Video projectors used to be ridiculously cool

You are looking at something you're not supposed to see. Well, at least not like this. The image on your screen is coming from one third of the business end of a video projector. This image is the second third. And this one is the third third. That's right. It's our old friends red, green, and blue. The primary colors of almost all modern display technologies. But for some reason, they've been separated. If we zoom out a bit, we'll find that we've been looking through the lenses of this device: a Sony VPH-D50HT Mark II. And for many years, when we needed a large full color video screen, this is how we did it. If you're my age or older, you might remember seeing these triclopses out in the wild. I have a particularly burned-in memory of one of these in a party room at a local entertainment center. And I also remember seeing one on an airplane. By the turn of the millennium, these were starting to go out of fashion for reasons which will become very obvious. But because of the technology inside of here, this device produces a shockingly good projected image, especially considering its age. It has fantastic color rendering, and it doesn't struggle in dark scenes like so many projectors do. In fact, when displaying a black video signal, the screen is truly black. And these support much higher video resolutions than you might expect. This model originally came out in 1998, yet it natively supports 1080i component video and can even go a little higher with an RGB input. In fact, the technology itself has a theoretically unlimited resolution. That's because behind each of its three lenses is a cathode ray tube. That's right. This is a CRT projector. But rather than use a single color CRT like you'd find in an ordinary television set, this uses three monochrome CRTs: one red, one green, and one blue. Then the three images each tube produces are merged into one on the projection surface, and that produces a full color image. This technique has lots of advantages, but it also requires an astounding level of complexity and precision. This is a red CRT from a similar model of projector. And you may notice there's some very odd stuff going on here. For one, there's quite the lens strapped to the front of it, and it appears to be filled with some kind of liquid. Yeah, this is higher tech than it looks at first glance. But, the basic idea of projecting an image from a small CRT like this is much older than this device and in fact dates back to the earliest days of television. These are the guts of a television set from 1950something. And these are socks! The technology connection socks I let you know about in my previous video. Now, if you didn't see that, I'm not just telling you about these socks to make a quick buck. \In fact, these are a collaboration between myself and the folks at Goodtore. That means that all the profit that's generated from the sale of these socks is donated to charity. These socks will help partners in fact, these are a collaboration between myself and the folks at Good Store. These socks will help Partners in Health operate the Maternal Center of Excellence in Sierra Leone. We're coming into the final days of orders being open for these, so I'm letting you know this is your last chance to get them. The Good Store team worked with independent artists and myself to design 12 Technology Connections-inspired socks. We are selling them as a prepaid subscription, meaning you only pay once. And if you choose to purchase it, you'll have a full year of delightful sock surprises arriving at your door each month starting in January. And we have a six-month option, too. The socks are shipped in flat compostable envelopes that go through the mail as if they are a letter. I've been a member of the Awesome Socks Club for years. And let me tell you, a monthly sock surprise is just so much fun. You can buy it for yourself or for someone else as a gift. Orders are going to be closing October 12th and then they will never be available again! So, if you want to warm your feet with socks that highlight my particular flavor of eccentricity - and help mothers and children in a region of the world with one of the highest infant mortality rates, well, you'll find links to get these in all the places. Thank you so much. And now, back to this thing. This black and white television receiver is actually not that complex. It looks like a jumbled mess of hands soldered parts... because that's what it is, but there really aren't that many parts in here. This is the schematic diagram for the whole thing. It's mostly the same bunch of capacitors, resistors, vacuum tubes, coils, and potentiometers you'd find in any radio receiver. Sure, there are many more of them than a typical radio, but there's not much to this which isn't just radio parts.

That is, except for three key things: The deflection yoke, which steers the electron beam that draws images on the picture tube, the flyback transformer, which generates the roughly 15,000 volts needed to make the picture tube function, and of course, the picture tube itself. Now, you might have caught a little thing about 15,000 volts. Yeah, here's the part where I say playing with CRTs is dangerous. Not only do the drive electronics produce extremely high voltage, but the aquadag coating on the inside and outside of the glass picture tube turns it into a giant capacitor which is able to store a lethal charge long after the TV has been switched off. So, don't screw around with these. But especially really old ones because electric shock is not the only danger here. This picture tube does not have integrated implosion protection, which makes handling it rather risky. If you've ever wondered why very old TVs had a flat sheet of glass in front of the actual picture tube, that was safety glass put there to protect it from you and to protect you from it should it one day violently implode into flying shards of glass. Yay! Anywho, I brought this out because the picture tube is the part that made televisions so expensive. Electronically, it's not really any more complicated than the other vacuum tubes in here, but it's still a vacuum tube. It cannot have any air inside of it or it won't work. And that made them very difficult to manufacture in large sizes because the bigger you make the viewing screen, the more area the atmosphere has to work with to try and crush the tube. That is made worse by the fact that a larger screen also requires the electron gun to be farther away from the front of the tube, which means the sides of the tube also have to get bigger and also become more vulnerable to atmospheric crushing. Now, obviously, we did eventually figure out how to make picture tubes with large viewing screens. Here is one of them. But before we did, people were experimenting with optical trickery. Rather than try and make a fragile bigger tube, you could use a small picture tube like this and make it much brighter. Then you could use lenses to magnify and project an image of this small screen onto a larger viewing surface. This was surprisingly common in the early post-war television sets of the 1940s. And in fact, some of the earliest television receivers which were sold were basically what today we would call video projectors. They weren't that different from this much newer device, though they had a single black and white picture tube and a single projecting lens. This technique worked to make a larger viewing screen, but it came with significant downsides. First, I don't want to mislead you: the viewing screens were not actually that big. Those early projection systems should really be thought of as a way to make normalsized TV screens cheaper. And in the spirit of cheap, the image quality wasn't that great. Rear projection systems where the CRT was behind a translucent screen tended to have poor contrast in the best of cases with a somewhat fuzzy image. And front projection systems required the room to be absolutely dark to see anything at all. And in both cases, the CRT needed to be driven really hard in order to produce a bright enough image to be projected, and that meant they wore out quickly and needed frequent replacement, which negated much of the savings. These downsides combined meant that once large direct view picture tubes could be economically manufactured, they would immediately take over the market, and projection systems became a strange curiosity of the past. That is until the 1970s. By then, lots had changed in the realm of television, such as color television broadcasts. Ooh! And we had gotten quite good at manufacturing large CRTs for use in television sets. But consumer demand for even bigger TV sets was starting to swell. And now those nasty physics came back to bite us. We knew how to make big CRTs. But the larger you make the screen of a CRT, the stronger the tube has to be to resist implosion. This means the glass has to get thicker as size scales up, and thus the tube becomes heavier and heavier, which presents a practical limit to the size of a television screen. And so, as often happens in 30-year cycles, what was old was suddenly new again. Video projectors and projection televisions were about to become the hot new thing.

Now, unfortunately, it's not easy to trace a clean line through the history of this concept coming back into vogue. Mainly, that's because the earliest devices weren't exactly projectors, but they also weren't exactly televisions. The first company to commercialize this basic idea was called Advent and they released the Videobeam in 1972. It was a very similar device to this projector with the main difference being the arrangement of the lenses. Here they're in a single row of three and the Videobeam arranged them in a triangle. But the Videobeam, while it was technically a projector, required the use of a dedicated screen placed at a fixed distance from the projection unit. You could not simply plop it somewhere, point it at a wall, and focus the lenses. You needed to use its dedicated 84in curved monster of a projection screen. Why? Well, the images being produced by its three CRTs need to converge with one another in order to look like a normal full color image on the screen. They need to perfectly overlap. And that is really hard to accomplish. Videobeam's approach was to simply calibrate their projectors in the factory and sell you the screen they did it with. No need to worry about convergence issues when you know all the variables. Eventually, other manufacturers would sell video projectors with integrated screens as extra-large televisions. You may remember the days of so-called big screen TVs. Those enormous blocky televisions which had flat plastic screens with a large base below them. That base essentially had one of these in it pointing up at a mirror which then reflected the images from the three CRTs onto the translucent viewing screen. Much like the projection TV sets of the 1940s, but with color! But this video is about a projector. This thing wasn't sold with a dedicated screen and supports screen sizes from 60 all the way up to 250 in. That means the calibration and convergence process has to be done on site. And would you like to see that process? Well, I hope so, cuz that's what I'm about to show you. And you're going to quickly learn why these projectors got replaced as soon as decent alternatives arrived. If you look closely, you'll notice that the center green lens is pointing straight ahead, but the red and blue lenses are pointing slightly inward. This is the very first thing that you'll be adjusting. You actually have to manually change the angle of these two lenses to make the center of the red and blue images line up with the green image. Except no, that's not actually the first step. The first step is to consult these convoluted charts to figure out just where exactly this thing needs to go in relation to your screen. I'm not using a projection screen here, I'm just pointing it at a wall. So I can skip all that, but I promise it doesn't help very much. Once it's in position, you can remove the cover to make all the things you're about to have to adjust accessible and power it on. Since these are CRTs, they only take a few moments to produce light, but then you'll discover that the projector would like to do a 20inut warm-up where it shows nothing but a white screen. It does this every time you switch it on, and it lets you skip it, but it's very important to let that warm-up happen before making adjustments because the geometry of the CRTs and lenses will actually be affected by temperature, and you don't want to fiddle with anything before it's all warmed up. Actually, remember when I showed you this naked tube and pointed out there's what appears to be liquid in there? Well, that's because there is. The CRTs in projectors like this and those old school big screen TVs are being driven very hard in order to get as bright as they do. And as all those electrons slam into the phosphors at the front, the faces of the tubes get quite warm. To deal with that heat, the gap between this lens and the face of the picture tube is filled with a glycol solution. The glycol carries that heat away from the face and with the help of these fins here dissipates it to the air. Now, it's not like these get very hot. The entire projector consumes about 450 watts. But keeping the phosphor cool during operation prolongs their life significantly. This cooling is basically what was required to make projection with CRTs possible. Unfortunately, some manufacturers weren't too careful with the preparation of this solution, and lots of these projectors suffer from mold growth in the coolant which pretty much destroys their ability to produce a clear picture. This one though, luckily, is perfect.

And by the way, speaking of cooling, this does use cooling fans to pull air through it and cool down the tubes. And I've done a bit of movie magic on you because this has not actually been switched on while I've been filming. But I will switch it on now. [click of button, then CLONK of CRTs coming to life] You might have heard those classic CRT noises, and depending on how sensitive your hearing is, you might also hear some whining from this thing, but you will definitely hear the fans. [fans drone softly in background] This is much quieter than many projectors out there, but honestly, it's a little louder than I expected. Anyway, once it's warmed up, you need to whip out this absolutely gnarly remote control, hook it up to the projector with this incredibly long cable. Hit the key sequence enter, up, down, enter to open up the service menu, and then you need to reset all of the video memory entries. This will make sure it's ready for a completely fresh calibration sequence. And by the way, this instruction manual is one which will really make you want to scream. It will tell you how to do those things... but not in order! This is page 23, adjusting the CRT conversion angle. And step three basically says, "do this thing, which is on page 35. " And then step four says "do this thing, which is on page 99. " That is awful, and I hate it. And once you've made your way through all that, you need to have it display this crosshair pattern. This will allow you to see how far off the red and blue lenses are compared to green by looking at the central vertical line. In this projector, the green tube can be thought of as the king tube, and you don't adjust anything on it except focus. Now, the crosshair should be white, but right now it's a mess of red, green, and blue. By loosening these screws, I can move the red and blue lenses side to side. The goal here is to have the vertical lines drawn by each tube perfectly line up with one another so it appears as a single white line. The remote allows you to switch off each tube with the press of a button, and it's often much easier to, say, disable the blue tube when adjusting the red one, which makes the crosshair appear yellow when perfectly aligned. And then do the opposite when adjusting the blue tube. Disabling the red tube causes the crosshair to appear cyan. Okay, and once you've gotten the vertical line as close to perfect as you can, you can tighten those adjustment screws back down and move on to focusing. Which is much, much more involved than you would think. First, we got to get it into service mode again. And then we have to make sure we set it to internal oscillator pattern P2. Why? No idea. Then we have to reset some more data for some reason. I continue to be very annoyed at this manual. Then we have it display this H pattern which is helpful for focusing. And we're going to disable the red and blue tubes so all we see is a sea of green. And now, finally, we can adjust the focus of one of its three lenses. And how many focus adjustments are there for each lens? Four. Technically there are just two focus adjustments per lens. But there are also two flapping adjustments. Flapping? Okay, so I should point out that as interesting as this concept is on its face, the optics of this system are quite impressive. Each of the CRTs has a 7 inch screen. That's not a large display size by any means, but projecting an image of something that large - and doing it with near-perfect optical clarity - is nuts! There's so much room for error when trying to make an image of such a large flat surface on another flat surface. And this has to do it three times. Each lens has a separate adjustment for the center focus and the corner focus. You start by loosening the wing nut closer to the rear of the projector and then you turn the barrel of the lens until the center of the screen is tack sharp. Then you lock it back down. Next, you loosen the farther wing nut and turn the barrel of the lens until the corners are tack sharp. And if you discover at this point that you can't make all the corners sharp, you get them as sharp as you can and then adjust the flapping. This actually moves the CRTs behind the lenses a little bit to adjust how parallel their faces are compared to the lens. And it may be necessary to move, say, the right side of the tube just a tad bit away from the glass in order to get the entire image in focus. It's a lot of work. And once you're done, you get to do it two more times! And then you'll discover, wow, it's really hard to see that H pattern with just the red or just the blue tubes. But you're going to try your best and get each of the three lenses as sharp as you possibly can.

And once you're finished with the focus, you'll turn all the tubes on again and cry because you're nowhere near done. In fact, you've barely started. You now have the lenses situated correctly. But you'll notice the image doesn't look that great. That's because the images that are actually being drawn on each tube aren't lining up quite perfectly on the screen, which means you now have to adjust the registration. Any of you out there remember playing with the geometry settings on a CRT computer monitor? Things like centering, skew, keystone, pin, cushion, and all that? Well, strap in because you're about to do that a whole awful lot using a very confusing remote. I want to call out the keystone adjustment because it's a great example of what makes these projectors so unique. Keystoning is what happens when the projection surface isn't parallel with the projector. If, for example, you point a projector slightly up at a screen, the image it projects will start to appear trapezoidal with the top of the image wider than the bottom. And you may notice that in this standard configuration, the lenses of the CRT projector are definitely angled upward. Modern digital projectors will compensate for that keystoning by simply cropping away parts of the image, but that forces it to lose active pixels and thus lose image resolution. This though can correct for keystoning simply by scanning the CRTs with a counteracting keystone shape. This is what's really cool about having monochrome CRTs. You can tell just by looking through the lens that the sides of the image that it's drawing aren't parallel with the sides of the actual picture tube. It's not forced to use a rigid grid of pixels. It can simply steer the scanning beam a little differently. That means no resolution is lost in the keystone correction. The shape of the image was simply changed. This is essentially what all the registration adjustments are doing. They affect the geometry of the scanning beam for each of the three picture tubes. And when you set this thing up, it's your job to make sure they are perfectly scanning on top of each other throughout the whole screen. There's really no sense showing you just how convoluted the entire process is, but I promise you'll have endless fun going through the different test patterns and turning on different combinations of the three tubes, trying to get them all to line up perfectly with one another. I didn't have to deal with the borders of a screen. I was just pointing this at a wall. But even still, this process was among the most fiddly and annoying things I've ever done. Now, as much as I truly despise this manual for how it's organized, it does have a very thorough and detailed explanation of the process. The order in which it chooses to say certain things remains baffling and infuriating, but at least it gives you a step-by-step guide on how to do all this. And once you've gotten everything to be as good as you can reasonably make it, congratulations! You're still not done. All of that registration tinkering was just for its baseline registration settings. Once you've saved them into memory, you'll discover that each individual video input has its own memory to make fine adjustments on top of the baseline registration. And if you want a perfect image from this thing, you're going to need to do more fiddling, especially because of this thing's key feature. This is a multi-scan projector, meaning it will accept pretty much any resolution you throw at it. And that means the actual raster that it's scanning on each of the three tubes will change depending on what signals it's receiving. The baseline registration assumes a standard definition video signal made of 525 lines per frame. But since this can also accept HD video in the form of 1,080 lines per frame, things aren't necessarily going to line up quite right when you switch to input two. But, once you've finally made your way through this incredibly frustrating process, you will be blown away by the results. I don't have that much experience with home cinema projectors, but I have a little and I've also seen plenty of other projectors in school and office settings. And this produces by far the best projected image I have ever seen outside of a movie theater. And in some ways, this is better than what's in theaters today. However, this is nowhere near as bright as anything you'd be used to now. These need to be in a completely dark room for it to really be a good experience, and it will still be kind of dim. There are some other things about it which leave something to be desired, too. But once dialed in, holy cow, is this an experience.

It simply doesn't make sense that a device this old can project an image which looks that good. Now, I don't think I could ever really convey what this looks like over video, but watching a Blu-ray disc through this projector is almost mindbending. Colors are phenomenal. Dark scenes are actually dark with none of the purply-grey blacks you so often find with projectors. And the screen door effect? Oh, that doesn't happen here because it doesn't even know what pixels are! You can sometimes make out the scanlines depending on what's on the screen, but especially with 1080i video, they almost seamlessly blend together, creating the illusion that there's no structure to the image at all. It's just there somehow. All that said, it's still not perfect. While it handles dark scenes excellently, if there's an even moderately bright spot anywhere in the image, you'll discover that its contrast leaves something to be desired. Bright objects, I think due to internal reflection, manage to illuminate the face of the tube enough to elevate the baseline black level. You can actually start to make out the entire face of the tubes when projected like this on a wall. With a properly matted screen you wouldn't notice that, but you will still notice a limited contrast ratio. It's still well above average for a projector, at least in my experience, but it's not the CRT perfection you might be expecting. Black and white content can also be slightly odd. You'll notice some color fringing at the edges between bright and dark spots. I suspect this never truly goes away even if you have the convergence and registration set perfectly due to the blooming which naturally occurs on the CRTs. With three different tubes producing slightly different levels of blooming, hard edges tend to get a little burst of color when they shouldn't. This also happens with color video, of course, but it's a lot less noticeable in that case. Editor's note, while filming some of the B-roll, I noticed that the registration was uh, drifting a little bit, particularly with the red tube. When I powered it on the next day, it was very off and you can actually see it moving in this footage here. This seems to be affected by the overall image brightness, which is why I described this as a side effect of blooming. But given that it seems to mainly affect just the red tube, I'm less sure than I was. This projector was never used before I got my hands on it, so the tubes are as fresh as they'll ever be. But this is a 25-year-old electronic device now, and it could be something is starting to fail. I suspect even when new, you could never get these to have rock solid registration, but I think it's likely this particular projector has some sort of problem making this seem worse than was typically the case. And then there's the really big weakness of this technology, burn-in. Those phosphor will wear out even with the help of cooling. And that means if the projector is showing a static image for very long, the image can be burned into the tubes. That makes these a rather poor choice for gaming, especially retro gaming where there are bright static elements always on the screen. And yes, I know everyone wants to know: unfortunately, you cannot play Duck Hunt with this particular projector. It's modern enough that it's doing quite a lot of signal processing, no doubt to help with convergence and registration, which introduces too much lag. I'm relatively sure it would be possible with older models of CRT projectors, but this here is pretty much the end of the line for the tech, and it's as advanced as it ever got. And for this projector, which can natively handle widescreen content, well, when installing it, you have a pretty big choice to make. These tubes have a native aspect ratio of 4:3. So when displaying 16:9 widescreen video, the projector simply stops scanning the top and bottom of the tubes. That's great because it means you aren't losing image resolution, but you are losing quite a lot of height and thus total screen size. The throw of these projectors is quite impressive. You get a huge screen with the projector relatively close to the projection surface. So, it's not really a big deal. But if you decide to mat your screen to 16x9 and then always use the projector as if it's a modern widescreen display, in a sense, you are wasting some of the projector's potential and even more if you end up pillar boxing 4:3 content within the 16:9 frame. I personally think this is fine, but it means only the central parts of the tubes will be getting used and burn-in will definitely happen. So, should you want to switch to a 4:3 screen later on, the central portion of the image will be unusually dark.

If you actually committed to using one of these today, I wouldn't think that would be too much of a problem. Personally, I would use it as a 16:9 display and just accept that the tubes are going to wear kind of weirdly. But, well, you've probably noticed that this really is a commitment. For one, it's kinda big. It's also quite heavy. This weighs nearly 120 pounds, about 54 kilograms. It's not fun to move. And of course, once you get it set up, you can't move it because if you do, that means you'll have to go through the entire focus, convergence, and registration procedure again. [screams] Yeah, as cool as these are, it doesn't take too much imagination to figure out why they were replaced almost the instant alternatives appeared. If your only concern is image quality, these were and remain quite good. But if you care about brightness, these aren't great. portability, these are very not great. And if you care about ease of setup, these are extremely not great. While early LCD and DLP projectors certainly couldn't hold a candle to this thing when it comes to a cinematic experience, for almost every other use case, they were obviously superior. They were brighter. They were actually portable, so you could just bring one into a conference room. And they needed little more setup than basic focusing. And a single lens meant you could do things like zoom. Whoa! Change the screen size without moving the projector? Sorcery! But you know what? This is sorcery, too. And I think a much cooler form. It's almost magical that this even works, let alone works so well. This thing literally is three cathode ray tube televisions somehow producing three separate images so precisely that they can line up on a projection screen nearly flawlessly. I don't know about you, but I find that much more impressive than a tiny little chip covered in tiny little mirrors that flip back and forth really, really fast. Okay, actually DLP is really cool tech, and one day I'm definitely going to cover it. But I will forever hold a special place in my heart for these old triclopses. I mean, this just looks so cool! and you get some trippy effects on the screen when you stand in front of it or walk in front of the projector. I mean, that's got to be worth at least some of the hassle. Now, I am definitely going to keep this thing, but I don't have a dedicated spot for it at home, so it's going to remain in storage for who knows how long. Perhaps one day I'll find a good place to set it up, but it will always be something of a pain to use. It's only got analog video inputs, which means adapters and perhaps HDCP nightmares are always going to be in its future. And honestly, in 2025, projectors just don't have much of an appeal anyway. You can get really big TVs for not a lot of money these days, which look great even in brightly lit rooms. And now that I'm used to an OLED TV at home... well, it's hard to imagine actually wanting to fire this sucker up very often, but it is certainly a lot cooler than a big black rectangle hanging on the wall. ♫ convergently smooth jazz ♫ I forgot about the tube, so I'm going to get it. This is heavier than you would think. But keeping the phosphor cool prolongs their... [bleep] that could have been bad! This means the glass has to get thicker as scott... skies sails up. roonerspisms... temperature. And you don't want to fiddlewidanything before it's all warmed up. I... that was a weird flub. Buchya know what? [laughs] I've said this too many times. Now it's breaking my brain. This process was among the most fiddly annannnoying things [speech falls apart into mumbles]. Well, that fell apart. So, are the captions-gag-reading members of the audience looking for any... socks? 'cuz I heard about a pretty cool way to purchase socks where the profit goes to help build a hospital rather than just go to some guy. I mean you're gonna need socks before too long... anyway the projector's rad, huh