Trinitron

Trinitron was Sony's brand name for its line of aperture-grille-based CRTs used in television sets and computer monitors. It was one of the first television systems to enter the market since the 1950s. The first color Trinitron system was released in October 1968. 100 million Trinitron systems had been sold by 1994. At its peak 20 million Trinitron tubes were made annually. Patent protection on the basic Trinitron design ran out in 1996, and it quickly faced a number of competitors at much lower prices. The company then designed and shifted to flatscreen tubes, named FD Trinitron, before the industry shifted to LCD panels. Sony ended production from Japanese plants in 2004, and stopped selling them in the United States and Canada in 2006. Sony continued to sell Trinitrons in China, India, and regions of South America using tubes delivered from their Singapore plant until it ended production in March 2008. A total of 280 million units were built by the time when Trinitron production concluded. The name Trinitron was derived from trinity, meaning the union of three, and tron from electron tube, after the way that the Trinitron combined the three separate electron guns of other CRT designs into one.