Cheers.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Made-Japan-Akio-Morita-Sony/dp/045115...
This isn't related to TVs, but I have a couple pieces of old Sony HiFi equipment from the very early 1970's and I'm always amazed by the quality and attention to detail Sony had back then. I feel like it's back when Sony had something to prove. This may have been the case for most consumer electronics manufacturers back then though.
One is a TA-1130 amplifier, and the other is a reel-to-reel tape player (I forget the model). The most amazing to me is that the reel-to-reel still works fine after nearly 50 years, considering all the moving parts.
He called the local Sony store to buy a spare part and the assistant was born after the part ceased production.
Begrudgingly he had to replace the record player.
Every (remaining) part of that old Sony is beautiful, unmistakably 80s but so well designed and finished it's still a joy to use; plus it sounds great.
I can't help but wonder if there's some correlation there. Perhaps the assistant's father was so dismayed at the part's cessation that the only comfort he could attain was in the arms of his wife.
There is a saying in Vietnam that goes "Sharp/Fine like a Sony," when someone talks about an act, a product, or a person so fine. That's in the context of a culture that does not (as) often associate products with brands (for example, they say photocopy instead of xerox, clasp locker instead of zipper, permanent marker instead of sharpie,...)
and read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/j...
to understand what happened in home electronics, especially TV sector. It was an economical revenge for WW2.
(It's that robotic dog, for anyone wondering)
By the time the PS3 rolled around Sony was getting a little too full of itself, lacking the competitive fire that made products like the Walkman and the Trinitron screen. It was a good console, but not one that redefined what a console was.
Champion perhaps in terms of sales, but the Dreamcast felt like the more forward thinking console of that generation.
It introduced the console industry to online gaming, downloadable content (it was free on the DC though), the idea of games being able to write portable mini games. Ok, that was badly executed but the VMU still had other cool quirks which was new for its era, like an LCD screen showing in game graphics.
The PlayStation 2, as nice as it was, was really just a hardware upgrade rather than a paradigm shift
At the time we called it a bacon and eggs partnership where they are the chicken and you are the pig.
That all said, I don't recall DirectX being hugely popular - or at least for games development - until around that era or not that long before. So it might have felt like it was pretty new back then. Particularly with how some of the new releases being quite a fundamental change from their previous releases (I seem to recall one version of DirectX (possibly 7?) dropped the previous version of Dx's DirectDraw APIs in favour of promoting Direct3D for all 2D rendering).
The first was truly groundbreaking in many ways (though some might say that was in part due to Sony was originally developing it with a games company).
After that later generations have mostly just gone with “make it faster” style evolution and taking the best parts of the previous generations competitors.
No drive to evolve like we’ve seen from Nintendo (Wii, Switch) or MS (Kinect, XBL, or even their games sharing ideas that got them pilloried).
The PS2 was better in that it not only became popular, but it had a huge wealth of titles for it. The true gems for a console come out usually near the end of the life-cycle when everyone's pushing the hardware to the limit. Sadly the Dreamcast never got that far.
I've never been as frustrated with a console as I have reading "disc read error" dozens of times a day.
At least lens replacement is a simple thing, not like changing the solder.
That must be Philips. Google "Philips natlab".