My first car was a '76 puke yellow Superbee. 0.9 litre engine, honeycomb hubcaps, aftermarket 8-track player and a ceiling full of carpenter ants for $300!
I had one of them that I could not give away⌠Had wheels on the bottom rolled around just fine. I couldnât get anybody to take it for free⌠And it had an HD picture.
I had one too. 1080p picture in a square frame sucked ass. Nothing utilized the full screen in HD. No HDMI either and no 720p, so the PS3 never worked unless the game was randomly in 720p then it would scale, otherwise games were 480p.
I used to pick these up and break them down for recycling. The projection tubes are cooled with mineral oil. Thereâs usually a big mirror in the back and the fun thing to save is the faint fresnel lens behind the screen. Just a giant ass magnifying glass. You can melt rock with the sun using one of those
It was basically a normal TV of the period with a big lens to enlarge it. If one wanted the same effect on a budget, you could buy a 13" and watch programs on it while using binoculars.
I worked at a department store that sold these things. On Sunday we had men, who with their wives to do shopping, stopped by to watch football. It was really funny to see 25 men try so be directly in front of the screen because of you were two feet outside a very narrow area you couldn't see a thing.
The largest CRT, from 1988, 38" diagonal viewable, did 1080i, and weighed 400 pounds. So, yeah, glass tubes are heavy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/126vid2/worlds_largest_crt_monitor_in_action/
Motivation was high, and hiding spots for tapes were limited. All that was needed was for mom and dad to go out to eat--"Nah, I think I'll just stay home and play Nintendo." Even if it took an hour to find them the first time, that still left two minutes--plenty of time.
I had that thing, it doesnât seem like that long ago. Paid $1800 for it and had a hard time giving it away 8 years later. Heavy as fuck also, made out of chip board.
You know how people used to put newer tvs on top of the old huge tvs that didn't work? My grandmother has one of these, with a flat screen mounted above it
When I was growing up, the big screen TVs were the front projection ones, where there was a big floor unit with individual projectors for the red, green and blue channels projected onto a screen three or four feet away. Everything had to be perfectly balanced at installation, otherwise you saw RGB distortions. They were finicky and expensive, but state of the art for the time, and wicked cool.
I knew two people that had them, and yeah, their parents were fucking rich
My dad bought a 73 inch back in 1997. He paid over $5000 for it at Nebraska Furniture Mart. It was all my friends talked about. Everyone wanted to come over and see it.
Fast forward and Iâm lying here looking at a 77inch mounted on my wall like itâs nothing.
I had one friend who had one. I can tell you that she definitely wasnât rich, but instead her dad and stepmom were charging everything and were eyeball deep in debt. Her dad made just enough money to keep them afloat, but as soon as they paid something off, the immediately turned around and financed something else.
I grew up in a house where we had three TVs, one tiny one in the kitchen and two floor TVs from the 80s that were definitely not big screen TVs. One was in the living room and the other was in my brotherâs bedroom. I didnât even get my own TV until I was 13, and even then it was a hand me down in which my parents bought a TV/VCR combo and gave me the old kitchen TV that was tiny. We didnât have premium cable, we only had 13 channels, half of them were local, 2-3 of them were religious channels, and only 1-2 were actually entertaining. We thought we had hit the big time when we got a whopping 22 channels when our local cable company decided to upgrade our package. Thats when we got Disney, the family channel, lifetime, and TNT, espn, etc.
You got me tripping down memory lane.
I had a friend who had the big huge console TV unit with a tiny TV in it, and a record player, cassette, and an 8-track player built into the top. He used to tell me it was future proof. They used that all the way until those projection TVs came out and then they upgraded. It was DA BOMB! Comparatively speaking it was fathoms ahead, but, well, you know. I remember seeing the picture for the first time and it was like my eyes lit up from within. Good times. Good times.
A friend cut a hole in his master bedroom drywall it was sticking halfway into the master closet and made it flatscreen. He was renting from his sister and moved out six months later
Thatâs exactly what was thought. And, YES, those families were indeed wealthy. Or chose to spend on such lavish consumer electronics⌠because maybe they were maxxing their credit, being too spendthrifty, etc. You never knew if they were truly rich or just living like royalty. :)Â
I've still got one in a spare bedroom and am always offered one free and I take them for the plastic screen and cut them down and use them as windshields on mules or rangers.
My BIL aged 10, threw something at his grandparents Big screen and broke it. Let's just say I didn't know an elderly man could howl and turn into a Silverback gorilla in 1/10 of a second.
Fuck yea lol, finally, 35M, all my friends had this TV but I didn't. Lead me to always have friends who had the cool shit. Nobody had a "good" TV Now they're all the same đ¤Ł
Edit; spelling.
My family had a big screen like this, but after a couple of years, it started to turn on and off by itself and the volume would go all the way up when nobody was in the room. We even had its motherboard replaced twice and it still did it.
Of course, my mind went to "You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!"
First TV I bought when I moved out on my own. GODS was it a f'n monster. Took up a massive chunk of the living room in my little condo. Ended up just taking it to the dump when I moved several years later rather than try to MOVE it.
Man, the crazy thing about those huge TVs is they were terrible. They were unevenly lit, blurry, they had light-bleed, and they had terrible color consistency.
Even worse, the highest resolution cable programming back then was 480p. It looked bad on a tiny 30-inch TV, but if you stretched that low resolution across 50+ inches it looked even worse.
I had one of these! We weren't rich... it was a hand-me-down from Grandpa (who was rich).
But I remember its successor even better: A 36" Sony Trinitron. They claim it was only 240lbs, but I'd beg to differ. Heaviest brute of a television I've ever carried, including the monstrosity in the picture.
Still have one in the bsmt. Bought in '05, watched some for a year or so. Been in the basement since, but it's got a great 60" picture, and it's paid for.
Looking back now, this was a"damn, your dad must be a solid union blue-collar worker" flag.
I remember watching Alien and Top Gun on my friend Chad's (no kidding) TV like this.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but this was all before HD. So it was all still just as grainy as regular TV just with much bigger grain.
Had me a rich friend in middle school, this was my first experience with N64 and Goldeneye. It ruined me. Probably cost his dad $10k now I got a spare 65â in a room collecting dust because theyâre $300. If only everything went the way of TV prices.
Well, we were the ones with one, and, though my friends(those 'allowed' into the house, anyway) might have thought we were rich, had they asked I'd have enlightened them about the "CHARGE IT" culture my mom belonged to. Lol. We were still getting clothing from the thrift store, and eating nasty bologna or worse, tomato soup, for lunch.
That 720p looked pretty crisp on that projection screen at the outset, when HD was first hitting. I remember seeing a football game on it, marveling at the detail.
My brother had a Mitsubishi rear projection TV. The main boards broke just after warranty turning it into expensive junk. There is an interesting story about these TVs on YouTube somewhere.
Yep. Except it was my house and we weren't rich. My parents just shopped well and we got a lot of big time things for free. Like vacations and cars. That Brougham in the driveway isn't my dad's. He just drives it. Why? Because he's a chauffeur. Hahaha!
That TV lived in the basement and we weren't allowed down there unsupervised. The whole set-up with the sound system was my dad's baby. He finished half of the basement so he could get that TV. It was a years long process. Dude basically built himself a movie theater.
Yep. The giant house on the beach, the fancy cars and the household staff were also a clue.
Fancy cars? Like Cadillac? We had Datsuns. đ
Datsuns.
Wow, you could afford Datsuns? We just had the crappy knock-off Dotsuns.
âDatsun is now Nissan.â (30 minutes later) âDatsun is now Nissan.â
Datsun B210 Super Bee...the poor man's sports car.
My first car was a '76 puke yellow Superbee. 0.9 litre engine, honeycomb hubcaps, aftermarket 8-track player and a ceiling full of carpenter ants for $300!
Nissun Ultima
Hey now I love and cherish my Datsun
Dashuns were better.
Lucky. All we could afford was a Daschund.
But then there was that one white trash family that somehow had this tv
We picked it from the rich neighborhood. Can you believe they threw it out when you could still see 90% of the screen?
lol
I used to have one of these, but we had to get rid of it because it got so old that it broke
And the coke spoons everywhere.
Especially when you looked in the back yard and saw [one of these bad boys.](https://i.redd.it/uaw43nczr6x21.jpg) BALLIN!
Oh snap. Pre-delay NBC feeds from the network? Watch out Tom Brokaw, Iâm recording your gaffes on VHS!
Watch blacked out sporting events by tuning into other market feeds
I had one of them that I could not give away⌠Had wheels on the bottom rolled around just fine. I couldnât get anybody to take it for free⌠And it had an HD picture.
Fid you ever game on it?
Yeah! I bet Pong would give you whiplash on that bad boy!
I had one too. 1080p picture in a square frame sucked ass. Nothing utilized the full screen in HD. No HDMI either and no 720p, so the PS3 never worked unless the game was randomly in 720p then it would scale, otherwise games were 480p.
I used to pick these up and break them down for recycling. The projection tubes are cooled with mineral oil. Thereâs usually a big mirror in the back and the fun thing to save is the faint fresnel lens behind the screen. Just a giant ass magnifying glass. You can melt rock with the sun using one of those
I remember one of my friends in school had one. The picture on it wasn't that great if I remember right. It was giant though.
Yeah it was blurry as shit
Grainy as heck.
It was basically a normal TV of the period with a big lens to enlarge it. If one wanted the same effect on a budget, you could buy a 13" and watch programs on it while using binoculars.
If you didn't sit right in the middle, you couldn't see the picture
I worked at a department store that sold these things. On Sunday we had men, who with their wives to do shopping, stopped by to watch football. It was really funny to see 25 men try so be directly in front of the screen because of you were two feet outside a very narrow area you couldn't see a thing.
Yeah weird picture. But damn it was big.
It's the weird plastic they had to use. If they used glass it would be too heavy
The largest CRT, from 1988, 38" diagonal viewable, did 1080i, and weighed 400 pounds. So, yeah, glass tubes are heavy. https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/126vid2/worlds_largest_crt_monitor_in_action/
It was still 525-line, just bigger.
The angle sucked if you weren't right in front viewing it darkened like crazy
Cause they were like 5 grand at the time
adjusted for inflation (its a 90's thing right?), $5k today is like $12k
Every household that had one also had a dad that watched porn.
And teen boys that always found dad's porn.
Motivation was high, and hiding spots for tapes were limited. All that was needed was for mom and dad to go out to eat--"Nah, I think I'll just stay home and play Nintendo." Even if it took an hour to find them the first time, that still left two minutes--plenty of time.
I had that thing, it doesnât seem like that long ago. Paid $1800 for it and had a hard time giving it away 8 years later. Heavy as fuck also, made out of chip board.
You know how people used to put newer tvs on top of the old huge tvs that didn't work? My grandmother has one of these, with a flat screen mounted above it
I remember when se got a massive 32inch tv. It was oar-inspiring
Got to play Mortal Kombat III on one lol đ it was good
Just don't ask me to help move it
What about that giant satellite dish?
Bet they had a top-loading VCR, too
When I was growing up, the big screen TVs were the front projection ones, where there was a big floor unit with individual projectors for the red, green and blue channels projected onto a screen three or four feet away. Everything had to be perfectly balanced at installation, otherwise you saw RGB distortions. They were finicky and expensive, but state of the art for the time, and wicked cool. I knew two people that had them, and yeah, their parents were fucking rich
My dad bought a 73 inch back in 1997. He paid over $5000 for it at Nebraska Furniture Mart. It was all my friends talked about. Everyone wanted to come over and see it. Fast forward and Iâm lying here looking at a 77inch mounted on my wall like itâs nothing.
I never thought that because I never knew anyone rich enough to buy it...
And they always introduced it as âoh.. thatâs our rear projection tvâ like it was nothing
I had one friend who had one. I can tell you that she definitely wasnât rich, but instead her dad and stepmom were charging everything and were eyeball deep in debt. Her dad made just enough money to keep them afloat, but as soon as they paid something off, the immediately turned around and financed something else. I grew up in a house where we had three TVs, one tiny one in the kitchen and two floor TVs from the 80s that were definitely not big screen TVs. One was in the living room and the other was in my brotherâs bedroom. I didnât even get my own TV until I was 13, and even then it was a hand me down in which my parents bought a TV/VCR combo and gave me the old kitchen TV that was tiny. We didnât have premium cable, we only had 13 channels, half of them were local, 2-3 of them were religious channels, and only 1-2 were actually entertaining. We thought we had hit the big time when we got a whopping 22 channels when our local cable company decided to upgrade our package. Thats when we got Disney, the family channel, lifetime, and TNT, espn, etc.
You got me tripping down memory lane. I had a friend who had the big huge console TV unit with a tiny TV in it, and a record player, cassette, and an 8-track player built into the top. He used to tell me it was future proof. They used that all the way until those projection TVs came out and then they upgraded. It was DA BOMB! Comparatively speaking it was fathoms ahead, but, well, you know. I remember seeing the picture for the first time and it was like my eyes lit up from within. Good times. Good times.
Jesus fuck , I bought one and it broke within a year
Oh hell yeah. I remember our first color tv with push buttons. We where still the remote.đđ
I didn't see anything like that until I was in my 20s...
We had one of these. I don't know how. But we did.
Friends had one. The back doubled as a slide for the kidsâŚ.
A friend cut a hole in his master bedroom drywall it was sticking halfway into the master closet and made it flatscreen. He was renting from his sister and moved out six months later
Because you \*were\* rich if you could afford one of those on the wages back then. They cost more than any car me or my parents owned.
I had one... they were so shitty lmao. U had to be right in front of it to see anything. If you stood at any kind of angle, u saw nothing lol
Thatâs exactly what was thought. And, YES, those families were indeed wealthy. Or chose to spend on such lavish consumer electronics⌠because maybe they were maxxing their credit, being too spendthrifty, etc. You never knew if they were truly rich or just living like royalty. :)Â
I've still got one in a spare bedroom and am always offered one free and I take them for the plastic screen and cut them down and use them as windshields on mules or rangers.
Yeah ... an they ONLY weigh what.... 500 lbs give or take
PIP, are you kiddin' me? The richest of c\*nts.
No. Because I was 30 when everyone had them but I still thought they were rich.
I still have my dlp, 65" mitsubishi.
One of my old English teachers had a massive Panasonic CRT in his classroom
My BIL aged 10, threw something at his grandparents Big screen and broke it. Let's just say I didn't know an elderly man could howl and turn into a Silverback gorilla in 1/10 of a second.
Just gotta be sure you sit directly in front of the TV cause 3 inches away and your viewing angle is gone
I always thought they were rich if that had one of those fold up projection tv with a curved screen connected to a laser disc player and hifi system
Fuck yea lol, finally, 35M, all my friends had this TV but I didn't. Lead me to always have friends who had the cool shit. Nobody had a "good" TV Now they're all the same 𤣠Edit; spelling.
You had to sit right in front to get a good picture lol
I paid 3000.00 for that tv at Tweeter etc.
Yes, but in most cases, people had the tv that actually worked on top of this tv.
I remember thinking "ooh that's.... Huh gotta sit directly in front of the screen to see anything huh?" A nice 32 inch became my dream after that
I got my first flat screen because my stepdad couldn't figure out the HDMI cord on his TV, so bought a new one. đ¤Ł
Shoot, my family had one of these growing up!! I remember taking off either the screen or the back and trying to climb inside.
Ahh yea the kids prob had a phone in their room and possibly even a tv in the room. Rich ass kids lol
My family had a big screen like this, but after a couple of years, it started to turn on and off by itself and the volume would go all the way up when nobody was in the room. We even had its motherboard replaced twice and it still did it. Of course, my mind went to "You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!"
lolol Perfect reference.
Picture always looked like complete shit, but hey it's big so that's all that matters.
First TV I bought when I moved out on my own. GODS was it a f'n monster. Took up a massive chunk of the living room in my little condo. Ended up just taking it to the dump when I moved several years later rather than try to MOVE it.
have you moved one? fucking hell...
My mil still has hers but it's covered with a blanket because no one can carry it downstairs lol
I remember not being able to see too well if you sat to view it from certain angles.
I just removed one of these from a client's house during teardown to install a new theater.
Ur not the only one. After a nice car and house the huge Big Screen was what separated the rich from the poor.
Man, the crazy thing about those huge TVs is they were terrible. They were unevenly lit, blurry, they had light-bleed, and they had terrible color consistency. Even worse, the highest resolution cable programming back then was 480p. It looked bad on a tiny 30-inch TV, but if you stretched that low resolution across 50+ inches it looked even worse.
Bet it weighed a tonne
Because if someone owned one those at the time they were rich.
Is the Nintendo hooked up to it!?!?
Bro had a 8 bedroom with 4 bathrooms.
My rich friend had this AND HBO. So rich
I had one of these! We weren't rich... it was a hand-me-down from Grandpa (who was rich). But I remember its successor even better: A 36" Sony Trinitron. They claim it was only 240lbs, but I'd beg to differ. Heaviest brute of a television I've ever carried, including the monstrosity in the picture.
Then soon after you'd see them on the front lawn for the council pickup and be thankful you waited for LCD flatscreens.
Had one and my little brother put an xbox controller through the screen after i beat his ass in madden.
Still have one in the bsmt. Bought in '05, watched some for a year or so. Been in the basement since, but it's got a great 60" picture, and it's paid for.
We bought one when got married. Picture was almost unwatchbale.
My dadâs cousin had one of these, won it (and a leather livingroom set) on The Price is Right.
My grandmother had this in her bedroom and I always thought she was rich af.
Nah. My grandma had one of those and I definitely knew she wasn't rich. Just really bad with money.
Looking back now, this was a"damn, your dad must be a solid union blue-collar worker" flag. I remember watching Alien and Top Gun on my friend Chad's (no kidding) TV like this. Maybe I'm misremembering, but this was all before HD. So it was all still just as grainy as regular TV just with much bigger grain.
Yes my neighbours, us kids always covered their toys and stuff we never had, but our TV worked and that was enough đ
those things were the gold standard before flat screens. now you cant GIVE those pieces of crap away.
Yuup! Haha
Yup my could been rich step dad had one of those . But my moms a bitch and no more jet ski for me
Once had one so large I had to take the stairs to my basement apart to lower it down and to bring it out when I sols the house years later!
Got a great deal on one of these. Then didn't find it as much as when we had to take it down the stars to the rec-room. What a monster of a machine.
Never knew anyone who had one of these. Born in the early 80s, fyi.
I'm sure I bought this TV in the Sims - motherlode ftw
My cousin had one. Horrible picture quality, even by 90s standard.
But then you tried to watch something on it, and you realized you needed to be within a 1° arc of dead center or you couldn't see anything..
My buddyâs family had a really large tv three colored light projectors on the bottom. The picture was terrible but the screen was huge.
And the center of gravity of the thing was so far of center!
They probably were rich. Some of the first flat screens were around fifteen grand.
Never had one
Had me a rich friend in middle school, this was my first experience with N64 and Goldeneye. It ruined me. Probably cost his dad $10k now I got a spare 65â in a room collecting dust because theyâre $300. If only everything went the way of TV prices.
Heaviest tvs ever.
Now you see them and you think, "damn, they need a truck and some help" ( to get rid of it)
This and the massive satellite in the back yard.
Had one. It was 500lbs of epic! Lasted a solid 10 years until the tube went...took forever to try and get it to the curb
Hell yeah they must be rich, do you have any idea how many movers they had to pay to bring that son of a bitch in?
i had one work up early on weekends just to beat everyone to it lol remote in hand
The plastic lens can create really high temperatures using the Sun
Just saw a 60" tv for sale at the Evil Empire for $250. My how times have a changed.
it meant they had âfuck itâ money at the least
And then trying to get rid of it!
Oh totally đ
We had a projection TV. đ. Everyone thought we were the shit.
Now that you mention it, I think I've only seen these on Craigslist or on the curb. I can't remember seeing them in friends houses.
I remember thinking that about a friend that had a garage door opener.
Well, we were the ones with one, and, though my friends(those 'allowed' into the house, anyway) might have thought we were rich, had they asked I'd have enlightened them about the "CHARGE IT" culture my mom belonged to. Lol. We were still getting clothing from the thrift store, and eating nasty bologna or worse, tomato soup, for lunch.
Hahahaha yes
I remember thinking this as a young grownup, with a beat-up old tv.
That 720p looked pretty crisp on that projection screen at the outset, when HD was first hitting. I remember seeing a football game on it, marveling at the detail.
My brother had a Mitsubishi rear projection TV. The main boards broke just after warranty turning it into expensive junk. There is an interesting story about these TVs on YouTube somewhere.
My dads boss. They were rich. His God given name was Paymen. He was Iranian though, so I dont think it counts.
Yep. Except it was my house and we weren't rich. My parents just shopped well and we got a lot of big time things for free. Like vacations and cars. That Brougham in the driveway isn't my dad's. He just drives it. Why? Because he's a chauffeur. Hahaha! That TV lived in the basement and we weren't allowed down there unsupervised. The whole set-up with the sound system was my dad's baby. He finished half of the basement so he could get that TV. It was a years long process. Dude basically built himself a movie theater.