Back in the 90s, my sister and I shared a hand-me-down RCA TV. It was color, but it had ye olde UHF and VHF dials, no remote, wood paneling, and I hooked up my Sega Genesis to it with a screwdriver. A new deliberately retro TV/monitor is giving me a lot of those same vibes, and this one won’t throw out my back.
The JapanNext JN-V236G180F-Retro won’t win any awards for its specifications — or its alphabet soup of a product name — but it’s not trying to. This 23.6-inch 1080p display is trying to give your desk the look of an oh-so-self-aware retro TV show, perhaps something from the Time Variance Authority on Loki. It’s rocking big chunky bezels, faux wood paneling, and two gigantic dials for OSD controls that will look familiar to any child of the 1980s.
The manufacturer advertises it as a “gaming monitor” — and with its 180Hz refresh rate panel, I suppose it qualifies. But the LCD panel is VA, and with that small size and 1080p resolution it’s not exactly a showstopper. But again, that’s not really the point here. It has HDMI and DisplayPort for video, a headphone port, and those awful 5-watt speakers that every cheap monitor seems to come with. (Though here it almost seems appropriate.)
JapanNext
You can mount it to a VESA monitor arm if you aren’t a fan of those faux chrome legs. And not to be picky, but if they really wanted to go for the retro vibes, they should have given this thing a 4:3 aspect ratio. But for the sake of avoiding letterboxing on almost every piece of modern media, I guess I can forgive the omission.
Tom’s Hardware says this little fella will go on sale in Japan for around 30,000 yen (approximately $200 USD), which seems pretty fine for a budget screen that’s going for a novelty factor. So far, there’s no indication that the manufacturer is planning a wider release… which at least means we’ll be spared the terrible and blatant AI-generated marketing images shown off in the press release.
