Reply 120 of 164, by momaka
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Tiido wrote on 2024-03-08, 15:25:I'm pretty sure the assembly lines to make the kinescopes are long sold off and scrapped so getting good newly made kinescopes will be quite difficult and very very expensive...
Indeed.
You don't actually need an assembly line. But similar to makers of vacuum tubes and glasswork, you will need a large kiln, an extremely high-class vacuum pump, various spot-welding machines (for making the CRT gun and grid), and probably a slew of other very specific / large tools and equipment that pretty much makes it cost-prohibitive for any one individual or small business to invest into. And there's not really such a high demand for mass-producing CRTs, so no large company will venture into this business either.
In short, CRTs and the making of, is a lost art now.
Whatever surviving tubes there are will be the last ones we see.
On the electronics side, things aren't that complicated at all and you can still get high-voltage & current transistors needed for the horizontal output. Proprietary all-in-one RGB amps may be gone now too, but they can be built from discrete transistor easily. In fact, my older Sony CRT monitors all have mostly discrete RGB amplifiers. It's the newer models that switched to special all-integrated RGB amps.