7 ms·

It's a pity such monitors aren't made any more. In the late 80s, I owned a small (12..13" or so) amber monochrome CRT monitor. Lovely phosphor color, non-flick

It's a pity such monitors aren't made any more. In the late 80s, I owned a small (12..13" or so) amber monochrome CRT monitor. Lovely phosphor color, non-flickering superb for text-based work, single composite video input. Let go when it didn't seem to matter much, and CRTs were still everywhere. But today I'd love to have such a screen. Commercially this would be a small niche market, but probably a stable one. And regardless of modern LCD/LED screens, such antique monochrome CRTs have properties that no modern flatscreen can match. As an in-between, LCD/LED screen designed for ~0 lag & X/Y vector input (monochrome or color), would be nice too. Doesn't exist afaik?

autoexec 3y ago
When LCD monitors/TVs came out they were a huge step backwards in terms of quality. They were relentlessly pushed on consumers because they were cheaper to make, cheaper to ship, and took up less space in stockrooms and on store shelves. I doubt the CRT will make a comeback. Even today's TVs are inferior to CRTs in some ways and so we're still compromising, but at least current LCD screens are so much better now than they were when they were replacing CRTs.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The problem is that the available market for CRT screens (and it does exist!) is well supplied for now by used and other older models. Modern screens are better in many ways, but like CRTs, there are tradeoffs and many things are not yet designed around those tradeoffs.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Not well supplied at all. None of the three sub-sects are well provided: a) high-quality video monitors like Sony PMW, great for gaming and old-school video b) slow amber screens like mentioned above c) large TV sets with good colors (and no semi-digital stuff messing with quality like 100Hz) None of those can be easily found, especially not in working condition. Oh, forgot about the substantial d) Gaming CRT with insane refresh-rate and true blacks! Of these, I think only monochrome sets and maaaaaaybe PMW-style sets have any inkling of a chance of new manufacture. Probably only monochrome monitors, they are much simpler to get right.
- theamk 3y ago
  I don't remember LCDs needing any "push" in the customer segment, and they certainly co-existed for a while, until people stopped buying CRTs. Initially they were wildly expensive, so all we could do is to sit and watch; but the moment they got affordable, people just started buying them. I remember swapping my CRT for a (smaller) LCD.. the extra space on my desk was so nice! And in a few years, I bought an LCDs display that was much larger than any CRT I could ever afford and fit on my desk... And yes, viewing angle restriction was annoying. Also magazines would keep writing about latency, but I didn't care - I was not a gamer, I was a programmer, big size + desk space was much more important.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The sales pitch was that "HD" was all anyone was supposed to care about. What we got in exchange for HD and some extra desk space was terrible color accuracy, worse contrast and grey blacks, low refresh rates, high latency/input lag, motion blur, dead/stuck pixels, poor viewing angles, fixed resolutions, backlight bleed, and DRM. We also lost the degauss button. Kids today will never know how fun that was. Some of that has gotten better over time, but it'd be nice if in 2024 we had screens at least as capable as what we had several decades ago.
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      Perhaps I just had poor ones, but my memory of CRTs was inferior blacks in practice due to the much higher reflectiveness of the glass surface. So while technically it was a perfect black in terms of direct emissions, it didn't help much when I could see the room behind me reflected in that "black" patch. In a dark arcade it's fine of course, but most of my monitor use is in a well-lit room. And I still dislike glossy modern monitors
      - autoexec 3y ago
        It's true that there were CRTs that performed worse than others and that glare was an issue. CRTs could develop some weird image issues when they started failing too so for a lot of people used to old CRTs that needed repair getting a new LCD probably did seem like an upgrade. Very few people who'd been using a well functioning Sony Trinitron would have felt that way though.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Lcds were way better than the crts consumers had. Most desktop crts were absolutely massive and took up the entire desk. We had to install special drawers in our desks that slid out and held a keyboard because there wasn’t room otherwise on most desks. The lcds that replaced them were far lighter, my grandparents could actually move them for once, they took up probably three inches of the desk, and they were bigger diagonally too with more io accepted. For tvs flat screens only really started replacing crt and plasma when they were hd. Even a 720p tv looked a lot better than a crt and once again, was much lighter, was much bigger, and had way more io (early flatscreens had even more than today usually). Crts sucked, thats why everyone happily threw them to a curb.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    LCDs were garbage at just about everything. It was so much worse when the screens were new, but even today I have yet to see an LCD screen that can display an image with even a single solid color accurately. Correctly representing an image on a screen is their one job and they still fail at it. See my reply here (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec#39670782 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec#39670782) for a list of just some of the ways LCD screens were worse than CRTs
    - xcv123 3y ago
      > even today I have yet to see an LCD screen that can display an image with even a single solid color accurately Have you tried professional calibrated monitors? https://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/ https://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/
      - autoexec 3y ago
        I doubt it. They aren't even terribly expensive.
        xcv123 3y ago
        Well those cost tens of thousands of dollars. But even a cheap (by comparison) Apple XDR display is properly calibrated and surpasses the color gamut of professional CRT monitors. (100% of DCI-P3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI-P3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI-P3)
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  > Even today's TVs are inferior to CRTs in some ways Get a high-end OLED. Totally exceeds the real and imagined advantages of CRT.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Motion blur is an area where impulse displays like CRTs still excel compared to sample-and-hold displays like LCD and OLED.
    - dbttdft 3y ago
      OLED can easily be implemented with black frame insertion. You could even do it yourself at from the GPU/software level given a sufficiently high refresh rate if the monitor units are still too stupid to provide it as a working option. I'm more worried about the terrible spectrum of light they emit as with seemingly all LED tech, and the viewing angle.
      - layer8 3y ago
        In theory yes. You’d need a sufficiently high refresh rate (1000 Hz or better I would guess) and corresponding brightness.
        dbttdft 3y ago
        What are you even talking about, an OLED running at 100Hz with BFI already would have zero motion blur. I'm not sure whether or not that's implemented yet but it's just a matter of time before the shitshow of monitor vendors figures that out.
        layer8 3y ago
        You need shorter pulses than 10 or 5 milliseconds to reduce motion blur down to the level of CRTs. 100 Hz would only be sufficient if the BF takes up > 90% of the time, instead of the usual 50%. What causes motion blur is the frame being held for a period of time. BFI merely reduces that time by half. On CRTs, each pixel is only held for 100 microseconds or so.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
I turned on a crt recently and it was so noisy I could hear it outside, through the walls. My cat ran and hid. Did we really all collectively just tolerate that noise back then, or do these things decay over time somehow and get louder?
- didntcheck 3y ago
  It it was that loud then I'd expect something was wrong with it. I can no longer hear those frequencies, but I could when I was a kid, and I don't remember it being annoying at all. Just one of those things you only really notice after it stops, like when the fridge stops humming. Our cat also didn't react at all from my memory
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    I tried to show off an Apple II to my then 5 y/o daughter using a CRT monitor. She the sound (presumably somewhere around 15Khz) and was really annoyed by it and clasped her hands to her ears. My wife and I were completely oblivious. We didn't see if she could acclimate to it. The monitor works okay but it's early 1990s stock so, presumably, something might be wrong w/ it, too. I definitely remember hearing CRTs as a kid and adults telling me I was making it up.
    - vikingerik 3y ago
      The horizontal refresh rate (scanlines per second, how often the beam retraces horizontally) of NTSC video is indeed 15750 Hz, and PAL is 15625. Just about every CRT will emit some amount of audio at that frequency, and yes that's just at the upper end of the audible range for some (mostly young) humans.
    - colanderman 3y ago
      My family's Apple //e monitor has always emitted a high pitched whine, since I was a kid. (I can't hear it anymore but my niece tells me otherwise.) What worked for us has always been to wedge a folded up piece of paper underneath the bezel of the screen. Don't know why this stopped the sound but it does.
demondemidi 3y ago
This is a pretty good emulation: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

autoexec 3y ago

When LCD monitors/TVs came out they were a huge step backwards in terms of quality. They were relentlessly pushed on consumers because they were cheaper to make, cheaper to ship, and took up less space in stockrooms and on store shelves. I doubt the CRT will make a comeback. Even today's TVs are inferior to CRTs in some ways and so we're still compromising, but at least current LCD screens are so much better now than they were when they were replacing CRTs.

bombcar 3y ago
The problem is that the available market for CRT screens (and it does exist!) is well supplied for now by used and other older models. Modern screens are better in many ways, but like CRTs, there are tradeoffs and many things are not yet designed around those tradeoffs.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Not well supplied at all. None of the three sub-sects are well provided: a) high-quality video monitors like Sony PMW, great for gaming and old-school video b) slow amber screens like mentioned above c) large TV sets with good colors (and no semi-digital stuff messing with quality like 100Hz) None of those can be easily found, especially not in working condition. Oh, forgot about the substantial d) Gaming CRT with insane refresh-rate and true blacks! Of these, I think only monochrome sets and maaaaaaybe PMW-style sets have any inkling of a chance of new manufacture. Probably only monochrome monitors, they are much simpler to get right.
theamk 3y ago
I don't remember LCDs needing any "push" in the customer segment, and they certainly co-existed for a while, until people stopped buying CRTs. Initially they were wildly expensive, so all we could do is to sit and watch; but the moment they got affordable, people just started buying them. I remember swapping my CRT for a (smaller) LCD.. the extra space on my desk was so nice! And in a few years, I bought an LCDs display that was much larger than any CRT I could ever afford and fit on my desk... And yes, viewing angle restriction was annoying. Also magazines would keep writing about latency, but I didn't care - I was not a gamer, I was a programmer, big size + desk space was much more important.
- autoexec 3y ago
  The sales pitch was that "HD" was all anyone was supposed to care about. What we got in exchange for HD and some extra desk space was terrible color accuracy, worse contrast and grey blacks, low refresh rates, high latency/input lag, motion blur, dead/stuck pixels, poor viewing angles, fixed resolutions, backlight bleed, and DRM. We also lost the degauss button. Kids today will never know how fun that was. Some of that has gotten better over time, but it'd be nice if in 2024 we had screens at least as capable as what we had several decades ago.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Perhaps I just had poor ones, but my memory of CRTs was inferior blacks in practice due to the much higher reflectiveness of the glass surface. So while technically it was a perfect black in terms of direct emissions, it didn't help much when I could see the room behind me reflected in that "black" patch. In a dark arcade it's fine of course, but most of my monitor use is in a well-lit room. And I still dislike glossy modern monitors
    - autoexec 3y ago
      It's true that there were CRTs that performed worse than others and that glare was an issue. CRTs could develop some weird image issues when they started failing too so for a lot of people used to old CRTs that needed repair getting a new LCD probably did seem like an upgrade. Very few people who'd been using a well functioning Sony Trinitron would have felt that way though.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Lcds were way better than the crts consumers had. Most desktop crts were absolutely massive and took up the entire desk. We had to install special drawers in our desks that slid out and held a keyboard because there wasn’t room otherwise on most desks. The lcds that replaced them were far lighter, my grandparents could actually move them for once, they took up probably three inches of the desk, and they were bigger diagonally too with more io accepted. For tvs flat screens only really started replacing crt and plasma when they were hd. Even a 720p tv looked a lot better than a crt and once again, was much lighter, was much bigger, and had way more io (early flatscreens had even more than today usually). Crts sucked, thats why everyone happily threw them to a curb.
- autoexec 3y ago
  LCDs were garbage at just about everything. It was so much worse when the screens were new, but even today I have yet to see an LCD screen that can display an image with even a single solid color accurately. Correctly representing an image on a screen is their one job and they still fail at it. See my reply here (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec#39670782 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec#39670782) for a list of just some of the ways LCD screens were worse than CRTs
  - xcv123 3y ago
    > even today I have yet to see an LCD screen that can display an image with even a single solid color accurately Have you tried professional calibrated monitors? https://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/ https://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/
    - autoexec 3y ago
      I doubt it. They aren't even terribly expensive.
      - xcv123 3y ago
        Well those cost tens of thousands of dollars. But even a cheap (by comparison) Apple XDR display is properly calibrated and surpasses the color gamut of professional CRT monitors. (100% of DCI-P3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI-P3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI-P3)
gwbas1c 3y ago
> Even today's TVs are inferior to CRTs in some ways Get a high-end OLED. Totally exceeds the real and imagined advantages of CRT.
- layer8 3y ago
  Motion blur is an area where impulse displays like CRTs still excel compared to sample-and-hold displays like LCD and OLED.
  - dbttdft 3y ago
    OLED can easily be implemented with black frame insertion. You could even do it yourself at from the GPU/software level given a sufficiently high refresh rate if the monitor units are still too stupid to provide it as a working option. I'm more worried about the terrible spectrum of light they emit as with seemingly all LED tech, and the viewing angle.
    - layer8 3y ago
      In theory yes. You’d need a sufficiently high refresh rate (1000 Hz or better I would guess) and corresponding brightness.
      - dbttdft 3y ago
        What are you even talking about, an OLED running at 100Hz with BFI already would have zero motion blur. I'm not sure whether or not that's implemented yet but it's just a matter of time before the shitshow of monitor vendors figures that out.
        layer8 3y ago
        You need shorter pulses than 10 or 5 milliseconds to reduce motion blur down to the level of CRTs. 100 Hz would only be sufficient if the BF takes up > 90% of the time, instead of the usual 50%. What causes motion blur is the frame being held for a period of time. BFI merely reduces that time by half. On CRTs, each pixel is only held for 100 microseconds or so.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

I turned on a crt recently and it was so noisy I could hear it outside, through the walls. My cat ran and hid. Did we really all collectively just tolerate that noise back then, or do these things decay over time somehow and get louder?

didntcheck 3y ago
It it was that loud then I'd expect something was wrong with it. I can no longer hear those frequencies, but I could when I was a kid, and I don't remember it being annoying at all. Just one of those things you only really notice after it stops, like when the fridge stops humming. Our cat also didn't react at all from my memory
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  I tried to show off an Apple II to my then 5 y/o daughter using a CRT monitor. She the sound (presumably somewhere around 15Khz) and was really annoyed by it and clasped her hands to her ears. My wife and I were completely oblivious. We didn't see if she could acclimate to it. The monitor works okay but it's early 1990s stock so, presumably, something might be wrong w/ it, too. I definitely remember hearing CRTs as a kid and adults telling me I was making it up.
  - vikingerik 3y ago
    The horizontal refresh rate (scanlines per second, how often the beam retraces horizontally) of NTSC video is indeed 15750 Hz, and PAL is 15625. Just about every CRT will emit some amount of audio at that frequency, and yes that's just at the upper end of the audible range for some (mostly young) humans.
  - colanderman 3y ago
    My family's Apple //e monitor has always emitted a high pitched whine, since I was a kid. (I can't hear it anymore but my niece tells me otherwise.) What worked for us has always been to wedge a folded up piece of paper underneath the bezel of the screen. Don't know why this stopped the sound but it does.

demondemidi 3y ago

This is a pretty good emulation: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term