no this is not about a dumb boring bvm or pvm. it’s actually about the (al)most pedestrian ass consumer crt made. it’s a late model, 2007 to be specific, DYNEX branded set that showed up at my ecycle job this last week. normally i don’t give a shit about them that much but we sell small sets quite often nowadays since no one has room to shove a big bastard of a set in their tiny apartment that is the norm in the Seattle area. So we went to test it before putting it out to sale and poking around in its menus you come to find out that sure enough, this little shit has a built in digital tv tuner in it!
if you were unaware, in the US all TVs sold after March 2007 needed to include a digital tuner to be considered a television set and not a monitor. well, i guess best buy who owns the dynex brand still wanted to sell small crt sets for guest bedrooms and garages everywhere and still be able to market them as a television.
now, crts with digital tuners built in aren’t necessarily all that rare as bigger sets and rear projection crts were still priced lower than their plasma and lcd counter parts and still offered a pretty good picture and they needed to have that damn tuner in them. where it gets weird is that not many low end sets had it let alone standard def units in 2007.
this little shit not only has that digital tuner in it but it is tightly integrated with the standard green text OSD that you’re probably familiar with on old crts! i was blown away by this and it actually looks shockingly good for a standard def set! but, it has another feature tied to that digital tuner that just made me giddy for a reason i have to explain a bit.
i run an in home private “cable” network consisting of about 6 analog channels going through professional modulators that were decommissioned from a hotel broadcasting various content ranging from old cartoons to a channel that just shows random vhs rips i’ve found of television from the internet. it’s really fun to run and it’s great for my anxiety to just turn on and have tv i know i like but don’t have to figure out myself in the moment. recently i actually came across some digital QAM modulators that i’ve put some HD content on to watch on the big LCD i have at night. it’s really neat to see HD video going through a coax cable that i’m generating on site that’s not at a big cable headend somewhere!!
here’s the catch with QAM, it’s using the same MPEG-2 codec we all know and hate that ATSC in america uses for the over the air broadcasts but, it’s wholly incompatible modulation wise from ATSC. a ton of sets can receive both but from a small amount of googling it didn’t become “standard” until the early 2010s. a lot of cable companies used to let limited basic cable be accessed this way and it was really cool until they just all decided out of no where to fucking encrypt them for no good reason.
this is where this tiny bastard comes in. it fucking receives QAM digital broadcasts as if it’s nothing and completely normal and i smiled like a giddy child that now i have this cute crt that can not only give me my normal analog channels but now it also can receive my digital content as well! it looks so damn good, like surprisingly so. it helps that the tube in this set is bright as the sun and seemingly has next to no hours on it.
anyway this big wall of shit is to say, i’m happy a crt set made me super happy again and it didn’t even cost me any money, let alone 100s of dollars. fuck even the convergence is good…..
