18 ms·

LCD displays still don't match the responsiveness of clunky CRT screens (2019)

135 points by hestefisk 2y ago

zactato 2y ago
I recall seeing this photo back in the 90s and it seemed like the pinnacle of display technology https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/articles/games/john-carmack-coded-quake-on-a-28-inch-169-1080p-monitor-in-1995-20110920/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/...
- birracerveza 2y ago
  It was.
- gtk40 2y ago
  I used to spend so much time on geek.com and I completely forgot about the website!
jsheard 2y ago
This article is a few years old, so the mention of OLED monitors is behind the times. They're available in desktop sizes (27-32") for around $1000 now, still expensive compared to LCDs, but getting more accessible. https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/oled https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/oled
- TylerE 2y ago
  I’d never own a OLED for desktop use due to burn in.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    They haven't solved it completely but it's getting better, we're at the point now where some manufacturers like Dell are confident enough to cover burn-in under warranty for 3 years. If they can get that up to 5 years I'd probably be okay with just upgrading after that point when it starts showing burn-in.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      3 years isn’t nearly enough. My average screen lasts about a decade.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        Your LCD is out of warranty by then too.
        riversflow 2y ago
        but no burn in on my LCD.
        o11c 2y ago
        Warranties are irrelevant if the LCDs don't actually fail though.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        Do you throw away everything you own when its warranty expires?
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    This is a completely reasonable take, though do note that they’ve come a long way over the past decade, in both improvements to materials and active management to reduce burn-in risk. I use a newish OLED TV for gaming and it’s both glorious and I’m not actually worried about burn-in. I’m not sure I’d risk full-time desktop use, but in a couple of years? Maybe.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      One man’s “active management” is another’s “blatantly obvious pulsing”. My barely a year old OLED TV reduces brightness so aggressive it makes bright white menus look lime they have an animated background. They don’t, it’s just the white dripping to almost gray after a second or two as the whole display dims. You can reduce this effect by dripping the peak nuts down… but then you lose much of the contrast ratio that’s the main point of OLED in the first place I’ll also add that there have been several TV manufacturers that swear they’ve solve burn in, but the rtinge long term testing is… rather less kind.
  - neRok 2y ago
    My Gigabyte OLED monitor is 2 years old now and gets used for many hours on most days and shows no changes. I bugged out the time counter for a few months by putting the panel in to service mode, but still it is up to 4040 hours, or 5.5 hours per day for 2 years. Your other post mentions the screen brightness dropping with white menus open, but that is not because of a burn in protection feature, but instead it's because of limits on the total power consumption of the panel (either because of power efficiency laws, or too much heat).
    - TylerE 2y ago
      It's the same thing. Heat is the major cause of burn in.
  - denkmoon 2y ago
    That's a tradeoff like everything else in life. You're trading visual quality for longevity.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    For me the pulse width modulation is just too annoying: it causes terrible headaches.
- smrtinsert 2y ago
  I tried the Samsung OLED, a recent one. It was absolutely burning my eyes. Headache, eye strain, the whole nine yards. Switched back to my ancient Samsung LCD and it all went away. My working theory was something about PWM modulation in the backlighting. Either way I don't need it.
  - kanbankaren 2y ago
    Yeah. PWM is used to control brighness of OLEDs. Some people are sensitive to PWM frequencies as high as 200Hz.
  - MichaelMug 2y ago
    I use LG C2 OLED's and I experience eye straining that I don't on LCD monitors. I haven't had the time to look into the cause.
    - neRok 2y ago
      First I would make sure the brightness isn't too high, and then I would consider if the problem is text on screen. The LG OLED panels have WRGB pixel layout, so it doesn't work quite right with the likes of ClearType on Windows. Instead I use MacType on my PC with a modified profile and 117% zoom in windows, and now it's fine to me (the font was an issue when I first got my OLED).
- tigen 2y ago
  OLED itself doesn't solve motion blur. But at least the Alienware one they recommend has a high enough refresh rate to mostly solve it. Getting such high refresh rates at 4K is sort of unrealistic without some other visual tradeoffs at least. Though of course motion blur only "really" matters in certain games. (To my eyes it becomes "acceptable" at around the 144 Hz level.) The BlurBusters site has explored various other approaches over the years. Black frame insertion to reduce persistence has been tried, but requires high brightness and can create flicker. AI upscaling or interpolation stuff could help with frame rates.
NikkiA 2y ago
I had one of them, it was a great monitor except for 3 things, 1: it's interlaced mode was literally painful, and it was all I could ever get at higher than 1080p, 2: it weighed 50kg, and partially related to 2, 3: it was so deep a tube that the only place it would go on my desk was on a corner section where it made the whole thing sag badly. Oh, and thinking about it, I just had a horrible flashback to the intersection of two horrible aspects of that time of my life, a day when I needed to use the interlaced mode and the neighbouring resort had one of their weekly reggae concerts with 120+ dB sound, my headache was epic.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Was this 1080 mode a limitation of your graphics card? I drove mine with a Matrox G400 Max (360MHz RAMDAC) and it was good for 1440p.
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    Most certainly yes. I can't recall which card I had the experience with, but around that time I upgraded from a G200 to a Geforce 2 Ti of some type, whichever it was, it was almost certainly not beefy enough a RAMDAC for it, and resulted in a ~43Hz interlaced mode. It was a rare enough occasion that I needed to run with a Y resolution of > 1280 that it wasn't a huge deal, but it physically hurt when I did. The viewsonic that I'd used previously to the FW900 had a more palatable interlaced mode.
voidwtf 2y ago
I had the benefit of growing up on the during the transition period from CRT to LCD. I had a friend who got an awesome Sony Trinitron WEGA and had the opportunity to play PS1 and PS2 games on it. I struggle to see the appeal of the CRT for modern day anything. For games designed on a CRT, the allure is obvious. Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT because of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the graphics were designed around. The games weren't meant to look like pixelated blocks with clearly defined edges like they do on a modern screen, and they didn't look that way on a CRT. However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water. The vibrancy of the colors, the overall quality of the picture, not having that CRT 'glow', readability of text is all improved in my opinion. CRTs also had a number of maintenance items, the screens attracted dust like a magnet, having to adjust vertical and horizontal alignment, color adjustments (both which often ended up out of whack for some reason). I'm sure there are benefits, for older games I see it, but for modern games I sometimes wonder if this is people waxing poetic or being nostalgic. I'm sure there are some people who will make claims about gaining an edge in online shooters, but I'm curious how much of that is real considering other losses in the pipeline like digital to analog conversion and how low the refresh rate is compared to modern gaming panels.
- theshackleford 2y ago
  > However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water. Sure, if you like motion blur that makes your content look like a slideshow. I personally don’t. It’s embarrassing that I’m still faced with worse motion qualities than I had 30 years ago. The sample and hold motion blur of LCD/OLED ruined gaming for me for a long time. 240FPS OLED panels have begun to just make it bearable again when such rates can be achieved.
  - foresto 2y ago
    Have you tried a DLP projector with a high-speed color wheel? When I still owned one, the sample-and-hold slide show effect was far less pronounced than it is on any LCD display I've used (assuming the same frame rate).
TheCleric 2y ago
My back hurts just thinking about picking up my Trinitron. Those things felt like they were made out of lead.
- jsheard 2y ago
  They kind of were, there was a substantial amount of lead mixed into the glass for radiation shielding. Bigger ones had several kilograms of lead in them IIRC.
- convolvatron 2y ago
  its also hard to image now exactly how much space they take up. even when you put it back in the corner of an angled desk, it still reaches most of the way towards the front
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  I worked at a high end stereo store in the 90's. When new models of things came out, sometimes the older ones would get sold (or given) to employees as a perk. I ended up with a 34" 16:9 Sony hi def CRT. No one wanted it. When I went to pick it up, I found out why... the thing weighed over 200 lbs! I remember getting 3 of my friends to help me move that thing into my second story walk up apartment. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still there.
  - Arrath 2y ago
    There was a period of time there where a friend of mine, real estate agent, was complaining about bigass rear projection big screens which had been overtaken by modern flat panel tvs, often living in dens, rec rooms or basement man caves. And per seller's wish, bequeathed to stay there because they did not at all want to go to the effort of removing the unwieldy beasts. Included with the house along with other bulky stuff like a washer and dryer or a pool table. Naturally, the buyers often didn't want them either and it could become a point of contention between the parties! He even lost a couple sales because neither side would budge.
    - 2y ago
physicsguy 2y ago
My overwhelming memory of CRT monitors is struggling to see what was on the screen when there's daylight shining on them at all. Computer rooms at school and university always used to be dark caves (even more so than they are now) because they had to have heavy blinds so that you could do anything...
- kiwijamo 2y ago
  That's still an issue with LCD as well though.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    Less than it used to be, though. There’s several 600+ nit panels that are plenty usable in even sunny rooms. These aren’t going to be cheap, though. Most LCD monitors with good brightness are midrange and up.
    - asdff 2y ago
      I can use my laptop in direct sunlight now. Brightness has reached its end game.
bloopernova 2y ago
I stupidly gave myself a hernia by trying to lift one of the big CRT widescreen TVs in the late 90s. It was a really nice picture though, PAL was decent resolution for back in the day. The hidef 1080p CRTs used by Sony Broadcast R&D in the 90s were absolute beasts. Gorgeous displays, I remember so many people really were blown away at the hidef content, and it wasn't even close to 4K! (I haven't yet seen any 8K content on an 8K screen, I prefer high refresh rates for 4K, at least 120Hz, rather than more pixels)
- bombcar 2y ago
  4K is nice, but even that it is a bit much at "TV" sizes; I swear the main reason it sells so well is that the line of TVs at Best Buy or Walmart is right next to you, so you're a few inches away from the pixels.
  - _carbyau_ 2y ago
    I'm a big believer that if the story isn't good enough to "suck you in" then pixels isn't going to help.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Once you go from VHS to DVD, everything else is just gravy (assuming the DVD isn't a very bad VHS rip). 1080p, 4K, and 8K are nice to have but they're not groundbreaking the way VHS to DVD was.
  - albrewer 2y ago
    I have a 4k@120 Hz projector and it's downright amazing on my 120" "screen" :) They're not that expensive, relative to some of the larger TV screens[0]. Plus, when it's off, there's no bulky appliance to navigate around. [0]: https://www.benq.com/en-us/projector/gaming/tk700/buy.html https://www.benq.com/en-us/projector/gaming/tk700/buy.html
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Those sizes are where the resolution starts to matter again
yardie 2y ago
Hacker tip: I had one of these FW900s I got for free from work. The screen was extremely dim and it was assumed the flyback had gone bad. Since I am a card carrying member of "program the damn VCR" generation I knew that it was probably a bad capacitor. Throwing complete caution to the wind I removed the case and shields around the multiple circuit boards. And with nothing more than a multimeter and a few cans of Redbull (gives you wings, and you're going to need them) I found the offending cap on the back of the tube (IIRC, the D-board). With nothing more than time, a 10c capacitor, and the immortality of a young, 20yo I was able to inline a working capacitor and got a free 150lb, $2000 monitor for my effort. If you're comfortable with working on HV electronics and know how to solder and use a multimeter getting one of these for cheap is completely doable.
- jve 2y ago
  > If you're comfortable with working on HV electronics and know how to solder and use a multimeter getting one of these for cheap is completely doable. Err, you missed the most important one: knowledge to find the bad cap
  - yardie 2y ago
    This was during the bad caps era [0] of computing. Visual inspection and then testing with a multimeter was more than enough. The 10k volts was my bigger worry! But I was fearless for a free, large monitor. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
  - buildsjets 2y ago
    It's usually the exploded looking one, but not always. I have replaced a great number of blowed up RIFA film caps in ancient Apple hardware. https://www.crackedthecode.co/replacing-failed-capacitors-in-a-macintosh-computer/ https://www.crackedthecode.co/replacing-failed-capacitors-in...
    - hakfoo 2y ago
      The fun thing about Rifas is that they're most there as filters; half the time the equipment still works fine, even AS it's emitting clouds of smoke from the final act of the capacitor's life.
mcbuilder 2y ago
I'm glad to have a 19in CRT nearby my desk, I do enjoy the retro vibes, but the big disadvantage has gotta be their weight and heft. There is no way the average consumer wants a FW900 taking up their entire desk. It would be cool if the CRT industry didn't completely die and instead it existed as a niche product.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  It weighs 40 kilos. I owned one, but I didn't want to. My 21" Trinitron blew up in the final month of its 5-year warranty and they didn't have a way to replace it so they sent me the 24". Crazy, must have cost a fortune for them just to ship it.
  - deadlydose 2y ago
    It was never the weight of them that bothered me it was the uneven distribution of the weight. 40kg isn't much until it's all shifted to one side (the front) of a cumbersome object.
bombcar 2y ago
The big advantage for these was the flatness of the screen, created by what seemed to be inches of glass to refract the curve straight. For those big sizes, there was nothing comparable - everything else was so convex that it was hard to use as a monitor once you got about 19 or 21 inches.
tombert 2y ago
You know, zero-latency is cool, but I gotta admit that I do not miss cathode ray tube TVs. They are really heavy, the picture was fuzzy, I never personally liked the scanlines, they're bulky, and I never liked that high pitch squeal that they make. I'll confess a little nostalgia for the CRTs sometimes, my first TV was a hand-me-down RCA from my parents and that served as my only TV until I was 20, but the second that 1080p (or better) LCD TVs got cheap, I never looked back. Even in regards to the latency, I'm kind of convinced that those claims are a little overblown. LCDs do increase latency, but some of the more modern LCD TVs have a "low latency mode", that claims to get the latency to below 15 milliseconds; assuming most games are 60FPS, that's below a single frame, and I don't think that a vast majority of humans can even detect that. and for the few that can, OLEDs have you covered with latency on the order of like 2ms.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  They spray x-rays into anyone behind them too. The leased glass only protects the immediate user.
  - pbj1968 2y ago
    Citation needed.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      There's even a federal regulation about how much radiation they're allowed to emit: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-J/part-1020/section-1020.10 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-J...
- morsch 2y ago
  If you were around when CRTs were popular, the high pitched squeal is probably not much of an issue for you anymore :P
  - tombert 2y ago
axegon_ 2y ago
For the longest time I thought I was having survivorship bias + nostalgia. Back in the late 90's my dad coughed up a lot of money on then the second family computer with all sorts of peripherals and accessories. One of which being a 17 inch Sony Trinitron CRT. I had this monitor until the second half of the 2000's when I went to study abroad. None of the computers and monitors I had in the future felt like a downgrade compared to the Trinitron, even till this day, even with a few several high end oled monitors at home. Seems it wasn't survivorship/nostalgia...
mbreese 2y ago
(2019) Things have changed substantially, especially regarding the availability of OLED gaming oriented monitors. CRTs were great (especially the Trinitrons), but they were stupid heavy. I’d much rather have an OLED today.
- Yeul 2y ago
  CRTs were ridiculously tiny. I wouldn't want to play games on anything smaller than 55 inches.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    Meanwhile, I like my 27" monitor and don't want anything bigger and am annoyed by the trend of bigger and bigger monitors. But I think my problem is I sit VERY close to my monitor. If I'm sitting up straight, my monitor is only ~20 inches from my screen. My eyes are just too accustomed that focus at that distance.
sjm 2y ago
CRTs are still unmatched for gaming. Aside from input lag, they don't degrade low resolutions the same way that LCDs do. For the longest time I stuck with a 19" flatscreen 4:3 CRT that did 170Hz at 800x600, an absolute beast. As a kid I'd lug it around to QuakeWorld and Counter-Strike LAN tournaments. I've gone through a bunch of high refresh rate LCDs since, but nothing has matched the perfect hand-eye sync of a CRT running at high FPS and high refresh rate with a 1000 Hz mouse, zooming around dm3 in a complete state of flow.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  You kinda forget how low latency feels like until you relive it and thinks 'oh ye this is how it should feel like'. Like the reaponsiveness of a PS/2 keyboard.
- _carbyau_ 2y ago
  I'd append: with the reflexes of youth. Seriously, I'm just throwing a ball with my kid and I notice that shit now.
KptMarchewa 2y ago
A lot of people are saying there are advantages to visual quality for CRT monitors. I don't disagree, but most what I remember from my gaming obsessed childhood are strong headaches from prolonged sessions, which disappeared after move to CRT. I don't play games anywhere close to what I used to do, but I can't imagine working for 8-10 hours on CRT monitor and not losing health.
- nottorp 2y ago
  Interesting, because I still think lcd monitors BLIND ME a lot more than the old CRTs. But then when you're programming with a black background with the brightness turned way way down on a crt, there is very little light shining into your face. Maybe oled will fix that, but it still has some growing up to do.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    > I still think lcd monitors BLIND ME User error, IMO. I'm of the opinion that if your monitor showing a pure white screen is painful, then either your brightness is too high or you don't have adequate ambient light.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      They’re always turned down as much as I can without losing contrast and I do have light in my office. It’s still not the same as a black screen that’s not emitting light. You said it yourself actually: lcd monitors do require ambient light to not be painful. CRTs could do without.
      - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
        I've always felt the opposite. When I was a kid, if I was playing NES/SNES games on my TV with no lights on, after an hour or so, my eyes were burning.
        nottorp 2y ago
nutshell89 2y ago
Unrelated to anything in the article, but I'm curious as to why there haven't been OLED or LCD panels manufactured specifically for general-purpose CRT emulation in hardware + software (via curved panels, artifacts unique to CRTs such as pixel blurring, phosphor persistence, scanlines, etc) for retro video games, film preservation, and artwork.
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  Filters for scanlines, blur, etc have existed for years. No need to bake that into the panel - it can be done in software easily.
  - p1mrx 2y ago
    DOSBox Staging has the best CRT emulation I've seen. It's subtle, but it really feels like going back to a VGA monitor. See the screenshots on https://dosbox-staging.github.io/ https://dosbox-staging.github.io/
  - nutshell89 2y ago
    There are software solutions that exist yes, (DOSBox Staging as mentioned below, certain RetroArch shaders look very good) but neither really represent an actual product — DosBox Staging is supposedly zero config but simultaneously requires configuring a DOS environment. Replicating a shadow mask, or curved screen for example requires fiddling with shaders, not to mention aspect ratio, the size, or display resolution. In any case, most emulation software is geared towards gaming — many art galleries for example still use CRTs for preservation (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/t-magazine/technology-art-ctl-electronics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lE0.u_uP.HwhMa7nimHuQ&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/t-magazine/technology-art..., https://youtu.be/rHBtmPZx82A?t=1828 https://youtu.be/rHBtmPZx82A?t=1828) and these software solutions don't really fill the gap of a general-purpose CRT display.
dekhn 2y ago
Oh hell no. We celebrated when I finally got my 36"(?) Sony Triniton WEGA out of the house. It was so heavy it took 2 strong people to move. It was enormous and hot. The image quality was great, but quickly eclipsed by LCDs. But the weight. It just made it impossible to move.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
moudis 2y ago
I had the fortune of owning a Dell P1110 (rebranded Sony Trinitron CPD-E500) many years ago, bought quite cheaply at a surplus auction while in college. 21", flat glass, and weighed in right at 70lbs. Lugged it to a few LAN parties here and there. It wasn't until OLED monitors came around that I finally felt like flat panel displays had really caught up.
- M95D 2y ago
  I still have my Dell P1130. I too lugged it to a LAN party. Only once. It bent the table and I still have back pains after 20 years.
deleted 2y ago
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Night_Thastus 2y ago
I'm sorry but I really don't believe a 540 Hz or even 360 Hz LCD is going to be beaten in total end-to-end latency by any kind of CRT. I've yet to see any real world tests to the contrary. And of course, modern OLED beats the pants off of both in that regard.
- xcv123 2y ago
  CRT has zero input lag. It is pure analog electronics with no buffering. "Racing the beam". Digital buffered displays are down to a few milliseconds but cannot ever be as low as CRT.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    Tell that to people having problems with screen tearing.
    - xcv123 2y ago
      CRT has zero input lag from signal to phosphor (maybe a few nanoseconds due to speed of electronics and the electron beam itself) but it will take a few milliseconds to scan an entire frame. With vsync enabled I guess you could have effectively lower input lag from a well engineered 500hz digital display, when considering lag for complete frames. If the system is fully engineered to race the beam then you can't beat zero input lag for CRT on mid scanline.
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      tearing is a software issue, it's completely unrelated to CRTs or the display technology in general.
  - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
    Depending on the display and the input type, some CRT displays do digitize and buffer the signal so that they can do some of the filtering and decoding digitally. The amount that they buffer is generally only on the order of a few lines, though.
  - 2y ago
maxrecursion 2y ago
I play retro games regularly, and as good as emulation is, there are tons of old fast paced games that are unplayable for me on modern TVs due to input lag. Recently was playing Zelda 1 on the NES when the game crashed and deleted my save half way through the 2nd quest. Tried to play it on an emulator and on the switch, and both felt clunky compared to playing on the NES. Could probably get through it, but it wouldn't have been fun.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  FWIW, these days display lag/input lag on good gaming monitors/TVs is well under 15ms, which is the point at which some people can notice it. ("Good" is anything <25ms.) https://displaylag.com/display-database/ https://displaylag.com/display-database/
dtgriscom 2y ago
For a while I owned a Tempest arcade game. It had a CRT, but driven as a color vector display. Beautiful lines, rapid updates. Very cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game)
RajT88 2y ago
One of the gems of my retro collection is my 36" Sony WEGA which has a native 720p resolution. HD image which works with the many retro light gun games.
g42gregory 2y ago
LCDs still can not change resolution away from native max, without screen getting blurred. As I recall, LCDs started to get wide adoption about 2004 or so. It has been only 20 yrs. Why can't they make them to be able to run on resolutions other than native? CRT could do that with no problems.
MarcoZavala 2y ago
[dead]
TradingPlaces 2y ago
I held on to the last Sony XBR Trinitron, the KD-34XBR970, for an unreasonable amount of time because the picture was so lively. Eventually sold it to a retro gamer, who was thrilled, and so was I.
WalterBright 2y ago
I used CRTs for maybe 20 years. Once I acquired an LCD, that was the end of CRTs for me. I didn't like the weight, the size, the heat, the warmup time, the power consumption, the whine from the flyback transformer, the resolution, or the fuzzy fonts. The LCD beats it in every metric. Even in price - I can get an LCD monitor for $10 from the thrift store. P.S. I can't hear the whine anymore in a CRT. Gettin' old.
- prpl 2y ago
  I tend to think of the heat from the song “Sleeping is the only Love” by the Silver Jews “I had this friend his name was Marc with a C, his sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV”
mistyvales 2y ago
Nobody seems to remember plasma TV's? It was the closest to CRT I used. 240hz, 1080p bliss. Yes, they were kinda heavy and power hungry but I still miss my 2013 Panasonic Viera Edit: It was actually only up to 96hz, but gaming on it didn't feel like there was too much motion blur
squarefoot 2y ago
Not a gamer, but have vivid memories of playing on CRTs and I don't miss them at all. They're like vinyl records: they bring wonderful memories, but technically speaking there's no reason to go back to them. That said, SED technology could have been employed to create products with the best of two worlds, if only it wasn't killed by patent and licensing issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-emitter_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...
Willish42 2y ago
I found the wallpaper used in the article picture, in case anybody else was curious (turns out it's a League of Legends fanart which I'm not too familiar with but was hoping this was a cool JRPG I hadn't tried yet or something) https://www.deviantart.com/zuqling/art/LoL-One-for-the-road-432734122 https://www.deviantart.com/zuqling/art/LoL-One-for-the-road-... Edit: also the DigitalFoundry video referenced in the article is a much better watch imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM
sssilver 2y ago
I occasionally get the itch of purchasing a brand new CRT monitor, and fail to find any. Has humankind stopped manufacturing CRTs entirely?
snakeyjake 2y ago
I find neither the aperture grill nor shadow mask aesthetically appealing. Throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s I spent obscene amounts of money trying to minimize them. Smaller and smaller grills, the switch to shadow masks and their infernal lines, it never stopped. To me, any screen technology where I can look at the clock in the upper right or lower left corner and see the pixels comprising the numbers (or a blurry smear) is trash. The same with colors. Any screen technology that cannot accurately reproduce colors is trash. Asking a CRT to accurately reproduce colors, even something as minimally acceptable as Rec.709, is like asking me to perform brain surgery: it ain't happening brah.

135 points by hestefisk 2y ago

I recall seeing this photo back in the 90s and it seemed like the pinnacle of display technology https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/articles/games/john-carmack-coded-quake-on-a-28-inch-169-1080p-monitor-in-1995-20110920/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/...

birracerveza 2y ago
It was.
gtk40 2y ago
I used to spend so much time on geek.com and I completely forgot about the website!

jsheard 2y ago

This article is a few years old, so the mention of OLED monitors is behind the times. They're available in desktop sizes (27-32") for around $1000 now, still expensive compared to LCDs, but getting more accessible. https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/oled https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/oled

TylerE 2y ago
I’d never own a OLED for desktop use due to burn in.
- jsheard 2y ago
  They haven't solved it completely but it's getting better, we're at the point now where some manufacturers like Dell are confident enough to cover burn-in under warranty for 3 years. If they can get that up to 5 years I'd probably be okay with just upgrading after that point when it starts showing burn-in.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    3 years isn’t nearly enough. My average screen lasts about a decade.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      Your LCD is out of warranty by then too.
      - riversflow 2y ago
        but no burn in on my LCD.
      - o11c 2y ago
        Warranties are irrelevant if the LCDs don't actually fail though.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Do you throw away everything you own when its warranty expires?
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  This is a completely reasonable take, though do note that they’ve come a long way over the past decade, in both improvements to materials and active management to reduce burn-in risk. I use a newish OLED TV for gaming and it’s both glorious and I’m not actually worried about burn-in. I’m not sure I’d risk full-time desktop use, but in a couple of years? Maybe.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    One man’s “active management” is another’s “blatantly obvious pulsing”. My barely a year old OLED TV reduces brightness so aggressive it makes bright white menus look lime they have an animated background. They don’t, it’s just the white dripping to almost gray after a second or two as the whole display dims. You can reduce this effect by dripping the peak nuts down… but then you lose much of the contrast ratio that’s the main point of OLED in the first place I’ll also add that there have been several TV manufacturers that swear they’ve solve burn in, but the rtinge long term testing is… rather less kind.
- neRok 2y ago
  My Gigabyte OLED monitor is 2 years old now and gets used for many hours on most days and shows no changes. I bugged out the time counter for a few months by putting the panel in to service mode, but still it is up to 4040 hours, or 5.5 hours per day for 2 years. Your other post mentions the screen brightness dropping with white menus open, but that is not because of a burn in protection feature, but instead it's because of limits on the total power consumption of the panel (either because of power efficiency laws, or too much heat).
  - TylerE 2y ago
    It's the same thing. Heat is the major cause of burn in.
- denkmoon 2y ago
  That's a tradeoff like everything else in life. You're trading visual quality for longevity.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  For me the pulse width modulation is just too annoying: it causes terrible headaches.
smrtinsert 2y ago
I tried the Samsung OLED, a recent one. It was absolutely burning my eyes. Headache, eye strain, the whole nine yards. Switched back to my ancient Samsung LCD and it all went away. My working theory was something about PWM modulation in the backlighting. Either way I don't need it.
- kanbankaren 2y ago
  Yeah. PWM is used to control brighness of OLEDs. Some people are sensitive to PWM frequencies as high as 200Hz.
- MichaelMug 2y ago
  I use LG C2 OLED's and I experience eye straining that I don't on LCD monitors. I haven't had the time to look into the cause.
  - neRok 2y ago
    First I would make sure the brightness isn't too high, and then I would consider if the problem is text on screen. The LG OLED panels have WRGB pixel layout, so it doesn't work quite right with the likes of ClearType on Windows. Instead I use MacType on my PC with a modified profile and 117% zoom in windows, and now it's fine to me (the font was an issue when I first got my OLED).
tigen 2y ago
OLED itself doesn't solve motion blur. But at least the Alienware one they recommend has a high enough refresh rate to mostly solve it. Getting such high refresh rates at 4K is sort of unrealistic without some other visual tradeoffs at least. Though of course motion blur only "really" matters in certain games. (To my eyes it becomes "acceptable" at around the 144 Hz level.) The BlurBusters site has explored various other approaches over the years. Black frame insertion to reduce persistence has been tried, but requires high brightness and can create flicker. AI upscaling or interpolation stuff could help with frame rates.

NikkiA 2y ago

I had one of them, it was a great monitor except for 3 things, 1: it's interlaced mode was literally painful, and it was all I could ever get at higher than 1080p, 2: it weighed 50kg, and partially related to 2, 3: it was so deep a tube that the only place it would go on my desk was on a corner section where it made the whole thing sag badly. Oh, and thinking about it, I just had a horrible flashback to the intersection of two horrible aspects of that time of my life, a day when I needed to use the interlaced mode and the neighbouring resort had one of their weekly reggae concerts with 120+ dB sound, my headache was epic.

jeffbee 2y ago
Was this 1080 mode a limitation of your graphics card? I drove mine with a Matrox G400 Max (360MHz RAMDAC) and it was good for 1440p.
- NikkiA 2y ago
  Most certainly yes. I can't recall which card I had the experience with, but around that time I upgraded from a G200 to a Geforce 2 Ti of some type, whichever it was, it was almost certainly not beefy enough a RAMDAC for it, and resulted in a ~43Hz interlaced mode. It was a rare enough occasion that I needed to run with a Y resolution of > 1280 that it wasn't a huge deal, but it physically hurt when I did. The viewsonic that I'd used previously to the FW900 had a more palatable interlaced mode.

voidwtf 2y ago

I had the benefit of growing up on the during the transition period from CRT to LCD. I had a friend who got an awesome Sony Trinitron WEGA and had the opportunity to play PS1 and PS2 games on it. I struggle to see the appeal of the CRT for modern day anything. For games designed on a CRT, the allure is obvious. Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT because of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the graphics were designed around. The games weren't meant to look like pixelated blocks with clearly defined edges like they do on a modern screen, and they didn't look that way on a CRT. However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water. The vibrancy of the colors, the overall quality of the picture, not having that CRT 'glow', readability of text is all improved in my opinion. CRTs also had a number of maintenance items, the screens attracted dust like a magnet, having to adjust vertical and horizontal alignment, color adjustments (both which often ended up out of whack for some reason). I'm sure there are benefits, for older games I see it, but for modern games I sometimes wonder if this is people waxing poetic or being nostalgic. I'm sure there are some people who will make claims about gaining an edge in online shooters, but I'm curious how much of that is real considering other losses in the pipeline like digital to analog conversion and how low the refresh rate is compared to modern gaming panels.

theshackleford 2y ago
> However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water. Sure, if you like motion blur that makes your content look like a slideshow. I personally don’t. It’s embarrassing that I’m still faced with worse motion qualities than I had 30 years ago. The sample and hold motion blur of LCD/OLED ruined gaming for me for a long time. 240FPS OLED panels have begun to just make it bearable again when such rates can be achieved.
- foresto 2y ago
  Have you tried a DLP projector with a high-speed color wheel? When I still owned one, the sample-and-hold slide show effect was far less pronounced than it is on any LCD display I've used (assuming the same frame rate).

TheCleric 2y ago

My back hurts just thinking about picking up my Trinitron. Those things felt like they were made out of lead.

jsheard 2y ago
They kind of were, there was a substantial amount of lead mixed into the glass for radiation shielding. Bigger ones had several kilograms of lead in them IIRC.
convolvatron 2y ago
its also hard to image now exactly how much space they take up. even when you put it back in the corner of an angled desk, it still reaches most of the way towards the front
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
I worked at a high end stereo store in the 90's. When new models of things came out, sometimes the older ones would get sold (or given) to employees as a perk. I ended up with a 34" 16:9 Sony hi def CRT. No one wanted it. When I went to pick it up, I found out why... the thing weighed over 200 lbs! I remember getting 3 of my friends to help me move that thing into my second story walk up apartment. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still there.
- Arrath 2y ago
  There was a period of time there where a friend of mine, real estate agent, was complaining about bigass rear projection big screens which had been overtaken by modern flat panel tvs, often living in dens, rec rooms or basement man caves. And per seller's wish, bequeathed to stay there because they did not at all want to go to the effort of removing the unwieldy beasts. Included with the house along with other bulky stuff like a washer and dryer or a pool table. Naturally, the buyers often didn't want them either and it could become a point of contention between the parties! He even lost a couple sales because neither side would budge.
  - 2y ago

physicsguy 2y ago

My overwhelming memory of CRT monitors is struggling to see what was on the screen when there's daylight shining on them at all. Computer rooms at school and university always used to be dark caves (even more so than they are now) because they had to have heavy blinds so that you could do anything...

kiwijamo 2y ago
That's still an issue with LCD as well though.
- jwells89 2y ago
  Less than it used to be, though. There’s several 600+ nit panels that are plenty usable in even sunny rooms. These aren’t going to be cheap, though. Most LCD monitors with good brightness are midrange and up.
  - asdff 2y ago
    I can use my laptop in direct sunlight now. Brightness has reached its end game.

bloopernova 2y ago

I stupidly gave myself a hernia by trying to lift one of the big CRT widescreen TVs in the late 90s. It was a really nice picture though, PAL was decent resolution for back in the day. The hidef 1080p CRTs used by Sony Broadcast R&D in the 90s were absolute beasts. Gorgeous displays, I remember so many people really were blown away at the hidef content, and it wasn't even close to 4K! (I haven't yet seen any 8K content on an 8K screen, I prefer high refresh rates for 4K, at least 120Hz, rather than more pixels)

bombcar 2y ago
4K is nice, but even that it is a bit much at "TV" sizes; I swear the main reason it sells so well is that the line of TVs at Best Buy or Walmart is right next to you, so you're a few inches away from the pixels.
- _carbyau_ 2y ago
  I'm a big believer that if the story isn't good enough to "suck you in" then pixels isn't going to help.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Once you go from VHS to DVD, everything else is just gravy (assuming the DVD isn't a very bad VHS rip). 1080p, 4K, and 8K are nice to have but they're not groundbreaking the way VHS to DVD was.
- albrewer 2y ago
  I have a 4k@120 Hz projector and it's downright amazing on my 120" "screen" :) They're not that expensive, relative to some of the larger TV screens[0]. Plus, when it's off, there's no bulky appliance to navigate around. [0]: https://www.benq.com/en-us/projector/gaming/tk700/buy.html https://www.benq.com/en-us/projector/gaming/tk700/buy.html
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Those sizes are where the resolution starts to matter again

yardie 2y ago

Hacker tip: I had one of these FW900s I got for free from work. The screen was extremely dim and it was assumed the flyback had gone bad. Since I am a card carrying member of "program the damn VCR" generation I knew that it was probably a bad capacitor. Throwing complete caution to the wind I removed the case and shields around the multiple circuit boards. And with nothing more than a multimeter and a few cans of Redbull (gives you wings, and you're going to need them) I found the offending cap on the back of the tube (IIRC, the D-board). With nothing more than time, a 10c capacitor, and the immortality of a young, 20yo I was able to inline a working capacitor and got a free 150lb, $2000 monitor for my effort. If you're comfortable with working on HV electronics and know how to solder and use a multimeter getting one of these for cheap is completely doable.

jve 2y ago
> If you're comfortable with working on HV electronics and know how to solder and use a multimeter getting one of these for cheap is completely doable. Err, you missed the most important one: knowledge to find the bad cap
- yardie 2y ago
  This was during the bad caps era [0] of computing. Visual inspection and then testing with a multimeter was more than enough. The 10k volts was my bigger worry! But I was fearless for a free, large monitor. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
- buildsjets 2y ago
  It's usually the exploded looking one, but not always. I have replaced a great number of blowed up RIFA film caps in ancient Apple hardware. https://www.crackedthecode.co/replacing-failed-capacitors-in-a-macintosh-computer/ https://www.crackedthecode.co/replacing-failed-capacitors-in...
  - hakfoo 2y ago
    The fun thing about Rifas is that they're most there as filters; half the time the equipment still works fine, even AS it's emitting clouds of smoke from the final act of the capacitor's life.

mcbuilder 2y ago

I'm glad to have a 19in CRT nearby my desk, I do enjoy the retro vibes, but the big disadvantage has gotta be their weight and heft. There is no way the average consumer wants a FW900 taking up their entire desk. It would be cool if the CRT industry didn't completely die and instead it existed as a niche product.

jeffbee 2y ago
It weighs 40 kilos. I owned one, but I didn't want to. My 21" Trinitron blew up in the final month of its 5-year warranty and they didn't have a way to replace it so they sent me the 24". Crazy, must have cost a fortune for them just to ship it.
- deadlydose 2y ago
  It was never the weight of them that bothered me it was the uneven distribution of the weight. 40kg isn't much until it's all shifted to one side (the front) of a cumbersome object.

bombcar 2y ago

The big advantage for these was the flatness of the screen, created by what seemed to be inches of glass to refract the curve straight. For those big sizes, there was nothing comparable - everything else was so convex that it was hard to use as a monitor once you got about 19 or 21 inches.

tombert 2y ago

You know, zero-latency is cool, but I gotta admit that I do not miss cathode ray tube TVs. They are really heavy, the picture was fuzzy, I never personally liked the scanlines, they're bulky, and I never liked that high pitch squeal that they make. I'll confess a little nostalgia for the CRTs sometimes, my first TV was a hand-me-down RCA from my parents and that served as my only TV until I was 20, but the second that 1080p (or better) LCD TVs got cheap, I never looked back. Even in regards to the latency, I'm kind of convinced that those claims are a little overblown. LCDs do increase latency, but some of the more modern LCD TVs have a "low latency mode", that claims to get the latency to below 15 milliseconds; assuming most games are 60FPS, that's below a single frame, and I don't think that a vast majority of humans can even detect that. and for the few that can, OLEDs have you covered with latency on the order of like 2ms.

HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
They spray x-rays into anyone behind them too. The leased glass only protects the immediate user.
- pbj1968 2y ago
  Citation needed.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    There's even a federal regulation about how much radiation they're allowed to emit: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-J/part-1020/section-1020.10 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-J...
morsch 2y ago
If you were around when CRTs were popular, the high pitched squeal is probably not much of an issue for you anymore :P
- tombert 2y ago

axegon_ 2y ago

For the longest time I thought I was having survivorship bias + nostalgia. Back in the late 90's my dad coughed up a lot of money on then the second family computer with all sorts of peripherals and accessories. One of which being a 17 inch Sony Trinitron CRT. I had this monitor until the second half of the 2000's when I went to study abroad. None of the computers and monitors I had in the future felt like a downgrade compared to the Trinitron, even till this day, even with a few several high end oled monitors at home. Seems it wasn't survivorship/nostalgia...

mbreese 2y ago

(2019) Things have changed substantially, especially regarding the availability of OLED gaming oriented monitors. CRTs were great (especially the Trinitrons), but they were stupid heavy. I’d much rather have an OLED today.

Yeul 2y ago
CRTs were ridiculously tiny. I wouldn't want to play games on anything smaller than 55 inches.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  Meanwhile, I like my 27" monitor and don't want anything bigger and am annoyed by the trend of bigger and bigger monitors. But I think my problem is I sit VERY close to my monitor. If I'm sitting up straight, my monitor is only ~20 inches from my screen. My eyes are just too accustomed that focus at that distance.

sjm 2y ago

CRTs are still unmatched for gaming. Aside from input lag, they don't degrade low resolutions the same way that LCDs do. For the longest time I stuck with a 19" flatscreen 4:3 CRT that did 170Hz at 800x600, an absolute beast. As a kid I'd lug it around to QuakeWorld and Counter-Strike LAN tournaments. I've gone through a bunch of high refresh rate LCDs since, but nothing has matched the perfect hand-eye sync of a CRT running at high FPS and high refresh rate with a 1000 Hz mouse, zooming around dm3 in a complete state of flow.

rightbyte 2y ago
You kinda forget how low latency feels like until you relive it and thinks 'oh ye this is how it should feel like'. Like the reaponsiveness of a PS/2 keyboard.
_carbyau_ 2y ago
I'd append: with the reflexes of youth. Seriously, I'm just throwing a ball with my kid and I notice that shit now.

KptMarchewa 2y ago

A lot of people are saying there are advantages to visual quality for CRT monitors. I don't disagree, but most what I remember from my gaming obsessed childhood are strong headaches from prolonged sessions, which disappeared after move to CRT. I don't play games anywhere close to what I used to do, but I can't imagine working for 8-10 hours on CRT monitor and not losing health.

nottorp 2y ago
Interesting, because I still think lcd monitors BLIND ME a lot more than the old CRTs. But then when you're programming with a black background with the brightness turned way way down on a crt, there is very little light shining into your face. Maybe oled will fix that, but it still has some growing up to do.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  > I still think lcd monitors BLIND ME User error, IMO. I'm of the opinion that if your monitor showing a pure white screen is painful, then either your brightness is too high or you don't have adequate ambient light.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    They’re always turned down as much as I can without losing contrast and I do have light in my office. It’s still not the same as a black screen that’s not emitting light. You said it yourself actually: lcd monitors do require ambient light to not be painful. CRTs could do without.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      I've always felt the opposite. When I was a kid, if I was playing NES/SNES games on my TV with no lights on, after an hour or so, my eyes were burning.
      - nottorp 2y ago

nutshell89 2y ago

Unrelated to anything in the article, but I'm curious as to why there haven't been OLED or LCD panels manufactured specifically for general-purpose CRT emulation in hardware + software (via curved panels, artifacts unique to CRTs such as pixel blurring, phosphor persistence, scanlines, etc) for retro video games, film preservation, and artwork.

Night_Thastus 2y ago
Filters for scanlines, blur, etc have existed for years. No need to bake that into the panel - it can be done in software easily.
- p1mrx 2y ago
  DOSBox Staging has the best CRT emulation I've seen. It's subtle, but it really feels like going back to a VGA monitor. See the screenshots on https://dosbox-staging.github.io/ https://dosbox-staging.github.io/
- nutshell89 2y ago
  There are software solutions that exist yes, (DOSBox Staging as mentioned below, certain RetroArch shaders look very good) but neither really represent an actual product — DosBox Staging is supposedly zero config but simultaneously requires configuring a DOS environment. Replicating a shadow mask, or curved screen for example requires fiddling with shaders, not to mention aspect ratio, the size, or display resolution. In any case, most emulation software is geared towards gaming — many art galleries for example still use CRTs for preservation (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/t-magazine/technology-art-ctl-electronics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lE0.u_uP.HwhMa7nimHuQ&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/t-magazine/technology-art..., https://youtu.be/rHBtmPZx82A?t=1828 https://youtu.be/rHBtmPZx82A?t=1828) and these software solutions don't really fill the gap of a general-purpose CRT display.

dekhn 2y ago

Oh hell no. We celebrated when I finally got my 36"(?) Sony Triniton WEGA out of the house. It was so heavy it took 2 strong people to move. It was enormous and hot. The image quality was great, but quickly eclipsed by LCDs. But the weight. It just made it impossible to move.

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moudis 2y ago

I had the fortune of owning a Dell P1110 (rebranded Sony Trinitron CPD-E500) many years ago, bought quite cheaply at a surplus auction while in college. 21", flat glass, and weighed in right at 70lbs. Lugged it to a few LAN parties here and there. It wasn't until OLED monitors came around that I finally felt like flat panel displays had really caught up.

M95D 2y ago
I still have my Dell P1130. I too lugged it to a LAN party. Only once. It bent the table and I still have back pains after 20 years.

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Night_Thastus 2y ago

I'm sorry but I really don't believe a 540 Hz or even 360 Hz LCD is going to be beaten in total end-to-end latency by any kind of CRT. I've yet to see any real world tests to the contrary. And of course, modern OLED beats the pants off of both in that regard.

xcv123 2y ago
CRT has zero input lag. It is pure analog electronics with no buffering. "Racing the beam". Digital buffered displays are down to a few milliseconds but cannot ever be as low as CRT.
- imtringued 2y ago
  Tell that to people having problems with screen tearing.
  - xcv123 2y ago
    CRT has zero input lag from signal to phosphor (maybe a few nanoseconds due to speed of electronics and the electron beam itself) but it will take a few milliseconds to scan an entire frame. With vsync enabled I guess you could have effectively lower input lag from a well engineered 500hz digital display, when considering lag for complete frames. If the system is fully engineered to race the beam then you can't beat zero input lag for CRT on mid scanline.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    tearing is a software issue, it's completely unrelated to CRTs or the display technology in general.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
  Depending on the display and the input type, some CRT displays do digitize and buffer the signal so that they can do some of the filtering and decoding digitally. The amount that they buffer is generally only on the order of a few lines, though.
- 2y ago

maxrecursion 2y ago

I play retro games regularly, and as good as emulation is, there are tons of old fast paced games that are unplayable for me on modern TVs due to input lag. Recently was playing Zelda 1 on the NES when the game crashed and deleted my save half way through the 2nd quest. Tried to play it on an emulator and on the switch, and both felt clunky compared to playing on the NES. Could probably get through it, but it wouldn't have been fun.

CharlesW 2y ago
FWIW, these days display lag/input lag on good gaming monitors/TVs is well under 15ms, which is the point at which some people can notice it. ("Good" is anything <25ms.) https://displaylag.com/display-database/ https://displaylag.com/display-database/

dtgriscom 2y ago

For a while I owned a Tempest arcade game. It had a CRT, but driven as a color vector display. Beautiful lines, rapid updates. Very cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game)

RajT88 2y ago

One of the gems of my retro collection is my 36" Sony WEGA which has a native 720p resolution. HD image which works with the many retro light gun games.

g42gregory 2y ago

LCDs still can not change resolution away from native max, without screen getting blurred. As I recall, LCDs started to get wide adoption about 2004 or so. It has been only 20 yrs. Why can't they make them to be able to run on resolutions other than native? CRT could do that with no problems.

MarcoZavala 2y ago

[dead]

TradingPlaces 2y ago

I held on to the last Sony XBR Trinitron, the KD-34XBR970, for an unreasonable amount of time because the picture was so lively. Eventually sold it to a retro gamer, who was thrilled, and so was I.

WalterBright 2y ago

I used CRTs for maybe 20 years. Once I acquired an LCD, that was the end of CRTs for me. I didn't like the weight, the size, the heat, the warmup time, the power consumption, the whine from the flyback transformer, the resolution, or the fuzzy fonts. The LCD beats it in every metric. Even in price - I can get an LCD monitor for $10 from the thrift store. P.S. I can't hear the whine anymore in a CRT. Gettin' old.

prpl 2y ago
I tend to think of the heat from the song “Sleeping is the only Love” by the Silver Jews “I had this friend his name was Marc with a C, his sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV”

mistyvales 2y ago

Nobody seems to remember plasma TV's? It was the closest to CRT I used. 240hz, 1080p bliss. Yes, they were kinda heavy and power hungry but I still miss my 2013 Panasonic Viera Edit: It was actually only up to 96hz, but gaming on it didn't feel like there was too much motion blur

squarefoot 2y ago

Not a gamer, but have vivid memories of playing on CRTs and I don't miss them at all. They're like vinyl records: they bring wonderful memories, but technically speaking there's no reason to go back to them. That said, SED technology could have been employed to create products with the best of two worlds, if only it wasn't killed by patent and licensing issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-emitter_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...

Willish42 2y ago

I found the wallpaper used in the article picture, in case anybody else was curious (turns out it's a League of Legends fanart which I'm not too familiar with but was hoping this was a cool JRPG I hadn't tried yet or something) https://www.deviantart.com/zuqling/art/LoL-One-for-the-road-432734122 https://www.deviantart.com/zuqling/art/LoL-One-for-the-road-... Edit: also the DigitalFoundry video referenced in the article is a much better watch imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM

sssilver 2y ago

I occasionally get the itch of purchasing a brand new CRT monitor, and fail to find any. Has humankind stopped manufacturing CRTs entirely?

snakeyjake 2y ago

I find neither the aperture grill nor shadow mask aesthetically appealing. Throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s I spent obscene amounts of money trying to minimize them. Smaller and smaller grills, the switch to shadow masks and their infernal lines, it never stopped. To me, any screen technology where I can look at the clock in the upper right or lower left corner and see the pixels comprising the numbers (or a blurry smear) is trash. The same with colors. Any screen technology that cannot accurately reproduce colors is trash. Asking a CRT to accurately reproduce colors, even something as minimally acceptable as Rec.709, is like asking me to perform brain surgery: it ain't happening brah.