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A Small Ode to the CRT
- mananaysiempre 5y ago> [CRTs] respond colourfully to magnets (also magic) held to their screens by curious children [...]. Look at the reflection of an LCD (not LED) panel in a non-conductive surface and try tilting it! (A glass window at night, a glass bathroom door, or a piece of furniture with a shellac finish works.) Hint: Brewster’s law. Doesn’t detract from the article, just ... LCDs have some of the good kind of magic in them, too! Feynman talked about “sun reflecting on bay”[1], but “tablet reflecting in bathroom door” is even better I think. [1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm
- gattilorenz 5y ago> I started to warm to CRTs, maybe a fondness when I realised I hadn’t had to seriously use one for over a decade. Same here, and now I'm looking for a CRT monitor because I don't remember anymore how it is to use one. Did the low resolution games look better on them? After more than 10 years I can't really recall the difference.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago> Did the low resolution games look better on them? Yes. The standard way of seeing pixel art in modern indie games, the edges of everything are too harsh. CRT filters exist, but most kinda suck, though there's an occasional good one (Cyber Shadow does an excellent job). There's also the issue of input lag. CRT's have virtually zero input lag beyond just their refresh rate, whereas for LCD/Plasma/OLED it's more substantial. In more recent years things have gotten better, with more and more TV's getting decent latencies (< 25ms) at least in game mode, but for a while there you were commonly looking at like 80-120ms lag times with no recourse for a given TV.
- christkv 5y agoI have a 21 inch trinitron crt and hooked it up to the pc over vga to play some modern games on it and it’s hard to describe how different of an experience it is over lcds. It’s great even though the resolution is lower you don’t notice it as much because you don’t see scaling artifacts and response latency is super low.
- dleslie 5y agoI honestly didn't think I noticed the "ghosting" in LCDs until I started using a 144hz display. Now I can't unsee the mouse trails on most LCD displays.
- Lammy 5y agoFun fact: a CRT was the first RAM! https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/williams-demonstrates-crt-storage/ https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/williams-demon... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube
- dredmorbius 5y agoThe principle of a decaying memory register requiring a refresh on a regular basis is actually not too far distant from how MOSFET DRAM memory works, to the extent I understand it (poorly). Or, on a broader basis, education within a human population (we spend 15 years sinking information into the infosponges of children and hope that enough of that keeps over a lifetime to sink it into the next generation of infosponges). Or of manuscript documents, rewritten by hand by scribes. Or palimpsests. All data storage is ultimately a palimpsest, I'm increasingly convinced. See also, BTW, delay-line memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
- formerly_proven 5y agoI've been told (many years ago) that CRTs for safety-critical applications like railway control used pretty much the same technique to read the image back and comparing it end-to-end to what the display is supposed to be. Never found a peep about that online though, and it seems to me like it'd be easier to just monitor deflection and beam current instead.
- hihihihi1234 5y ago
- raffraffraff 5y agoI miss light gun games. Point Blank. Time Crisis. No MAME arcade emulator will ever being them back from the dead without a CRT.
- keithnz 5y agoyes, loved these games! Point Blank especially Light guns are a lot harder these days, and even then you can't do the same thing with modern expensive guns, my 4 year old son would literally get up point blank to the TV screen and play point blank putting the gun on the glass.
- greggman3 5y agoI certainly have some nostalgic for light gun games but there are plenty of far more immersive gun games in vr, and ducking with your body is fun
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoUnless you mean something more specific than 'being able to play them with a gun', there are several solutions to this in the form of light guns that use infrared border leds or even image processing for aiming.
- christkv 5y agoCheck out https://www.sindenlightgun.com/ https://www.sindenlightgun.com/ it’s made to work with modern panels and can be made to work with emulators. The whole is incredibly impressive .
- dleslie 5y agoAnd it's crazy expensive for a peripheral that's not going to have any modern games for it. Which is fine for wealthy middle-aged folks chasing nostalgia, but generations of kids are growing up without that experience. At best, they might have experienced a (terrible) wiimote gun game.
- 5y ago
- smoldesu 5y agoI don't mind CRTs. What does bother me somewhat is the narrative that they're somehow better than the displays we use today; your use case has to be so narrow and specific to benefit from a CRT is any meaningful way that most people may as well just ignore they existed. They're less color accurate, have horrible artifacting ("but it makes pixel art look better!"), force you to choose between refresh rate and resolution, are massive and heavy and consume more power than most people's computers in the first place. If you're a retro fetishist or an analog gaming nut, then I could see how you might get something out of it. For everyone else, save your money and buy anything else. The price that good CRTs demand is simply absurd when compared to their cheaper, flatscreen alternatives.
- chowells 5y agoWhat is analog gaming? (The output lag in LCD displays is really significant. Switching between LCD and CRT feels remarkably different in games where reaction speed matters.)
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI think he means vintage gaming, especially arcade games that used 15 Hz monitors.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoSimilar things can be said about records and cassettes. But there's a retro nostalgic vintage contingent that will pay a premium for them.
- andrewzah 5y agoCRTs are relevant to gamecube players- in particular, super smash bros. latency. For example, playing on 720p+ displays causes upscaling, which introduces variable latency into the game and renders it unplayable at a competitive level. These days there are monitors that you can get instead, but the demand for CRTs is still high since they're cheap.
- com2kid 5y agoUntil recently, you could only have LCDs at 60hz. Over 20 years ago we had 1600x1200 CRTs at 85hz.
- andrewstuart 5y agoI have a thing for old televisions for some reason. I have a small collection of nice ones, typically the smaller ones.
- acidburnNSA 5y agoThe CRT, in its original sense, was a somewhat incredible crossroads in technological history. The combo of higher-vacuum and high-voltage allowed people to start fiddling around with glowy glass tubes in the late 1800s. In 1895 Röntgen was messing with such a device trying to understand cathode rays when he discovered and published on x-rays (leading to medical diagnostics, x-ray diffraction, understanding of ionic bonds and modern chemistry, and the discovery that DNA had a double-helical structure). This caused much excitement. Soonafter Becquerel was looking into x-rays in CRTs when he discovered natural radiation (leading directly to the field of nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants). In 1897, J.J. Thompson discovered (using a CRT) that those very cathode rays were actually new particles known as electrons (leading to the photoelectric effect, general relativity, quantum physics, solar panels). Right after that, people turned the CRT into the vacuum tube (leading to long-distance telephone networks, radio amplifiers, the electric guitar, the Beatles, Katy Perry). And then of course if you stick some electromagnets around the CRT beam you can shake them around and draw out moving pictures, and you get the CRT we all know and love (and is written about in OP article). I blogged about it a bit here [1] [1] https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-modern-era-passed-through-a-cathode-ray-tube/ https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-modern-era-passed-th...
- jacquesm 5y agoAnd vacuum tubes are still in use, Geiger counters, Nixie tubes , microwave ovens (Klystrons), very high power RF amps, overpriced high end audio gear and so on.
- jamesmaniscalco 5y agoAre there really any microwave ovens that use klystrons? I thought most if not all commercial microwave ovens used magnetrons.
- jacquesm 5y agoFair enough, klystrons are more likely to be found in radars rather than microwave ovens.
- ggm 5y agoAh yes, the home X-Ray machine. Soft of course. better stand in front of the tube, at least the phosphor coating absorbs some of them.
- TD-Linux 5y agoFWIW I've run a mica window geiger cointer for hours in front of my tubes and been completely unable ti measure any radiation above ambient. At some point I will do it with a large scintillator, but already it's pretty clear that those X-rays are very soft indeed.
- sprayk 5y agoThe glass where the image is displayed is quite thick, and leaded for just this reason. There is also a protection circuit that will shut down the whole set if the voltage were to increase enough to risk xrays that can't be contained.
- deergomoo 5y agoI’m fascinated by the effects on images caused by different display technologies. Retro games on CRTs are an obvious one (CRTPixels on Twitter[0] is great). It’s not just the displays themselves either, some games on the Mega Drive/Genesis used the specific qualities of a composite video signal to produce a transparency effect from a dither pattern. Even today with all-digital displays there are differences. The very high response time of an OLED panel causes lower framerate content to look stuttery to some, whereas the slower response time of something like an IPS LCD causes a natural interpolation of sorts. I miss my PVM, but the geometry was starting to drift and I have neither the time nor the inclination to adjust and/or recap it. [0]: https://twitter.com/crtpixels https://twitter.com/crtpixels
- beebeepka 5y agoQuake 3, 800x600 at 120 fps. It was glorious. My current 180 Hz IPS is ok but CRT displays excel at lower resolutions and high refresh rates. Not sure we're going to have anything quite like it with LCD, despite the amazing developments over the last decade
- nickjj 5y ago> Quake 3, 800x600 at 120 fps. It was glorious. 640x480 with r_picmip 5! It is kind of crazy though. In 2001 I was running a CRT 120hz monitor but today in 2022 my 2560x1440 LCD monitor is 60hz. I know they make 120hz/144hz+ LCDs nowadays but it feels like it took forever for them to get decently main stream considering we had 120hz displays before 2000. I remember waiting until 2008 to finally switch to an LCD which was a Dell 2007FP 1600x1200, it still works. The last time I checked it was last year when I needed a temporary 2nd monitor in a pinch.
- anthk 5y agoMax Payne and NFSU2 looked amazing under a CRT. Under an LCD panel NFS2U it's unplayable.
- hulitu 5y agoThere are a lot of games which looked much better on CRT's ( MDK, Blood, Doom). The fact that early LCD's could not represent many colors (they claimed 24 bits but the image looked like 16 bits - especially visible in gradients)
- eternityforest 5y agoEventually they're gonna solve OLED lifespan for the high end and color e-ink cost and speed for everything else, and maybe even layer both of them for phones, so LCDs might not be around forever.
- rbanffy 5y ago> or made a loud whistle at 15.625KHz Oh dear. I can still hear it. Really, retrocomputing is my hobby. One of.
- watersb 5y agoYeah, fly-back transformer hell. I used to manage a network of about 400 computers. People would turn off their computer but the monitor would stay on, and if there were any loose components in there, I could hear the noise. I would wander around the building, trying to find the beast. It was relatively rare to have a monitor that was that loud when it was synced up and busy showing the computer display. Mass-market televisions, though... every damn one.
- rbanffy 5y ago> rare to have a monitor that was that loud when it was synced up and busy showing the computer display. Yes! Back then I could see a computer failed without looking at the screen.
- jacquesm 5y agoBeware of corona leaks, if you can really hear it and smell ozone you might have bigger problems than just noise. Other than that: you may be able to varnish the coil and get the whine to become inaudible, make sure you use the right kind (HV suitable). Capacitors can also make quite a bit of noise.
- spongeb00b 5y agoTom Scott covered this in a good video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA5UiLYWdbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA5UiLYWdbM
- AlbertCory 5y agoIt was quite a shock to look on the retro_gaming subreddit and see people bragging about this beauty of a 27" Sony Panavision they'd found. The very one I had to pay to get rid of. Who knew? I guess the old game programmers knew how to take advantage of CRT weirdness.
- Sophistifunk 5y agoI hunted ages to find a CRT a year or two ago, and it's not even very good :-/ If you find an old (studio, rather than consumer) CRT in good condition in the back of some old company's shed, you can pretty much demand whatever you want for it.
- humanistbot 5y agoIt has been so weird seeing all the headlines and rants about CRT as "Critical Race Theory" in schools, because every time I hear it I just think about good ole Cathode Ray Tubes.
- guenthert 5y agoI don't care one bit about raster graphics CRT (can't stand flicker); good riddance I say. I do miss vector monitors though (their heyday was before my time, I used only the one in the Vectrex). Anyone to sell me a HP1300?
- jessikat 5y agoHave to say that at least it was simpler to work with than digital displays as a user. I still have trouble with digital displays, EDID, getting __nothing__ when a signal is out of range, whereas you might get something you can decipher from a CRT. Displays that don't wake up, displays that blink off and on, and all sorts of other timing issues and such. It can certainly be a mess for drivers too, esp. in the hobby OS space.
- foxfluff 5y agoIt's annoyingly common to have these issues with modern display. I have an older Eizo which won't wake up after going to sleep if you use DisplayPort. Dad recently bought a new monitor (can't remember brand) and it has basically the opposite problem: the backlight glows all the time unless you manually power it off.
- WalterBright 5y agoCRTs are marvelous technology, but I don't miss them at all. Not a bit. Not the weight, the heat, the power consumption, the footprint on my desk, the depth, the whistle, the fuzzy pixels, the X-rays. My dad told me around 1970 that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall like a picture and a typewriter that could fix mistakes. He was right on both counts :-)
- WalterBright 5y agoI do kinda miss the flippy-flappy electro-magnetic leaderboards at the airport, though.
- bch 5y agoSplit-flap displays! So satisfying[0]. Heres another video about just the split-flap clock[1], also very entertaining. [0] https://youtu.be/cj32w5z81Ak https://youtu.be/cj32w5z81Ak [1] https://youtu.be/ZArBfxaPzD8 https://youtu.be/ZArBfxaPzD8
- ahartmetz 5y agoI liked the fuzzy pixels (note, I had a quite sharp 1600x1200 @ 85Hz CRT) - the purpose of a screen is not to show pixels, but a pleasant image. The fuzziness was just right for text, and LCDs took a long time to mostly catch up with CRT color reproduction. I waited witch switching to LCD until IPS LCDs with low input lag became available. My next screen will hopefully be OLED... Today, fuzzy pixels for text are available in E-ink displays. They produce good sharpness and no visible pixels at resolutions lower than you'd think.
- foxfluff 5y agoI also had a 19" CRT that I ran at 1600x1200 most of the time. It was quite sharp, not as sharp as an LCD but not something I would consider blurry. As you say, just the right amount of fuzz for text. The interesting thing is that I never enabled anti-aliasing in games with that screen. I just didn't feel the need for it. Once I got an LCD (I was late to that party), I immediately gawked at how its sharp rectangular subpixels made jaggies pop out.
- eternityforest 5y agoCRTs are so terrible by themselves, but the history is amazing. The whole modern world, geek culture, gaming, people's childhoods... it all went through those heavy lead glass things. The tech was much worse, but people seemed happier anyway. Maybe because what was actually on those screens was better("better" interpreted relative to the potential of the tech)
- WalterBright 5y agoThe tail end of the CRT would stick out the back of the TV set. One day, a picture on the wall came off and sliced that off of the TV. We did without a TV for a year or so as my dad thought good riddance. You can only watch so many Jack Lalane shows anyway.
- WalterBright 5y agoI still want an LED display that's 4x8 feet. I want it for literally my desktop. I do have a projector that does it, but it only works after dark.
- PolygonSheep 5y agoI sometimes feel like a weirdo because I just don't miss the cathode ray tube that much, either as a PC monitor or as the living room TV. I'm 34 so I think I'm on the tail end of the last generation that used them when they were still common. I've never once pined for them. I really don't miss moving them. I don't miss 17" displays (and lets be honest most people weren't using high end ones). I don't miss 21 inches being the biggest you could get unless you had insane money. I don't miss 1024x768. Yeah the blacks were good but I wouldn't go back to using a '90s CRT monitor as a daily driver even if you paid me a thousand dollars. The only thing I do miss is the 4:3 aspect ratio. If someone could do a nice large high dpi 4:3 LCD monitor that would be "shut up and take my money!".
- selectodude 5y agoThere are some super high-res square monitors out there used for viewing mammograms and MRIs and such but they're like $25,000. This is the only one I can think of off the top of my head [1]. https://www.cdw.com/product/barco-coronis-uniti-mdmc-12133-led-monitor-12mp-color-33.6/6196033 https://www.cdw.com/product/barco-coronis-uniti-mdmc-12133-l...
- Istribitel 5y agoThat one is 3:2.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago> I don't miss 1024x768 1600x1200 was readily achievable in the 90's through 00's when LCDs were gimped by an industry unwilling to exceed 1080 lines.
- shitgoose 5y agoNot a single mention of the critical race theory. There is life on this planet!
- BruiseLee 5y agoOr Chinese Remainder Theorem
- culi 5y agoToo bad Virginia is banning it in schools
- sprayk 5y agoThere is an employee run arcade where I work that I am the de facto maintainer of, and the hardest part to keep up is the multiple 29" CRT displays. Specifically, their chassis (control boards in the pack) tend to need frequent repair. Pulling the displays out of the cabs to work on them is also a huge pain. The size/weight has been mentioned here a few times; imagine having to pull a giant one out of an abdomen-height hole in a cab, and putting it back in without resting it on the plastic shell framing it.
- dhosek 5y agoIn my first job out of college, our cubicles were outfitted with magnetic coat hooks that had very strong magnets. I would occasionally take mine off the cube wall and distort the display on my monitor with it. I did this a little too much once and ended up with a permanently distorted monitor.
- dan_hawkins 5y agoDegauss FTW!
- dhosek 5y agoOh man, I just remembered somewhere I worked with monitors with a Degauss button. It was really cool the first time you pushed it but then it did very little until enough magnet stuff happened to give it something to do.
- ahonhn 5y agoI have a big heavy 20 year old Trinitron monitor which I still drag out and use from time to time for the simple reason that it continues to outlast every modern screen I've bought to replace it. It can do 1600x1200, though I run it at 1280x1024 as my eyes aren't what they were when I acquired it second-hand for $50 so many years ago - yet I can still hear the mosquito buzz when its not plugged into anything so maybe I'm not completely old yet? Its days are numbered now, not because of the electrics but because the plastic casing is getting very brittle and cracked. I can see there will come a day it won't survive the short walk back to my storeroom.
- jsz0 5y agoThat reminds me of working with my Dad as a kid who's senses were pretty much shot from years of working on heavy mechanical equipment. He asked me to do smell/listening tests when he fired up one of his repair projects.
- neurostimulant 5y agoWith the magic of 3d printing, you might be able to reinforce or even replace the plastic casing to extend your monitor's life.
- hilbert42 5y agoMy kitchen TV is a 43-year-old Sharp brand 26" color cathode ray tube model from 1979 and I've no intention of changing it as it still works fine. When digital came out I added a STB/PVR and that's the only change since new. The CRT still performs well and there is no sign of the picture blooming or losing focus (that's to say its vacuum and cathode emission are still OK). As far as I'm concerned, CRTs are still alive and well.