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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 opportuni

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).
  - theshackleford 2y ago
    Yup, until just a few years ago I gamed almost exclusively on a DLP projector on a 120" projection screen when using displays outside of my CRT's. I miss it and have considered going that route again, that or picking up a nice late generation 1080P plasma.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  > 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. What crappy panels are you buying? I know 10 years ago, IPS panels were known for having terrible response times, but there are other types of LCD that have pixel response times in the 1 ms range.
  - simoncion 2y ago
    Manufacturers quote those response times, but worst-case response times are often at least a full frame, and sometimes multiple frames. Unlike with CRTs, response time is a factor of what color you're switching to and from, and their intensity, it's highly-variable, and it makes me so sad whenever an otherwise-lovely game happens to put colors together that very obviously smear on my monitors. (Also, see above for my report on the laughably bad color smearing on my Pixel 5a.) RTNGS usually has more-detailed breakdowns of best and worst-case color transition times for the monitors they test, as well as over- and under-shoot reports... which is a phenomenon that's just as bad as slow transitions between colors.
  - theshackleford 2y ago
    > What crappy panels are you buying? Exactly zero. I own the highest end panels you can buy, regardless of whether it's OLED or LCD. I have a variety of CRT displays, desktop and broadcast on top of this. > I know 10 years ago, IPS panels were known for having terrible response times, but there are other types of LCD that have pixel response times in the 1 ms range. The vast majority of motion blur on todays displays is due to sample and hold, not pixel response times. https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/ https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      Ahhh...I understand now. You're talking about motion blur created from eye tracking, rather than slow pixel response like I had assumed. Meh, I don't see it as a problem, really. And as frame rates get higher, it becomes even less of a problem, as the distance an object moves across the screen between each frame is less. I'm already running at 144 fps, and I'll probably be looking for 240 fps in a few years.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  OLED has near instant pixel response times. No idea what display you are looking at, but if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED
  - simoncion 2y ago
    > ...if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED I have a Pixel 5a. It has _comically_ slow switching times between dark-ish colors and blacks that's most obvious with dark blue-family colors. If you have such a phone, go check out the "Gunnerkrigg Court" webcomic (<https://gunnerkrigg.com https://gunnerkrigg.com>), scroll down to the border between the comic and the blog part, and jostle the viewport up and down. If you go check out today's episode (comic 2929), you get an especially long trail of slow-transitioning pixels in the art that is particularly noticeable in the bottom panels of the comic, itself. (Examine the black borders of the people's hair, as well as the black frame of the comic panels. If you're not noticing it, scroll at a rate of travel of roughly one-quarter of the screen's height per second.)
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      This is a limitation/downside/flaw of "VA" LCD panels. OLED panels will not experience this, and neither will several other LCD technologies.
      - simoncion 2y ago
        > This is a limitation/downside/flaw of "VA" LCD panels. OLED panels will not experience this... I don't know what to tell you, man. I'm seeing this behavior on a Pixel 5a. Purchased _directly_ from Google's store. Google says this model of phone has a OLED display... an HDR one, at that. [0] Not even the worst color transitions for my my VA monitor (a BenQ EWE3270U) streak this badly. [0] <https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel5a-with-5g-new-google-phone/ https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel5a-with-5g-new-googl...>
    - gknoy 2y ago
      I realize that this is not even on topic, but _what a jolt of nostalgia_. I haven't even thought of that comic in what feels like a decade. Perhaps that's the optimal way of reading a webcomic (waiting until it's binge-able)? It's tripled in length since I last read it, and now my phone actually will display it :D (now if only the web interface tracked what page I was on, so that coming back months later didn't show Today's page, and instead showed where I last read ...) On-topic, I have tried jostling the page on my Pixel 6a (also a 60hz OLED screen), and I don't notice _at all_ the display latency or issues that you mention. The only time I've noticed any kind of delay or ghosting like that is when I have it in extremely low brightness settings (reading at night in the dark), with "extra dim" enabled.
LocalH 2y ago
Rhythm gaming is a big one for me. All other display devices commonly used for gaming have at least a small amount of lag between input and final display. I have a midrange LED set that gives me something like 12ms lag calibration when I play Rock Band 3 on it. It's a very slight difference, but it is noticeable, and I'd much rather have the 0 calibration that a CRT could provide.
- timw4mail 2y ago
  I've played modern games on CRTs through HDMI->VGA convertors, and still felt lower latency than LCD. OLEDs will eventually catch up, I think, but LCDs are always going to have some lag. And it's not the refresh rate, it's the time from input -> display picture updates. With a CRT that can happen during the current field being displayed, but it will take at least one frame for any LCD.
  - tverbeure 2y ago
    This is just not true. You can update an LCD in the middle of the screen just the way you can for CRT. The only hard limit to the latency of an LCD panel is the finite amount of time that’s needed to flip the fluid in the LCD cells. There is nothing that requires a full frame delay. Most LCD monitors have a frame buffer to look back in time for things line overdrive compensation, but you can easily do without. In fact, some of the monitor scaler prototypes that I have worked on were initially direct drive because we hadn’t gotten the DRAM interface up and running yet. Desktop LCD panels themselves typically don’t have memory, laptop panels do but that’s for power saving reasons (to avoid the power of transferring the data over a high speed link and to allow the source to power down.)
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      > You can update an LCD in the middle of the screen just the way you can for CRT. And in fact this is such an annoyance there are multiple different ways people try to deal with the screen tearing, between V,G,and FreeSync.
Workaccount2 2y ago
The core argument for CRT's is their low latency and high refresh rate. Nobody is using a CRT for picture quality (outside the aforementioned blurred retro gaming look) However this article is from 2019, and I know they have some pretty snazzy gaming monitors today that might well be better than old top-end CRTs.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  The low latency only works when the source is sending an analog signal which is essentially controlling the electron gun. An NES for example, could decide between scan lines what the next scaling to emit would look like. Most modern systems (and computers) are sending digital signals where entire frames need to be constructed and reconstructed in a buffer before they can be displayed. Many HD CRT televisions have terrible latency because they’ll take the analog scan line signal, buffer it into a frame, scale it to the native CRT resolution, then scan it back out to the screen. A high end PVM might allow a straight path, but there is maybe one Toshiba HD CRT that doesn’t introduce several frames of latency (iirc). That said, from 1999 to 2008 I ran 1600x1200 on 19in CRTs and except for professional LCDs, nothing had resolution, pitch, and color that came close. For 2008 was the inflection point where cost and quality of LCDs exceeded CRTs.
  - toast0 2y ago
    > Most modern systems (and computers) are sending digital signals where entire frames need to be constructed and reconstructed in a buffer before they can be displayed. HDMI and DVI-D are a digital representation of a tv signal --- there's all the blanking and porches and stuff (audio data is often interleaved into the blanking periods). You could process that in realtime, even though most displays don't (including CRT HDTVs; I trust your maybe one doesn't).
  - tverbeure 2y ago
    It makes little sense to buffer a full frame before up scaling. Why would you do that? It’s a total waste of DRAM bandwidth too. The latency incurred for upscaling depends on number of the vertical filter taps and the horizontal scan time. We’re talking order of 10 microseconds. The only exception is if you’re using a super fancy machine learning whole-frame upscaling algorithm, but that’s not something you’ll find in an old CRT.
kmacleod 2y ago
I worked for a video titling company in the 80s during their transition from Analog titling to Digital titling. One key thing I learned there is that CRTs have about three times the horizontal resolution folks give them credit for. Most folks measure horizontal resolution in how many clear pixels you can go from light to dark and back. What they don't account for is the pixel-shift, you can position those start and end transitions at three or more times that resolution. Nowadays we call that sub-pixel rendering or antialiasing. But in the 80s so many people were convinced TVs could only do 640x480. Our titling systems were typically doing 2400x480 to get good quality character aliasing and image shading on CRTs. This is still somewhat true today analog-wise but common sub-pixel rendering or antialiasing does achieve the same effect on LCDs.
- grishka 2y ago
  Strictly speaking, because the signal is continuous, analog video doesn't really have horizontal resolution, does it?
  - kmacleod 2y ago
    Exactly. Black and white TVs worked very much like oscilloscopes and had almost no definition of horizontal resolution. Very few color broadcast TVs were made with three separate beams and three separate color filters (like rear-view projectors). Your typical color TV effectively created "pixels" by their use of shadow masks and three separate beams. The analog signal, however, could still be in transition along the entire horizontal sweep. The biggest difference between high-end studio monitors and your average TV was how packed the shadow mask was.
    - abstractbeliefs 2y ago
      I don't think that's quite how it worked. The colour was created by different phosphors on the inside of the screen, there was nothing different about the electron beams. The number and pitch, the resolution, of these different phosphor dots determined the resolution of the screen. The shadow masking was to prevent the beam for, say, the red phosphors sweeping blue/green subpixels when moving from one pixel to another, since it wasn't practical to turn the beam off and then back on once the steering coils had been changed. Steering was continuous, so without shadowmasks, you would illuminate on the neighbour subpixels you pass on the way. You could have done it all with a single beam, if you really wanted, but it's not very practical - you'd need to sweep slower since you could only illuminate 1 subpixel at a time, it'd take much longer to to steer, illuminate at the right level, and move to the next with the right beam power selected.
autoexec 2y ago
> However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water. You can find some modern screens that do better at certain things than others but compared with what most people have CRTs are still likely to have better color accuracy, better contrast, zero motion blur, no dead/stuck pixels, far better viewing angles, no fixed resolutions, higher refresh rates, and zero backlight bleed. It's not all nostalgia (although I really do miss the degauss button) but CRTs were also before DRM, data collection, and ads being pushed at you and it's hard to not be nostalgic about that.
- buran77 2y ago
  The best CRTs may have been ok but most CRTs in the history of their kind were not what you describe. I've seen and used my share of them over many decades. Even in the 2000s any of the hundreds of CRTs in an office would have been rather characterized by some CRT glow ruining the contrast particularly around text, constantly needing focus and geometry adjustments if yours was fancy enough to offer the option, commonly 60Hz but somehow always flickering, a bulging screen, in time weird color distortions or fading in some corner of the screen that never went away, the inevitable scratch of the antiglare coating, peaking at 1080i resolution if you were willing to sell your aunt for it, the fine stabilizing wires from the aperture grill creating OCD triggering shadows, huge but still realistically limited to 24-32" screen (in reality most were still huge but only 15-17"), hernia inducing heavy, and above 32" gave your dolly a hernia (300lbs worth), hard to adjust ergonomically, likely some buzzing noise, dust magnets, the smell of overheated plastic and dust being burned off the tube, and I'll stop here before it starts looking like CRTs stole my girlfriend and spit in my coffee. Don't get me wrong, that smell will always take me back to a time when I had hair and it will without a doubt put a happy smile on my face any day. But it's all nostalgia anchored by a couple of technical advantages that pale in the face of overall tech today.
  - olyjohn 2y ago
    Limited to 1080i? That's a 16x9 aspect ratio... I had a CRT that did 1600x1200 back in like 1995. Are you thinking of just TVs? Because most of them did suck. There were lots of excellent computer monitors however...
Yeul 2y ago
CRT versus modern screens is a lot like vinyl versus FLAC. Hipsters gonna hipster.
ktosobcy 2y ago
Eh... I don't understand current fashion for "pixelart" games... It was done on purpose in the past to look good on CRT but nowadays it just looks terrible...
- hakfoo 2y ago
  i suspect the appeal is the constraints. That you can tell a story and express emotion with 16x16 figures is an interesting counterargument to the "we need a trillion polygons per second to render a few hairs".
  - ktosobcy 2y ago
    Erm, but do we always have to end up with extremes? I think that pixelart games became somewhat of a cult at this point... And no you don't need gazzilion polygons and GPU that requires private power plant to tell a good story - a while back I played Limbo and it was amazing.
theodric 2y ago
Here's my €0.02: In 1998, I liked the active matrix LCD on my Gateway laptop a lot more than the GDM-17E11 Trinitron on my SGI because the Trinitron had these 2 fucking wires across the picture, which annoyed me, and also the RGB convergence was off on the edges, and the geometry was poor and heavily bowed by about 0.5" on the bottom. Gross. In 2020, I bought a cheap new-old-stock CRT monitor for retro nonsense, and threw it on an underpowered Linux system in my office for funzies, and I was like HOLY FUCK the response time on this is INSANE, and the blacks are UNREAL. I felt a Responsive Computer-Feeling I hadn't felt since using my CRT'd dual PPro Debian system in college. Blew away every aspect of every LCD in the house, even my overpriced top-of-the-range Sony LCD TV-- apart from the abysmal, headache-inducing max 60Hz refresh rate at a low 1024x768 resolution, distracting flyback transformer whine, and high-ish power consumption, that is. Conclusions: every monitor sucks. Always have, always will. CRTs flicker, LCDs muddle, OLEDs over-contrast and burn in. With apologies to Dorothy Parker: you might as well live. But the glow is real! Gorgeous! I want it on my 70s terminals, but don't need it on my workstation.
hulitu 2y ago
> 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 No. They looked their best because CRT were able to reproduce more colors than an a LCD. Only now, after more than 10 years, LCDs with HDR come close to CRTs. I remember vividly my first LCDs who were marketed as 24 bit but you could see the colour gradient like in 16 bit mode on CRTs.
- epcoa 2y ago
  > No. They looked their best because CRT were able to reproduce more colors than an a LCD. > LCDs with HDR come close to CRTs. This is pretty meaningless and conflating gamut with dynamic range. The vast majority of CRTs back in the day would be driven with 8-bit per channel RGB DACs, so not HDR, and most CRTs would have an sRGB or similar gamut (so not a wide gamut). It is true that both the dynamic range and gamut of cheaper LCD panels is pretty poor (~5 bits per channel) and not even complete sRGB, and this set the tone for many low cost TN displays of the early 2000s (and still adorns the lowend of laptops and even some Thinkpads to this day). However affordable LCD monitors have been around for YEARS with wide gamut (ex Adobe RGB or DCI-P3), superior to all but the most expensive reference CRT monitors that virtually no one owned, and long before HDR becoming commonplace. I bought a 98% Adobe RGB monitor about 14 years ago for less than $800, color reproduction and contrast wise completely blowing any CRT out of the water I ever owned. But even a cheap <$300 IPS display on sale for the past 15 years including all MacBooks will exceed most CRTs as well. In practice CRTs also have middling contrast ratio as well unless you work in a pitch dark room, which almost no one does. > I remember vividly my first LCDs who were marketed as 24 bit IPS and true 8-bit TN panels have been mainstream for a long time now. Nothing to do with recent uptake of HDR.
  - guenthert 2y ago
    > unless you work in a pitch dark room, which almost no one does. Is that actually true? In the very early 2000s I worked at a start-up (with not quite well defined target, ended up in the game industry) with darkened office. At that time CRTs were still common and iirc we all used them and I don't recall to have minded. Twenty years later I worked again at a small software shop which had the main office darkened for unclear reasons (I suspect a personal quirk of the fellow running that part of the company) as we now all had LCDs (of course) and there was little to no visual media produced. In between, I visited the earlier company, which grew and moved a few times since, but still kept the office dark (not sure if to benefit content creators or as a fashion statement). Personally, I rather not sit in the dark during the day for prolonged times; at the very least, it messes with the sleep rhythm. Oh, flash-back to having visited the lab of a physics PhD student who was working on ultra-short pulse lasers in the early nineties. The underground lab was totally dark all day, only every five minutes or so briefly flooded in light meant to pump the lasers. That was the time I decided that physics isn't for me ...
justinpombrio 2y ago
That's all nice, but you can't draw on an LCD screen with a whiteboard marker.
majormajor 2y ago
> 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. This seems to suppose a world where, had LCDs been common, people wouldn't have used low-resolution bitmaps. But... there were not a lot of alternative technologies available! There are a few vector-art CRT arcade games out there, but generally very black-and-white/virtual-boy-style, and I believe bitmap graphics even without super-high-resolution would've won out anyway. This also suggests that you couldn't tell the difference as much between NES/SNES/Playstation resolutions of bitmap-art games, when you DEFINITELY could. The old games never looked "great", it was just the best we had.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > This seems to suppose a world where, had LCDs been common, people wouldn't have used low-resolution bitmaps. But... there were not a lot of alternative technologies available It's less about "They would not have used low res bitmaps for displaying graphics" and more about "The artists would likely have arranged the pixels in the bitmaps in different ways" There are some really interesting articles out there about how the artists for old NES and SNES games designed the sprites to look better with scanlines, and without scanlines (like when playing on modern emulators) everything kind of looks worse than it did when it was rendered on CRTs
  - majormajor 2y ago
    It's not the impact that's claimed at all. No sprite magic in the world will get around trying to display 200 pixels of image on a 65" modern TV. Play an NES game on a super-high-quality 13" flat panel and it looks a lot better than on a 75" one even without any fancy scanline filters or such. Which pixels in Mario them would you move around, exactly, to prevent big square pixels from being really obvious? Hell, those games didn't really look great on 60" RPTV CRTs either. (For anything other than 4x split-screen, my friends and I always preferred a smaller screen since the big screen exposed all the limitations of the graphics and by the N64 era PC games had advanced to the point that we knew what we were missing.) And of course anything Mode 7 or full-3D era suffers all the same problems of looking bad blown up to modern display sizes without "CRT optimized sprites" being a factor anymore since the models are seen from all sorts of perspectives and sizes. They looked better back then because it was new and magical and there were no 4k games to compare against, not because 256 pixels looked more like 1000. Like with VHS vs DVD - it was absolutely easy to tell even on a pretty small CRT. Look at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNx89J0MBHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNx89J0MBHA - the pixels are perfectly apparent even just viewing it on a laptop screen in a browser on a video from a fairly big CRT.
MarcoZavala 2y ago
[dead]
jrmg 2y ago
the screens attracted dust like a magnet You just brought back vivid memory of something I haven’t thought about in years! For those who never experienced it: the constant firing of electrons into the screen caused it to become statically charged over time. It would, yes, attract dust - and if you ran your hand over a TV that had been on for a while, you could feel the ‘fuzz’ of the electric charge directly with your fingers. I can remember the feeling so vividly now!
- sh1mmer 2y ago
  And the great big thunk if you had a model that supported degaussing.
  - cpuguy83 2y ago
    Loved doing a degaussing.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Fingers? Wasn't it the hair on the top of your hand that felt it? I might remember wrong!
  - brirec 2y ago
    You could definitely feel little pops/tingles on your fingertips if you touched the screen. A little while it’s on, but even more strongly immediately after it turns off and the fields all collapse. But also, hair itself has no living tissue or nerves within. You can feel hair standing on end because it’s anchored in your skin, which does have nerves.
detourdog 2y ago
I had the oppertunity inthe early 90’s to work woth Sony analog HDTV products. The picture was the best I have ever seen and it immediately demonstrated how bad digital HDTV is compared to analog HDTV.
bernawil 2y ago
I just want to clear the myth that pixel art style wasn't real and it's just an artifact of running games meant for CRT displays on modern screens: portables had LCD screens since the beginning and their art style was absolutely intended to look blocky. I'd say the biggest influence for pixel art today is the Gameboy generation, problably the pokemon games.

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).
- theshackleford 2y ago
  Yup, until just a few years ago I gamed almost exclusively on a DLP projector on a 120" projection screen when using displays outside of my CRT's. I miss it and have considered going that route again, that or picking up a nice late generation 1080P plasma.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
> 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. What crappy panels are you buying? I know 10 years ago, IPS panels were known for having terrible response times, but there are other types of LCD that have pixel response times in the 1 ms range.
- simoncion 2y ago
  Manufacturers quote those response times, but worst-case response times are often at least a full frame, and sometimes multiple frames. Unlike with CRTs, response time is a factor of what color you're switching to and from, and their intensity, it's highly-variable, and it makes me so sad whenever an otherwise-lovely game happens to put colors together that very obviously smear on my monitors. (Also, see above for my report on the laughably bad color smearing on my Pixel 5a.) RTNGS usually has more-detailed breakdowns of best and worst-case color transition times for the monitors they test, as well as over- and under-shoot reports... which is a phenomenon that's just as bad as slow transitions between colors.
- theshackleford 2y ago
  > What crappy panels are you buying? Exactly zero. I own the highest end panels you can buy, regardless of whether it's OLED or LCD. I have a variety of CRT displays, desktop and broadcast on top of this. > I know 10 years ago, IPS panels were known for having terrible response times, but there are other types of LCD that have pixel response times in the 1 ms range. The vast majority of motion blur on todays displays is due to sample and hold, not pixel response times. https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/ https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    Ahhh...I understand now. You're talking about motion blur created from eye tracking, rather than slow pixel response like I had assumed. Meh, I don't see it as a problem, really. And as frame rates get higher, it becomes even less of a problem, as the distance an object moves across the screen between each frame is less. I'm already running at 144 fps, and I'll probably be looking for 240 fps in a few years.
kllrnohj 2y ago
OLED has near instant pixel response times. No idea what display you are looking at, but if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED
- simoncion 2y ago
  > ...if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED I have a Pixel 5a. It has _comically_ slow switching times between dark-ish colors and blacks that's most obvious with dark blue-family colors. If you have such a phone, go check out the "Gunnerkrigg Court" webcomic (<https://gunnerkrigg.com https://gunnerkrigg.com>), scroll down to the border between the comic and the blog part, and jostle the viewport up and down. If you go check out today's episode (comic 2929), you get an especially long trail of slow-transitioning pixels in the art that is particularly noticeable in the bottom panels of the comic, itself. (Examine the black borders of the people's hair, as well as the black frame of the comic panels. If you're not noticing it, scroll at a rate of travel of roughly one-quarter of the screen's height per second.)
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    This is a limitation/downside/flaw of "VA" LCD panels. OLED panels will not experience this, and neither will several other LCD technologies.
    - simoncion 2y ago
      > This is a limitation/downside/flaw of "VA" LCD panels. OLED panels will not experience this... I don't know what to tell you, man. I'm seeing this behavior on a Pixel 5a. Purchased _directly_ from Google's store. Google says this model of phone has a OLED display... an HDR one, at that. [0] Not even the worst color transitions for my my VA monitor (a BenQ EWE3270U) streak this badly. [0] <https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel5a-with-5g-new-google-phone/ https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel5a-with-5g-new-googl...>
  - gknoy 2y ago
    I realize that this is not even on topic, but _what a jolt of nostalgia_. I haven't even thought of that comic in what feels like a decade. Perhaps that's the optimal way of reading a webcomic (waiting until it's binge-able)? It's tripled in length since I last read it, and now my phone actually will display it :D (now if only the web interface tracked what page I was on, so that coming back months later didn't show Today's page, and instead showed where I last read ...) On-topic, I have tried jostling the page on my Pixel 6a (also a 60hz OLED screen), and I don't notice _at all_ the display latency or issues that you mention. The only time I've noticed any kind of delay or ghosting like that is when I have it in extremely low brightness settings (reading at night in the dark), with "extra dim" enabled.

LocalH 2y ago

Rhythm gaming is a big one for me. All other display devices commonly used for gaming have at least a small amount of lag between input and final display. I have a midrange LED set that gives me something like 12ms lag calibration when I play Rock Band 3 on it. It's a very slight difference, but it is noticeable, and I'd much rather have the 0 calibration that a CRT could provide.

timw4mail 2y ago
I've played modern games on CRTs through HDMI->VGA convertors, and still felt lower latency than LCD. OLEDs will eventually catch up, I think, but LCDs are always going to have some lag. And it's not the refresh rate, it's the time from input -> display picture updates. With a CRT that can happen during the current field being displayed, but it will take at least one frame for any LCD.
- tverbeure 2y ago
  This is just not true. You can update an LCD in the middle of the screen just the way you can for CRT. The only hard limit to the latency of an LCD panel is the finite amount of time that’s needed to flip the fluid in the LCD cells. There is nothing that requires a full frame delay. Most LCD monitors have a frame buffer to look back in time for things line overdrive compensation, but you can easily do without. In fact, some of the monitor scaler prototypes that I have worked on were initially direct drive because we hadn’t gotten the DRAM interface up and running yet. Desktop LCD panels themselves typically don’t have memory, laptop panels do but that’s for power saving reasons (to avoid the power of transferring the data over a high speed link and to allow the source to power down.)
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    > You can update an LCD in the middle of the screen just the way you can for CRT. And in fact this is such an annoyance there are multiple different ways people try to deal with the screen tearing, between V,G,and FreeSync.

Workaccount2 2y ago

The core argument for CRT's is their low latency and high refresh rate. Nobody is using a CRT for picture quality (outside the aforementioned blurred retro gaming look) However this article is from 2019, and I know they have some pretty snazzy gaming monitors today that might well be better than old top-end CRTs.

jonhohle 2y ago
The low latency only works when the source is sending an analog signal which is essentially controlling the electron gun. An NES for example, could decide between scan lines what the next scaling to emit would look like. Most modern systems (and computers) are sending digital signals where entire frames need to be constructed and reconstructed in a buffer before they can be displayed. Many HD CRT televisions have terrible latency because they’ll take the analog scan line signal, buffer it into a frame, scale it to the native CRT resolution, then scan it back out to the screen. A high end PVM might allow a straight path, but there is maybe one Toshiba HD CRT that doesn’t introduce several frames of latency (iirc). That said, from 1999 to 2008 I ran 1600x1200 on 19in CRTs and except for professional LCDs, nothing had resolution, pitch, and color that came close. For 2008 was the inflection point where cost and quality of LCDs exceeded CRTs.
- toast0 2y ago
  > Most modern systems (and computers) are sending digital signals where entire frames need to be constructed and reconstructed in a buffer before they can be displayed. HDMI and DVI-D are a digital representation of a tv signal --- there's all the blanking and porches and stuff (audio data is often interleaved into the blanking periods). You could process that in realtime, even though most displays don't (including CRT HDTVs; I trust your maybe one doesn't).
- tverbeure 2y ago
  It makes little sense to buffer a full frame before up scaling. Why would you do that? It’s a total waste of DRAM bandwidth too. The latency incurred for upscaling depends on number of the vertical filter taps and the horizontal scan time. We’re talking order of 10 microseconds. The only exception is if you’re using a super fancy machine learning whole-frame upscaling algorithm, but that’s not something you’ll find in an old CRT.

kmacleod 2y ago

I worked for a video titling company in the 80s during their transition from Analog titling to Digital titling. One key thing I learned there is that CRTs have about three times the horizontal resolution folks give them credit for. Most folks measure horizontal resolution in how many clear pixels you can go from light to dark and back. What they don't account for is the pixel-shift, you can position those start and end transitions at three or more times that resolution. Nowadays we call that sub-pixel rendering or antialiasing. But in the 80s so many people were convinced TVs could only do 640x480. Our titling systems were typically doing 2400x480 to get good quality character aliasing and image shading on CRTs. This is still somewhat true today analog-wise but common sub-pixel rendering or antialiasing does achieve the same effect on LCDs.

grishka 2y ago
Strictly speaking, because the signal is continuous, analog video doesn't really have horizontal resolution, does it?
- kmacleod 2y ago
  Exactly. Black and white TVs worked very much like oscilloscopes and had almost no definition of horizontal resolution. Very few color broadcast TVs were made with three separate beams and three separate color filters (like rear-view projectors). Your typical color TV effectively created "pixels" by their use of shadow masks and three separate beams. The analog signal, however, could still be in transition along the entire horizontal sweep. The biggest difference between high-end studio monitors and your average TV was how packed the shadow mask was.
  - abstractbeliefs 2y ago
    I don't think that's quite how it worked. The colour was created by different phosphors on the inside of the screen, there was nothing different about the electron beams. The number and pitch, the resolution, of these different phosphor dots determined the resolution of the screen. The shadow masking was to prevent the beam for, say, the red phosphors sweeping blue/green subpixels when moving from one pixel to another, since it wasn't practical to turn the beam off and then back on once the steering coils had been changed. Steering was continuous, so without shadowmasks, you would illuminate on the neighbour subpixels you pass on the way. You could have done it all with a single beam, if you really wanted, but it's not very practical - you'd need to sweep slower since you could only illuminate 1 subpixel at a time, it'd take much longer to to steer, illuminate at the right level, and move to the next with the right beam power selected.

autoexec 2y ago

> However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water. You can find some modern screens that do better at certain things than others but compared with what most people have CRTs are still likely to have better color accuracy, better contrast, zero motion blur, no dead/stuck pixels, far better viewing angles, no fixed resolutions, higher refresh rates, and zero backlight bleed. It's not all nostalgia (although I really do miss the degauss button) but CRTs were also before DRM, data collection, and ads being pushed at you and it's hard to not be nostalgic about that.

buran77 2y ago
The best CRTs may have been ok but most CRTs in the history of their kind were not what you describe. I've seen and used my share of them over many decades. Even in the 2000s any of the hundreds of CRTs in an office would have been rather characterized by some CRT glow ruining the contrast particularly around text, constantly needing focus and geometry adjustments if yours was fancy enough to offer the option, commonly 60Hz but somehow always flickering, a bulging screen, in time weird color distortions or fading in some corner of the screen that never went away, the inevitable scratch of the antiglare coating, peaking at 1080i resolution if you were willing to sell your aunt for it, the fine stabilizing wires from the aperture grill creating OCD triggering shadows, huge but still realistically limited to 24-32" screen (in reality most were still huge but only 15-17"), hernia inducing heavy, and above 32" gave your dolly a hernia (300lbs worth), hard to adjust ergonomically, likely some buzzing noise, dust magnets, the smell of overheated plastic and dust being burned off the tube, and I'll stop here before it starts looking like CRTs stole my girlfriend and spit in my coffee. Don't get me wrong, that smell will always take me back to a time when I had hair and it will without a doubt put a happy smile on my face any day. But it's all nostalgia anchored by a couple of technical advantages that pale in the face of overall tech today.
- olyjohn 2y ago
  Limited to 1080i? That's a 16x9 aspect ratio... I had a CRT that did 1600x1200 back in like 1995. Are you thinking of just TVs? Because most of them did suck. There were lots of excellent computer monitors however...

Yeul 2y ago

CRT versus modern screens is a lot like vinyl versus FLAC. Hipsters gonna hipster.

ktosobcy 2y ago

Eh... I don't understand current fashion for "pixelart" games... It was done on purpose in the past to look good on CRT but nowadays it just looks terrible...

hakfoo 2y ago
i suspect the appeal is the constraints. That you can tell a story and express emotion with 16x16 figures is an interesting counterargument to the "we need a trillion polygons per second to render a few hairs".
- ktosobcy 2y ago
  Erm, but do we always have to end up with extremes? I think that pixelart games became somewhat of a cult at this point... And no you don't need gazzilion polygons and GPU that requires private power plant to tell a good story - a while back I played Limbo and it was amazing.

theodric 2y ago

Here's my €0.02: In 1998, I liked the active matrix LCD on my Gateway laptop a lot more than the GDM-17E11 Trinitron on my SGI because the Trinitron had these 2 fucking wires across the picture, which annoyed me, and also the RGB convergence was off on the edges, and the geometry was poor and heavily bowed by about 0.5" on the bottom. Gross. In 2020, I bought a cheap new-old-stock CRT monitor for retro nonsense, and threw it on an underpowered Linux system in my office for funzies, and I was like HOLY FUCK the response time on this is INSANE, and the blacks are UNREAL. I felt a Responsive Computer-Feeling I hadn't felt since using my CRT'd dual PPro Debian system in college. Blew away every aspect of every LCD in the house, even my overpriced top-of-the-range Sony LCD TV-- apart from the abysmal, headache-inducing max 60Hz refresh rate at a low 1024x768 resolution, distracting flyback transformer whine, and high-ish power consumption, that is. Conclusions: every monitor sucks. Always have, always will. CRTs flicker, LCDs muddle, OLEDs over-contrast and burn in. With apologies to Dorothy Parker: you might as well live. But the glow is real! Gorgeous! I want it on my 70s terminals, but don't need it on my workstation.

hulitu 2y ago

> 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 No. They looked their best because CRT were able to reproduce more colors than an a LCD. Only now, after more than 10 years, LCDs with HDR come close to CRTs. I remember vividly my first LCDs who were marketed as 24 bit but you could see the colour gradient like in 16 bit mode on CRTs.

epcoa 2y ago
> No. They looked their best because CRT were able to reproduce more colors than an a LCD. > LCDs with HDR come close to CRTs. This is pretty meaningless and conflating gamut with dynamic range. The vast majority of CRTs back in the day would be driven with 8-bit per channel RGB DACs, so not HDR, and most CRTs would have an sRGB or similar gamut (so not a wide gamut). It is true that both the dynamic range and gamut of cheaper LCD panels is pretty poor (~5 bits per channel) and not even complete sRGB, and this set the tone for many low cost TN displays of the early 2000s (and still adorns the lowend of laptops and even some Thinkpads to this day). However affordable LCD monitors have been around for YEARS with wide gamut (ex Adobe RGB or DCI-P3), superior to all but the most expensive reference CRT monitors that virtually no one owned, and long before HDR becoming commonplace. I bought a 98% Adobe RGB monitor about 14 years ago for less than $800, color reproduction and contrast wise completely blowing any CRT out of the water I ever owned. But even a cheap <$300 IPS display on sale for the past 15 years including all MacBooks will exceed most CRTs as well. In practice CRTs also have middling contrast ratio as well unless you work in a pitch dark room, which almost no one does. > I remember vividly my first LCDs who were marketed as 24 bit IPS and true 8-bit TN panels have been mainstream for a long time now. Nothing to do with recent uptake of HDR.
- guenthert 2y ago
  > unless you work in a pitch dark room, which almost no one does. Is that actually true? In the very early 2000s I worked at a start-up (with not quite well defined target, ended up in the game industry) with darkened office. At that time CRTs were still common and iirc we all used them and I don't recall to have minded. Twenty years later I worked again at a small software shop which had the main office darkened for unclear reasons (I suspect a personal quirk of the fellow running that part of the company) as we now all had LCDs (of course) and there was little to no visual media produced. In between, I visited the earlier company, which grew and moved a few times since, but still kept the office dark (not sure if to benefit content creators or as a fashion statement). Personally, I rather not sit in the dark during the day for prolonged times; at the very least, it messes with the sleep rhythm. Oh, flash-back to having visited the lab of a physics PhD student who was working on ultra-short pulse lasers in the early nineties. The underground lab was totally dark all day, only every five minutes or so briefly flooded in light meant to pump the lasers. That was the time I decided that physics isn't for me ...

justinpombrio 2y ago

That's all nice, but you can't draw on an LCD screen with a whiteboard marker.

majormajor 2y ago

> 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. This seems to suppose a world where, had LCDs been common, people wouldn't have used low-resolution bitmaps. But... there were not a lot of alternative technologies available! There are a few vector-art CRT arcade games out there, but generally very black-and-white/virtual-boy-style, and I believe bitmap graphics even without super-high-resolution would've won out anyway. This also suggests that you couldn't tell the difference as much between NES/SNES/Playstation resolutions of bitmap-art games, when you DEFINITELY could. The old games never looked "great", it was just the best we had.

bluefirebrand 2y ago
> This seems to suppose a world where, had LCDs been common, people wouldn't have used low-resolution bitmaps. But... there were not a lot of alternative technologies available It's less about "They would not have used low res bitmaps for displaying graphics" and more about "The artists would likely have arranged the pixels in the bitmaps in different ways" There are some really interesting articles out there about how the artists for old NES and SNES games designed the sprites to look better with scanlines, and without scanlines (like when playing on modern emulators) everything kind of looks worse than it did when it was rendered on CRTs
- majormajor 2y ago
  It's not the impact that's claimed at all. No sprite magic in the world will get around trying to display 200 pixels of image on a 65" modern TV. Play an NES game on a super-high-quality 13" flat panel and it looks a lot better than on a 75" one even without any fancy scanline filters or such. Which pixels in Mario them would you move around, exactly, to prevent big square pixels from being really obvious? Hell, those games didn't really look great on 60" RPTV CRTs either. (For anything other than 4x split-screen, my friends and I always preferred a smaller screen since the big screen exposed all the limitations of the graphics and by the N64 era PC games had advanced to the point that we knew what we were missing.) And of course anything Mode 7 or full-3D era suffers all the same problems of looking bad blown up to modern display sizes without "CRT optimized sprites" being a factor anymore since the models are seen from all sorts of perspectives and sizes. They looked better back then because it was new and magical and there were no 4k games to compare against, not because 256 pixels looked more like 1000. Like with VHS vs DVD - it was absolutely easy to tell even on a pretty small CRT. Look at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNx89J0MBHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNx89J0MBHA - the pixels are perfectly apparent even just viewing it on a laptop screen in a browser on a video from a fairly big CRT.

MarcoZavala 2y ago

[dead]

jrmg 2y ago

the screens attracted dust like a magnet You just brought back vivid memory of something I haven’t thought about in years! For those who never experienced it: the constant firing of electrons into the screen caused it to become statically charged over time. It would, yes, attract dust - and if you ran your hand over a TV that had been on for a while, you could feel the ‘fuzz’ of the electric charge directly with your fingers. I can remember the feeling so vividly now!

sh1mmer 2y ago
And the great big thunk if you had a model that supported degaussing.
- cpuguy83 2y ago
  Loved doing a degaussing.
rightbyte 2y ago
Fingers? Wasn't it the hair on the top of your hand that felt it? I might remember wrong!
- brirec 2y ago
  You could definitely feel little pops/tingles on your fingertips if you touched the screen. A little while it’s on, but even more strongly immediately after it turns off and the fields all collapse. But also, hair itself has no living tissue or nerves within. You can feel hair standing on end because it’s anchored in your skin, which does have nerves.

detourdog 2y ago

I had the oppertunity inthe early 90’s to work woth Sony analog HDTV products. The picture was the best I have ever seen and it immediately demonstrated how bad digital HDTV is compared to analog HDTV.

bernawil 2y ago

I just want to clear the myth that pixel art style wasn't real and it's just an artifact of running games meant for CRT displays on modern screens: portables had LCD screens since the beginning and their art style was absolutely intended to look blocky. I'd say the biggest influence for pixel art today is the Gameboy generation, problably the pokemon games.