by Theodores | 2025-09-16 11:28:32+00:00
The article concerns 'PVMs', not a phrase I remember in period, even though we had hundreds of Sony D1 monitors, which were the pinnacle of 'professional digital monitors'.

These were different beasts to civilian TVs, even top of the line Trinitron. They had none on the RF circuitry of a regular TV and the inputs were typically component, or, in the late nineties, digital, but not the digital we know today, that signal came down one BNC connector.

We had an outside broadcast company which had massive trucks full of screens for televising sports, concerts and public events. A new boss decided to outfit the new trucks with domestic TVs rather than the expected mega-expensive D1s. The trucks did not last long, much to the amusement of the crew. The TVs rattled themselves to pieces before they made it to their first event.

Unlike the civilian TVs, the Sony D1 monitors were designed to be repaired. We had people for that and you could often see the innards of one of them if you went to see the engineers in their den. They generally did not need to be repaired, but, if you have hundreds of the things then you raised the odds of having a few need a little bit of servicing.

In the studio environment they were rack mounted with air conditioning and extremely neat cabling to some type of desk where you had the buttons to choose what camera, VT or other source went to the screen. Lighting in the gallery was also controlled, so the picture you saw was the definitive picture, with no fiddling of brightness or contrast necessary. The blacks were black, which flat screens were only really able to achieve decades later with AMOLED.

In the basement with the DigiBeta tape machines we had smaller D1s in the racks, often with an adjacent oscilloscope. You could tell if the content was 'adult material' by the oscilloscope, which I always found amusing.

The magic of TV in that era was the analog nature of the CRT. The studio set was usually very battered and yet you could put a few tens of thousands of watts of lighting onto it for the cameras to show something beautiful on the D1 monitors. The advent of HD was problematic in this regard as every dent and scratch would show, along with every wrinkle and blemish on the presenter's faces.

Video games of the era were designed around the hardware, in Europe this meant 720 x 576 PAL, with lots of that image as 'overscan'. Note that JPG was also designed for the magic of analog, with slow CPUs. You can change the look up table in JPG to make it work for digital and fast CPUs but only MozJPEG does that.

You mention flickering, and most CRTs would be flickery, think of electrical shops of the era and what you would see out of the corner of your eye. Clearly you would not want this in a studio gallery lest anyone collapse with an epileptic fit. In Europe we had 50Hz rather than 60Hz, so, even with interlacing, flicker was a thing but only in the electrical shop, not in the studio gallery. This had more to do with genlock (for analog) than phosphor persistence trickery.

Regarding the article, I am pleased that the D1 monitors of old have found a new fan base that truly appreciate them. In period we put a lot of work into our setups and, to this day, I struggle to come to terms with all of that expertise and expense having gone forever.

In broadcasting there has always been an 'old guard' that can remember the 'good old days'. I now feel like one of those fuddy duddies!!!