7 ms·

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

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
    Things are getting obscene at the high end of the treadmill though. Current high-end monitors like 38GN850G and X27 are already plumbing the $2000 price point and the X32 is expected to tip the scale at $3600 MSRP. "Compared to" just going out and buying a TV and using it as a monitor - you could buy a 55" OLED for your PC and a 65" for living room at that price. Or two 55" oleds, replace it in 3 years when it starts having burn-in from years of marathon Starcraft sessions or whatever. There really isn't a lot to justify a 32" IPS 4K144 over a 48" OLED 4K120 other than burn-in.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Enthusiast, early adopter products have always been expensive. This doesn't seem that exceptional to me. It's not like tons and tons of people are buying that high end monitor. I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist? Hdmi 2.1 isn't even done yet is it? How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device? And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk? Fwiw I have a 4k 144 monitor that I got for $800-900. I believe I first heard about it on this site actually. 4k is important to me for text and 120hz is important to me for gaming. It's nice to have both, and gsync compatibility, all in one device. Well worth a small splurge.
      - paulmd 6y ago
        Yes, high-end is a thing but high-end gaming monitors have tripled over the last 3 years or so, and now they are to the point where they are competing with premium televisions which offer a better overall picture quality. So you really have to figure out what you actually want. IPS contrast is not good and OLED contrast is amazing (it's the only way to get "real" HDR except for VA which has poor motion clarity), with the only real downside to OLED being burn-in (it's gotten massively better over the last few years but heavily UI type stuff in lightmode-type color schemes with fixed elements is the worst case scenario, this should not be your daily driver for Excel spreadsheets). But again, you have to bear in mind that you could literally buy two OLEDs for the price of that "premium" IPS monitor, so if it doesn't become obnoxiously burned within 2.5 years or so (assuming a 5y lifespan on your IPS monitor) you are coming out ahead on burn-in. > I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist? Yes, LG's OLED series has supported 4K120 input (not strobing/interpolation, true input at 120fps) since the last generation (C9, support continues with CX). Also supports HDMI VRR. CX adds 120 Hz black frame insertion - so it can take 60 hz and alternate between a signal frame and a black frame for additional motion clarity. > How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device? For the LG OLED series, HDMI 2.1, from an NVIDIA 3000 series or Radeon RDNA2 GPU. Or, display stream compression over DP 1.4, which is what the 4K144 gaming panels are currently doing (none of them currently support HDMI 2.1). Also, that currently only gets you to 4K120 without chroma subsampling, another disadvantage of the current "gaming monitor" crop. > And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk? Wall mount. CX 48" wall mounted 3 feet away is probably about the same as a 34" ultrawide that's 18" away (which is what I'm currently using) I'd think. Certainly a "big" monitor but the people who are really up shit creek are the ones with shallow desks and/or who are currently situated in a corner and can't wall mount.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I don't disagree at all with this. In an adjacent field, graphics, we used to debate spending cycles on simulating thing like lens flare, as if in a first person shooter you are wearing goggles with tubular optics? Sure it showed off mad math skilz but what was the point? I do appreciate the lack of eyestrain for detail work on a high resolution CRT though.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  I've had 4K monitors on both my work laptop, my PC, and my TV for as long as that was possible. Nearly 7 years. This has cost me thousands and thousands of dollars. My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at. I don't sit next to the case staring at RGB LEDs. I can't "experience" a processor in any aspect except speed, and that's been perfectly acceptable for a decade. But I'll stare at the screen for 8 hours a day for work, and an additional few hours at home. Spending money on improving the image quality of something I look at for 10+ hours a day is absolutely worthwhile! This is also the advice I give people: Buy a bigger, better monitor than you planned, and make sacrifices elsewhere. A larger 4K monitor is a very visible upgrade in the literal sense versus, say, a few hundred more megahertz on the processor.
  - redler 6y ago
    I feel this way not only about monitors, but chairs and shoes, and for the same reasons.
    - mleonhard 6y ago
      And keyboard, mouse, headphones, bed, pillow, and underclothes.
    - boston_clone 6y ago
      I've heard the saying as "spend good money on what separates you from the ground" - tires, shoes/boots, mattress, etc. In this sense, it'd be "spend good money on what separates you from the virtual". That is, of course, our I/O devices :)
  - skybrian 6y ago
    A larger monitor I can understand, but on a laptop, how can 4k resolution be visible if it's... too small to see?
    - GekkePrutser 6y ago
      Depends how close you sit to it (touchscreen models promote closer use) and how good your eyes are :) I can definitely see the difference between 4K and Full HD on a 15".
- fock 6y ago
  yeees. Just look at the crappy Netflix 4k, which is less bandwith than a 1080p Bluray (like 30% less iirc). Now, obviously, it's a better codec, but h265/VP-9 (or whatever they use) won't give you a > 400% increased efficiency over h264. So, people are buying new Fire-TVs/TVs/GPUs all so that they can enjoy a 4k artifact show. Meanwhile I've fallen under the hedonic treadmill and bought a TV. Sitting 3m from this 49inch screen, I play Netflix in 540p (on Linux) – and it totally looks fine. Well... But, truth be told: I'm typing this on a 32inch 4K monitor. For work it's gorgeous (yet some people still buy FHD...).
- wazoox 6y ago
  Even worse, you can't see in 4K. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM
- leetcrew 6y ago
  at least on a 27" display, I mostly agree 2160p is overkill for games. it's hard to notice the additional sharpness over 1440p, and it breaks a lot of old games that don't support UI scaling. the performance hit isn't necessarily that bad though; at 2160p, I'm satisfied with much lower AA settings which almost splits the difference between 1440p and 2160p. if the game is really demanding, you can always drop down to 1080p with perfect scaling. it wasn't too long ago that 1080p was an acceptable resolution on a 27" display. not really an issue for me anyway. my 1080ti can do better than 60 fps in most games I play. knowing what I know now, I'd almost rather have a higher refresh rate 1440p monitor. but now that I'm working from home, I really appreciate the higher dpi for coding. the difference in font rendering really is night and day. I can't unsee it.
imstate 6y ago
The CRT monitors do have a faster response time and higher refresh rate (I've seen up to 640x480@480hz <1ms). But you would be sacrificing fidelity for this "competitive advantage".
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  You might find this note[1] interesting to read. I would love to see a commercial off the shelf cathode ray tube (CRT) that could do 480 Hz, so please share with us a link if you can find it in your notes. A CRT monitor, with a refresh rate of 480 Hz, allows just 2 mS (2.083333 mS to be precise) for excitation of the phosphor. As you know, (here is a similar explainer [2]) the phosphor is excited by the arrival of electrons which contribute their kinetic energy when they impact the phosphor to the electron energy of the particular phosphor. When the energy decays back to base level, it emits a photon at a frequency that is characteristic of the band gap between the excited and rest state of the electrons in the outer orbit of the crystal. The more electrons you can get excited in the phosphor crystal, the brighter the display. But the more electrons in the beam gives the beam more inertia and so rapidly moving it from one side of the screen to the other requires higher voltage potential. I haven't seen any high refresh rate CRTs but back in college we had a device which was a "flying spot" scanner which had a very fast phosphor but it was enclosed in a black box and basically relied on photographic film for persistence (it was made by a company called "Dicomed"). The shorter the persistence of the phosphor gave it a very high dynamic range of brightness which allowed us to transfer digital photos with a high dynamic range to film without losing fidelity. I haven't really followed the evolution of cathode ray tubes post the Sony Trinitron era, I would really love to play with the tube you mention, or at a minimum get the engineers specification for it. I'm assuming it was full color? (the Dicomed's screen was a sort of yellowish white and it had three filters that it would place over the screen to scan out a color image). [1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/87778main_H-609.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/87778main_H-609.pdf [2] https://www.phosphor-technology.com/how-do-phosphors-work/ https://www.phosphor-technology.com/how-do-phosphors-work/
  - buildbot 6y ago
    Somewhat tangential, but Dicomed also made pretty special large format digital backs at one point [1] that really have yet to be eclipsed in terms of chip size (definitely in quality). Interesting they also produced what sounds like a really high quality digital to film solution too. [1] http://www.epi-centre.com/reports/9604cs.html?LMCL=xIZMrP http://www.epi-centre.com/reports/9604cs.html?LMCL=xIZMrP
badsectoracula 6y ago
> I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD monitor it will look better than your CRT :-) Since you bring up the refresh rate, then i'd assume that you include motion in the "look better" - in which case, i can easily respond with "no, it absolutely does not". I have a CRT next to me which can do 120Hz at 640x480 (which is a low resolution but the CRT is also very small and i use it on a mid-2000s PC for playing some older games, so it doesn't bother me). It is a Samtron which is basically poor man's Trinitron, so not even among the best out there (i also have a Trinitron but that was also not among the best out there... it was one of the cheaper models). Despite that, motion on this thing at 120Hz can only be described as liquid butter smooth. Just moving the mouse around makes you want to... well, keep moving the mouse around because it feels so good. FPS games feel amazing. It is so good that i decided to buy a high refresh rate monitor for my main PC. I avoided that for a long time for two reasons: a) good monitors use high resolutions like 2560x1440 often at huge sizes like 27" and i do not really like high resolutions nor huge monitor (huge in terms of viewable area) and b) all flat panels have persistence issues so chances are they wouldn't be that good. But you know, having that CRT next to me and using it from time to time really made me want to have a similar experience on my main PC. So i decided to find something that would be close enough and bought a (rather expensive) 165Hz monitor. I mean, ok, how bad can it be? I rarely get disappointed with new purchases i make and i can't say i was completely disappointed, but i can easily say that if i hadn't experienced using a decent CRT for years (like many that seem to praise modern display tech do - assuming they ever experienced a CRT at all, things aren't getting younger) i'd probably be much more enthusiastic. The thing is however, i had experienced a CRT and my brand new expensive monitor is far from being as good as the CRT i bought for barely 15 euros. It is day and night. Not just something that you need to go back and forth to compare - i realized how worse the new monitor was the moment i tried to move some windows around and launched a game i also had played on the older PC and that even though i hadn't used the older PC since a while. All it takes is using both once to realize how better the CRT is. And it isn't like the new monitor doesn't feel smoother than the 60Hz, but it just isn't as good at the old CRT i have next to me. At best it brings back some of the responsiveness i lost when Windows forced a vsync'd compositor on me. But i never used vsync in games so that sort of responsiveness in games wasn't something i lost and i disable vsync for almost two decades now, so any tearing not only doesn't bother me - it barely registers. Also, aside of motion, CRTs (at least the decent ones) have much better contrast than any tech outside OLED (which isn't available in PC monitor form, at least not at a non-ridiculous size, non-ridiculous resolution and non-ridiculous price). Sadly it isn't just a matter of older or cheaper monitors. It is just that modern monitor tech simply sucks at most things outside being flat and having high resolutions. It is fine for office work, etc, which is how i guess they became popular, but for gaming they just aren't as good as the better CRTs (sure there were many crappy CRTs out there - and i am certain that anyone who complains that they dislike CRTs because they flickered used a crappy one - but people who say that they prefer CRTs do not refer to the crappy ones as i'm certain that people who say things are better nowadays do not refer to crappy TNs with washed out colors either). > So many ways to optimize for particular markets. I'd like an optimization for a high end CRT please :-/. The article mentions $500, i'd actually pay $1500 for a brand new (not old stock, i mean truly new) good CRT like those mentioned in the article.
denkmoon 6y ago
That 240hz panel will have terrible colour reproduction compared to the CRT. Only TN panels are clocked that fast, and TN are ugly. If you want nicer colours you go for IPS, which has a very slow response time (especially when compared to a CRT). The only modern display technology that comes close to CRT in terms of colour, contrast and responsiveness, you need to go OLED. And that's great (Oled with scanline emulation and black-frame insertion is incredible!) but OLED has the issues everyone knows about regarding degradation of the organic compounds (burn in). I want my cake and to eat it, I want great colours and contrast and a stupid fast response time, with a panel that won't burn-in my desktop.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  Tech changes fast. Nano-IPS 144hz IPS panels are becoming common now, with upper 90s DCI-P3 coverage, something you'd only dream of a few years ago.
  - denkmoon 6y ago
    Becoming common isn't quite how I'd phrase it, but they certainly are becoming available if you're willing to pay. I've been interested in Nano IPS to replace my current ultrawide, but it appears the contrast ratio of Nano IPS panels isn't that great vs. my current MVA panel.
  - account42 6y ago
    And their contrast is still shit.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  These are solid points, the IPS stuff is getting better though. And if there is a miniled salesman out there he will be calling :-), it promises all the win of OLED and none of the downside. There was also the tech which was basically an array of really small 1-pixel CRTs, it is too bad they couldn't get that to scale to the pixel densities of OLED.
  - account42 6y ago
robomartin 6y ago
> f you consider the amount of RAM and processing power you have to have inside the monitor at 4K resolution You need nearly zero memory inside an LCD monitor of any resolution. Technically all you need is 256 bytes for EDID and that’s it. You can drive the panel directly from the graphics card from DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, often with a single format conversion chip. In fact, Apple’s HD Cinema Displays were built using LG panels with a DVI interface built right into them (which isn’t the norm). Source: I designed custom FPGA-based LCD panel interfaces for many years.
louhike 6y ago
"I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD" It depends what you will plug on it. CRT are considered the best solution to play unmodded old consoles (up to the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox/Gamecube generation, and even the Wii) or VHS tapes. Games and consoles were made to look good on CRT, and to take advantages of specific features of these TV.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I agree with this and it is key. Video that has been "designed to be displayed on TV" looks better than stuff that wasn't designed to be shown there. The same is true for LCDs of course.
m463 6y ago
Yeah but could you play duck hunt? And in the old old days you could skip the scanning and just go draw what you wanted where you wanted with vector graphics. (as long as there weren't too many "what"s) There were even tricks like defocusing the beam. :)

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
  Things are getting obscene at the high end of the treadmill though. Current high-end monitors like 38GN850G and X27 are already plumbing the $2000 price point and the X32 is expected to tip the scale at $3600 MSRP. "Compared to" just going out and buying a TV and using it as a monitor - you could buy a 55" OLED for your PC and a 65" for living room at that price. Or two 55" oleds, replace it in 3 years when it starts having burn-in from years of marathon Starcraft sessions or whatever. There really isn't a lot to justify a 32" IPS 4K144 over a 48" OLED 4K120 other than burn-in.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Enthusiast, early adopter products have always been expensive. This doesn't seem that exceptional to me. It's not like tons and tons of people are buying that high end monitor. I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist? Hdmi 2.1 isn't even done yet is it? How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device? And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk? Fwiw I have a 4k 144 monitor that I got for $800-900. I believe I first heard about it on this site actually. 4k is important to me for text and 120hz is important to me for gaming. It's nice to have both, and gsync compatibility, all in one device. Well worth a small splurge.
    - paulmd 6y ago
      Yes, high-end is a thing but high-end gaming monitors have tripled over the last 3 years or so, and now they are to the point where they are competing with premium televisions which offer a better overall picture quality. So you really have to figure out what you actually want. IPS contrast is not good and OLED contrast is amazing (it's the only way to get "real" HDR except for VA which has poor motion clarity), with the only real downside to OLED being burn-in (it's gotten massively better over the last few years but heavily UI type stuff in lightmode-type color schemes with fixed elements is the worst case scenario, this should not be your daily driver for Excel spreadsheets). But again, you have to bear in mind that you could literally buy two OLEDs for the price of that "premium" IPS monitor, so if it doesn't become obnoxiously burned within 2.5 years or so (assuming a 5y lifespan on your IPS monitor) you are coming out ahead on burn-in. > I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist? Yes, LG's OLED series has supported 4K120 input (not strobing/interpolation, true input at 120fps) since the last generation (C9, support continues with CX). Also supports HDMI VRR. CX adds 120 Hz black frame insertion - so it can take 60 hz and alternate between a signal frame and a black frame for additional motion clarity. > How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device? For the LG OLED series, HDMI 2.1, from an NVIDIA 3000 series or Radeon RDNA2 GPU. Or, display stream compression over DP 1.4, which is what the 4K144 gaming panels are currently doing (none of them currently support HDMI 2.1). Also, that currently only gets you to 4K120 without chroma subsampling, another disadvantage of the current "gaming monitor" crop. > And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk? Wall mount. CX 48" wall mounted 3 feet away is probably about the same as a 34" ultrawide that's 18" away (which is what I'm currently using) I'd think. Certainly a "big" monitor but the people who are really up shit creek are the ones with shallow desks and/or who are currently situated in a corner and can't wall mount.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I don't disagree at all with this. In an adjacent field, graphics, we used to debate spending cycles on simulating thing like lens flare, as if in a first person shooter you are wearing goggles with tubular optics? Sure it showed off mad math skilz but what was the point? I do appreciate the lack of eyestrain for detail work on a high resolution CRT though.
jiggawatts 6y ago
I've had 4K monitors on both my work laptop, my PC, and my TV for as long as that was possible. Nearly 7 years. This has cost me thousands and thousands of dollars. My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at. I don't sit next to the case staring at RGB LEDs. I can't "experience" a processor in any aspect except speed, and that's been perfectly acceptable for a decade. But I'll stare at the screen for 8 hours a day for work, and an additional few hours at home. Spending money on improving the image quality of something I look at for 10+ hours a day is absolutely worthwhile! This is also the advice I give people: Buy a bigger, better monitor than you planned, and make sacrifices elsewhere. A larger 4K monitor is a very visible upgrade in the literal sense versus, say, a few hundred more megahertz on the processor.
- redler 6y ago
  I feel this way not only about monitors, but chairs and shoes, and for the same reasons.
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    And keyboard, mouse, headphones, bed, pillow, and underclothes.
  - boston_clone 6y ago
    I've heard the saying as "spend good money on what separates you from the ground" - tires, shoes/boots, mattress, etc. In this sense, it'd be "spend good money on what separates you from the virtual". That is, of course, our I/O devices :)
- skybrian 6y ago
  A larger monitor I can understand, but on a laptop, how can 4k resolution be visible if it's... too small to see?
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Depends how close you sit to it (touchscreen models promote closer use) and how good your eyes are :) I can definitely see the difference between 4K and Full HD on a 15".
fock 6y ago
yeees. Just look at the crappy Netflix 4k, which is less bandwith than a 1080p Bluray (like 30% less iirc). Now, obviously, it's a better codec, but h265/VP-9 (or whatever they use) won't give you a > 400% increased efficiency over h264. So, people are buying new Fire-TVs/TVs/GPUs all so that they can enjoy a 4k artifact show. Meanwhile I've fallen under the hedonic treadmill and bought a TV. Sitting 3m from this 49inch screen, I play Netflix in 540p (on Linux) – and it totally looks fine. Well... But, truth be told: I'm typing this on a 32inch 4K monitor. For work it's gorgeous (yet some people still buy FHD...).
wazoox 6y ago
Even worse, you can't see in 4K. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM
leetcrew 6y ago
at least on a 27" display, I mostly agree 2160p is overkill for games. it's hard to notice the additional sharpness over 1440p, and it breaks a lot of old games that don't support UI scaling. the performance hit isn't necessarily that bad though; at 2160p, I'm satisfied with much lower AA settings which almost splits the difference between 1440p and 2160p. if the game is really demanding, you can always drop down to 1080p with perfect scaling. it wasn't too long ago that 1080p was an acceptable resolution on a 27" display. not really an issue for me anyway. my 1080ti can do better than 60 fps in most games I play. knowing what I know now, I'd almost rather have a higher refresh rate 1440p monitor. but now that I'm working from home, I really appreciate the higher dpi for coding. the difference in font rendering really is night and day. I can't unsee it.

imstate 6y ago

The CRT monitors do have a faster response time and higher refresh rate (I've seen up to 640x480@480hz <1ms). But you would be sacrificing fidelity for this "competitive advantage".

ChuckMcM 6y ago
You might find this note[1] interesting to read. I would love to see a commercial off the shelf cathode ray tube (CRT) that could do 480 Hz, so please share with us a link if you can find it in your notes. A CRT monitor, with a refresh rate of 480 Hz, allows just 2 mS (2.083333 mS to be precise) for excitation of the phosphor. As you know, (here is a similar explainer [2]) the phosphor is excited by the arrival of electrons which contribute their kinetic energy when they impact the phosphor to the electron energy of the particular phosphor. When the energy decays back to base level, it emits a photon at a frequency that is characteristic of the band gap between the excited and rest state of the electrons in the outer orbit of the crystal. The more electrons you can get excited in the phosphor crystal, the brighter the display. But the more electrons in the beam gives the beam more inertia and so rapidly moving it from one side of the screen to the other requires higher voltage potential. I haven't seen any high refresh rate CRTs but back in college we had a device which was a "flying spot" scanner which had a very fast phosphor but it was enclosed in a black box and basically relied on photographic film for persistence (it was made by a company called "Dicomed"). The shorter the persistence of the phosphor gave it a very high dynamic range of brightness which allowed us to transfer digital photos with a high dynamic range to film without losing fidelity. I haven't really followed the evolution of cathode ray tubes post the Sony Trinitron era, I would really love to play with the tube you mention, or at a minimum get the engineers specification for it. I'm assuming it was full color? (the Dicomed's screen was a sort of yellowish white and it had three filters that it would place over the screen to scan out a color image). [1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/87778main_H-609.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/87778main_H-609.pdf [2] https://www.phosphor-technology.com/how-do-phosphors-work/ https://www.phosphor-technology.com/how-do-phosphors-work/
- buildbot 6y ago
  Somewhat tangential, but Dicomed also made pretty special large format digital backs at one point [1] that really have yet to be eclipsed in terms of chip size (definitely in quality). Interesting they also produced what sounds like a really high quality digital to film solution too. [1] http://www.epi-centre.com/reports/9604cs.html?LMCL=xIZMrP http://www.epi-centre.com/reports/9604cs.html?LMCL=xIZMrP

badsectoracula 6y ago

> I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD monitor it will look better than your CRT :-) Since you bring up the refresh rate, then i'd assume that you include motion in the "look better" - in which case, i can easily respond with "no, it absolutely does not". I have a CRT next to me which can do 120Hz at 640x480 (which is a low resolution but the CRT is also very small and i use it on a mid-2000s PC for playing some older games, so it doesn't bother me). It is a Samtron which is basically poor man's Trinitron, so not even among the best out there (i also have a Trinitron but that was also not among the best out there... it was one of the cheaper models). Despite that, motion on this thing at 120Hz can only be described as liquid butter smooth. Just moving the mouse around makes you want to... well, keep moving the mouse around because it feels so good. FPS games feel amazing. It is so good that i decided to buy a high refresh rate monitor for my main PC. I avoided that for a long time for two reasons: a) good monitors use high resolutions like 2560x1440 often at huge sizes like 27" and i do not really like high resolutions nor huge monitor (huge in terms of viewable area) and b) all flat panels have persistence issues so chances are they wouldn't be that good. But you know, having that CRT next to me and using it from time to time really made me want to have a similar experience on my main PC. So i decided to find something that would be close enough and bought a (rather expensive) 165Hz monitor. I mean, ok, how bad can it be? I rarely get disappointed with new purchases i make and i can't say i was completely disappointed, but i can easily say that if i hadn't experienced using a decent CRT for years (like many that seem to praise modern display tech do - assuming they ever experienced a CRT at all, things aren't getting younger) i'd probably be much more enthusiastic. The thing is however, i had experienced a CRT and my brand new expensive monitor is far from being as good as the CRT i bought for barely 15 euros. It is day and night. Not just something that you need to go back and forth to compare - i realized how worse the new monitor was the moment i tried to move some windows around and launched a game i also had played on the older PC and that even though i hadn't used the older PC since a while. All it takes is using both once to realize how better the CRT is. And it isn't like the new monitor doesn't feel smoother than the 60Hz, but it just isn't as good at the old CRT i have next to me. At best it brings back some of the responsiveness i lost when Windows forced a vsync'd compositor on me. But i never used vsync in games so that sort of responsiveness in games wasn't something i lost and i disable vsync for almost two decades now, so any tearing not only doesn't bother me - it barely registers. Also, aside of motion, CRTs (at least the decent ones) have much better contrast than any tech outside OLED (which isn't available in PC monitor form, at least not at a non-ridiculous size, non-ridiculous resolution and non-ridiculous price). Sadly it isn't just a matter of older or cheaper monitors. It is just that modern monitor tech simply sucks at most things outside being flat and having high resolutions. It is fine for office work, etc, which is how i guess they became popular, but for gaming they just aren't as good as the better CRTs (sure there were many crappy CRTs out there - and i am certain that anyone who complains that they dislike CRTs because they flickered used a crappy one - but people who say that they prefer CRTs do not refer to the crappy ones as i'm certain that people who say things are better nowadays do not refer to crappy TNs with washed out colors either). > So many ways to optimize for particular markets. I'd like an optimization for a high end CRT please :-/. The article mentions $500, i'd actually pay $1500 for a brand new (not old stock, i mean truly new) good CRT like those mentioned in the article.

denkmoon 6y ago

That 240hz panel will have terrible colour reproduction compared to the CRT. Only TN panels are clocked that fast, and TN are ugly. If you want nicer colours you go for IPS, which has a very slow response time (especially when compared to a CRT). The only modern display technology that comes close to CRT in terms of colour, contrast and responsiveness, you need to go OLED. And that's great (Oled with scanline emulation and black-frame insertion is incredible!) but OLED has the issues everyone knows about regarding degradation of the organic compounds (burn in). I want my cake and to eat it, I want great colours and contrast and a stupid fast response time, with a panel that won't burn-in my desktop.

ricardobeat 6y ago
Tech changes fast. Nano-IPS 144hz IPS panels are becoming common now, with upper 90s DCI-P3 coverage, something you'd only dream of a few years ago.
- denkmoon 6y ago
  Becoming common isn't quite how I'd phrase it, but they certainly are becoming available if you're willing to pay. I've been interested in Nano IPS to replace my current ultrawide, but it appears the contrast ratio of Nano IPS panels isn't that great vs. my current MVA panel.
- account42 6y ago
  And their contrast is still shit.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
These are solid points, the IPS stuff is getting better though. And if there is a miniled salesman out there he will be calling :-), it promises all the win of OLED and none of the downside. There was also the tech which was basically an array of really small 1-pixel CRTs, it is too bad they couldn't get that to scale to the pixel densities of OLED.
- account42 6y ago

robomartin 6y ago

> f you consider the amount of RAM and processing power you have to have inside the monitor at 4K resolution You need nearly zero memory inside an LCD monitor of any resolution. Technically all you need is 256 bytes for EDID and that’s it. You can drive the panel directly from the graphics card from DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, often with a single format conversion chip. In fact, Apple’s HD Cinema Displays were built using LG panels with a DVI interface built right into them (which isn’t the norm). Source: I designed custom FPGA-based LCD panel interfaces for many years.

louhike 6y ago

"I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD" It depends what you will plug on it. CRT are considered the best solution to play unmodded old consoles (up to the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox/Gamecube generation, and even the Wii) or VHS tapes. Games and consoles were made to look good on CRT, and to take advantages of specific features of these TV.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
I agree with this and it is key. Video that has been "designed to be displayed on TV" looks better than stuff that wasn't designed to be shown there. The same is true for LCDs of course.

m463 6y ago

Yeah but could you play duck hunt? And in the old old days you could skip the scanning and just go draw what you wanted where you wanted with vector graphics. (as long as there weren't too many "what"s) There were even tricks like defocusing the beam. :)