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Comment by taude | Hacker News Reader

All my friends and myself had these Sony "flatscreen" TVs from around 2001. Took maybe three of us to move them out of our apartments. My friend had a bigger one, maybe 40" that was truly a beast and took up like a quarter of his Boston apartment living room. I remember I paid about $1K USD for the 32" model. I recently purchased a 4K 60" Samsung refurbed for $540. Memories.

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When HDTV was getting started, the TV you wanted was the Sony XBR Trinitron. There was a reason that Best Buy didn't put them in the television display area with all the then-new LCD and Plasma flatscreens - because it had a far better picture and was half the cost (even at $1400).

They weighed 200 lbs (90kg) and nearly all of it was at the front with that thick cylindrical tube face. So you definitely needed a strong stand for them and you'd also want to add a strap to secure it to the wall so it wouldn't fall over on a child or pet.

My buddy had the XBR version, now that I think about it. It even had a cable card slot. What ever happened to cable cards?

I think they had a problem with pay-per-view.

Worth noting these were pushing very close to if not true 1080i on the final models with 1000~ lines of vertical res, when most LCD or plasmas were doing 1024x768(yep, non square pixels), or even 800x480. Only the REALLY expensive ones were true 720p, even.

They looked so much obviously better that it took plasma into the late 2000s to catch up

The closest comparison i can think of is gaming laptops vs desktops. You got objectively better performance for less money, at the cost of it being large and heavy. They were also pretty reliable, especially compared to early plasmas that blew various expensive boards constantly.(and i would know, i scored several for free this way)

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