Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I Can’t Believe How Much I Paid For This…”.
You’Ve seen a portable projector you’ve seen a CRT, but have you seen a portable CRT, projector? Okay, portable might be a little generous, but the vidam magic fp60 from Sony came with its own. Carrying bag. Has a microphone input for projecting your voice, and did I mention? There’S a built betamax player. No, how about the fact that it uses a single tube to produce a color image rather than three tubes, like most other CRT projectors in this episode of lonus overpays for ancient Hardware, that you’ve probably never heard of we’ll be cosplaying as a traveling salesman from the 1980S, I can’t wait to play with this thing. Just like. I can’t wait to tell you about our sponsor build Redux.
Sometimes computers are hard, but all the time build Redux is easy. They’Ll get a custom PC built and delivered Direct ly to your doorstep, just check them out at the link down below according to radiomuseum.org the introductory price for the viam magic fp60 was $ 3,000. That’S not that bad for a portable projector, except that was in 1984, meaning it would be closer to $ 9,000.
Today, that’s high enough that just about nobody was going to be buying these for home theater use, but businesses. Well, that’s another story and cosmetics, giant Avon. Even went as far as to co-brand the fp60 and deploy it to company Representatives across the United States. Hence my uh world’s largest makeup bag, here at 35, lbs she’s, more luggable than really portable, but when you compare it to other mid 80s options for boardroom presentations, for example like what a CRT on an AV cart or a real toore projector, the fp60 had major Advantages in terms of screen size and in terms of durability and convenience, so we’re going to get to that whole presentation use case.
But first I have a burning question: kenet game, oh yeah, fun! Fact, by the way the NES wouldn’t come out in America for another year we just felt like being Gamers. It would be a great choice for us to evaluate the latency not going to lie brother. I can see it’s on, but uh wow.
Barely I mean is that supposed to be curtains at the top, or is that just this reason everyone had blacked out media rooms right, okay, we’re going to have to lose some lights. Yeah get the lamp there we go. Oh, my God, yeah the lamp doesn’t do much.
No, we need that one hold on. I got you, I got you, it’s still horrible get this okay hold on. I got this one. I got this one. What that’s the only light we have left and that’s all we got turn it off dude. This is terrible.
Well, you know it’s a crd yeah, but it didn’t get very bright to begin with. Okay hold on hold on that’s that’s markedly, better, okay, we’re getting somewhere. I mean that’s about as far as we’re going to get, but that’s that’s not bad. Okay, that lamp’s got to go that lamp was throwing so much more light than the CRT projector.
With that said, looking into this thing, that’s about the brightest CRT. I’Ve ever seen right that indextron wow there’s like hairs in there, oh yeah, you can probably it’d, probably be fun to try to play with the focus if you want to. Basically that’s the cross. Oh, it’s probably slightly out of focus.
There’S also a uh manual focus on the very front that you can use. Okay, but you shouldn’t don’t touch them together or you can break the whole Focus system. Yeah. It’S definitely still got some blurry spots. Do you have any idea what that is? No Elijah tried cleaning the lens so like it’s been wiped down, so basically Elijah touched it yeah, Elijah tou said that it was bad before he touched it. I’M not blaming him in this scenario.
Maybe some of the phosphors are worn out or something or like some of the co CU you can see. It looks like burnning when you’ve got it on a single um like color here, oh my God. What this is perfect right, there’s no latency! There’S none cuz, it’s a CRT, it’s a projector, but it’s a CRT, a CRT wow, it’s like so easy. This is like freaking, Easy Street and it looks pretty good.
Hey, like those blacks, actually look pretty black. It’S pretty colorful too, like this is not bad. No, it’s not bad at all. I mean it’s not good. No, but in a in a dark environment, though this is like totally fine, oh no wow, you’re diding. So well! Let’S see you do better. I probably won’t another thing: that’s not included with ours is a working speaker. Unfortunately yeah it’s just not working and theoretically we could use our uh technical manual service manual to repair it or we could just not do that. Oh my God, you’re wasting the pow.
There’S no pow, we don’t need it. I thought you were too good. You don’t need the pow. Did you die yeah again, I hit a blue shell. While it was flipped over we’ve already realized that when it comes to old games, you’ll usually win new games.
I don’t know okay well, that was you dying on purpose. I actually did not. Okay, all right. This is it for all the marbles.
Here we go um, they kill me yeah, yeah yeah. They kill you if they’re um moving yeah yeah yeah. This feels too good. I know right like it feels like you’re playing on a CRT yeah, because the only additional latency compared to looking directly into a CRT is the speed of light to the screen.
That’S it so, just the slightly increased like distance. The light has to travel like this. Is awesome but blue we’re getting about 2.2 nits. 2.2 nits.
The point two matters: let’s stop it for now cuz. I want to talk about brightness In fairness, most projectors don’t get that bright compared to direct view displays, but this is clearly way behind the experience that Sony showed off in this by the way, amazing, promotional video that was recently re-uploaded by retro TV, film and video And if we look closely yep composited got him now. It was probably brighter when it was new. Crts do Decay over time, but they show this thing being usable in a literally sunlit room when realistically it would have needed pitch Darkness.
Even then, with that said, how cool would a land party have been if someone showed up with one of these bad boys? Oh it’d be sick with, like a GI, even not even 180. 50 60 in that would be unheard of as a kid unheard of a regular CRT tube TV works by coating, the front glass with a phosphor material that lights up when it gets Zapped by one of three electron guns, one for red, one for green and one For blue with our CRT projector, we’re not looking at a lit up phosphor screen. So what are what is going on here? It turns out, it’s surprisingly simple, they’re still using a cathode ray tube to generate the image, and we can see that if we look directly down the barrel, but it’s upside down and backwards so that once it goes through the lens which is basically functioning as a Giant magnifying glass it’ll be the right way around now. I alluded to this before, but one of the big Innovations for the vid magic was that most CRT projectors in those days were using three separate tubes and lenses for RG and B kind of like this.
They were reliable, but they were extremely heavy and and inconvenient to set up. Supposedly it took quite some time to get them all lined up correctly and something as small as a swift kick to the table. It was resting on could put the whole thing out of whack again another major hurdle they faced was well. You can probably guess from what we’ve seen so far.
Brightness CRTs by modern standards are pretty dim to begin with and projecting that light across a much larger area exacerbates the issue. How do you fix all of that? Okay, the fp60 is no regular CRT. It uses a single electron gun with a beam index tube, so to get the right colors from a single gun. They would modulate the beam strength. Then there was a fourth phosphor stripe and when that lit up, the result was captured by a photo multiplier tube, and that signal was then Amplified and sent to a decoder circuit, which would basically check if the colors were correct and then adjust the modulation of the Beam on the fly, if you open this thing up, the number of boards involved to properly index and decode the signals is pretty wild by the way shout out to 12volt vids, for this amazing footage from his repair video a few years ago. That gives us a great look by the way at the water cooling that was built into this projector. Now this design did have drawbacks like inferior contrast, but the benefits were Brighter Images, no convergence problems and lower sensitivity to magnetic interference, which is why they saw some military use.
Sony commercialized a couple of versions of this technology, including the indextron tube, which was used in our fp60, as well as in the highly sought after kvx 370 watch cube a super cute 4in bedside TV that came out in 1989. Realistically, nobody was buying this thing for gaming, so why don’t we try a movie? This definitely makes these 1980 special effects, not look out of place. Yeah I mean they look pretty good um at this resolution.
Yeah at this brightness got to love those four textures, not 4K. Just four. This looks about how I remember watching TV in the 9s. No, we had more color than that. The contrast is terrible, fine yeah terrible. So I guess what we want to know is how much of what we’re looking at is limitations of the betamax format and or degradation of the tape versus how much of it is limitations of the performance of our projector. So do we want to throw our DVD on yeah? Let’S put our DVD in, I think it’s already in the player. Okay, I love how delightfully easy to operate. This thing is yeah, it’s pretty simple switches for different modes y. This looks better.
I think that other than getting 16 by9 M, which we can actually kind of take advantage of with this projector, because the image isn’t so small that you are basically just like well, I gave up 30 % of my whole screen. I don’t think this is a whole ton better though, like a little bit, I think it’s a little better a little bit looking into the lens. This is as bright a CRT as I have ever seen. How small does it get to be CRT bright off the projection screen, I’m going to move it okay, moving forward careful! This is like 60 80 lbs worth of I got.
I got you oh yeah. I got hang on yeah um wow. That’S still really dim. Okay, more, I think that’s his oh, that is as much as it goes boy, so we can’t go any smaller than this yeah all right, so it’s not great for watching movies either, but there were advantages to using a CRT projector.
Even when LCD and DLP option options started, hitting the market better black levels and better flesh tones, no pixelation and exceptionally long tube life, most CRT projectors were rated for around 10,000 hours, while the bulbs in LCD and DLP projectors were only good for 1 or 2,000 They’D also gotten pretty cheap on the used Market by then, so you could go with the used CRT projector and still have money left over to spend on the new noock to a screwdriver from LTD store.com. To take it apart, when you need to change the tube by the way guys we got a full service manual for this thing and a second projector, let us know in the comments, if you want to see Dan try to fix it. With all of that said, these benefits were not enough to keep CRT projectors in fashion like their TV set Brethren. They were replaced by lighter brighter models, even if it meant sacrificing a little bit of image quality for actually years to come, and the last CRT projector came out in 2001, the pro 1200 X from Zenith it retailed for about $ 30,000 and weighed around 155 lb By contrast, the high-end Christy Mirage 200000 DLP projector, launched in the same year for 55, grand but weighed almost half of what the Zenus did and was roughly seven times brighter.
Modern projectors have obviously gotten a lot better by the way and we’ll have some decent options linked down below back to our fp60, though, the only thing we haven’t done yet is give a presentation about our sponsor. Squarespace need a website, but don’t have the knowhow. Squarespace’S all-in-one platform makes it easy to design your dream website and get it up and running quickly. You can choose from a wide selection of award-winning templates that are optimized for both desktop and mobile devices, and you can grow your business online through their marketing features like support for search engine, optimization email campaigns and social tools once you’ve sold. Customers on your brand Squarespace can also help you sell your product. Their Commerce platform comes with everything you need for from merchandising to checkout you’ll, even get analytic insights on your site so that you can see what’s working well and What needs a tweak or two. If you need help, Squarespace offers help guides and a 247 support team. So don’t wait head to squarespace.com LT and get 10 % off today, thanks for watching, if you guys liked this video make sure to check out our laser dis exploration, that was a ton of fun.
They really do look like records except shiny. Like a CD. Oh know we’re going to do video disc next, oh yeah, okay, I don’t know we’ll see it’s like a floppy disc .