How to Spot a Psychopath

A reader writes:

My CPD-G500 is getting the twitches and I fear it will soon slip out of usable duty. I work in Photoshop and Illustrator and Motion and After Effects, I also edit with Final Cut Pro (where the twitching is getting most noticeable - the image twitches and folds at the bottom of the screen.

I would like you to tell me what you finally decided was the best CRT monitor. I'm not sure how you feel about LCD screens but I can't work on them, they feel slippery, tricky, I don't believe what I see and don't trust it at all.

I've been checking CRT monitors for sale on the Web, and of course end up at eBay. There are 19- and 21-inch monitors that I've looked at, only one Sony G500, no G520, and there is a 19-inch G400 but it's in Melbourne and I'm in Sydney; a long way off for a drive to pick it up.

What do you think I might do?

Philip

Your twitching-and-folding image is probably fixable, but you'd need to find a good old-fashioned CRT TV repair guy - they're a dying breed - to get it done without delving into the realm of high tension with your own uneducated hands. Working with one hand behind your back helps, but CRT repair really, really isn't the right place to start applying what you've just learned from repairfaq.org.

Occasional image "twitching" is a classic dry-solder-joint or failing-insulation problem; a little re-soldering and the slathering of some neutral-cure RTV silicone sealant over the old, cracking insulation on the high-tension cable to the side of the picture tube is likely to cure it. The "folded" image sounds like it's just an image positioning problem, which is another thing that can be down to components wearing out (electrolytic capacitors changing value, for instance), and which may be fixable with trim-pots on the board or something similarly simple.

All CRTs will die eventually, though; they naturally get darker and darker as the years go by, and eventually the brightness control can't compensate. A standard old-TV-repair-guy trick is to wind up the electron-gun voltage on old CRTs; that'll make them die even faster, but will at least give you a decently bright picture again.

If you're determined to get yourself a new CRT, I think you're going to find your choices constrained by what you can get (without paying $1000 for shipping from overseas...), rather than what actually is the very best CRT for your purposes. So what-to-buy recommendations from me would be of limited practical value - and I never really used enough different kinds of CRT to have very strong preferences. But, for what it's worth:

1: Aperture-grille tubes (Sony Trinitron, Mitsubishi Diamondtron, ViewSonic Sonictron...) are brighter than shadow-mask, and many people prefer them. But aperture-grille computer monitors always have horizontal vibration-damper wires for the grille that cast a noticeable shadow...

...across the screen. One wire for small-to-medium tubes, two for 21-inchers, possibly even more for aperture-grille TVs. This is one of those things that many people aren't annoyed by until they're told that it exists, then can never stop seeing. You need not thank me if I've just ruined aperture grille for you.

(People seldom notice this problem in aperture-grille televisions, because unless you're sitting ridiculously close to the screen, you won't be able to see them.)

2: Samsung's mainstream CRT monitors were always good quality (not the best possible quality, but good enough for almost any purpose), reliable, and excellent value. I don't know whether they ever made a flat-screen 21-incher, though.

3: The gripping hand is that the big names just don't make many CRT monitors any more. As you say, you can find second-hand CRTs here and there, but they're unlikely to be a whole lot younger than the one you've already got.

I've poked around on the monitor-manufacturer sites - Sony, NEC, Philips, Samsung and so on - and it's surprisingly difficult to even find product pages for CRT monitors these days, much less CRTs that're still on sale. Every now and then there's a couple of old 17-inchers still being sold in South Africa, Bangladesh, Montenegro or India, but if you're in the USA, Australia or most of Europe, you're out of luck.

ViewSonic still have a few CRTs, but I think they top out at a 19-inch unit. Lenovo have a relatively cheap 19-incher, too, currently on special... in Canada.

And these are all plain old consumer monitors - higher-spec ones for graphics work are ever rarer. Eizo, for instance, used to have a lineup of hooded CRTs that came with a calibrator, but they seem to only have LCDs now.

And just finding a company that still makes CRTs is only half of the battle. Let's presume you've decided that, say, this 20-inch-viewable-diagonal LG looks good. Now you have to find a dealer that still sells them. Which, so far as I can tell, nobody does.

Any decent computer store will be able to order in pretty much any product from a company that has a distributor in your country, but the demand for CRTs is so minuscule now that there could easily be zero stock of whatever you're asking for in Australia, so you'd have to take the absurdly-expensive corporate-procurement route to lay your hands on one, or buy some dedicated video-preview screen with more sockets on the back than you ever thought possible; such units have list prices that range from the merely alarming to the downright hilarious.

(Note that there may be a heap of new-old-stock CRTs sitting in some dealer's warehouse or self-storage unit, which they'd be glad to unload. It can't hurt to ask. Just don't get your hopes up.)

If you were in the USA, you could find tons of dealers still selling CRTs of one kind or another. A lot of them are definitely not what you're after - tiny little screens, monochrome monitors for ancient computers or digital X-ray systems, workstation monitors with funny plugs and/or fixed scan rates, $100 monitors that cost at least $80 to ship, used screens sold as-is, "special order" items that may not actually be available any more, and of course a cavalcade of weird-branded Chinese products that're probably junk. But there are some real, well-reviewed dealers selling real, new CRTs, and if you were in any major city in the USA it'd probably only take you a few hours of fossicking to get one delivered for a reasonable price.

But you're not in the USA. So you may find yourself having to join us LCD-monitor pod people.

Fortunately, I really don't think there's any objective reason for your mistrust of LCDs, any more.

Many mass-market LCDs are still not as good as mass-market CRTs for really colour-critical work, but almost nobody is actually doing that sort of work. If your CRT needs to have one of those light-blocking hoods over it and you recalibrate it once a month, then you probably do need another CRT. If not, though, then any LCD that doesn't have a cheap narrow-angle 6-bit twisted-nematic panel in it should, today, be more than good enough for almost any purpose. You'll need to colour-calibrate it to get accurate colour response, but you need to do that with CRTs anyway.

It helps to have a CRT on hand for video editing, so you can see how your video wizardry looks with classic fuzzy pixels. But unless your target audience for some reason includes a lot of people still using old CRT computer monitors, the preview CRT you'll want will be a television (probably connected via composite), not a computer monitor. There are still tons of CRT TVs in daily service around the world, but cheap and nasty Dell PCs have been coming with LCD monitors as standard for long enough that I think CRT monitors are probably in the minority now, in affluent countries at least.

A lot of mass-market LCDs have somewhat "cartoonish" default colour reproduction, with weird colour temperature and over-response that gives a "punchy" look, like that from cheap digital cameras. That's fine for happy-snap photography and playing games, but it can give weird results for graphics work. You can fix it very easily with even a cheap colour-calibrator, though; the Pantone Huey and one or another ColorVision Spyder (like the one I reviewed years ago) can be had for less than $US100 now.

It's entirely possible that someone reading this is in Sydney and has a 21-inch CRT mouldering in the spare room that Philip might like; if so, drop me a line and I'll pass your info on to Philip. If you know of a great source of well-priced decent-quality CRTs in Australia or elsewhere, do post a comment about it!

A few times a year, all the gadget blogs get excited about some new lighter-than-air vehicle. Sometimes it's a little one for the determined hobbyist, a big one for specialised cargo, or a huge one that's never even going to exist.

And then there are the modern Goodyear-Blimp tiddlers that're shamelessly described as "Zeppelins", despite only being a third - often less than a quarter - of the length of the proper ones.

I mean, look at the "Zeppelin NT". It's 75 metres long, and can only carry 14 people, or a payload of less than two tonnes. Zeppelin bombers in World War One were already more than twice as long, and carrying 16 tonnes!

This, for example, is the LZ1, the very first of the Zeppelins. It was already 128 metres in length.

I, therefore, officially demand that we bring back the hydrogen-filled zeppelin!

They'd be very safe, especially with modern technology; giant bags full of hydrogen need be no more dangerous than giant fuel tanks full of kerosene, which I remind you are usually mere feet away from the jet engines that're burning the fuel. Modern control systems could intelligently manage multiply-compartmented cellular gas-bags, to automatically keep the zeppelin in the correct attitude, manage altitude, and keep the thing flying even if someone flies his Learjet straight into the side of the airship.

If people just can't get past their irrational terror of hydrogen, then you could of course just fill your zeppelin with helium, like the old American ships. But hydrogen gives more lift and can be easily manufactured from water; the world's helium supply all comes from natural gas. Lots of scientists and engineers are beavering away at finding efficient hydrogen-storage technology, too, because we'll need such technology for fuel-cell cars to become practical. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the same tech came in handy for managing lifting hydrogen in airships. And, heck, some of the hydrogen could also be used as fuel!

The one great advantage of a dirigible airliner is that legroom is not an issue. You don't get vast lifting power - even the gigantic, 245-metre-long Hindenburg only had a payload capacity around the same as that of a 70.6-metre-long 747-400 freighter - but you can have as much space as you like. You just don't get to fill that space with heavy stuff. Modern lightweight composite materials would be very helpful, here; we could probably make a 75-kilo grand piano if we wanted to, these days.

(One of the indications that the huge design-concept "Strato Cruiser lifestyle zeppelin" I linked to above is not a workable device is its hilarious inclusion of a topside swimming pool. That would weigh at least a hundred tonnes, and maybe a lot more; a standard Olympic pool contains at least 2,500 tonnes of water. It'd get a lot lighter when the airship turned and the water all sloshed out, of course.)

This, for instance, was just the dining room on the Hindenburg. It also had a lounge, a writing room, a smoking room (which contained the single lighter permitted aboard the vessel...), bathrooms, a crew mess hall, and small, but private, cabins for the 50-to-72 passengers.

"Oh, but what if someone tried to hijack the zeppelin, or blow it up?", I hear, from the people who don't mind having their shoes examined before they're allowed onto a plane.

Well, if the hijackers are only armed with box cutters, passengers could just run away from them through the modern zeppelin's acres of lounges, bars and tennis courts. And if terrorists had, let's say, a two-part shaped-charge-plus-thermite guaranteed-747-killer of a bomb, you could stand back and let 'em set it off, straight out into a gas-bag. The venting gas might catch fire, but the straight hydrogen inside the gas cell cannot support combustion by itself, and automated systems could dump the cell's contents out the side of the airship, or pump it into other cells. The damage would be a reduction of total lift by a few per cent, at worst. The frame of the airship could be a tensegrity structure of light composite beams and pressurised gas cells, so there'd be no single component an attacker could break to bring the whole ship down.

Even if the terrorists were running around with satchels full of bombs setting them off wherever they could, they'd still only be able to damage the gas cells adjacent to the passenger areas. You wouldn't even need to have gas cells in such locations, if you didn't mind making the airship somewhat larger.

Let's see - what other objections might there be?

Oh, yes: "What if a storm catches you? You'd be blown around like a toy balloon! Storms were a big problem for the old hydrogen airships, you know!"

Well, yes, they were. But that was because the old passenger dirigibles - and the early military ones - had a cruising altitude that seldom exceeded 2000 feet, and was often much lower. Like other aircraft of the time, they didn't have pressurised passenger compartments, so they simply couldn't fly too high without everyone needing oxygen masks and eight layers of sealskin.

Back in WWI some bomber airships were made as "height climbers", flimsier in structure to make them able to attain great altitude; doing so was rather dangerous, and horrible for the crew, especially when the engines started freezing up. Even when flying at modest altitude, the old dirigible engines often needed in-flight maintenance, which was a very exciting task. None of these problems would apply to a modern zeppelin, with a pressurised cabin and reliable engines, or even fuel-cell-powered electric motors.

With modern technology to manage the gas bags, modern engines, vectored thrust for much better maneuverability and pressurised gondolas, modern dirigibles would only need to worry about weather during takeoff and landing - and they could probably delay landing a lot longer than a 747 can. The rest of the time, they'd deal with storms in the same way that regular airliners do - by flying over them.

This does creates obvious limits to the routes airships could fly, though, since they couldn't make much headway against fast high-altitude air currents. We could easily make dirigibles twice as fast as the Zeppelins were, but that still only gets you to 260km/h. If you're happy to go in the same direction as a jet stream, though, it'll boost your speed by an easy 50-to-100 knots.

I think the main actual reason why nobody's brought back the zeppelin is that they wouldn't be cost-competitive with heavier-than-air craft, in the same way that ocean liners couldn't compete with planes. Airships might be able to compete for some exotic cargo applications, perhaps, as per the above-linked SkyHook JHL-40, a hybrid zeppelin/rotorcraft, but they certainly couldn't deliver passengers from A to B anything like as cheaply as an airliner.

In a fantasy world where everybody wasn't utterly determined to turn every field of human experience into a money-making operation, however (hey, how's that all working out for you, world?), and assuming that we actually could make 38,000-foot-capable pressurised zeppelins if we wanted to ("...we can put a man on the moon, but we can't..."), then airships certainly would be competitive, if one's aim was to travel in a pleasant way.

Ocean liners of the sky, able to cover 5000 kilometres a day and take off and land virtually anywhere, which cause people to actively compete to buy a house near the airport, just to be able to watch them. Sounds like an improvement to me.