LCD displays still don't match the responsiveness of clunky CRT screens (2019)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You personally might not see it as one, but it objectively is. Whether or not you personally are bothered by it is irrelevant to the reality of sample and hold displays poor motion handling. I am happy to hear it does not bother you, and I wish I could be you, however I am not. Probably a side effect of until not too long ago, having spent my entire life with displays that were not complete garbage in this aspect.
> And as frame rates get higher, it becomes even less of a problem
I have the best hardware today money can buy, but cant reach my 240hz capability now in any relatively modern title. It mostly only helps in esports/far older content. It also ignores the fact that we have decades worth of content that will never exceed 60FPS that looks terrible today on modern displays, and will continue to do so.
> I'll probably be looking for 240 fps in a few years.
240fps has made my usage of modern displays far more tolerable, still cant touch a CRT though. I'll be moving to 480hz OLED soon enough to further improve that. However all of these increased refresh rate displays suffer from the same issue.
Not everything can or will run at the refresh rates required to take advantage of the reduced motion blur, not even with top of the line hardware. This will probably eventually be resolved with software/hardware based framerate amplification, but we aint there today and probably wont be for at least another half decade or more.
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>), 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.)
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-googl...>
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.
Man, I tend to think so. (Though... I say that, and I've been reading Gunnerkrigg thrice a week for what seems like five years now, so sometimes I think one thing and do another sometimes. ;))
It's a good comic, IMO.
> 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.
I would have never thought to play with the brightness settings.
So, I nearly always have my screen on "8->10% brightness, automatic brightness adjust, 'extra dim' disabled.". I played with the brightness settings just now and discovered that I have to get the brightness up to 100% before the smearing is _nearly_ gone. At 50%, the trails are much, MUCH smaller than at ~10%, but still obviously there. 75% is not _that_ much better than 50%.
> [I have a] Pixel 6a
Hmm! Maybe in the year between the 5a and the 6a's release, they got on display manufacturers' collective asses to substantially reduce the amount of color smearing in the display that they selected for their next phone.
Pixel response times are one small part of the equation. The vast majority of modern display blur comes from sample and hold motion blur, not pixel transition times.
https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/
> No idea what display you are looking at, but if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED
I am looking at a 27" LG27GR95QE. A 240hz WOLED panel produced by LG. Just one of multiple OLED panels I currently own. This is just in addition to a few high end LCD FALD panels, a couple of 21" Trinitrons and a handful of JVC broadcast CRT's.
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.
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.)
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.
Would it really be 0 though? Assuming 60Hz, the bottom of each frame is scanned out 16ms after the top. Assuming that Rock Band 3 renders an entire frame before displaying it (definitely true) and that it actually renders at 60FPS as opposed to rendering at a higher resolution and tearing (definitely true on console, might not be true on an emulator?), the video latency will range from 0ms for the top of the frame to 16ms for the bottom, for an average of 8ms.
Admittedly, I don't know what Rock Band 3 calibration numbers actually measure, e.g. whether they already take into account factors like this.
If you can manage to render at a high frame rate then you could reduce latency by tearing, but at that point, I feel like you're leaving a lot on the table by not using a 240Hz OLED or something, which can show the entirety of every frame.
Supposedly OLED has comparable response times to CRT anyway. The article says that OLED gaming monitors are unattainable, but it's 5 years old and things have changed.
But modern displays add unnecessary latency on top of that. HDTV CRTs often did too. Input devices sometimes add latency too. It's really not too awful as long as it's consistent, real musical instruments have latency too (especially pipe organs! but organists manage to figure it out). It's not as much fun if you need to hit the note when it's visibly far from the 'goal' section, or if the judging becomes visible a long time after the note --- shortening the feedback loop is good.
More-modern displays (obviously including LCD and OLED, but also CRT displays that themselves have a framebuffer, as was also a thing) always add additional latency.
0: It's not like we can just somehow convert an existing closed-source thing like Rock Band 3 into a 240Hz source.
The company that made Rock Band, Harmonix Music Systems, has amazing beatmatching technology that has been used in countless games and is even available in the newest versions of Unreal Engine, thanks to being currently owned by Epic Games. They've been developing this technology since the mid 90s.
The main difference between CRTs and other display types, is that the other display types are all largely sample-and-hold - they display the whole frame line by line, hold it for an amount of time, then begin the process again. They generally lack the decay that happens with a CRT, where the image fades by the time the next frame is to be drawn. Some displays can do black frame insertion, but this is a poor substitute. It requires double the frame rate of the intended output, and it reduces effective brightness. I'd like to see an OLED display that could simulate the phosphor decay on a per-pixel basis, to better simulate the scanning process of a CRT.
High refresh rate displays have been gaining a lot of traction in the past few years with 1080p or 1440p displays running at 120 or 144 Hz being affordable.
I've got a firebeat at home that I play Pop'n on and it feels magical to play with absolutely minimal difference between when the audio and visuals are to where they game expects you to hit notes. Same cabinet but with a windows PC plugged in for modern games feels worse thanks to all the extra latency you get going through Windows (it's especially bad with the audio).
I know modern iidx and sdvx use newer audio apis that are lower latency but it's still more delay than the pre-PC systems imo.
It is. I've played on both modern ligthening cabs, and on a variety of old official hardware setups in the CRT and Twinkle era. I'd rather play on a Lightening.
Specifically there is a source of lag even greater than the display lag introduced on almost all of the official LCDs. The input lag, or lag between a button being pressed and the game engine registering the input, is critically important in keysounded rhythm games. The bio2 board introduced in the IIDX25 hardware upgrade made a bigger reduction of this lag than the lag that was introduced in official LCD monitors.
The "custom hardware" or Twinkle system used by Konami for IIDX 1-8 is essentially modified PS1 hardware. It's really not much different than building ontop of Windows Embedded with the amount of custom hardware inside the cabinets.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I've done it in Verilog on FPGA, for example.
But we do so on our machines because that's how the GPU/display controller pipeline works easiest from a software POV. That latency would be present on a CRT as well. What would be missing is the internal latency present in some monitors.
still, it's usually only 2 or 3 frames in game mode on a good display
This is a thing in the last 5-10 years, but was absolutely not a concern to the majority of display manufacturers before gamers complained. 100ms is significant in twitch games where network latencies are 20ms or lower.
I'll take a wild guess though that my group (crt media watchers) is slightly less easy to take advantage of with actual hardware than video gamers which I'd guess to be the reason why there are few articles or HOLY GRAIL crt's like this fw900 widescreen in the media watching community. Not that we aren't often suckers for things like ORIGINAL VINTAGE POSTERS and SEALED MEDIA lol.
The article is outdated (like you said) because LCD/OLED displays have long since surpassed CRTs in latency and refresh rate.
A modern gaming LCD can refresh the entire screen multiple times over before an old CRT scans the entire frame and returns to the top to redraw the next one.
There are Samsung TVs that have around ~6ms input delay, and many, many gaming monitors have 1-2ms input delay.
If you spend $400 you can get a 1440p monitor with 1ms input delay, 2-3ms grey-to-grey timing, that will do 240hz.
All with more contrast, color gamut, and 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.
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.
I think he described exactly what you did (in fewer words) in the second half of his post. ("Your typical color TV ..."
The first half discusses that some projection screens had 3 different tubes. ("Very few broadcast TVs ...")
Either that or he edited his post.
> Your typical color TV effectively created "pixels" by their use of shadow masks and three separate beams.
It's true that almost all colour TVs are pixelated and have shadow masks and three separate beams, but it's got the cause and consequence the wrong way around.
The pixels are created by the phosphor dots, not the mask/tube design. It's possible to use this design without three tubes or the screen, strictly, but a consequence of this design suggests the optional addition of a shadow mask and additional tubes as a natural, later progression for improved performance.
Without shadow masks or an aperture grille seems pretty dang hard. Even ignoring the alignment concerns, it requires a much, much higher bandwidth.
The shadow mask and aperture grille approaches were the only approaches that ever really worked for color CRTs.
Phosphors and some kind of masking is how you make different colors on a single tube. Indeed, the shadow mask or aperture grille was offset 3 times and used to etch for the phosphor coatings in most manufacturing processes.
> l addition of a shadow mask and additional tubes as a natural, later progression for improved performance.
There's just one tube-- multiple guns/beams, though.
To the number of horizontal pixels is essentially limitless (if you ignore the bandwidth limit and the CRT scan raster) while the number of vertical pixels/lines is always discrete.
CRTs additionally impose their own limit on how sharp the picture can get horizontally. Confusingly, these are called "television lines", even though you'd think that refers to the horizontal scanlines that do discretely divide up the picture vertically. Color CRTs further limit the amount of color resolution independent of luminance resolution, and how they do that depends on what specific phosphor pattern they use, how they separate electrons from each color gun, etc.
[0] And one that's just as misleading as sample-and-hold diagrams of digital audio that make people go out and buy really expensive DACs for reproducing ultrasonics they can't hear
Let's say you're displaying a 640x480 screen on a TV. Your chroma information is sampled from an area about 2.1 pixels wide. So even if the signal is continuous, your color information is the result of sampling a boxed area centered on that pixel.
And because you don't want the wave pattern to be displayed as luma, you also take the average luma of that area. Now you have a blurred fat color pixel, but it can be positioned anywhere continuously.
Furthermore, even when using NTSC video timings, the 3.58 MHz subcarrier is specific to transmission of composite video (carrying brightness and color combined in the same signal). A DVD player for instance with a component or SVideo output produces NTSC timing but there is no subcarrier because the color signal is discrete.
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.
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.
This doesn't surprise me though. The high end Sony monitors always had trouble with flyback transformers and people that had those were quick to replace them with whatever the latest tech at the time was. The crappy 14" monitors were cockroaches that never broke. Now they get to torture zoomers with 60hz 800x600 lol.
One of the other niceties associated with crts as a result. A monitor that you could just plug in to a source and it would work, from a time when manufacturers didn’t have the ability to kneecap your setup with handshake bullshit. Now hooking up stuff is just a bit more likely to be frustrating and nonstandard setups are much more likely to simply not work without pricey extra hardware. Want to split your bluray player or playstation 5 between a an oled television and a projector? It may just work with a basic hdmi splitter, or it may not. It may only work with certain hdmi splitters. It may only work if one display is on at a time. With dvi you could’ve gotten a basic splitter and it would’ve worked guaranteed regardless, but hdcp means that hdmi splitting will give you headaches because god forbid you hook up a secondary source to record a copy of content you purchased. Despite that, it’s still easily defeated with relatively cheap hardware, making it completely and utterly pointless as well
You're comparing the best CRTs ever made with the "average" modern LCD.
The run of the mill CRT that "most people had" was dim, blurry, flickery, and bloom-y.
You're absolutely deep in nostalgia land lol
This isn't true, and hasn't been true for decades. CRTs have relatively poor display contrast due to all of the light bleed. CRT contrast in real scenes (that is, not just comparing all-black to all-white screens) can be around 100:1 or 200:1. LCDs have been better than that for a very long time. Even the cheap oens.
> zero motion blur,
Also not true. CRT phosphors have some persistence. Even the best CRT monitors back in the day had several milliseconds of persistence, depending on what you're measuring. Definitely not zero!
Modern LCD monitors have motion blur in a similar range, perhaps less if you're getting a gaming panel.
> no fixed resolutions
At the cost of some very blurry text, of course.
> You can find some modern screens that do better at certain things than others but compared with what most people have
It's almost certainly easier to find a high performing LCD than a quality CRT. A working FW900 CRT can easily fetch $1000-2000, which will buy a modern OLED display that completely blows it out of the water.
The only reason to buy a good CRT monitor is for the nostalgia/retro effects.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 ...
I am addressing some CRT enthusiasts claim or pine for near infinite contrast ratios which of course is much better than any LCD - because the beam can theoretically be completely off or full on, unlike an LCD that is a filter. But the reality is that amazing contrast ratio is only with no ambient light and very little bright material displayed. Look up on/off CR and ANSI CR. These figures of merit are also distinct from black level.
At the end of the day it’s a box with a huge glass window.
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.
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
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 - the pixels are perfectly apparent even just viewing it on a laptop screen in a browser on a video from a fairly big CRT.
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!
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.
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.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-J...
Still, I don't miss it, I never really liked it. People love to crap on LCD TVs, but honestly I'm an unapologetic fan of them. Even pretty cheap LCD TVs nowadays are really decent [1], and give a really sharp, nice picture with very few downsides. I have a MiSTer plugged into my $400 Vizio in my bedroom plugged in via HDMI, and SNES games just look so much better on it than they ever did on my CRT as a kid.
[1] Except for the speakers. Somehow built in speakers have gotten way worse than they were in the 90s, and TVs are borderline unusable without a soundbar or something.
On speakers, it's pretty simple. Physical depth is very useful for simple speaker designs, and today's screens are very thin and try not to have a bezel. It's pretty common for speakers to be downward or rear facing to make the front of the tv beautiful. This provides sound, but it's not very good. And you can't get much bass out of a small speaker anyway. A CRT tv was pretty big, adding a sizable speaker wasn't a big deal. Even early flat screens had room for an OK speaker, usually oval to use the width of the screen without adding much to the height.
Yeah, I figured it had something to do with how thin they are.
I remember with my first multi-monitor setup the desk heavily bowed in the middle from all the weight. Now I have a 3x2 monitor setup, all larger than the largest of those, supported much more easily.
So your 91 pound TV has a significantly larger screen, and still weighs less than a third. This still seems like a win to me.
Edit: Monitor prices can vary significantly based on the time and the place you buy it from. I payed about $800 less than MSRP. It was still super expensive.
I really like it; 4k is enough pixels to be pretty sharp, even for high-contrast stuff like text, as well as enough room to able to cram a bunch of stuff on screen. Also, my brain is kind of bad and as a result I am able to comprehend what I'm reading if the text is huge. I have not measured the latency on this screen yet, but FWIW I was able to beat Donkey Kong Country 2 (a pretty challenging game) with the MiSTer plugged into it.
People have told me that dedicated monitors are better though, both in refresh rate and just in general for more desktopey stuff...do you think that's true? How much more worth it do you think that is? I've debated buying a dedicated monitor, but getting something of a comparable size and resolution is pretty pricey.
I’m not sure I’d risk full-time desktop use, but in a couple of years? Maybe.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Err, you missed the most important one: knowledge to find the bad cap
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.
Seriously, I'm just throwing a ball with my kid and I notice that shit now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/...
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)
1080p, 4K, and 8K are nice to have but they're not groundbreaking the way VHS to DVD was.
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
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.
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.
Where is the problem?
After the sale has been done, you invite some strong friends (either one of them has a big van or pickup truck, or you rent one for half a day), and together you bring the devices to get rid of to the junkyard. After that, you empty crates of beer together.
I have no idea how I moved my 36" WEGA back in the 90s. I've blanked the pain out.
Fortunately my roommate at the time was very nice, and also a huge gym bro and was able to help me lug it back to my car after the semester was over.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway I've never been burned burned by tv or monitor lighting, but I've started to see less well in the dark just a few years after switching to lcds. Being under 30, maybe closer to 25 than 30. To the point that my wife asks me why I keep turning lights on at dusk in rooms where she sees perfectly with what's left of the sunlight.
Some PWM flicker might reach a frequency that is low enough to bother you, I've read about people who bought a brand new LCD TV and had to return it due to headaches, supposedly attributed to the rate of flicking by the PWM.
Some monitors are sometimes even reviewed as not employing a PWM thus being easier on the eyes.
And I definitely notice the flicker in a CRT, especially when I'm not looking straight at it (oddly). Heck, I see the flicker of LED Christmas lights.
The problem them is that your brain might be subconsciously sensitive to some specific flicker patterns, resulting in the aforementioned headaches.
And let's be honest, many CRT don't look that great, they tend to suffer from bad geometry and color aberrations.
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.
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.
These aren’t going to be cheap, though. Most LCD monitors with good brightness are midrange and up.
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.
See the screenshots on https://dosbox-staging.github.io/
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..., https://youtu.be/rHBtmPZx82A?t=1828) and these software solutions don't really fill the gap of a general-purpose CRT display.
Edit: It was actually only up to 96hz, but gaming on it didn't feel like there was too much motion blur
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.
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.
Edit: also the DigitalFoundry video referenced in the article is a much better watch imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM
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.
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.
“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”
It wasn't until OLED monitors came around that I finally felt like flat panel displays had really caught up.
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.
HD image which works with the many retro light gun games.
Has humankind stopped manufacturing CRTs entirely?
And of course, modern OLED beats the pants off of both in that regard.
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.
> presumably you have some sort of digital to analog converter box
Yes the CRT will display the output of that DAC in real-time. No additional buffering/latency after that conversion.
The Atari 2600 video hardware had no framebuffer and the code running on the CPU was racing the electron beam, updating the graphics mid-scanline in real-time while the electron beam was scanning that line on the display. That was about as raw and zero lag as it gets. The other 8 bit and 16 bit consoles also did not have framebuffers.
Another guy has commented here saying that in theory you could do the same with digital displays. In practice they buffer the input and add latency.