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A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

257 points by MrJagil 6y ago

02020202 6y ago
that was a surprisingly good read
- 02020202 6y ago
  lol, thanks for the downvotes. so i guess it was not that good of a read after all :D
  - eru 6y ago
    Ignore downvotes, especially early downvotes. There are some knee-jerk reactions these days. (But do keep in mind that your initial comment didn't really add anything to any conversation. So it didn't really deserve any upvotes, either.)
Terretta 6y ago
TL;DR: For gaming, because ‘input lag’. [In a CRT] the electron-to-photon exchange happens instantly. While CRTs do have some sources of lag —namely, the time spent buffering each video frame and scanning each line of the frame from top to bottom on the screen —those delays are on the order of microseconds. When you move your mouse or press a button on the keyboard, the response time is imperceptible... By contrast, an LCD requires physical movement on the part of every pixel. On an LCD, the back of the display emits a constant stream of white light, which passes through a polarizer and onto an array of liquid crystals. Applying voltage to each crystal causes them to twist, altering the amount of light that comes through the screen's front polarizer. Compared to electron-photon conversion, the physical movement of liquid crystals inside an LCD display takes a lot more time, introducing input lag. It also creates blurriness when there's a lot of motion happening across the screen. Also TL;DR: CRTs to look for. Sony FW900 16:10 CRT [also sold as] HP A7217A, SGI GDM-FW9011, and Sun GDM-FW9010 ... 16:9 CRT monitors including the Intergraph InterView 28HD96 and 24HD96... [and] you'll need a graphics card with an analog output, such as Nvidia's 900 series and AMD's 300 series cards, or a digital-to-analog converter.
- gruez 6y ago
  > a digital-to-analog converter. How much latency would that typically add?
  - labawi 6y ago
    If you're using DVI-D -> VGA or HDMI -> VGA, probably a couple of pixels worth on a simple converter, as it would be expensive and unnecessary to cache a whole frame. DP has incompatible timings so I would expect a frame or so on a cheap (though significantly more expensive) converter.
    - Grazester 6y ago
      For eternal analogy to digital converts/upscalers, with good ones you can have zero lag since they would be no frame buffer. I have an OSSC that I use to upscale my the VGA signal from my Dreamcast to HDMI output and there is zero lag.
- Matthias247 6y ago
  The description is actually not very good. Input lag doesn't purely exist because of liquid movement and pixels changing colors. If it would, then an input lag of 50-100ms (which where common with older generation LCDs) - would also mean the screens response time (the time to change color) would be that high. Which would mean your picture would be a blurry mess. The majority of input lag came from additional signal processing algorithms which were built into LCDs, which buffered the full picture for 1-2 frames. E.g. to apply overdrive algorithms, color correction, scaling, etc. Those are all running before the signal gets towards the crystals. I think a lot of that was actually just bad design in the earlier generation of LCDs. And it was really bad, I had a screen with 100ms input lag and neither working nor gaming on it was really fun. But it seems like manufacturers now understand the problem better and try to minimize the delay through signal processing.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  >those delays are on the order of microseconds That's wrong, on a 60Hz CRT it takes the beam 1/120th of a second to reach the center of the screen, which is an average lag of 8.3 milliseconds. There are LCDs with 9ms lag.
nottorp 6y ago
I have a different problem with LCDs. I still think they're too bright. With a CRT you could set everything to white on black and you had almost no light coming out of the screen. Also brightness meant brightness and you could turn it way down for when working in dim light or darkness. Of course i'm talking about text work here. Maybe when OLED monitors become affordable we'll go back to monitors that aren't basically a lamp shining into your eyes all day. At least the oled on my phone looks like it doesn't put out light where it shouldn't. For gaming, i'm not latency sensitive, but then i don't play twitch shooters any more. I'm more the kind that buys mid-low range video cards and turns on the fps limiter where it's available.
- bserge 6y ago
  Yeah I have no idea why the lowest levels on monitors are so bright. Are there models that can go really low without the PWM flicker effect kicking in (that's another problem I have with monitors, I can notice the damn cheap PWM backlight)? Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
  - ianai 6y ago
    After lowering brightness to 0 the brightness can be lowered by lowering the contrast ratio. It’s obviously not perfect but does work.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I’ve always wished the Macbook’s lowest brightness setting was subdivided two or more times. It’s still too bright when I feel like reading in my dark room perhaps on the way to sleep. I have to use an app called Shady to cover the screen in a dimming overlay.
    - cmurphycode 6y ago
      Have you tried using option-shift-[f1] to subdivide? or the brightness slider in the settings.
vidanay 6y ago
There was a really good article shared a few weeks ago about video memory on old systems that didn't use a frame buffer, instead the video data was streamed to only a couple of bytes and calculated in real time. This had the effect of nearly zero lag because sprite location could be calculated right up until the moment the first row was drawn to the screen. I wish I could remember exactly what that article was.
- deergomoo 6y ago
  This was quite a popular technique to achieve fancy video effects on low powered hardware. A good example is the various parallax and scrolling effects in the intro cinematic to Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy/Color, achieved by changing various hardware scroll registers in the horizontal blanking interval (time between one line being finished and the other starting). The main limitation is that you can only do horizontal effects, not vertical. I’m wondering if the article you’re thinking of was the Wired piece on the Atari 2600? That famously ran all of its game logic in the H- and V-blank intervals.
  - vidanay 6y ago
    I seem to recall the article being about Apple II hardware, but it might have been Atari 2600. They are of similar generations. edit: Yep, you are right - the article is titled "Racing the Beam" https://www.wired.com/2009/03/racing-the-beam/ https://www.wired.com/2009/03/racing-the-beam/
    - Someone 6y ago
      If so, “sprite location could be calculated right up until the moment the first row was drawn to the screen” is a tad optimistic. In theory, you could, but on the Atari 2600, during screen drawing, the CPU cycle budget for each line was 76 cycles (see https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1646277043401568/Atari_2600_Programming_for_Newbies_Revised_Edition.pdf https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1646277043401568/Atari_2600_Pr...). Rounding up, that’s 40 instructions, and if the current line is different from the previous one, you’d have to update memory from that same budget. Because of that, reading of user input and updating of player/object positions typically/always was done during the vertical blank interval.
taneq 6y ago
Gaming LCDs these days boast response times in the low single digit millisecond range. Even at 144Hz that’s less than a frame. If there’s framebuffer-to-photons lag, I’d point my finger at DVI decoding before the physical movement of liquid crystals. Also, for all the focus on “physical changes” there’s no mention of phosphor fade rate, which is a physical property of the CRT screen with a built-in trade off between latency and flicker. Please let’s not have CRTs become the new Monster Cables.
- R0b0t1 6y ago
  The gray to gray response time is heavily gamed. There's some tech reporter investigation on it that shows how most monitors that game the GTG response time have slower overall response than monitors with a ~7ms time.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    TFT Central's reviews are a great source for detailed measurements of response times: https://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/asus_rog_swift_360hz_pg259qn.htm#detailed_response https://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/asus_rog_swift_360hz_pg...
bserge 6y ago
My eyes used to hurt a lot on CRTs. A few hours every day in front of one and I could not go outside without sunglasses, anything would make my eyes hurt. Everything was fine if I went a week without using a computer. With LCDs, that's not a problem anymore, and I like it.
- vidanay 6y ago
  I think this had a lot to do with low quality fluorescent light ballasts in offices. I agree that it seemed to happen a lot more with CRT, but I have experienced it with LCD too.
  - bserge 6y ago
    On LCD monitors, I could notice that on very low brightness settings, which was likely due to PWM flicker. I guess I'm sensitive to it.
  - tonyarkles 6y ago
    In 2008 or so, I ended up going to a neurologist because I was getting these brutal headaches that couldn’t be resolved by my GP. They couldn’t find anything either. And then I quit my job and no longer spent my days starting at a CRT under shitty fluorescent lights, and all the problems went away. Magic!
    - Moru 6y ago
      Some people call it allergy to electricity but most of them just have problem with flickering lights. It's incredibly straining even if we don't notice the flicker.
- thedanbob 6y ago
  I guess most people can’t see the flicker on a CRT set at 60Hz, but I can. It’s especially bad in a room with fluorescent lights. First thing I’d do upon sitting down at a new computer with a CRT monitor was to bump up the refresh rate to 75Hz so I didn’t get a headache. Taking standardized tests in the early 2000s on locked down computers in fluorescent-lit test centers was torture.
peatmoss 6y ago
I wonder if there’ll eventually be enough demand for new CRTs, and if manufacturing technology has improved enough to make a CRT that is less of an ecological menace. If cost were only partly a constraint, how good could we build a CRT today? I am still mesmerized by new display technologies / display technologies that I haven’t seen in a long time. Like the vector CRTs that exist in old Asteroids cabinets. The phosphors are really bright—brighter than you can imagine an LCD being. I also remember the first time I saw e-ink and being shocked to see something so inert looking shift to a new image. This article really captured my imagination. I’ve not seen a modern GPU driving high frame rates on a CRT, but now I’m very curious to do so. I’d imagine the experience would defy my intuitions the same as it appears to have done for the authors here.
- ptx 6y ago
  They took up a huge amount of desk space though, which was quite inconvenient. But perhaps they could be made flatter?
  - everdrive 6y ago
    The obsession with device thinness and smallness is a cancer. Engineering gets put into the wrong efforts, and cost, efficiency, and repair-ability are all damaged. Modern lcd screens seem to be the worst of this. The screen itself is quite thin, but then the base, and the cables coming out the back mean it’s still effectively 3-7 inches “thick.” The thinness accomplishes nothing, and has made the device worse.
    - vikramkr 6y ago
      Sure, but I think you're looking at CRTs with rose tinted glasses if you think the thickness, size, and weight of those monitors was not a problem. I physically couldn't fit a couple of extra monitors on my desk, and a vertical monitor for code, etc, on my desk if they were as thick as the CRT I used to use ages ago. And having recently upgraded from a plasma TV to an LED - good lord even the plasma TV was stupid heavy. Sometimes you want to be able to move around physical objects you know? Cleaning, rearranging, etc? There's a difference going from a 10 mm phone to a 9 mm phone vs going from a 30 inch CRT to a 65 inch LED
MrJagil 6y ago
I stumbled upon this article while trying to figure out if i could hook up my ipad to a crt. If any one has any wise words for me on my journey, I’m all ears.
- opencl 6y ago
  Apple sells both USB-C to VGA and Lightning to VGA adapters, just buy one of those depending on which iPad you have.
elric 6y ago
I remember reading something by John Carmack back in the early Oculus days, where he was basically saying he wished he could use small CRTs in VR headsets for many of the same reasons the article highlights.
- jaimex2 6y ago
  What stopped him?
  - elric 6y ago
    Not sure. At a guess, weight? And I'm guessing no one was making CRTs small enough to be practical? Maybe power requirements?
nickjj 6y ago
CRTs were really good. They really were. I remember back in the day the HardOCP forum[0] had massive threads about people buying the FW900 in the mid-2000s. It definitely achieved legendary status. Sadly I never had a chance to use one. I remember having a 21" NEC that let me play Quake 2 / 3 at 120hz at 640x480 in the mid-late 1990s and I think I paid like $120 for it back then from one of those refurbished monitor sites. It also did 1600x1200 at 60hz for non-gaming. I still don't know how those refurbished sites stayed in business because they offered free shipping, but a decently sized CRT back then used to weigh like 60 pounds (30 kg). Back then I remember waiting so many years to get an LCD because the input latency, refresh rates and color accuracy were horrendous for so long despite being 3x the price. [0]: https://hardforum.com/threads/24-widescreen-crt-fw900-from-ebay-arrived-comments.952788/ https://hardforum.com/threads/24-widescreen-crt-fw900-from-e...
- indymike 6y ago
  For a long time the big advantage of LCD was just size and energy use. You lost a lot of the clarity with the conversion from analog VGA or SVGA signal in devices that predated DVI and HDMI connectors. It would be really hard to trade in my 28" 4k display for any CRT I've ever had.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    > It would be really hard to trade in my 28" 4k display for any CRT I've ever had. Agreed. I use an LCD today (25" 2560x1440) and I'm happy with it. But I did wait until about 2007 or 2008 to get my first LCD which was a 1600x1200 Dell FP2007 (which still works the last time I plugged it in a year ago as a very temporary 2nd monitor while I waited for a replacement).
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    For work, LCD is absolutely superior. Gaming - especially shooters -, however, are a totally different use-case: Refresh rate is absolutely necessary for quick reaction times, while something like readability is not as big of a factor (Games tend to use big and easy-to-read fonts). Of course, you still need some color quality to spot enemies, but it's very different from reading text for several hours.
yardie 6y ago
I used to have one of these (GDM-FW900) at an old job, a long time ago. They were great monitors for the time, top of the line. They weighed almost 300lbs, IIRC. And like all CRTs they can put out some heat. LCDs at the time still left much to be desired so VFX houses weren't rushing to replace them with inferior, at the time, technology. I remember running mine at a higher refresh rate. 75Hz and 100Hz was easily reachable. 120Hz and you started to drop resolution and the coils would sing. I miss the wide range of resolutions you could run. LCDs still haven't been able to replicate that without making everything a blurry, boxy mess. I was able to take the broken smaller GDM-F500 (21") home. It was dim and after a bit of research I found out replacing a capacitor and a few resistors would bring it back. But it was terrifying working directly on the HV board. Once it was working I had so much screen. Almost getting electrocuted was practically it.
- dreamofkoholint 6y ago
  Yes! I think the ability to watch lower-res video (even 480p) on them and still have a decent picture is what I miss the most. It would be quite comical if the 300lb figure were correct, having lugged one around before. They hovered around 92lbs, though.
  - yardie 6y ago
    > It would be quite comical if the 300lb figure were correct, having lugged one around before. They hovered around 92lbs, though. I might be mistaken then. There was also a Trinitron in the room, 30-something inches and required 3 people to pick up. The FW900 certainly felt like 300lbs, for a single person.
hexbinencoded 6y ago
I remember my Sony Trinitron and Iiyama monitors fondly. RIP.
- qayxc 6y ago
  Had both, don't remember them fondly at all because I moved a lot. These 35kg monsters were the perfect combination of unwieldy and delicate at the same time...
jimnotgym 6y ago
Better at some things than some LCDs maybe, like taking up desk space, heating the room, that sort of thing.
- chaganated 6y ago
  don't forget the lead and the ionizing radiation!
liquidise 6y ago
As a former epileptic, the strobing that comes with CRTs is something i’m happy to be rid of. It wasn’t something I could see so much as perceive, but it’s a feeling my body still remembers. That said modern monitor tech still has big problems. Quantum dot has a chance of shifting the field in the next 10 years but right now any monitor effectively excels at only 2-3 of: color gamut, color accuracy, pixel density, refresh rate, response time. HDR is a whole different topic that the industry hasn’t figured out.
- simcop2387 6y ago
  I'm curious if you've ever had the chance to see an oled monitor in person and if it reacts similarly to a CRT for you. They have a global refresh/flash instead of one that's rasterizing so it might not have the same effect and they don't have the same phosphor fade of a CRT either. I'm also curious about the LCD monitors that strobe the backlight to reduce apparent motion blur (basically they shut the backlight off during the time that each pixel is fading between colors in each frame).
  - liquidise 6y ago
    I own a 77” LG oled that I positively love and have not noticed any strobing. I’m also no longer epileptic, so maybe that also plays a role?
    - 0-_-0 6y ago
      It might be a much higher frequency which you're not sensitive to. My Galaxy S5 had 240 Hz. You can figure it out using a digital camera. Set the shutter speed to e.g. 1/10s, and take a picure of a bright spot displayed on a dark background while moving the camere so you get "motion blur", and count the number of times the object repeats. Multiply by 10 and you have your refresh rate.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  The problem with monitors is much more with the display industry's preference for finding new ways to scam customers instead of commercializing display technology improvements. The history of LCD monitors and TVs is a history of the industry increasing prices while finding new corners to cut by removing functionality that reviewers and users didn't know they needed to test for. When users first realized that IPS was vastly superior to TN for most purposes, the industry responded by making low-quality 6-bit IPS panels, which the industry happily described as 'IPS' without disclosing that the panels can't display color gradients--and often flickered badly due to FRC. Early 6-bit panels were worse than TN in everyday use. 6-bit IPS is now essentially unavoidable in smaller, non-4K, screens. Another fun scam the display industry concocted was releasing one production run of good quality 8-bit IPS monitors, to get positive professional reviews and user word of mouth, then making subsequent production runs under the same model number with 6-bit fraud-IPS, PVA, or even TN panels. The low-frequency PWM backlighting scam (which probably saves all of ten cents per display) is now known well enough that reviewers will test for it, but the industry has developed other ways of preventing users from purchasing good-quality hardware at a fair price. Dynamic contrast is a particularly insidious problem. This piece of joy from the display industry changes the backlight intensity and RGB pixel values depending on screen contents. As a result, the color tint of the display changes depending on screen contents. These constant color shifts make dynamic contrast monitors unusable for even non-professional design/photo/video work and prevents color calibration entirely. This technology is even applied, with no user option to disable it, to monitors sold as sRGB pre-calibrated and marketed towards mid-range color work. Officially, dynamic contrast is intended to save energy, but the actual intent is likely to force people who want stable colors to buy professional displays at ten times the price. A new scam that's emerged since the start of the pandemic is color gamut restriction; it's now very difficult to get displays--especially laptop displays--that support more than 50% of the sRGB gamut. Displaying actual red is now something the industry has decided to exclusively paywall into professional panels targeted at the design market. The problem with displays isn't technology; it's an industry that's built on the premise of ripping off consumers.
dbuder 6y ago
I've picked a lot of junk off the streets but never managed to get a nice Grundig.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rvr_ 6y ago
I miss 4:3
andrewzah 6y ago
CRTs are still heavily used in the smash bros. melee gaming community as the nintendo gamecube natively outputs to 480i. Using a modern 720p+ display involves upscaling, which causes latency. This latency is wildly inconsistent across tvs, which makes competitive play untenable. There are monitors with extremely low response time (~1ms), BenQ was the go-to for a while. It used to be that the cost was prohibitive, but now finding CRTs is more prohibitive... especially finding a good trinitron.
- hnick 6y ago
  I was going to mention this. I've heard stories about players scouring the streets on council cleanup day in the hopes to snag an old CRT.
- cyrialize 6y ago
  I have a tiny Sony trinitron (I think) CRT. The screen is the size of a banana diagonally. I specifically have it around just for practicing SSBM. Many people nowadays do just use their PC with a good monitor. There are a ton of hacks that you can do to reduce the lag that you get from a monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6B4t5fCEbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6B4t5fCEbQ The video above is from Hax, a prominent smasher who has been part of the SSBM scene for a very long time.
ddingus 6y ago
I love CRT displays myself. The standard 50/60hz is a bit rough, unless one is working on a high persistence phosphor. Older monochrome, amber, green screens often have that phosphor. I like how simple they are to drive too. Managing a high resolution analog stream takes far fewer resources. For personal electronics, retro fun, I recommend one. Glowing phosphor in a glass tube just rocks! There were variations too. I got to work on one of these in the 80's: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-F7ZySfgZ0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-F7ZySfgZ0 In a dim room, these are beautiful. Up to 4k resolution in the 70's, no display buffer. Surprisingly techy looking and feeling. I will miss CRTs when they are no longer available. They should be made in 16:9 for a while longer. People would use them. All that said, current flat panels continue to improve. They are fine for the majority of things most of us do.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Just a late edit: My favorite thing to watch on CRT displays is well produced SD programs. They look really good. At the peak of SD, I had tuned a great Sony to near what a PVM can do. Watching DVD movies on that via RGB OR component in a dark room was a good experience. Huge dynamic range. The occasional trail from a bright entity in the program. Real black. In many ways, many of us did not experience what was lost in the tech change. This revival makes sense in some ways. Look at vinyl. It is a similar thing. The overall experience is really good. Gratifying. Fact is, where there are limits, there is art. A great vinyl production is something I appreciate a lot. A similar one done digitally actually sounds better, but the art is not there. The CRT is art. We had limits and the CRT bubbles up out of that just nailing it.
kristopolous 6y ago
Unless you play video games, the space, power and heat aren't worth it. I didn't have much desk space and higher resolutions became really cheap to come by. So maybe 8 years ago I got rid of my 2 fw900s and now use rotatable 4ks that I put side by side in portrait mode, essentially getting a ~4kx4k square (18:16). It's $750 or whatever 2 go for now well spent. Most modern laptops can even drive two monitors as long you get the adapters right. It's a really good work set up. Highly recommended. I'd honestly say it's the most significant thing that's affected how I interact with computers (and I've done foot pedals, gestural systems, custom made input devices I've designed myself, repurposed midi device for UX, my own window manager, etc ... 2 4k monitors in portrait is the top of the list, really)
dreamofkoholint 6y ago
I have one of the variants(HP A7217A) sitting away gathering dust at a relative's place. Its weight/size just made it too difficult to move with over the years. I hadn't realized they're still desired now. I'll have to dust it off and see if there's a buyer out there.
bla3 6y ago
It's weird to me to see all this affection for CRTs here. I had a "flicker free" 120 Hz CRT and I could still easily see it flicker and got headaches when using it for more than a few hours.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Heh, everything is better on Tubes whether it is guitar amps or gaming monitors? :-) I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD monitor it will look better than your CRT :-) But it is perfectly valid to say "What is the best experience I can get for $X?" and find that CRT solutions out perform LCD solutions at various price points. That said, I suspect it is less about the "superiority" of the CRT than it is about the corners cut by the LCD manufacturer in terms of display fidelity. A lot of the early "high res" displays got there by sacrificing video image quality. That those monitors aren't great for gaming is not surprising, it is also not surprising if that was the only monitor you've ever gamed on, when you saw gaming on a better image experience you would be impressed. If you consider the amount of RAM and processing power you have to have inside the monitor at 4K resolution you start to understand why there is a thing like nVidia's G-Sync technology. That is a lot of bits to throw around. Similarly, a monitor that processes the 4k video stream down to 1080p, and has 10 or even 12 bit dynamic range on the pixels with full motion emulation might give you a better looking display than a 4K display. So many ways to optimize for particular markets.
- skybrian 6y ago
  It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Compared to what? A cheaper monitor? On a relative basis, spending $400 on a 4k monitor vs $250 on a similar 1440p monitor is wasteful. But if you compare to any other category of goods, it's a drop in the bucket. Most people don't even consider efficiency when adding thousands of dollars of options to a new car purchase. You can buy a lot of 4k monitors for the amount families spend on larger than needed houses throughout the suburbs of the United States.
    - paulmd 6y ago
WalterBright 6y ago
> Taylor said in an interview that he's willing to pay up to $500. I wonder what the shipping cost of those heavy monsters are. Me, I've used CRTs for 25 years. I have zero nostalgia for them. I don't want to ever use one again. There's nothing about them I prefer.
- Matthias247 6y ago
  Reminds me of a story in when I was in university in around 2005. In our usenet group some people found a sale of used fw900s (definitely for less than 500€ each). They then organized a group buy, which had around 20 interested people. Then they wondered how they would actually get all of those transferred across half the country. I think in the end they rented a truck or trailer to pick them up. It was definitely a bigger feat than getting a LCD shipped from your favorite online store.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I still want my desktop, which is currently a Dania dining room table, to be a display. Wouldn't that be cool, even with my coffee cup and junk sitting on it? I also want a true wall-sized display. No, not a projected image.
- sosborn 6y ago
  I feel the same way about CRTs. Things are so much better now (to me anyway). I also feel the same way about loud keyboards. The current fetish for "clackety clack" keyboards cracks me up.
danjc 6y ago
Haven’t seen any other mention of this in comments but the sound of CRT’s used to drive me mad, particularly CRT TV’s. If I walked in to a house where the TV was on, I could often hear it from the entrance!
tasty_freeze 6y ago
Color convergence on large CRT monitors is problematic. Back in the early 90s I spent $1200 out of my own pocket to buy a 20" CRT. At the time I was designing 3D rasterization algorithms and circuits and would spend hundreds of hours tweaking constants (how much difference loss does a 5b interpolation fraction introduce vs 6b, etc) and A/B testing to get the most cost effective & high quality results. I bought and returned two and just lived with the defects of the 3rd one when I realized it was impossible to get good convergence across the display. I would confine my A/B tests to a specific area of the screen where convergence was best. BTW, I forget the exact details, but color convergence at the factory was set with the monitor facing some particular direction, lets say north. If you set up the monitor facing east, the convergence would be off a little bit. When quality LCDs became available, convergence was a non-issue, but they used dithering to attempt to increase the color gradations, so it didn't really help my kind of work anyway.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  In my youth I bought one of those types of high end monitor second hand. Had 5 BNC inputs and required a resolution tweaking utility to change the sync polarity. I spent hours tweaking convergence on the 9 million trim pots to get it just right. Best color gamut of any display I ever owned. Sadly the display physically broke something internal when I lost the included plastic screwdriver and tried using a metal one. The internal heads of the trim pots were apparently connected to the circuit. The display was fixed to 1024x768x75Hz exactly (though you could squeeze in a bit more with modeline tweaking), but the colors were great.
MrJagil 6y ago
CRTs are still being made: https://dotronix.com/our-work/dnr-series/ https://dotronix.com/our-work/dnr-series/ Via https://reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/j930qr/brand_new_crt_displays_are_still_being_made_today/ https://reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/j930qr/brand_new_crt...
jeffbee 6y ago
Ah man, memories, and not from 20 years ago, either. I bought a top-of-the-line 21" Trinitron in 1999 and after 4.99 years of the 5-year warranty something stopped working inside it so I shipped it back to Sony and they couldn't or didn't want to fix it and they didn't have any more to replace it so they shipped me a new 24" GDM-FW900 for free, which gave me years of trouble-free service. Eventually I had to get rid of it because video cards with respectable analog outputs became scarce. Younger computer users never had to deal with this but in the late stages of CRT technology the quality of the analog end of the video card (the RAMDAC) was a major differentiation between brands. Having a quality RAMDAC and a quality cable of minimal length made a visible difference in the resulting picture.
- vidanay 6y ago
  Trinitron were great monitors. Except you could never un-see the embedded wires once you noticed them.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    `xsetroot mod 2 2` and I rarely thought about them.
  - jsrcout 6y ago
    > Except you could never un-see the embedded wires once you noticed them. So true. Seeing those wires for the first time was a major WTH moment. And you could sort of forget to notice them for a while, but they always came back.
- speeder 6y ago
  I still use CRT, and I own a Radeon R9 380X. I am worried with the fact that this card is the final one with a RAMDAC, any newer one doesn't have, but any monitor better than mine is ludicrously expensive. I dunno what to do now.
stakkur 6y ago
Also, a 20-year-old CRT monitor (21") consumes almost four times the electricity of an LCD, and can cost about 5x more to run-even with energy saving mode.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Gamers aren't really known to go out of their ways to save 100 or 200W.
thdrdt 6y ago
The only thing I miss are the resolutions. 15 years ago I had a Sony Trinitron running at *XGA. Today most monitors are still HD. And even most 4k monitors are in fact sharper HD displays.
pritovido 6y ago
I had one of those that a programmer that worked for me sold me. It did cost him something like $6000-9000 new. The image was incredible, but it had lots of drawbacks: 1. It was huge and heavyweight. Most people that say "people obsession with flatness" has never expirienced having an screen that is as deep as long and tall. Attaching it to the wall was a nightmare. 2. It had problems with magnets. I put a big magnet like 1 meter away and it affected the screen. 3. It emitted X-Rays directly to your eyes. Not good. In the end replacing it with LCDs was a great decision. Much better for the programming or CAD that I do. OLED is great, as the article says, if you can buy-recover the cost somewhat.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  3. It emitted X-Rays directly to your eyes. Not good. What's your source for this? Was it limited to the Sony?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  No display made in at least in late 90-s would emit X-Rays.
BearOso 6y ago
> On a CRT monitor, the screen is coated in millions of phosphor dots, with one red, green, and blue dot for every individual pixel. Not true. The number of dot triads is usually greater than the number of pixels. The distance between them is specified as the “dot pitch,” which serves as a physical resolution cap. In aperture grilles they’re continuous RGB vertical lines, with the dot pitch being the horizontal distance between them. Framebuffer pixels don’t align exactly with the dots, and that’s one reason why CRTs are so blurry. The other reason is that the DAC analog output doesn’t transition discretely between pixels. As the refresh rate and resolution get higher, the DAC has to spend less time on each pixel, so the output becomes blurred horizontally.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I loved the warmth of this blur. When I sold my old mitsubishi diamondtron, I tested it before shipping it. And watching an old divx made me feel all confused. It looked nicer .. warmer .. something.
  - alt219 6y ago
    This idea is expressed by the Brian Eno quote: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      I don't think that applies, it didn't feel like 'home at last' but really 'new made me forgot what can be'
Shivetya 6y ago
Interestingly enough the LG CX 48 inch TV has been pretty much targeted at gamers and has received some really good reviews. This was targeted at Nvidia setups. Granted at this size they don't work well on desktops One Review https://youtu.be/IR6RnZI2uoY https://youtu.be/IR6RnZI2uoY
ellis0n 6y ago
Yeah, CRT was amazing. In my childhood I experimented with my 320x200 black and white CRT monitor and 4-color CGA, and went over the 720px resolution by manipulating the registers of the video adapter.
tomc1985 6y ago
Ugh. Keyboard hipsters are bad enough. Now we're going to have CRT hipsters! It's like, name some piece of newly vintage tech, find its fans, start a movement, sell folks their shit nostalgia, lather, rinse, repeat
- visarga 6y ago
  Being able to choose your desired mechanical response of the keyboard switches is useful for serious work.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    For some, I guess. For others it is pointless materialism and social posturing that this hobby-slash-profession could really do without.
tuxracer 6y ago
Please don't let CRTs come back in style. After a while they tend to develop this headache inducing high pitched tone almost akin to tinnitus that is emitted constantly while they're powered on. It seems to be so high pitched most people cannot hear it at all but if you're one of the lucky few who can it can actually be really disruptive. Unfortunately it's also often loud enough to hear through doors, walls, etc... Please be mindful of this before setting up a CRT if you go down this path. For example a house might be better for this setup vs an apartment or condo.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  When I was a kid I would always hunt down and turn off CRTs left on anywhere in the house since the sound annoyed me so much. Either my hearing has gotten worse or all the CRTs are gone now... probably both.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    I read somewhere that you lose high pitch hearing first, which is why the young could hear the CRTs when the elderly could not. I tried to google for this (actually DDG) but all I got was SEO spam.
    - hvis 6y ago
      Something like this? https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/age-related-hearing-loss/ https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/age-related-heari... https://playback.fm/hearing-test https://playback.fm/hearing-test and "gradual loss of sensitivity to higher frequencies with age is considered normal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range)
      - tzs 6y ago
        I wish there was audiophile equipment for older people that took that into account. Headphones and speakers, say, that only go to 14 KHz instead of 20 KHz. By not needing to design for as wide a frequency range, they should be able to either make them less expensive, or more accurate, or both.
taf2 6y ago
My lower back disagrees. Not having to lug super heavy CRT monitors is one of the best things about the light weight LCD.
User23 6y ago
I bought the Sony Trinitron from the story back in 2000 at Fry's. When the salesman tried to upsell me on a service contract I accidentally laughed in his face. It happened before I could stop myself and Sony had an absolutely incredible record for quality at the time. I used that monitor heavily for over a decade, but finally replaced it because the phosphors were starting to go and the picture was getting dingy. Still it was a great piece of hardware.
LockAndLol 6y ago
What's the energy consumption like for LCDs, OLEDs and CRTs? It wouldn't surprise me if using a CRT meant higher consumption. Shooting around electrons I'm a vacuum can't be cheap.
nmstoker 6y ago
This is part of the reason why, when LCD screens were being introduced as "the new thing" most large shops would not display them side by side with CRTs - so you didn't notice how aspects were much worse, like responsiveness and sharpness.
djaque 6y ago
The biggest argument to use a CRT to me is interfacing to a computer using a literal particle accelerator pointed at your face. How metal is that?
Lordarminius 6y ago
This ! I recently bought two new monitors and had to return them, swapping them in for a laserjet printer, because my ragged Acer (manufactured 2011) gave better FAR perfomance
IronWolve 6y ago
I was using my 24 inch sun monitor for a long long time when LCD's came out, wouldnt want to downgrade to a 17 or 19. Also It was running at 1920x1200, going to a 4:3 lcd with smaller display seemed wrong. Funny, I bought first 24inch LCD, a dell, color matched, and they gave me a free pc. Put a nvidia 8800GT in and gamed for quiet a while, it came with a pentium D 820, after a few years put a 960 in it. Think I got 5+ years of gaming on it. Still using the LCD as my 2nd monitor net to my 27 inch 1440p wide screen gsync gaming monitor.
- jsrcout 6y ago
  Some of the Sun monitors were incredible, back in the day. I remember using a GIS system on, IIRC, a Sun 4 workstation with Sony Trinitron monitor. Just razor sharp and fast as hell.
fomine3 6y ago
Recommended video to see how CRT works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM
sevensor 6y ago
Many a year ago, in college, I was helping a friend move. He had a giant 21" CRT, which seemed like it weighed eighty pounds. It was the dead of night, in the middle of winter. We were walking on ice, carrying it together. (We both had late-90s computer nerd biceps.) He slipped, and with a great exertion I managed to grab his side and prevent a fall to the pavement. Neither of us had much in the world at the time, and that sweet monitor was one of his most valuable posessions. Needless to say, he was grateful that I'd rescued his 1600x1200 view into the future.
- willis936 6y ago
  Judging from the description, that may have been a G520: the 4:3 brother to the FW900. Truly something to carry into the future.
dusted 6y ago
Now you just need to find a modern video card with a VGA output, because if you use a converter, you're going to introduce lag, and probably more lag than you shaved off going from LCD to CRT.
Yizahi 6y ago
I feel like CRTs today belong to the same nostalgic area as cast iron skillets, vinyl players and manual gearbox cars. Sure, they are good for certain things, and they excel in some of them, but really they are usually way to much hassle to use and acquire, and need too much sacrifices in other areas in which they don't excel. Articles which compare such products usually completely ignore or outright forgive any disadvantages for "nostalgic" product, something which they wouldn't even think of doing for product created in 2020, instead of several decades ago.
intrasight 6y ago
In the early-90's I worked on prototypes for the new FAA air traffic control system. We sourced 2Kx2K CRTs from Sony that where the most incredible things to behold when used with hardware anti-aliased vector graphics. Almost 30 years ago. Where has the time gone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron
egberts1 6y ago
I’m still experiencing pthread lockups in KDE Plasma under Debian Bullseye (11). It’s time to hook up that dumb 20’ CRT to the serial port of my expensive rig with 42’ QLCD panel. Grrrrr.

257 points by MrJagil 6y ago

02020202 6y ago

that was a surprisingly good read

02020202 6y ago
lol, thanks for the downvotes. so i guess it was not that good of a read after all :D
- eru 6y ago
  Ignore downvotes, especially early downvotes. There are some knee-jerk reactions these days. (But do keep in mind that your initial comment didn't really add anything to any conversation. So it didn't really deserve any upvotes, either.)

Terretta 6y ago

TL;DR: For gaming, because ‘input lag’. [In a CRT] the electron-to-photon exchange happens instantly. While CRTs do have some sources of lag —namely, the time spent buffering each video frame and scanning each line of the frame from top to bottom on the screen —those delays are on the order of microseconds. When you move your mouse or press a button on the keyboard, the response time is imperceptible... By contrast, an LCD requires physical movement on the part of every pixel. On an LCD, the back of the display emits a constant stream of white light, which passes through a polarizer and onto an array of liquid crystals. Applying voltage to each crystal causes them to twist, altering the amount of light that comes through the screen's front polarizer. Compared to electron-photon conversion, the physical movement of liquid crystals inside an LCD display takes a lot more time, introducing input lag. It also creates blurriness when there's a lot of motion happening across the screen. Also TL;DR: CRTs to look for. Sony FW900 16:10 CRT [also sold as] HP A7217A, SGI GDM-FW9011, and Sun GDM-FW9010 ... 16:9 CRT monitors including the Intergraph InterView 28HD96 and 24HD96... [and] you'll need a graphics card with an analog output, such as Nvidia's 900 series and AMD's 300 series cards, or a digital-to-analog converter.

gruez 6y ago
> a digital-to-analog converter. How much latency would that typically add?
- labawi 6y ago
  If you're using DVI-D -> VGA or HDMI -> VGA, probably a couple of pixels worth on a simple converter, as it would be expensive and unnecessary to cache a whole frame. DP has incompatible timings so I would expect a frame or so on a cheap (though significantly more expensive) converter.
  - Grazester 6y ago
    For eternal analogy to digital converts/upscalers, with good ones you can have zero lag since they would be no frame buffer. I have an OSSC that I use to upscale my the VGA signal from my Dreamcast to HDMI output and there is zero lag.
Matthias247 6y ago
The description is actually not very good. Input lag doesn't purely exist because of liquid movement and pixels changing colors. If it would, then an input lag of 50-100ms (which where common with older generation LCDs) - would also mean the screens response time (the time to change color) would be that high. Which would mean your picture would be a blurry mess. The majority of input lag came from additional signal processing algorithms which were built into LCDs, which buffered the full picture for 1-2 frames. E.g. to apply overdrive algorithms, color correction, scaling, etc. Those are all running before the signal gets towards the crystals. I think a lot of that was actually just bad design in the earlier generation of LCDs. And it was really bad, I had a screen with 100ms input lag and neither working nor gaming on it was really fun. But it seems like manufacturers now understand the problem better and try to minimize the delay through signal processing.
0-_-0 6y ago
>those delays are on the order of microseconds That's wrong, on a 60Hz CRT it takes the beam 1/120th of a second to reach the center of the screen, which is an average lag of 8.3 milliseconds. There are LCDs with 9ms lag.

nottorp 6y ago

I have a different problem with LCDs. I still think they're too bright. With a CRT you could set everything to white on black and you had almost no light coming out of the screen. Also brightness meant brightness and you could turn it way down for when working in dim light or darkness. Of course i'm talking about text work here. Maybe when OLED monitors become affordable we'll go back to monitors that aren't basically a lamp shining into your eyes all day. At least the oled on my phone looks like it doesn't put out light where it shouldn't. For gaming, i'm not latency sensitive, but then i don't play twitch shooters any more. I'm more the kind that buys mid-low range video cards and turns on the fps limiter where it's available.

bserge 6y ago
Yeah I have no idea why the lowest levels on monitors are so bright. Are there models that can go really low without the PWM flicker effect kicking in (that's another problem I have with monitors, I can notice the damn cheap PWM backlight)? Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
- ianai 6y ago
  After lowering brightness to 0 the brightness can be lowered by lowering the contrast ratio. It’s obviously not perfect but does work.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I’ve always wished the Macbook’s lowest brightness setting was subdivided two or more times. It’s still too bright when I feel like reading in my dark room perhaps on the way to sleep. I have to use an app called Shady to cover the screen in a dimming overlay.
  - cmurphycode 6y ago
    Have you tried using option-shift-[f1] to subdivide? or the brightness slider in the settings.

vidanay 6y ago

There was a really good article shared a few weeks ago about video memory on old systems that didn't use a frame buffer, instead the video data was streamed to only a couple of bytes and calculated in real time. This had the effect of nearly zero lag because sprite location could be calculated right up until the moment the first row was drawn to the screen. I wish I could remember exactly what that article was.

deergomoo 6y ago
This was quite a popular technique to achieve fancy video effects on low powered hardware. A good example is the various parallax and scrolling effects in the intro cinematic to Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy/Color, achieved by changing various hardware scroll registers in the horizontal blanking interval (time between one line being finished and the other starting). The main limitation is that you can only do horizontal effects, not vertical. I’m wondering if the article you’re thinking of was the Wired piece on the Atari 2600? That famously ran all of its game logic in the H- and V-blank intervals.
- vidanay 6y ago
  I seem to recall the article being about Apple II hardware, but it might have been Atari 2600. They are of similar generations. edit: Yep, you are right - the article is titled "Racing the Beam" https://www.wired.com/2009/03/racing-the-beam/ https://www.wired.com/2009/03/racing-the-beam/
  - Someone 6y ago
    If so, “sprite location could be calculated right up until the moment the first row was drawn to the screen” is a tad optimistic. In theory, you could, but on the Atari 2600, during screen drawing, the CPU cycle budget for each line was 76 cycles (see https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1646277043401568/Atari_2600_Programming_for_Newbies_Revised_Edition.pdf https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1646277043401568/Atari_2600_Pr...). Rounding up, that’s 40 instructions, and if the current line is different from the previous one, you’d have to update memory from that same budget. Because of that, reading of user input and updating of player/object positions typically/always was done during the vertical blank interval.

taneq 6y ago

Gaming LCDs these days boast response times in the low single digit millisecond range. Even at 144Hz that’s less than a frame. If there’s framebuffer-to-photons lag, I’d point my finger at DVI decoding before the physical movement of liquid crystals. Also, for all the focus on “physical changes” there’s no mention of phosphor fade rate, which is a physical property of the CRT screen with a built-in trade off between latency and flicker. Please let’s not have CRTs become the new Monster Cables.

R0b0t1 6y ago
The gray to gray response time is heavily gamed. There's some tech reporter investigation on it that shows how most monitors that game the GTG response time have slower overall response than monitors with a ~7ms time.
- wtallis 6y ago
  TFT Central's reviews are a great source for detailed measurements of response times: https://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/asus_rog_swift_360hz_pg259qn.htm#detailed_response https://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/asus_rog_swift_360hz_pg...

bserge 6y ago

My eyes used to hurt a lot on CRTs. A few hours every day in front of one and I could not go outside without sunglasses, anything would make my eyes hurt. Everything was fine if I went a week without using a computer. With LCDs, that's not a problem anymore, and I like it.

vidanay 6y ago
I think this had a lot to do with low quality fluorescent light ballasts in offices. I agree that it seemed to happen a lot more with CRT, but I have experienced it with LCD too.
- bserge 6y ago
  On LCD monitors, I could notice that on very low brightness settings, which was likely due to PWM flicker. I guess I'm sensitive to it.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  In 2008 or so, I ended up going to a neurologist because I was getting these brutal headaches that couldn’t be resolved by my GP. They couldn’t find anything either. And then I quit my job and no longer spent my days starting at a CRT under shitty fluorescent lights, and all the problems went away. Magic!
  - Moru 6y ago
    Some people call it allergy to electricity but most of them just have problem with flickering lights. It's incredibly straining even if we don't notice the flicker.
thedanbob 6y ago
I guess most people can’t see the flicker on a CRT set at 60Hz, but I can. It’s especially bad in a room with fluorescent lights. First thing I’d do upon sitting down at a new computer with a CRT monitor was to bump up the refresh rate to 75Hz so I didn’t get a headache. Taking standardized tests in the early 2000s on locked down computers in fluorescent-lit test centers was torture.

peatmoss 6y ago

I wonder if there’ll eventually be enough demand for new CRTs, and if manufacturing technology has improved enough to make a CRT that is less of an ecological menace. If cost were only partly a constraint, how good could we build a CRT today? I am still mesmerized by new display technologies / display technologies that I haven’t seen in a long time. Like the vector CRTs that exist in old Asteroids cabinets. The phosphors are really bright—brighter than you can imagine an LCD being. I also remember the first time I saw e-ink and being shocked to see something so inert looking shift to a new image. This article really captured my imagination. I’ve not seen a modern GPU driving high frame rates on a CRT, but now I’m very curious to do so. I’d imagine the experience would defy my intuitions the same as it appears to have done for the authors here.

ptx 6y ago
They took up a huge amount of desk space though, which was quite inconvenient. But perhaps they could be made flatter?
- everdrive 6y ago
  The obsession with device thinness and smallness is a cancer. Engineering gets put into the wrong efforts, and cost, efficiency, and repair-ability are all damaged. Modern lcd screens seem to be the worst of this. The screen itself is quite thin, but then the base, and the cables coming out the back mean it’s still effectively 3-7 inches “thick.” The thinness accomplishes nothing, and has made the device worse.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    Sure, but I think you're looking at CRTs with rose tinted glasses if you think the thickness, size, and weight of those monitors was not a problem. I physically couldn't fit a couple of extra monitors on my desk, and a vertical monitor for code, etc, on my desk if they were as thick as the CRT I used to use ages ago. And having recently upgraded from a plasma TV to an LED - good lord even the plasma TV was stupid heavy. Sometimes you want to be able to move around physical objects you know? Cleaning, rearranging, etc? There's a difference going from a 10 mm phone to a 9 mm phone vs going from a 30 inch CRT to a 65 inch LED

MrJagil 6y ago

I stumbled upon this article while trying to figure out if i could hook up my ipad to a crt. If any one has any wise words for me on my journey, I’m all ears.

opencl 6y ago
Apple sells both USB-C to VGA and Lightning to VGA adapters, just buy one of those depending on which iPad you have.

elric 6y ago

I remember reading something by John Carmack back in the early Oculus days, where he was basically saying he wished he could use small CRTs in VR headsets for many of the same reasons the article highlights.

jaimex2 6y ago
What stopped him?
- elric 6y ago
  Not sure. At a guess, weight? And I'm guessing no one was making CRTs small enough to be practical? Maybe power requirements?

nickjj 6y ago

CRTs were really good. They really were. I remember back in the day the HardOCP forum[0] had massive threads about people buying the FW900 in the mid-2000s. It definitely achieved legendary status. Sadly I never had a chance to use one. I remember having a 21" NEC that let me play Quake 2 / 3 at 120hz at 640x480 in the mid-late 1990s and I think I paid like $120 for it back then from one of those refurbished monitor sites. It also did 1600x1200 at 60hz for non-gaming. I still don't know how those refurbished sites stayed in business because they offered free shipping, but a decently sized CRT back then used to weigh like 60 pounds (30 kg). Back then I remember waiting so many years to get an LCD because the input latency, refresh rates and color accuracy were horrendous for so long despite being 3x the price. [0]: https://hardforum.com/threads/24-widescreen-crt-fw900-from-ebay-arrived-comments.952788/ https://hardforum.com/threads/24-widescreen-crt-fw900-from-e...

indymike 6y ago
For a long time the big advantage of LCD was just size and energy use. You lost a lot of the clarity with the conversion from analog VGA or SVGA signal in devices that predated DVI and HDMI connectors. It would be really hard to trade in my 28" 4k display for any CRT I've ever had.
- nickjj 6y ago
  > It would be really hard to trade in my 28" 4k display for any CRT I've ever had. Agreed. I use an LCD today (25" 2560x1440) and I'm happy with it. But I did wait until about 2007 or 2008 to get my first LCD which was a 1600x1200 Dell FP2007 (which still works the last time I plugged it in a year ago as a very temporary 2nd monitor while I waited for a replacement).
- Sebb767 6y ago
  For work, LCD is absolutely superior. Gaming - especially shooters -, however, are a totally different use-case: Refresh rate is absolutely necessary for quick reaction times, while something like readability is not as big of a factor (Games tend to use big and easy-to-read fonts). Of course, you still need some color quality to spot enemies, but it's very different from reading text for several hours.

yardie 6y ago

I used to have one of these (GDM-FW900) at an old job, a long time ago. They were great monitors for the time, top of the line. They weighed almost 300lbs, IIRC. And like all CRTs they can put out some heat. LCDs at the time still left much to be desired so VFX houses weren't rushing to replace them with inferior, at the time, technology. I remember running mine at a higher refresh rate. 75Hz and 100Hz was easily reachable. 120Hz and you started to drop resolution and the coils would sing. I miss the wide range of resolutions you could run. LCDs still haven't been able to replicate that without making everything a blurry, boxy mess. I was able to take the broken smaller GDM-F500 (21") home. It was dim and after a bit of research I found out replacing a capacitor and a few resistors would bring it back. But it was terrifying working directly on the HV board. Once it was working I had so much screen. Almost getting electrocuted was practically it.

dreamofkoholint 6y ago
Yes! I think the ability to watch lower-res video (even 480p) on them and still have a decent picture is what I miss the most. It would be quite comical if the 300lb figure were correct, having lugged one around before. They hovered around 92lbs, though.
- yardie 6y ago
  > It would be quite comical if the 300lb figure were correct, having lugged one around before. They hovered around 92lbs, though. I might be mistaken then. There was also a Trinitron in the room, 30-something inches and required 3 people to pick up. The FW900 certainly felt like 300lbs, for a single person.

hexbinencoded 6y ago

I remember my Sony Trinitron and Iiyama monitors fondly. RIP.

qayxc 6y ago
Had both, don't remember them fondly at all because I moved a lot. These 35kg monsters were the perfect combination of unwieldy and delicate at the same time...

jimnotgym 6y ago

Better at some things than some LCDs maybe, like taking up desk space, heating the room, that sort of thing.

chaganated 6y ago
don't forget the lead and the ionizing radiation!

liquidise 6y ago

As a former epileptic, the strobing that comes with CRTs is something i’m happy to be rid of. It wasn’t something I could see so much as perceive, but it’s a feeling my body still remembers. That said modern monitor tech still has big problems. Quantum dot has a chance of shifting the field in the next 10 years but right now any monitor effectively excels at only 2-3 of: color gamut, color accuracy, pixel density, refresh rate, response time. HDR is a whole different topic that the industry hasn’t figured out.

simcop2387 6y ago
I'm curious if you've ever had the chance to see an oled monitor in person and if it reacts similarly to a CRT for you. They have a global refresh/flash instead of one that's rasterizing so it might not have the same effect and they don't have the same phosphor fade of a CRT either. I'm also curious about the LCD monitors that strobe the backlight to reduce apparent motion blur (basically they shut the backlight off during the time that each pixel is fading between colors in each frame).
- liquidise 6y ago
  I own a 77” LG oled that I positively love and have not noticed any strobing. I’m also no longer epileptic, so maybe that also plays a role?
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    It might be a much higher frequency which you're not sensitive to. My Galaxy S5 had 240 Hz. You can figure it out using a digital camera. Set the shutter speed to e.g. 1/10s, and take a picure of a bright spot displayed on a dark background while moving the camere so you get "motion blur", and count the number of times the object repeats. Multiply by 10 and you have your refresh rate.
bleepblorp 6y ago
The problem with monitors is much more with the display industry's preference for finding new ways to scam customers instead of commercializing display technology improvements. The history of LCD monitors and TVs is a history of the industry increasing prices while finding new corners to cut by removing functionality that reviewers and users didn't know they needed to test for. When users first realized that IPS was vastly superior to TN for most purposes, the industry responded by making low-quality 6-bit IPS panels, which the industry happily described as 'IPS' without disclosing that the panels can't display color gradients--and often flickered badly due to FRC. Early 6-bit panels were worse than TN in everyday use. 6-bit IPS is now essentially unavoidable in smaller, non-4K, screens. Another fun scam the display industry concocted was releasing one production run of good quality 8-bit IPS monitors, to get positive professional reviews and user word of mouth, then making subsequent production runs under the same model number with 6-bit fraud-IPS, PVA, or even TN panels. The low-frequency PWM backlighting scam (which probably saves all of ten cents per display) is now known well enough that reviewers will test for it, but the industry has developed other ways of preventing users from purchasing good-quality hardware at a fair price. Dynamic contrast is a particularly insidious problem. This piece of joy from the display industry changes the backlight intensity and RGB pixel values depending on screen contents. As a result, the color tint of the display changes depending on screen contents. These constant color shifts make dynamic contrast monitors unusable for even non-professional design/photo/video work and prevents color calibration entirely. This technology is even applied, with no user option to disable it, to monitors sold as sRGB pre-calibrated and marketed towards mid-range color work. Officially, dynamic contrast is intended to save energy, but the actual intent is likely to force people who want stable colors to buy professional displays at ten times the price. A new scam that's emerged since the start of the pandemic is color gamut restriction; it's now very difficult to get displays--especially laptop displays--that support more than 50% of the sRGB gamut. Displaying actual red is now something the industry has decided to exclusively paywall into professional panels targeted at the design market. The problem with displays isn't technology; it's an industry that's built on the premise of ripping off consumers.

dbuder 6y ago

I've picked a lot of junk off the streets but never managed to get a nice Grundig.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rvr_ 6y ago

I miss 4:3

andrewzah 6y ago

CRTs are still heavily used in the smash bros. melee gaming community as the nintendo gamecube natively outputs to 480i. Using a modern 720p+ display involves upscaling, which causes latency. This latency is wildly inconsistent across tvs, which makes competitive play untenable. There are monitors with extremely low response time (~1ms), BenQ was the go-to for a while. It used to be that the cost was prohibitive, but now finding CRTs is more prohibitive... especially finding a good trinitron.

hnick 6y ago
I was going to mention this. I've heard stories about players scouring the streets on council cleanup day in the hopes to snag an old CRT.
cyrialize 6y ago
I have a tiny Sony trinitron (I think) CRT. The screen is the size of a banana diagonally. I specifically have it around just for practicing SSBM. Many people nowadays do just use their PC with a good monitor. There are a ton of hacks that you can do to reduce the lag that you get from a monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6B4t5fCEbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6B4t5fCEbQ The video above is from Hax, a prominent smasher who has been part of the SSBM scene for a very long time.

ddingus 6y ago

I love CRT displays myself. The standard 50/60hz is a bit rough, unless one is working on a high persistence phosphor. Older monochrome, amber, green screens often have that phosphor. I like how simple they are to drive too. Managing a high resolution analog stream takes far fewer resources. For personal electronics, retro fun, I recommend one. Glowing phosphor in a glass tube just rocks! There were variations too. I got to work on one of these in the 80's: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-F7ZySfgZ0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-F7ZySfgZ0 In a dim room, these are beautiful. Up to 4k resolution in the 70's, no display buffer. Surprisingly techy looking and feeling. I will miss CRTs when they are no longer available. They should be made in 16:9 for a while longer. People would use them. All that said, current flat panels continue to improve. They are fine for the majority of things most of us do.

ddingus 6y ago
Just a late edit: My favorite thing to watch on CRT displays is well produced SD programs. They look really good. At the peak of SD, I had tuned a great Sony to near what a PVM can do. Watching DVD movies on that via RGB OR component in a dark room was a good experience. Huge dynamic range. The occasional trail from a bright entity in the program. Real black. In many ways, many of us did not experience what was lost in the tech change. This revival makes sense in some ways. Look at vinyl. It is a similar thing. The overall experience is really good. Gratifying. Fact is, where there are limits, there is art. A great vinyl production is something I appreciate a lot. A similar one done digitally actually sounds better, but the art is not there. The CRT is art. We had limits and the CRT bubbles up out of that just nailing it.

kristopolous 6y ago

Unless you play video games, the space, power and heat aren't worth it. I didn't have much desk space and higher resolutions became really cheap to come by. So maybe 8 years ago I got rid of my 2 fw900s and now use rotatable 4ks that I put side by side in portrait mode, essentially getting a ~4kx4k square (18:16). It's $750 or whatever 2 go for now well spent. Most modern laptops can even drive two monitors as long you get the adapters right. It's a really good work set up. Highly recommended. I'd honestly say it's the most significant thing that's affected how I interact with computers (and I've done foot pedals, gestural systems, custom made input devices I've designed myself, repurposed midi device for UX, my own window manager, etc ... 2 4k monitors in portrait is the top of the list, really)

dreamofkoholint 6y ago

I have one of the variants(HP A7217A) sitting away gathering dust at a relative's place. Its weight/size just made it too difficult to move with over the years. I hadn't realized they're still desired now. I'll have to dust it off and see if there's a buyer out there.

bla3 6y ago

It's weird to me to see all this affection for CRTs here. I had a "flicker free" 120 Hz CRT and I could still easily see it flicker and got headaches when using it for more than a few hours.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Heh, everything is better on Tubes whether it is guitar amps or gaming monitors? :-) I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD monitor it will look better than your CRT :-) But it is perfectly valid to say "What is the best experience I can get for $X?" and find that CRT solutions out perform LCD solutions at various price points. That said, I suspect it is less about the "superiority" of the CRT than it is about the corners cut by the LCD manufacturer in terms of display fidelity. A lot of the early "high res" displays got there by sacrificing video image quality. That those monitors aren't great for gaming is not surprising, it is also not surprising if that was the only monitor you've ever gamed on, when you saw gaming on a better image experience you would be impressed. If you consider the amount of RAM and processing power you have to have inside the monitor at 4K resolution you start to understand why there is a thing like nVidia's G-Sync technology. That is a lot of bits to throw around. Similarly, a monitor that processes the 4k video stream down to 1080p, and has 10 or even 12 bit dynamic range on the pixels with full motion emulation might give you a better looking display than a 4K display. So many ways to optimize for particular markets.

skybrian 6y ago
It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Compared to what? A cheaper monitor? On a relative basis, spending $400 on a 4k monitor vs $250 on a similar 1440p monitor is wasteful. But if you compare to any other category of goods, it's a drop in the bucket. Most people don't even consider efficiency when adding thousands of dollars of options to a new car purchase. You can buy a lot of 4k monitors for the amount families spend on larger than needed houses throughout the suburbs of the United States.
  - paulmd 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago

> Taylor said in an interview that he's willing to pay up to $500. I wonder what the shipping cost of those heavy monsters are. Me, I've used CRTs for 25 years. I have zero nostalgia for them. I don't want to ever use one again. There's nothing about them I prefer.

Matthias247 6y ago
Reminds me of a story in when I was in university in around 2005. In our usenet group some people found a sale of used fw900s (definitely for less than 500€ each). They then organized a group buy, which had around 20 interested people. Then they wondered how they would actually get all of those transferred across half the country. I think in the end they rented a truck or trailer to pick them up. It was definitely a bigger feat than getting a LCD shipped from your favorite online store.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I still want my desktop, which is currently a Dania dining room table, to be a display. Wouldn't that be cool, even with my coffee cup and junk sitting on it? I also want a true wall-sized display. No, not a projected image.
sosborn 6y ago
I feel the same way about CRTs. Things are so much better now (to me anyway). I also feel the same way about loud keyboards. The current fetish for "clackety clack" keyboards cracks me up.

danjc 6y ago

Haven’t seen any other mention of this in comments but the sound of CRT’s used to drive me mad, particularly CRT TV’s. If I walked in to a house where the TV was on, I could often hear it from the entrance!

tasty_freeze 6y ago

Color convergence on large CRT monitors is problematic. Back in the early 90s I spent $1200 out of my own pocket to buy a 20" CRT. At the time I was designing 3D rasterization algorithms and circuits and would spend hundreds of hours tweaking constants (how much difference loss does a 5b interpolation fraction introduce vs 6b, etc) and A/B testing to get the most cost effective & high quality results. I bought and returned two and just lived with the defects of the 3rd one when I realized it was impossible to get good convergence across the display. I would confine my A/B tests to a specific area of the screen where convergence was best. BTW, I forget the exact details, but color convergence at the factory was set with the monitor facing some particular direction, lets say north. If you set up the monitor facing east, the convergence would be off a little bit. When quality LCDs became available, convergence was a non-issue, but they used dithering to attempt to increase the color gradations, so it didn't really help my kind of work anyway.

nitrogen 6y ago
In my youth I bought one of those types of high end monitor second hand. Had 5 BNC inputs and required a resolution tweaking utility to change the sync polarity. I spent hours tweaking convergence on the 9 million trim pots to get it just right. Best color gamut of any display I ever owned. Sadly the display physically broke something internal when I lost the included plastic screwdriver and tried using a metal one. The internal heads of the trim pots were apparently connected to the circuit. The display was fixed to 1024x768x75Hz exactly (though you could squeeze in a bit more with modeline tweaking), but the colors were great.

MrJagil 6y ago

CRTs are still being made: https://dotronix.com/our-work/dnr-series/ https://dotronix.com/our-work/dnr-series/ Via https://reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/j930qr/brand_new_crt_displays_are_still_being_made_today/ https://reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/j930qr/brand_new_crt...

jeffbee 6y ago

Ah man, memories, and not from 20 years ago, either. I bought a top-of-the-line 21" Trinitron in 1999 and after 4.99 years of the 5-year warranty something stopped working inside it so I shipped it back to Sony and they couldn't or didn't want to fix it and they didn't have any more to replace it so they shipped me a new 24" GDM-FW900 for free, which gave me years of trouble-free service. Eventually I had to get rid of it because video cards with respectable analog outputs became scarce. Younger computer users never had to deal with this but in the late stages of CRT technology the quality of the analog end of the video card (the RAMDAC) was a major differentiation between brands. Having a quality RAMDAC and a quality cable of minimal length made a visible difference in the resulting picture.

vidanay 6y ago
Trinitron were great monitors. Except you could never un-see the embedded wires once you noticed them.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  `xsetroot mod 2 2` and I rarely thought about them.
- jsrcout 6y ago
  > Except you could never un-see the embedded wires once you noticed them. So true. Seeing those wires for the first time was a major WTH moment. And you could sort of forget to notice them for a while, but they always came back.
speeder 6y ago
I still use CRT, and I own a Radeon R9 380X. I am worried with the fact that this card is the final one with a RAMDAC, any newer one doesn't have, but any monitor better than mine is ludicrously expensive. I dunno what to do now.

stakkur 6y ago

Also, a 20-year-old CRT monitor (21") consumes almost four times the electricity of an LCD, and can cost about 5x more to run-even with energy saving mode.

jeffbee 6y ago
Gamers aren't really known to go out of their ways to save 100 or 200W.

thdrdt 6y ago

The only thing I miss are the resolutions. 15 years ago I had a Sony Trinitron running at *XGA. Today most monitors are still HD. And even most 4k monitors are in fact sharper HD displays.

pritovido 6y ago

I had one of those that a programmer that worked for me sold me. It did cost him something like $6000-9000 new. The image was incredible, but it had lots of drawbacks: 1. It was huge and heavyweight. Most people that say "people obsession with flatness" has never expirienced having an screen that is as deep as long and tall. Attaching it to the wall was a nightmare. 2. It had problems with magnets. I put a big magnet like 1 meter away and it affected the screen. 3. It emitted X-Rays directly to your eyes. Not good. In the end replacing it with LCDs was a great decision. Much better for the programming or CAD that I do. OLED is great, as the article says, if you can buy-recover the cost somewhat.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
3. It emitted X-Rays directly to your eyes. Not good. What's your source for this? Was it limited to the Sony?
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
No display made in at least in late 90-s would emit X-Rays.

BearOso 6y ago

> On a CRT monitor, the screen is coated in millions of phosphor dots, with one red, green, and blue dot for every individual pixel. Not true. The number of dot triads is usually greater than the number of pixels. The distance between them is specified as the “dot pitch,” which serves as a physical resolution cap. In aperture grilles they’re continuous RGB vertical lines, with the dot pitch being the horizontal distance between them. Framebuffer pixels don’t align exactly with the dots, and that’s one reason why CRTs are so blurry. The other reason is that the DAC analog output doesn’t transition discretely between pixels. As the refresh rate and resolution get higher, the DAC has to spend less time on each pixel, so the output becomes blurred horizontally.

agumonkey 6y ago
I loved the warmth of this blur. When I sold my old mitsubishi diamondtron, I tested it before shipping it. And watching an old divx made me feel all confused. It looked nicer .. warmer .. something.
- alt219 6y ago
  This idea is expressed by the Brian Eno quote: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I don't think that applies, it didn't feel like 'home at last' but really 'new made me forgot what can be'

Shivetya 6y ago

Interestingly enough the LG CX 48 inch TV has been pretty much targeted at gamers and has received some really good reviews. This was targeted at Nvidia setups. Granted at this size they don't work well on desktops One Review https://youtu.be/IR6RnZI2uoY https://youtu.be/IR6RnZI2uoY

ellis0n 6y ago

Yeah, CRT was amazing. In my childhood I experimented with my 320x200 black and white CRT monitor and 4-color CGA, and went over the 720px resolution by manipulating the registers of the video adapter.

tomc1985 6y ago

Ugh. Keyboard hipsters are bad enough. Now we're going to have CRT hipsters! It's like, name some piece of newly vintage tech, find its fans, start a movement, sell folks their shit nostalgia, lather, rinse, repeat

visarga 6y ago
Being able to choose your desired mechanical response of the keyboard switches is useful for serious work.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  For some, I guess. For others it is pointless materialism and social posturing that this hobby-slash-profession could really do without.

tuxracer 6y ago

Please don't let CRTs come back in style. After a while they tend to develop this headache inducing high pitched tone almost akin to tinnitus that is emitted constantly while they're powered on. It seems to be so high pitched most people cannot hear it at all but if you're one of the lucky few who can it can actually be really disruptive. Unfortunately it's also often loud enough to hear through doors, walls, etc... Please be mindful of this before setting up a CRT if you go down this path. For example a house might be better for this setup vs an apartment or condo.

titanomachy 6y ago
When I was a kid I would always hunt down and turn off CRTs left on anywhere in the house since the sound annoyed me so much. Either my hearing has gotten worse or all the CRTs are gone now... probably both.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  I read somewhere that you lose high pitch hearing first, which is why the young could hear the CRTs when the elderly could not. I tried to google for this (actually DDG) but all I got was SEO spam.
  - hvis 6y ago
    Something like this? https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/age-related-hearing-loss/ https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/age-related-heari... https://playback.fm/hearing-test https://playback.fm/hearing-test and "gradual loss of sensitivity to higher frequencies with age is considered normal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range)
    - tzs 6y ago
      I wish there was audiophile equipment for older people that took that into account. Headphones and speakers, say, that only go to 14 KHz instead of 20 KHz. By not needing to design for as wide a frequency range, they should be able to either make them less expensive, or more accurate, or both.

taf2 6y ago

My lower back disagrees. Not having to lug super heavy CRT monitors is one of the best things about the light weight LCD.

User23 6y ago

I bought the Sony Trinitron from the story back in 2000 at Fry's. When the salesman tried to upsell me on a service contract I accidentally laughed in his face. It happened before I could stop myself and Sony had an absolutely incredible record for quality at the time. I used that monitor heavily for over a decade, but finally replaced it because the phosphors were starting to go and the picture was getting dingy. Still it was a great piece of hardware.

LockAndLol 6y ago

What's the energy consumption like for LCDs, OLEDs and CRTs? It wouldn't surprise me if using a CRT meant higher consumption. Shooting around electrons I'm a vacuum can't be cheap.

nmstoker 6y ago

This is part of the reason why, when LCD screens were being introduced as "the new thing" most large shops would not display them side by side with CRTs - so you didn't notice how aspects were much worse, like responsiveness and sharpness.

djaque 6y ago

The biggest argument to use a CRT to me is interfacing to a computer using a literal particle accelerator pointed at your face. How metal is that?

Lordarminius 6y ago

This ! I recently bought two new monitors and had to return them, swapping them in for a laserjet printer, because my ragged Acer (manufactured 2011) gave better FAR perfomance

IronWolve 6y ago

I was using my 24 inch sun monitor for a long long time when LCD's came out, wouldnt want to downgrade to a 17 or 19. Also It was running at 1920x1200, going to a 4:3 lcd with smaller display seemed wrong. Funny, I bought first 24inch LCD, a dell, color matched, and they gave me a free pc. Put a nvidia 8800GT in and gamed for quiet a while, it came with a pentium D 820, after a few years put a 960 in it. Think I got 5+ years of gaming on it. Still using the LCD as my 2nd monitor net to my 27 inch 1440p wide screen gsync gaming monitor.

jsrcout 6y ago
Some of the Sun monitors were incredible, back in the day. I remember using a GIS system on, IIRC, a Sun 4 workstation with Sony Trinitron monitor. Just razor sharp and fast as hell.

fomine3 6y ago

Recommended video to see how CRT works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM

sevensor 6y ago

Many a year ago, in college, I was helping a friend move. He had a giant 21" CRT, which seemed like it weighed eighty pounds. It was the dead of night, in the middle of winter. We were walking on ice, carrying it together. (We both had late-90s computer nerd biceps.) He slipped, and with a great exertion I managed to grab his side and prevent a fall to the pavement. Neither of us had much in the world at the time, and that sweet monitor was one of his most valuable posessions. Needless to say, he was grateful that I'd rescued his 1600x1200 view into the future.

willis936 6y ago
Judging from the description, that may have been a G520: the 4:3 brother to the FW900. Truly something to carry into the future.

dusted 6y ago

Now you just need to find a modern video card with a VGA output, because if you use a converter, you're going to introduce lag, and probably more lag than you shaved off going from LCD to CRT.

Yizahi 6y ago

I feel like CRTs today belong to the same nostalgic area as cast iron skillets, vinyl players and manual gearbox cars. Sure, they are good for certain things, and they excel in some of them, but really they are usually way to much hassle to use and acquire, and need too much sacrifices in other areas in which they don't excel. Articles which compare such products usually completely ignore or outright forgive any disadvantages for "nostalgic" product, something which they wouldn't even think of doing for product created in 2020, instead of several decades ago.

intrasight 6y ago

In the early-90's I worked on prototypes for the new FAA air traffic control system. We sourced 2Kx2K CRTs from Sony that where the most incredible things to behold when used with hardware anti-aliased vector graphics. Almost 30 years ago. Where has the time gone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron

egberts1 6y ago

I’m still experiencing pthread lockups in KDE Plasma under Debian Bullseye (11). It’s time to hook up that dumb 20’ CRT to the serial port of my expensive rig with 42’ QLCD panel. Grrrrr.