Looking for the largest direct-view CRT, the Sony Trinitron PVM-4300
 

The Sony PVM-4300 is a 45" (43" viewable) CRT monitor that was sold between 1989 and 1990. No surviving units have turned up in the past 20 years. If you own this CRT or know someone who might still own it please contact me.

The unfortunate reality is that most very large CRTs got sent to the dump. There was a long span of time when it was extremely difficult to find homes for anything like that, and the majority of them were originally owned by businesses and educational institutions that had hard deadlines to get rid of stuff.

Working for labs and colleges over the years, I've seen so much stuff just get chucked away you wouldn't believe; easily hundreds of of thousands of dollars worth of high end computers, monitors and scientific equipment in perfect working order just because a project ended and there was no space for it anymore.

As much as it pains me to say it, there isn't going to be any out there not already in the hands of a collector.

Largest I've seen is the 40" Mitsubishis.

Personally I think the Sony WEGA super-fine-pitch HD-CRT sets are the best all around performing CRT TVs out there. HDMI (and analog inputs) 1080i native phosphor resolution, built in ATSC tuning, and my KD-34XBR960 even has an iLink port for direct one wire digital interface with my D-VHS HD-VCRs (a large part of the reason I sidelined my KD-34XS955 for it). They're also still relatively easy to find compared to 90s beasts.

Would need an army of grunts to move something that large, I have the Panasonic CT-34WX54 CRT set and that weighs 155 lbs.

Sony KX45ED-1

Best shot is the Japanese marketplace. But you never know when one might turn up.

Depends on how strong you are...My 34" 16x9 Wegas are supposed to be 205lbs and I can pick them up and walk with them. Getting them up the stairs that aren't as wide as the set is an 2-3 man job, but on level ground I don't need help...I've done extensive training buying and selling vacuum tube circuit era consoles.

Here is a UTube video of one being found in Japan and brought to the US

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk&t=40s

Skip to 1:30 to get past the goofy intro and to the PVM-4300

Skip to 16:30 to see it unboxed after it's journey to the US

I like how on the 2 pictures of the set he can find on the Internet the one he didn't buy he claims is unsubstantiated because there's nothing in the picture for scale when there's a freaking Pilot TV-37 in the photo sitting on top of it.

The gamers in the hobby don't seem to give a damn to learn about the TVs that came before the Atari 2600 even if some of those sets (not the TV-37 though) are worth more than their car...

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I got one of these Great Picture, & Awesome Sound too!

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Yeah, I watched that one. I love how he tried to talk to someone at Sony and they ghosted him.

I wouldn't be surprised if Sony is a little irritated that some random kid from the US ended up with something that should be in the Sony museum.

Suppose that it's their fault for not being a little more proactive about it, but honestly it's pretty awful that something like that is in the hands of a random hobbyist and not in a museum.

There are hundreds maybe thousands of museum worthy sets that aren't in museums. As long as their owners appreciate what they are and are preserving them then it's fine if they aren't in museums.... Better someone is appreciating them than they end up scrapped or rotting in the back room of a museum that won't display them (you'd be surprised how many interesting things museums have that they don't or only rarely display).

That's an absurd thing to say. Museums have collections that don't all have a place out on the floor constantly. That's how museums work and is normal. Exhibits and works are rotated in and out to highlight different parts of the collection.

Museums are tasked with storing and preserving history and art for as long as possible for future generations. It is overly dramatic to say that undisplayed exhibits are "rotting in the back room" like they are locking stuff up in some Indiana Jones style government warehouse.

To be fair to Tom's point here;

With a set as rare as this one is, it should never be anywhere but "on display" if it were to be in a museum. From my limited reading/research when I read this thread and then found the UTube vid in a search, it'd take a pretty rare specimen indeed to upstage this one in the competition for a museum's display space.

Anyway, I didn't post the vid to start a dustup, the OP (Bottom1) posted a request for information as to whether any of these sets still survive, and I obliged the request with what I found :thmbsp:

As opposed to being in private hands and only ever getting seen in person by a handful of people before it gets used up?

I disagree. While I do think things are supposed to be used and enjoyed, this is a one of kind thing and needs to be preserved.

What I was objecting to was Tom's characterization of museums as being black hole that rot away artifacts. That couldn't be further from the truth. The whole purpose of museums is to preserve things by employing professionals to conserve and store things correctly. Exhibits are sometimes kept on basically permanent display, but they aren't always.

One good example of such a place is the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. This is the place that I first got to see many of the wonderful TVs and personal computers of history. It is an awe-inspiring and inspirational place for me and many people who became excited to learn about technology and media.

https://movingimage.org/

Nope.


Speaking from 20 years of computer collecting there are a lot of places that declare themselves as museums where the actual exhibit hall is tiny compared to the long-term storage. Some places do properly photograph, catalog and store their items. Others are black holes for machines that were found/donated, you get a few photos but then and are never seen again, or worse, the donations through poor paperwork are sold when the museum closes (the Living Computer Museum) and the items disappear into the shadows of the new private owner.
Likewise I am aware of museums who refuse to do any preventative maintenance even for static displays, either because modern technology somewhat conflicts with existing policy for handling artifacts or because the removal of volatile components would devalue the item. The Smithsonian is guilty of this.

I can absolutely see the largest known CRT on the planet doing that. I know systems that were selectively stolen and have never been seen again.

All museums that I am personally aware of have vastly larger storage than exhibit space. That's perfectly normal.

The Smithsonian is not an institution that specializes in the preservation of 20th century electronics. There exists reputable museums that could care for and display a set like this. I think that would be a better fate for it.

Some museums aren't as bad as others but there's plenty of one of a kind stuff that hasn't been on display in my lifetime sitting in museum storage that the public can't even see in a YouTube video.

If private collectors are the only ones making an effort to preserve this stuff then they deserve to have it. There's plenty of museums that could have done the research and leg work to find and save it and beat him to it, but they didn't, and if preserving it were left to them that set would definitely hit e-waste already. May still end up in a museum eventually....One either contacts him and offers him a big wad of cash, or years down the road he gets tired of it, looses storage space or something and donates it to one...Hell if he sells it someday a museum may end up the high bidder.

I stand by the gist of my statement that a party that appreciates it for what it is and is willing to put money into it's preservation and maintenance is better than it hitting E-waste.

I agree with that.

I don't agree that anyone "deserves" to have anything. Applying deservedness is a sticky business.

I also agree that some museums are better than others, but that doesn't preclude the existence of responsible museums dedicated to the preservation of electronic history. Aside from the AMMI, we have a great local museum in Hunt Valley here in the Baltimore area that has loads of great stuff all out on display, and the keeper of the museum is working to get things running so the public can experience them.

You can't say that "there are some bad museums" therefore "a museum shouldn't have it;" that's absolute plastics.

I never said that.
However if it were my set and I had to choose between a meh level museum that is getting it to store and not display, and a collector that's going to give it the maintenance it needs to get it back to working to specification and publicly document the set so others can appreciate it I'd choose the collector. I grant that a good museum that will preserve and display it is probably a better place for it to be.

I've never seen anyone use "plastics" in a sentence besides as a way to broadly refer to all materials commonly refered to as plastic... that's a new one one me.

Apologies, there were other people in the conversation I was responding to. I didn't make that clear.

There was a general statement made that implied it was the case. Not something you said.

Yes, as in "bending information to fit your hypothesis."

...

Here's a Toshiba 40" on the side of the road. It was totally trashed. Broke my heart.

It's gotten to be that those (CRT TVs) are truly never seen being thrown away like that where I live, it's always flat TVs, and the trash service won't pick them up just like they wouldn't pick up the CRT TVs back when they were still around. So the flat screens sit at the side of the road till the town issues the property owner where they are a citation to get rid of their junk, and then they have to pay both the citation AND the extra removal fee to get rid of them. And no, taping a piece of white paper to the screen with "FREE" scrawled across it don't get them a free pass either, it usually takes a couple to three weeks for the town to issue the citation and then it's usually gone pretty quick after that.

There are 4 or 5 trash removal services one can contract with in town (the town doesn't itself run it, it's all private contract now) and every one of the trash removal companies specifically state in the contract that TVs, large appliances, and large furniture are not part of the contract, ya gotta pay extra and make a special appointment to have such items removed.....

Wow, that's pretty tough. Our township is not quite so difficult. The county does the trash pickup. But large items like appliances are picked up by Mexican junk recyclers. Tires and paint are not picked up at all. TV's and computers are usually picked up by enthusiasts like us. Yard waste is picked up by a private contractor for the county. (Burning is not allowed.)

Out here the trash won't take electronics but will take furniture (within reason) the town doesn't care what's on your lawn... There's been 3 BPCs that have sat outside for a whole year recently. After they've had a few months to fail to find a home I take the HV cable degaussing coil and HV caps for parts. The handful of people who either don't like TVs in their yard or live in apartments dump their sets in farm fields and ditches nearby...If you try and make people pay for something that used to be free they'll get around paying for it in the ways you least desire...
In my case if I have a junk BPC set (I try to avoid anything that new) or loose CRT, I smash the tube and cabinet to bits seal it in one or more cardboard boxes small enough to slip into the regular house hold trash bags that also have household garbage in them and trick the garbage men into taking it that way.

Yes! I threw away my house's entire old layer of shingles that way, when I replaced its roof about 10 years ago or so. A pile of them to fill 80% of the can each week, covered with the one bag or so of actual trash I typically have, for a couple of months or so, and the big pile was gone.

If you're familiar with the first generation of Sony 26-inch console TV sets (KV-2642R, KV-2644R, KV-2645R if I remember right) that had really short-lived CRTs, someone gave me a white one in about 1992, and after I gave up trying to do anything to help its CRT, I busted the entire set (that had a cracked and yellowed cabinet) into pieces and "threw it in the trash" over a couple of weeks or so.

"Go to the dump?" "That's what we pay those guys in the trucks to do for us."

Did not see the video until today.

The saga of YouTuber, Shank Mods efforts to recover one of the few remaining Sony KX45ED-1 televisions, a truly herculean effort indeed. Thanks to all involved in the rescue. All the images shown in the recovery video of this magnificent set were of video games. Gamers love CRT sets for zero lag response. In this authors opinion, watching animated cartoons bores the hell out of me. This set deserves better.

https://youtu.be/JfZxOuc9Qwk?si=tejmtQHsjLOXecKZ

TBH I'm kinda surprised Bottom1 (the OP of this thread) hasn't weighed in here regarding the finding of this previously thought to be extinct TV :scratch2:

In the video Shank Mods talks about trolling forums looking for that set only to post finding it soon after...I kinda wonder if bottom1 was one of the troll accounts Shank created or how he contacted Charles Murray (some of his old videokarma posts were shown in the video)...

I have the Panasonic CT34WX54 widescreen CRT set and know what it weighs so I can't imagine what that overgrown Trinitron would be. I caught a YouTube video on that monster and can't even fathom moving it without a forklift.