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Brand-new arcade CRTs are razor sharp, and certainly do not accept an RF signal (I don't think they accept composite either). With time the electron beam starts

Brand-new arcade CRTs are razor sharp, and certainly do not accept an RF signal (I don't think they accept composite either). With time the electron beam starts to diverge, and things can get a little blurry or color-fringey. What I've found—based on limited experience with a "modern" arcade cabinet (Fix-it Felix Jr., a tie-in promotion to the 2012 film Wreck-it Ralph)—is that if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications. But that goes only for raster games. Nothing we currently have can replace the razor-sharp, completely unaliased lines of an original Asteroids and its vector display.

cubefox 5d ago
> if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications. CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp. It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.
- bitwize 5d ago
  CRTs almost never show the entire frame at all. The phosphor decay on a typical television CRT is so rapid that by the time the beam hits the right-hand side of any given scanline, the left side is completely dark. And unfortunately that motion clarity comes at a cost: flicker. Some people, like my sister, cannot bear that cost. She has photosensitive epilepsy, but even before that ripened into full-on seizures in her 20s she became profoundly uncomfortable playing video games, and never got truly into them until flat panels predominated. Even without photosensitive epilepsy, flicker can be annoyingly perceptible and cause eyestrain even if you don't consciously register it. Most of the motion blur mitigation strategies we see on panels, like black frame insertion, suffer from the same problems. The only way we'll come close to solving both problems at once is with very high speed panels, but until then I'll take a bit of blur, thank you.
  - cubefox 5d ago
    Yeah flicker, that is true. But people without epilepsy didn't really notice it on video content (TV or video games), even at 50 Hz (PAL) in Europe. On PCs with static content, flicker was a lot more noticable at 60 Hz, e.g. when staring at a white Word document. But increasing the Hz to something like 85 Hz made the flicker practically disappear. (Not sure whether that would sufficient for people with photosensitive epilepsy. And it wasn't a solution available for consoles anyway.)
    - hylaride 5d ago
      As somebody that grew up in Canada (NTSC), I noticed the 50Hz flicker on visits to Europe whenever the screen was white, but eventually my brain would filter it out and it didn't bother me. I wonder if I'd notice it on a modern NTSC screen. It's been a long time since I saw one...
      - cubefox 5d ago
        Later many or even most PAL TVs were actually 100 Hz (advertised as "100 Hz flicker-free"), but I don't remember seeing the difference. They weren't optimal for games because they used a digital cache to double the input frame rate. Native Hz CRTs could be completely analog with extremely low input latency.

cubefox 5d ago

> if you have an LCD or OLED that can do true enough blacks, the effect is very similar to having a brand spanking new CRT, even in arcade applications. CRTs are inherently less blurry when your eyes follow moving objects on screen, which they do all the time ("smooth pursuit"). The reason is that LCDs and OLED displays show each frame for the entire frame time (like 1/60th of a second) during which your eyes, and the corresponding tracked object, move. This creates a blur. E.g. if an object moves on the screen 10 pixels horizontally per frame, on an LCD/OLED you would then see 10 pixels of horizontal blur. This doesn't happen on CRTs because they flash each frame only for an extremely short period of time and are relatively dark otherwise. At 60 Hz, they don't show the frame for 1/60th of a second, but about 1/1000th or something like that. This time is so short that during it, even fast moving objects and the eyes that track them hardly move at all, which results in basically zero blur. See https://testufo.com/ https://testufo.com/ to see the blur. On a CRT, with matched FPS and Hz, the test would appear completely sharp. It is true that LCDs and OLED screens are much brighter (especially LCD) and that OLED has better black levels, but CRT screens have much better motion clarity.

bitwize 5d ago
CRTs almost never show the entire frame at all. The phosphor decay on a typical television CRT is so rapid that by the time the beam hits the right-hand side of any given scanline, the left side is completely dark. And unfortunately that motion clarity comes at a cost: flicker. Some people, like my sister, cannot bear that cost. She has photosensitive epilepsy, but even before that ripened into full-on seizures in her 20s she became profoundly uncomfortable playing video games, and never got truly into them until flat panels predominated. Even without photosensitive epilepsy, flicker can be annoyingly perceptible and cause eyestrain even if you don't consciously register it. Most of the motion blur mitigation strategies we see on panels, like black frame insertion, suffer from the same problems. The only way we'll come close to solving both problems at once is with very high speed panels, but until then I'll take a bit of blur, thank you.
- cubefox 5d ago
  Yeah flicker, that is true. But people without epilepsy didn't really notice it on video content (TV or video games), even at 50 Hz (PAL) in Europe. On PCs with static content, flicker was a lot more noticable at 60 Hz, e.g. when staring at a white Word document. But increasing the Hz to something like 85 Hz made the flicker practically disappear. (Not sure whether that would sufficient for people with photosensitive epilepsy. And it wasn't a solution available for consoles anyway.)
  - hylaride 5d ago
    As somebody that grew up in Canada (NTSC), I noticed the 50Hz flicker on visits to Europe whenever the screen was white, but eventually my brain would filter it out and it didn't bother me. I wonder if I'd notice it on a modern NTSC screen. It's been a long time since I saw one...
    - cubefox 5d ago
      Later many or even most PAL TVs were actually 100 Hz (advertised as "100 Hz flicker-free"), but I don't remember seeing the difference. They weren't optimal for games because they used a digital cache to double the input frame rate. Native Hz CRTs could be completely analog with extremely low input latency.