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
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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
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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