Why Did NBC Use Trinitrons?

[old_tv_nut]

When Trinitrons appeared, they outshone other sets in brightness and maintaining color purity at high brightness, whereas shadow mask tubes would "dome" and lose purity around constant bright areas. The smaller screen Trinitrons also had a very carefully controlled video frequency rolloff so there was no trace of chroma dot crawl that might cause a moire with the phosphor stripe structure. They had a very good luma transient response shape without ringing or unsymmetrical response on edges. Also, the roll-off made any high frequency noise in the video invisible. Station/studio people loved them, because it made their pictures look so clean, even though you couldn't really see fine detail. It was a case of "see no evil" in case there was a high frequency problem with a studio's signal. The larger Trinitron professional monitors had a better luma frequency response, but the great majority of monitors in use that video folks were gaga over were the smaller ones.