Vintage plasma TV?
 

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A 4:3 Plasma, very cool and sure to be a future collectible!
Does it have an NTSC tuner built in or is it a monitor only?

Wow that is really cool. I've never seen a 4x3 Plasma set. Bad caps seems very typical though. Thanks for sharing the pics.

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I remember working on a Philco plasma set in the mid 90s ('93 or '94 model?)... Had a base unit with tuner & power supply, and a cable went up to the wall mount plasma display. It was about a 30", if I recall. It was Phillips-built. I wouldn't mind getting hold of one of those, as they're super-rare I guess. I remember the owner saying he paid over $20,000 for it.

Charles

Good lord! Is thatr the sustains and the buffers and logic and address modules all in one board?? Thats crazy! I have had my fair share of repairing plasmas and I have seen some odd designs but that one takes the cake!

Wow, a 4:3 Plasma monitor from 1998-now that's really awesome. Mow if they would make 4:3 HDTVs to watch my vintage 4:3 shows on:-) A future collectable indeed from 1998:-)

Sitting in my shop at my ballpark is our 1999 Sony 50" plasma from the lobby of the old park. Model number next week when I dig it out...all $12,000 worth. I think it may be 720p capable. Stay tuned. And if I can find a few good men to move this 200+ pound beast, I will unbox it and see if it still works. It's been in the box since late 2003. I remember it in our lobby at the old park but do not remember how we fed it. I hope the remote is in the box.

And in my new ballpark in a public hallway is a 2003 Zenith (LG) 4x3 40" or so plasma. It runs 24/7 fed in analog by a $59 DVD in an eternal loop with some trivia questions for the passers-by. It used to be fed by a Firefly hard drive player which would quit on a yearly basis. I subbed the DVD 4 years ago and it runs 24/7 also. I can get a pix of that also next week. It shows no diminishing of the pix after 7 years. And we have a new marketing deal with Sharp to change out 750 flat screens which means that this Zenith will come down and I will be there to catch it.

Oh dear moderators, could we be on the edge of a new Vintage Plasma category? Then again, Vintage Plasma is an oxymoron.

And who remembers the early Japanese late-80"s attempts at HD in analog? Something above 1080,

Dave A

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They actually did some broadcasting in that format, Hi-Vision (production) and MUSE (encoding for broadcast). It has 1125 horizontal lines overall but the active video area is 1080 lines or less, similar to the current 1080i digital HDTV standards.

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Hi Gentlemen,

1) Andy, i also have a vintage plasma, a Fujitsu PDS-4203 42" unit purchased in may 1999 at half price because it was being phased out. Back then it was a real novelty, sort of a year 2000 CT-100.

I went with Fujitsu after seeing them yearly at the NAB displaying Japanese MITI funded research for about 10 years. I figured that since they had been chosen by the government to do all the development groundwork, if anyone knew how to build a plasma, Fujitsu would know.

Well my choice was good, this PDP has been chugging along for 11 years now and has never failed once. It's dim compared to modern units, is VGA resolution, knows nothing about HD or HDMI, but i just don't have the heart to replace it especially when i see the reliability record (3 years?) of today's units.

Pix 1 is an actual unretouched photo, the plasma is surrounded by a bunch of US Trinitrons & other tiny screen TVs.

2) Sony HDVS 1125/60 HD TV
Around 1986, we had an American production/postproduction facility in Paris known as SEE/Captain Video run by a certain David Niles. The guy managed to convince Somy management to loan him 3 HD cameras, 2x 1" HD VTRs, a switcher and a bunch of 300lb HD monitors.

The picture quality straight out of the cameras was stupendous, much better than today's HD. Try seeing the very faint fuzz on a woman's upper lip framed news achor style (not zoomed on the face itself). It was that good!

It was also highly experimental, the cameras "ate" red tubes (1" Saticons) after just a few hundred hours, so all 3 tubes had to changed and imagine the fun of doing registration on something so razor-sharp.

Coming back to today, some of the behemoth HD trinitrons show up from time, it would be nice to decode HDMI to RGB to watch HD content.

C) Andy, is this the HD VCR you were telling about?
I had better pictures but VK won't let me repost and the link to the old post shows no photos - probably deleted as "too old".

Best Regards

jhalphen
Paris/France

PS: David Niles went back to the US in the 90s and opened a facility in NYC named Studio 1125, maybe it still exists...

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