a lot better.  I had a Sony Qualia 46" LED that was c. $15K new.  Discontinued because it cost so much to make them, I don't think it was profitable.  Sony went all out and put all the electronics, which were of "audiophile" type quality, in a separate box the size of a receiver, connected by an umbilical.  It was fabulous. I know of no other tv in which the manufacturer used the kind of parts and engineering standards used in hi end audio.  Such a tv might be $30  - 40 K today, the market's just not there.  Particularly when upgrading is desirable and justifiable because the new model is provably better every year, quite unlike audio... 
 
  

I’m very happy with my 65” Sony 4K OLED. The upsampling is amazing, 4k is killer. Football no judder or anything CRT isn’t even close 

i have one for sale that has all  new caps and resisters with an attenuator on back for adjusting gain digital feed with external digital zenith box.

I owned one of Sony's best CRT models, toward the end of that era, and the picture was outstanding.

I defer to the experts in terms of the objective superiority of today's technology, but I sure didn't feel like I was missing anything at the time, and could live quite happily with that quality today.

Yes warm up time and the picture what was it 200p.They were heavy.i know I worked in an electrical warehouse in LIC back in 1970.

The major convenience of going to solid state from tube TV's was that you turned it on and instantly you had a pretty good picture, whereas the tube TV's you turned on and the screen kinda lit up and gradually got brighter and more colorful as everything warmed up in about 5-10 minutes or so.  I also remember that my uncle had his TV on the same circuit as a window air conditioner and when the AC kicked in it washed the colors out of the screen.

   +1 mitch2, I have one of the older Panasonic plasmas . It was their top level set when I bought it. The two best TV’s at the time were the Panasonic and the Pioneer elite. After enjoying my brother in laws Fujitsu plasma for a couple years I pulled the trigger on the Panasonic. I had a couple of the last Sony CRT’s a big console and the later wide screen tabletop. Both excellent sets. I still have the plasma, and a new Sony and a Visio. The Sony is in the gym and the Visio does summers  in  the den and winters in the bedroom. The Sony is passable and the Visio is crap. If I wanted a top tier new TV I’d go Samsung. It would have been interesting if the industry continued to develop the CRT. BTW that Fujitsu was about $6K and my Panasonic went on sale for $3500 so I saw it as a good buy at the time. Going back in time my dad ( long deceased ) was a TV fan. I remember when he ponied up $1K for a Mitsubishi 4 head VCR. At the time it was amazing. Looking back it was the Nakamichi Dragon of VCR’s. Years later my friend was using a similar Mitsubishi to record and play audio from vinyl in his system. I run a power filter, cord and upgraded cables on my plasma. It was a very slight but noticeable difference. It seems that my old conditioner and cables went on the TV, Vs going into the extras box in the spare closet. In closing you’ve made me curious. My ?????  is currently flying an F-18 Hornet. Between the plane and the carrier I’ll have to ask him about the monitors. Last year I had the opportunity to fly/ crash in their simulator at the base. It was an amazing two minutes of total confusion. Most of the systems were turned off due to being top secret, but I’ll have to revisit the equipment in regards to the screens. Regards, Mike. 

Perhaps consider also that today’s TV take up much less room, produce almost no heat, come in many more sizes for convenience, at almost every price point look better, use way less energy and are able to display higher quality images than earlier technologies. TV are mass market and world wide items. By comparison the audiophile market is tiny. Almost every aspect of video delivery to the user is also regulated and homogenized to one size fits all by the government. If we look at it from the hardware side, audio is one of the few product lines where technologies doing essentially the same thing exist side by side in the marketplace. Audio is quite unique.

My point is no matter the technological advances audio will always begin and end with electromechanical interfaces and video with electro optical. 

Sound is created through mechanical actions, ie. vibrations. Audio begins with the microphone and ends with the speaker. Everything in between matters but is not seen. Same with video: it begins with light and ends with light. Everything in between matters but is unseen. Wow! Must have been that cheesecake last night.

Rudy, technology dies when it is ousted by better technology.
viz horse and cart vs car
     CRT vs flat screen
     VCR vs DVD
     bow and arrow vs rapid fire automatic rifle
     etc.

Valves and vinyl have not been driven from the market because there are no newer technologies that are clearly better.

See also:  oil painting on canvas, the violin, most other musical instruments.  After all the electric violin was consigned to Desolation Row.

@tim_p - I had one of those Pioneer Kuro plasmas, too; it was wonderful and yes, those were about as 'true' blacks as you could get at that time... Now I use TOTL Sony OLED, and yeah, it's even blacker! 

The most entertaining thing to do with an old CRT was to toss it off a bridge.....sans chassis, of course.

Best variant of that was the Ant Farm car crashing into a wall of CRTs', but I'm just languishing in an old fit of Creative Destruction.

Progress on many levels is a Good Thing, to paraphrase The Martha....a CRT VR headset would not only be heavy, hot, wayyyy too much voltage wayyy too close to ones' face....and look like an alien mind control experiment done 'retro-punk' by Spock in a drunken state....

I had one of the last widescreen 16:9 tube tv’s back in 2001, the Toshiba 34HF81, beautiful TV, even supported a Klipsch KLFC7 centre on top. Along with those huge projector box tv’s, and the lcd/plasma. That was my last tube TV, the next plunge was probably the best, in the Pioneer Kuro plasma at that time, blacks were a "true" black. Now using the last of the plasmas made in the Panasonic 65VT60 and still love it.

Remember the Quasar, "works in a drawer" TV's?  They had a literal slide out cabinet with the circuit boards in a row like files.  I recall reliability was poor due to the bad connectors at the base of the boards.  So ironically, easy to work on which was good since they needed servicing often.  The good old days- AM tube radios, car tires that lasted 5000 miles, oil changes every 1500-3000 miles, carburetors (good luck starting on cold mornings) but also we had soda fountains, juke boxes and roller skating rinks.  Real movie theaters...

Well, it's just a matter of time, as technology progresses.
For example Alienware 27 Gaming Monitor (AW2721D)
a 27' 2560x1440 IPS gaming monitor with... oh yeah, this is impressive
240Hz.

Tube TVs like tube amps, 35mm film, and vinyl are objectively inferior to modern replacements. However, all of them provided excellent quality and remain perfectly enjoyable today. My mother still has a Panasonic 20" TV I bought back in the 1990s and it is still in regular use. The colors don't seem to have faded even though she often leaves it on through the night as she falls asleep. When viewed at a typical distance it still looks great. My previous TV was a 34" widescreen tube with 1080 resolution. It had a great picture for watching movies. It was a little warpy around the edges which was noticeable on news banners and video games. That TV had a digital image processor so it was a hybrid of sorts. The gamers like the pure analog sets because the lag time is practically non existent, although frame rate ultimately sets the gaming lag and with modern 120Hz displays and gaming systems the lag is down below 10 milliseconds, which is from a human perspective pretty much non existent. 

I got rid of the VCR and tapes long ago! I have a nice collection of movies on DVD. When I saw the first DVD players back around 2002 I knew that was the future! And they played CDs too!

@rixthetrick : I watch a lot of over-the-air broadcasts on the 19". Certainly limited selection compared to cable. The ABC and FOX news shows done with HD cameras look quite impressive for a cheap TV! OTA broadcasts of movies made with better cameras also look great! Ditto for sports! The limiting factor is the camera technology - OTA broadcasts are not compressed, unlike much on cable. I also have a Sharp 55" in the living room and a new Insignia 40" in an unopened box (lack of space!). 

party pooper!!

If you want to only watch TV made in low res pre-2000 (,at best) and no sports - and mostly stuff like The Andy Griffith show go ahead. Tubes cannot reproduce modern digital content, can't do even 720p  (really it's like comparing apples and oranges) plus they generate heat and use FAR FAR FAR more energy. Theoretically I suppose you could create a 96" CRT tv and, discounting the insurmountable firm/software incompatabilties, it would weigh a ton, would need all sorts of bear sinks and fans, and consequently be the size of a small room - to to mention rewiring your entire house and the electric bill. And it would cost, what $1M? More? So...insane even to discuss. 

When I was a kid we had a large tube TV in a wooden console, as was common then. It stopped working. My excellent idea at the time was to remove the large picture tube and replace it with my fish tank. Worked out great, but what to do with that large picture tube. It was way too big to fit in the garbage can.

So I took it out to the field in back of the house to break it into pieces. I then threw a large rock at it from a discrete distance. The rock just bounced off the screen. So, looking for heavier armament, I found a brick to throw at it. When that brick hit, it was like a bomb went off. Scared the daylight out of me. You have no idea what a loud noise those TV picture tubes make when they implode. It was quite a shock.

Now I ask you, what modern big screen could do that and provide an unexpected and memorable experience of that sound quality, which by the way, you can still vividly recall some sixty years later. Bring back the tube TV’s.

Mike

CRT TV FISH TANK

jasonbourne52, what do you watch on your Insignia? [I thought you might like some attention?]
Insignia NS-DVDVCR Dvd & 4-Head Vcr Combo Player, I bet you have this bad boy to play your analog movies, then step back to DVD when you’re slummin’it?

New TVs are totally better. But what kinda sucks nowadays is that when the signal is interrupted, the picture is frozen or gone.

Where before it would just be fuzzy/snowy...and you still had a bit audio to help you along. You would rarely miss a critical moment. There have instances where signal is out for (super bowl) for the count.

Easy trade off though...4k looks great at 55".

I remember our town of 1000 had two TV repair guys.  They charged $5 to come to our place to put new tubes in the TV.  Today there are no repairman in that town.  That explains a lot

CRT are like big gun battleships: state of the art in their day and obsolete today. So the few that remain are in museums or recycled. Why? Size limitations: Today, people want big tv's. 55-65-75 are the most popular sizes. CRT tubes maxed out at 40" 4x3 ratio at 300 pounds: A 65 4k weighs in at 60 pounds or less with 4 million pixels & 600 to 1000 nits of brightness. Another reason is the broadcast standard is 16x9 not 4:3 which results in black bars top and bottom for all modern shows. We should not forget the environmental hazard because CRT contain lead. 

My dad would take several tubes out of the TV when us kids were "bad".
Funny that it made me angry/sad back then.  Now I couldn't care less about TV.

Was visiting my son in Denver last week, he had very recently purchased a Sony 85 incher.  Have no clue as to the refresh rate or latency, but I can tell you that the new Sony Playstation 5 looks amazing. There is no smearing whatsoever.  We watched "The Martian" on blu-ray and that was actually astounding.

Regards,
barts

I remember my Dad blessing the console TV, tearing it apart and hauling down a handful of tubes to the local Hoyle's drugstore wher they had a tube tester and hundreds of replacements.  Seems like we did that every 6 or 8 months.  Ah, the good ol` days.

Unlike audio, TVs are super-commoditized to the point that most are extremely comparable to each other - the panels likely came from the same source in Asia and the processing isn’t nearly as differentiated as with earlier generations like DLP’s spinning color wheel and plasmas, for instance, that came after the monstrous rear projection TVs. Tvs have become like cell phones largely because the demand is so massive. When it comes to audio most people are given just good enough (I.e no crackling or very noticeable distortion with bass thrown in) without even knowing it with their Bose car stereo and EarPods. So much about audio in our Audiogon world is more art than commodity. For this reason, I for one am glad the mainstream hasn’t taking the art out of audio.

You might as well ask why there are no horses and carts.

@clearthinker Yes, those are ancient technologies. And that’s my whole question, my wondering ... how come there are still ancient technologies like tubes and vinyl in use in the audiophile world, while there’s no such trend in the videophile world? If it sounds nicer (to avoid the word better) then maybe a TV set with tubes could also look nicer? If there’s a market for ’audio fuses’ because they make it sound nicer ... how come there are no ’video fuses’ that make the picture look nicer? Apparently there’s no market for that.

To gamers refresh rate is not the only factor, although the higher the better. The other factor is latency ... the delay between the moment the video info left the PC and the moment it’s displayed on screen, caused by the built in digital image processing. When watching a movie latency plays no role at all, but to competitive gamers this delay impacts their reaction time in a negative way.

Most modern TV sets have a ’gaming mode’ via which (most of the) image processing is bypassed and latency is minimized. But still there’s a delay of a couple of ms. With a CRT this latency is zero.

Not a valid comparison.

CRT TVs worked on an entirely different principle to those of today's flat screens.

Apart from transistors and, for those that like it, digital, today's hi-fi uses the same technology as yesterday's, going back nearly 100 years.

You might as well ask why there are no horses and carts.

Size, weight and cost.
The last large crt tv I worked on was all crt inside. The plastic case was molded around the tube.   I think it was a 32". The circuit board was only about 8" x 10".  And I could lift it myself.  A 32" all tube console took two people to lift.  20 or so tube cluttered inside around the crt. Just to heat the filaments on those 20 tubes took 25amp at 6 volts.  High voltage!  Zenith anode voltage was 35kv on their larger unit.  42.5 rings a bell.  CRT convergence was touchy to get a sharp image.  With age the crt would go gassy.  The red, blue and green color guns would go weak and need balancing.  My dad spent $850 in the 60's for our color tv.  I kept it going into the 80's.  Glory hallelujah they are no more.  

There isn't a 4k tv made that has a native refresh rate of 240hz.

I still have a clear memory of helping my Dad pull 15-20 tubes out of our b&w console TV once or twice a year, when it was acting up, and driving to the Bernstein-Applebee electronics store where we’d kill an hour or so testing each one a couple times. We’d get several that rated "good" a few that rated neither good or bad and 2-3 that tested as "bad". We’d buy new replacements for the "bad ones, put them all back in the TV, cross our fingers and turn it on. Sometimes it worked and sometimes We’d have to go back and buy replacements for the ones that tested inconclusive.
It was a pain in the rear and waste of time.
I don’t miss tubes in TV’s at all.
I also remember that TV repairmen did housecalls then and kept quite busy.
My father and I built a Heathkit mono tube-amp for our 45 player and a guitar amp that I used in a terrible garage band in the 60’s. The Heathkits were rock solid.

I think someone compared tweaks to religion.  Some people just don't know about not discussing/comparing politics and religion here.

Thy name is jasonbourne54.  

It's not about superiority oldhvymech. That's not how I read it.  

while there seem to be far less intense discussions in the TV & video realm?

Different hobby.  Recreating pleasing sound/music is different from video interests.  The are many different preferences for audio sonics and many methods to achieve them.  TVs are resolution based so there is much less reasons for debate the end products-likely just which video resolves better.  

I’ve made a good chunk of my living as a commercial film director. As the poster above mentioned we had 550k color suites and 150k avid machines that became obsolete overnight. BTW, Those loans sucked.

My theory is that my high end Sony TVs are just about to catch up to my old Panasonic plasma in showing “directors intent”.

so much tv tech makes sports look better but movies look worse as 240hz exhausts me. 
If we all spent the time to go to tweak.tv and follow their instructions as a baseline the world would become a prettier place

My take on this is a bit different, not about the tech but maybe applicable nonetheless.   Recently had to change provider and cable vs streaming etc.  Lots of different qualities to be seen across offerings.  Sure i/we watch them all and complain but we still watch.  Why?  Because we want the answer or conclusion to the (previously unseen) episode or event.  We simply put up with it in order to reach the end.  

No so with music.  We've heard it a multitude of times (usually) so it's purely for the enjoyment.  Wouldn't put up with inferior as long as we have the proper equipment.  Watching TV we are prone to overlook quality to achieve the goal or the end.  Do you watch a football game or Yellowstone to marvel at the image? Now on a HT blog, this might not describe the average reader.  I wouldn't know.