My 40" XBR WEGA has the dreaded 6 flashing standby light problem and since I'm not that good at soldering (to replace the 2 bad IC's causing the problem), I'm just going replace it.

Looking up more info on WEGAs, I stumbled across someone from Australia talking about this particular model, the Sony KV-HR36M31. It's a 16:9 flat-screen Trinitron like a WEGA (I'm guessing the moniker WEGA was only used in North America?), but unlike the North American WEGAs where the largest 16:9 consumer tube was 34", this one is 36".

Makes me wonder why the 16:9 WEGAs were offered in 30" and 34" tubes, but larger flat tubes (32" and 36") were offered in other countries? Anybody know?

I always thought there was an upper limit to how big CRTs could get and that 34" 16:9 and 36" 4:3 pushed that limit to the edge (although I've seen 40" 4:3 CRTs). I know that sometimes they report the tube size instead of the viewable size for some models. For example, I once had a 29" broadcast monitor (PVM-2950Q), but the viewable area was 27"

That 2" inflation in size sounds a little familiar doesn't it?

Well outside of the Sony consumer line, I do know there were at least two consumer CRTs that have widescreen 40" tubes with 38" viewable screens--the RCA F38310 and the Loewe Aconda. I believe they use the same tube.

As far as viewable vs actual screen size, I dunno why some companies give you the size of the tube rather than the actual viewing area. Sony with the WEGA line always gave the viewable area in the model number. My previous HT monitor, Mitsubishi Megaview Pro 37", was a 37" computer CRT, but 37" was the tube size, not the viewable area (35" were viewable.)

The largest SONY professional crt I ever came across was the HDM 3830.
It was 38", but no clue what the actual viewable size was.
I owned the smaller model for a couple years, HDM 2830.
It was superb in every aspect.

Also I remember speaking with the owner of a tv/hi-fi store ca. 2006~2007 when
everyone was buying LCD/Plasma screens and he said he just spoke with someone
from LOEWE and they still had two 40" crt's in stock but nobody to buy them.
He mentioned a _massive_ discount was possible for those, but I kinda doubt they
managed to sell them still when full HD and whatnot was what people were interested
in at the time, and all of a sudden 40" wasn't all that large anymore when the first 60"
flat screens showed up in stores for unbelievable prices