Every so often something appears on eBay for pickup only which is quite special.

Trintron, a technology created by Sony that allows for brighter and sharper images than most other CRTs. Basically if you’re got the choice between a Sony Trinitron CRT and anything else, well it’s not really a choice.

The chap selling this was asking £60 for this 19" Sun monitor, so I jumped on the Buy It Now button, knowing that I’d regret it if someone else snapped it up before me.

After carefully transporting the beast back home I decided to give it a test in the garage before moving it any further.

My dutiful Toshiba Libretto 100CT helped out by supplying a looping demo of Quake and Duke 3D to ensure the monitor was working correctly. After leaving it in the garage for a few hours to play by itself I was happy to discover it was still working perfectly.

Now the real challenge would begin, how to shift the immense bulk of this 26KG monster into my retro attic space? It was very difficult to carry across level ground, yet alone attempting to lift through a small attic hatch.

After a little research online I decided that installing a fairly cheap hoist would allow me to safely lift the load into the attic. So after the hoist and various straps and fixtures had arrived I set about fixing them to a strong beam and strapping up my 26KG cube for it’s assent.

All the components I used were rated for well over 100KG of weight, so I had faith they’d all hold. However on my first attempt I hadn’t secured the straps very well and was faced with the prospect of the monitor slipping out of the straps and falling to the ground from quite a height.

I quickly decided to lower it back down and resecure it, rather than attempting to continue on and hope my luck wouldn’t run out.

Thankfully the second lift went very smoothly, other than me awkwardly putting weight on the monitor stand and snapping off a corner once I had it in the attic. Oh well, some plastic glue should be able to repair that.

So now I have the pleasure of further upgrading my “Millennium” PC with a top end monitor to match the other hand picked components of the system.

So what kind of resolution and refresh rate does this monster support? Well, pretty impressive ones that’s for sure!

I think I’ll stick at 1024 x 768 and enjoy a solid 120Hz refresh rate though!