Editing Trinitron (section)

===Chromatron===

{{main|Chromatron}}

Sony had entered the television market in 1960 with the black and white [[TV8-301]], the first non-projection type all-transistor television.<ref name="Lucie-Smith1983">{{cite book|author=Edward Lucie-Smith|title=A History of Industrial Design|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fMsfAQAAIAAJ&q=TV8-301|year=1983|publisher=Phaidon Press|isbn=978-0-7148-2281-5|page=208}}</ref> A combination of factors, including its small screen size, limited its sales to niche markets. Sony engineers had been studying the color market, but the situation in Japan was even worse than the U.S.; they accounted for only 300 of the 9 million sets sold that year.<ref name=s42/> But by 1961, dealers were asking the Sony sales department when a color set would be available, and the sales department put pressure on engineering in turn. [[Masaru Ibuka]], Sony's president and co-founder, steadfastly refused to develop a system based on RCA's shadow mask design, which he considered technically deficient. He insisted on developing a unique solution.<ref>''Sony'', p. 43</ref>

In 1961, a Sony delegation was visiting the [[IEEE]] trade show in [[New York City]], including Ibuka, [[Akio Morita]] (Sony's other co-founder) and [[Nobutoshi Kihara]], who was promoting his new [[CV-2000]] home [[video tape recorder]]. This was Kihara's first trip abroad and he spent much of his time wandering the trade floor, where he came across a small booth by the small company [[Autometric]]. They were demonstrating a new type of color television based on the [[Chromatron]] tube, which used a single electron gun and a vertical grille of electrically charged thin wires instead of a shadow mask. The resulting image was far brighter than anything the RCA design could produce, and lacked the convergence problems that required constant adjustments. He quickly brought Morita and Ibuka to see the design, and Morita was "sold" on the spot.<ref name=s44>''Sony'', p. 44</ref>

[[File:Sony Chromatron.jpg|thumb|Sony Chromatron]]

Morita arranged a deal with [[Paramount Pictures]], who was paying for Chromatic Labs' development of the Chromatron, taking over the entire project. In early 1963, Senri Miyaoka was sent to Manhattan to arrange the transfer of the technology to Sony, which would lead to the closing of Chromatic Labs. He was unimpressed with the labs, describing the windowless basement as "squalor".<ref name=s44/> The American team was only too happy to point out the serious flaws in the Chromatron system, telling Miyaoka that the design was hopeless. By September 1964, a 17-inch prototype had been built in Japan, but mass-production test runs were demonstrating serious problems. Sony engineers were unable to make a version of Chromatron that could be reliably mass-produced.<ref name=s44/>

When sets were finally made available in late 1964, they were put on the market at a competitive 198,000 yen (US$550), but cost the company over 400,000 yen (US$1111.11) to produce. Ibuka had bet the company on Chromatron and had already set up a new factory to produce them with the hopes that the production problems would be ironed out and the line would become profitable. After several thousand sets had shipped, the situation was no better, while [[Panasonic]] and [[Toshiba]] were in the process of introducing sets based on RCA licenses. By 1966, the Chromatron was breaking the company financially.<ref>''Sony'', p. 45</ref>