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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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...

One thing that does make me chuckle when I see "retro" setups on reddit is the use of a crappy 13"-14" monitor from 1993 surrounded by hardware from 1998 or 2002 or so.

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.

The limit was mainly due to lack of hdmi support. There are obviously some crts with hdmi but they’re fairly uncommon as display manufacturers basically abandoned crts quickly in favor of significantly lighter yet larger display tech that was much more popular with average consumers. Obviously crts can do much higher resolution over dvi or even vga. with home av stuff they abandoned those connectors as well as component early on in favor of hdmi.

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

> 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

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.

> CRTs are still likely to have ... better contrast,

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.

Most people have IPS or OLED phones with accuracy, gamut, brightness, contrast, density, and responsiveness that the best CRTs don't come close to.

You're absolutely deep in nostalgia land lol

The current oled panel with total blackness + hdr is way beyond crt now. The only drawback is that it could have burn in.

CRT can also suffer from burn in. I have seen some retro arcades with text like "insert coin" burnt in.

I mean OLED has the reverse issue, they burn out specifically on Blue and it mostly depends on the brightness/screen on time as well as heat can affect it too.

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