I just got back from visiting my nephew at school and noticed that he and his roommate are operating my nephew’s CRT monitor–I gave him the PC, BTW–on its side, apparently to take advantage of XP’s “portrait” CRT setting.
I didn’t say anything, but this seems … wrong to me. If CRT’s were meant to be turned on their side, wouldn’t more people do it?
Anyway, I casually looked at the monitor and noticed there are vents on what is now the top of the monitor, so I suppose it is staying cool enough. I do remember the roomie saying they degaussed the monitor somehow.
I think it should be Ok too. It is not like they are expensive or never fail in other ways. I seen CRT’s literally piled with stuff, in hot humid places and they seemed to do ok.
The monitor’s calibrated to compensate for the earth’s magnetic field. When shipping old arcade monitors large distances, I’ve heard of operators having to recalibrate the screens for the field strength in the new location. When rotating a screen, you’re going to induce a much greater change. Luckily, today’s auto-degaussing screens take care of all the legwork.
The guts of the monitor is a Cathode Ray Tube (thus CRT), and these have a round yoke at the back end. So it can generally be turned in any direction without causing any problems for the CRT.
If the vents were covered so it overheated, that would be a problem. But it sounds like you checked that there were vents on top for heat to escape. Do check that the air intake vents are not blocked.
As Carnac & Alvis said, many CRTs are pre-gaussed for the normal landscape operation. Turning them on the side may mess up the image a little, but de-gaussing should fix that.
There used to be monitors available that were designed to be easily rotated from landscape to portrait. They even had sensors to automatically reset the screen resolution when you did this. These were high-end monitors for graphic designers & such. Clearly this doesn’t bother the CRT.
Indeed, and CRTs work best when facing a particular compass direction (I forget which) - nothing to do with feng shui, just the Earth’s magnetic field deflecting the electron beam a little. All CRTs fitted to TVs and monitors have a degaussing coil fitted as standard. It’s this that makes that initial “whump” noise on startup, and a big 21" monitor will just about degauss the fillings in your teeth.
There was a screening of an Andy Warhol film (Empire?) that required a TV set placed on its side. It was sponsored by a TV manufacturer, and they did some checks to make sure it wouldn’t harm the TV.
The Radius Pivot was probably the most well-known of these. For its time, it was a hugely expensive item. IIRC, the biggest they ever got was 15 or 17" and 1024x768 resolution.