[poemxo]

I think economies of scale, while only mentioned in the penultimate paragraph in TFA, is an underrated factor. Whenever something looks like alien technology but is available for $200-300, I assume an economy of scale helped.

TFA goes into the industrial engineering efforts associated with LCD manufacturing, but I don't think those wins would have shown up without a huge market for TVs.

[api]

It's the largest reason by a gigantic margin. Economies of scale are exponential in manufacturing. Things get exponentially cheaper as you make more of them.

CRTs got cheap too (relatively speaking), but the scale was smaller back then. The bulkiness and high power requirements of CRTs limited their use to a narrower set of applications, and the overall global economy was smaller. They never saw this scale.

Today the number of TVs plus commercial displays plus phones plus laptops plus gaming consoles plus cars plus consumer appliances with screens is just gigantic, and they all use flat panel displays. While there are different variations on flat panels there are ultimately only a few core technologies and there's a lot of overlap in how the fabrication process works for all of them. They are all delicate sandwiches of micro-electronics and light-modifying layers and various exotic materials that block, reflect, or emit light.

[chii]

> Things get exponentially cheaper as you make more of them.

not all things.

Things that can scale are things that have a non-linear scaling production output vs input. For the LCDs (and semi-conductors), the area of the output is squared, if you increased the size of the production by a linear amount (let's say, the glass width). But the work required is not quadrupled!

Things that are linear in scaling - e.g., a burger cooked, does not scale the same way (at least, not for a McDonalds burger) - it's a one to-one, even if you tried to make it scale up by having more cooks/more machines etc. Cars, to a similar degree, but the fixed cost of a car factory/assembly line vastly out weight the lack of scaling i suppose, and so cars did get cheaper but not from the scaling manufacturing, but from cheaper components, and more automated steps etc.

[xnorswap]

Global standardisation surely helped too. In the CRT era, there was a functional difference between NTSC and PAL CRTs.

[jonhohle]

Not only that, but NTSC and VGA (and higher) CRTs. I had a 1600x1200 CRT on my desk in 1999. HD CRTs existed, but were basically always out of reach for most people. PVMs fo broadcast and medical were different still.

Now LCDs are used at effectively every scale - tiny embedded systems, watches, phones, tablets, laptop displays, monitors, TVs, projectors, and even billboards. CRTs can’t scale like that.

[PearlRiver]

How many CRTs could you put in one standard sized shipping container versus LCD panels?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Saw a box at Costco the other night, looked like it was a queen-sized mattress. I doubt that they're less bulky than CRTs, just shaped different.

[jonhohle]

The largest CRT had a 43” viewable screen and had a volume of 0.75m³. A 43” LCD TV has a volume around 0.025m³. I’m not saying you could fit 30 packaged LCD TVs in the space of one CRT, but the volume is completely different. If you don’t think LCDs are less bulky, you probably never had a CRT.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

But the size of the box is what, again? We're not measuring the volume of the tv, but the volume of the tv's box. I've never seen a tv box less than about 10" deep. Most are more like 14". They're what, even for a 43", nearly 5ft long by 4ft. That's 20 cubic feet, or something like it, for the crappy little smallest tv that they sell at Walmart. That would compare what, to a 13" crt (similar price points and so on). That probably fit in a box that was 8 cubic feet.

None of you are looking at this right. We were talking about how much space to ship one of them. And here you are talking about how thin the tv is when you stare and gawk at it, not the box it came in. Reddit-tier commentary.

[jonhohle]

Again, I’m going to disagree. Boxes for CRTs were massive. I had to RMA my 19” CRT in college and it was heavy, but worse was how wide and tall the box was. I had no car so had to painfully lug it a few blocks to the post office. I can’t quickly find package dimensions, but did find a YouTube video of a guy packaging a 13” trinitron for sale second had. The volume of the box was approx 0.075m³. The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. I have a 65” TVs that came in a box approximately 68”x38"x8". That’s rough equivalent to the package volume of a 24” CRT.

Costco wasn’t selling 24” CRTs, though, they were selling 27” & higher up to projection. These were massive, maybe three to a palette at most. CRTs needed to get deeper as they got larger, so their packaging grew in all three dimensions. LCDs only get bigger in two dimensions.

Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office. It is a production to move it. I could fit at least four of the package boxes for the 27” monitor I just bought for my in laws in footprint of that display.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>I had no car so had to painfully lug it a few blocks to the post office. I'm sure that it was awkward, and it without a doubt was heavy. But heaviness is only one factor in shipping difficulty, the other is volume. For comparable tvs, flatscreens are going to outdo them on that count.

>The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. I

That's what, to hang on the back of a minivan front seat for the kids to watch? Or a computer monitor? No one is buying televisions like that. Could you even find one retail that small?

>I have a 65” TVs that came in a box approximately 68”x38"x8". That’s rough equivalent to the package volume of a 24” CRT.

And both of those are comparable, are they not? That's about the max (non-gargantuan) television people get, and the 24" crt was pretty close to the max size back in the day.

>Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office.

You're being unfair in this comparison. That Trinitron isn't a tv is it, it's a monitor right? The CRT televisions were rarely Trinitrons, even most 25" televisions are half it's size. If you have to stoop to corner cases to win the argument, did you really win?

[danaris]

Sure, LCD TVs come in boxes that have padding.

So did CRT TVs.

The padding was probably a lower percentage of the volume, because they were honkin' great cubes to start with, but don't try to pretend that LCDs in boxes come to the same size as (or even remotely comparable to) equivalent-viewing-size CRTs in boxes.

[jonhohle]

The other thing is that TVs are nearly trapezoidal prisms, but the boxes are nearly cubes. There’s a lot of dead space to fill with some structure, especially if the boxes need to be stackable.

[Ekaros]

Also I wonder if there was some density limit too. Were CRTs more dense and if they were was it enough to be limiting factor in shipping.

[dylan604]

You doubt they are less bulky? A screen the size of something you claim as large as "queen-sized mattress" would dwarf the largest of CRTs. It would also be drastically lighter. I'm guessing the weight of the thing would still be manageable by one person if not for the awkwardness of the size. Modern TVs are damn near weightless when compared to CRTs. Even your "queen-sized mattress" example could fit so many more into a shipping container than you could with CRTs. Even if the CRTs could fit more with respect to volume, their weight would quickly become a limiting factor.

"less bulky". I'm flabbergasted at the implication

[afavour]

They are absolutely, 100% less bulky than CRTs. If you saw a box the size of a queen mattress it was presumable for a massive screen. A CRT that's 100" or whatever would be insanely large and weigh so, so much.

[NuclearPM]

I don’t understand. You doubt that LCDs are less bulky than CRTs? How is that possible?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Because we were talking about how much space they take up in a shipping container, not in your living room. That means comparing the boxes they ship in, not the tv themselves.

[xnorswap]

CRTs were often deeper than they were wide, they were incredibly bulky in all dimensions.

It's not as if CRTs didn't also have package and padding.