Through the Mask
Every tube in the fleet, modeled from its own numbers — picture height, 240 scan lines, center resolution, aperture-grille pitch. Pick two, choose what to put on them, then pull back from the glass to the couch and watch the differences appear and vanish the way they do in the room. The real thing is on the fleet page; the specs behind every frame are on the side-by-side table.
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What is modeled, and what is not
Scan lines are placed 240 to the viewable height, so the gap between them is Sony’s picture height divided by 240 — 1.21 mm on a 20-inch tube, 1.71 mm on the 2950Q. Horizontal softness comes from the center-resolution spec: TV lines over a width equal to the picture height, so 1000 TVL on the BVM-20E1U resolves a 0.29 mm element where the 2950Q’s 600 TVL resolves 0.69 mm. The aperture grille is drawn at the pitch Sony states where it states one — 0.25 mm on the E and F tubes from the E/F manual, 0.7–0.85 mm on the 2950Q from its brochure; the PVM-20L5 has no published figure and is drawn at the 0.25 mm class its HR tube belongs to. The LCDs are drawn as their actual pixel grids — 640×480 on the 9020 and 9030, 1024×768 on the 9050, 800×480 on the 940W — with 240p scaled by nearest neighbor, which is an assumption about Sony’s scaler, not a fact; the 9050’s 3.2× fractional scale is why its text shows uneven pixel widths. Beam bloom, gamma, the damper wires and the eye’s one-arcminute limit are approximations. Nothing here is a photograph of these monitors; the gallery has those.
Numbers from the fleet spec table and Sony’s documents; what each letter on a Sony badge means is on the model-number page. Links from the compare mode land here with the two models preselected.
Compare the real specs → PVM vs. BVM → Spotting professional glass →