8 ms·
That you feel the need to inform us of this "historical fact" makes me feel especially old... having lived through the CRT -> LCD transition period when buying
by hadlock 7y ago
That you feel the need to inform us of this "historical fact" makes me feel especially old... having lived through the CRT -> LCD transition period when buying an LCD made going to LAN parties a lot easier
- fred_is_fred 7y agoIt didn't even occur to me that this would need to be explained. Up next we should talk about why it was bad to leave VCRs paused for long periods of time.
- cpach 7y agoWhy was that bad?
- jannes 7y agoI believe because the tape will stay under tension
- mortenjorck 7y agoI remember being told as a child that it "wears out the tape," but I'm going to guess it's specifically because the same section of tape stays wrapped around the capstan (the metal cylinder it loops around to be read) when it would normally be passing through. Keeping the same section of tape under tension for a prolonged period presumably weakens or risks distorting it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kozak 7y agoIt was worse than that. The head drum continued to spin throughout the entire duration of the pause, rubbing against the film at high speed. That's because the VCR didn't have any "memory" to hold the entire frame¹, so the lines of the frame had to be read from the tape over and over again. ¹ It was actually an interlaced field, not a frame, but that too much nitpicking.
- mc32 7y agoSo kinda like riding a clutch... ok maybe not that bad.
- hunter2_ 7y agoMore like a burnout vs launch control, with infinite tread and it's the road you really care about.
- brirec 7y agoIt isn’t about tension. In order to display a paused image, the head must continuously rotate and scan that section of the tape. You can literally overheat and wear the tape out in that spot because there is a spinning piece of metal against it. Only specialized VCRs such as high end professional/broadcast or security recorders have something like a framebuffer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tomc1985 7y agoSome kids call 3.5" floppies "save icons" because they've never seen them in any other context
- zorpner 7y agoI think my favorite contextual example of this is the opening line from Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." Means something very different now.
- toomanybeersies 7y agoI wonder if 2000n years from now, scholars will be wondering over the meaning of that sentence, the same way that they currently discuss the meaning of "wine-dark sea" in the Iliad and the Odyssey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer))
- Talanes 7y agoThat section on ancient languages tending to lack blue is very interesting. I wonder if there was just a lack of blue in their environment. If the local birds and flowers don't contain any blue, then you just have the sky and the sea(or whatever large body of water.) If the majority of the blue you see in the world is the sky and the sea, would you just start to think of blue as a blank? If you just consider blue as something more like we consider white, then any competing hues dominate what you describe. So just like white with the tiniest bit of red becomes pink, a purplish sea becomes red?
- goblin89 7y agoHomer’s wine-dark sea leads down an interesting rabbit-hole of thinking about perception, other minds, shared labels for sensations, how one individual consciousness is shaped by (exists only in context of?) others, and the implications of the information age with more extensive inter-mind connections and increasingly numerous and specific shared labels.
- airstrike 7y agoI guess that means perfect blue skies these days haha
- ck2 7y agoI finally threw out my $1500 Sony Trinitron 27" high resolution CRT this year. It worked fine, felt like a huge waste of money. But it weighed over 100 pounds!
- Hydraulix989 7y agoI would have bought it.
- BallyBrain 7y agoToo bad that you threw out. Those Trinitrons are still sort after for retro gaming. You could of sold it or given it away.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago"Could of?"
- exikyut 7y agoYou missed "sort after". We're both just as bad as each other, the meaning is discernible.
- soylentcola 7y agoI had one (it was either cheap or free from someone who wanted to get rid of it years ago) and I loved that it was my first TV with HDMI input at a time when HDTVs were out of my price range. I had a small apartment so my desk/office area was a corner of the living room and I could run an HDMI cable over to use it as a secondary monitor for watching stuff on the computer. Even the fact that it would display 1080i was a huge jump from my previous bargain bin TV. It was the days of Windows Media Center and it was before cable companies got rid of Clear QAM channels so I found that I could just take the shared cable in my 3-apartment house and hook up to a cheap Hauppauge card for tuner, guide, and DVR. Add a cheap USB IR receiver/remote and it was like having the "good" cable with the bells and whistles (but with a better interface and for free). Eventually got an HDTV when prices came down and income went up, but a few years ago when a girl I knew was looking for a CRT to set up a retro gaming station for her young daughter, I donated all 111 lbs. of it gladly. That thing is probably still going.
- aogl 7y agoI still remember dragging my CRT around to LAN parties... oh the good old days... was such a pain in the ass though in reality...
- mgiampapa 7y agoThose Sony Trinitron's were literally were made of lead. My back still hurts, but the 20" was worth it!
- enneff 7y agoStill the nicest displays I've ever used.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoAnd 120hz refresh rates... almost 20 years ago!
- hunter2_ 7y agoI never noticed a benefit over 70 or so. The flicker of 60 made my eyes bleed though. Then with LCDs 60 was fine.
- aasasd 7y agoI still don't know what it is about 60 Hz that made me see the flicker plainly as a strobing light. TVs at 50 Hz—nothing (other than being generally bleh back then). Had to use 800x600 instead of 1024x768 just to have 85 Hz instead. On LCDs, I still can see faint flicker on some static backgrounds, and I think 60 Hz might play a role here too—though it seems to also depend on the brightness and Flux being on or off. E.g. on https://marctenbosch.com/news/ https://marctenbosch.com/news/
- extrapickles 7y agoThe LCDs you see this on are 6-bit color displays using temporal dithering to pretend to be 8-bit color.
- z3t4 7y agoI visited a TV shop about 5 years ago and some of the TV's up on display had the demo image burned in. So it's probably still a problem.
- epse 7y agoLCD can definitely have burn in
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 72deluxe 7y agoMy Honor Play phone has this problem if the screen is higher than 50% brightness. It's very bad.
- fidelramos 7y agoFrom what I have heard this is a problem with OLED panels.
- leshenka 7y agoI frequently use apps with "night" theme (black background, white UI controls). You know how Android apps have "back" button on the top-left corner, right? There is also a navbar (back/home/recent buttons). In my case it's a white-ish rectangle that's almost always present on screen. By the time Samsung added an option to hide it, the damage was already done. I have them both burnt in on my screen. I first noticed them after merely 1.5 years of using the phone. OLED burn in is a 100% real thing.
- Kuinox 7y agoMake an image of the back button, revert the color, and make your phone display it when you sleep. You will burn the other pixels and won't see the pattern anymore !
- globular-toast 7y agoI'm not usually an early adopter but I was the first guy at my LAN party to bring an LCD monitor. It was smaller and looked worse than everyone's CRTs and had terrible ghosting, but everyone was fascinated by it and could tell it was the future. I've still yet to see an LCD that performs as well as those CRTs, though.