4 ms·
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
by 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 agoYeah 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 agoAs 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 agoLater 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.