Why were big-screen TVs so massive in the 1990s?

Mel Magazine

"Nowadays, screen size is taken for granted; someone can buy a 52-inch flat screen for a few hundred bucks on Black Friday, and it weighs only a few pounds and can be easily mounted on a wall," says Brian VanHooker. "But back in the day, a big-screen TV was insanely heavy and took up a shit-ton of floorspace. For many people, they just weren’t an option. The reason these beasts were so massive was because of the technology they housed. While old-school cathode ray tube TVs worked by firing color beams through an electron gun and generating the image directly on the screen, big-screen TVs worked via rear projection, so the image was generated inside the TV and then projected onto the screen via a mirror, which is why those TVs were also called 'rear-projection TVs.'"