LCD displays still don't match the responsiveness of clunky CRT screens (2019) (opens in new tab)

Strictly speaking, because the signal is continuous, analog video doesn't really have horizontal resolution, does it?

And the great big thunk if you had a model that supported degaussing.

Fingers? Wasn't it the hair on the top of your hand that felt it? I might remember wrong!

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.

> The core argument for CRT's is their low latency and high refresh rate

The article is outdated (like you said) because LCD/OLED displays have long since surpassed CRTs in latency and refresh rate.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.

As someone who almost never plays video games but owns several CRTS for the sake of media I can attest to the fact that at least some of us purely own CRT's for their picture quality, or in my case the fact that I think pre 2000's 4:3 media was also kind of intended to be watched on screens like that (much in the same way I see video gamers arguing)

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.

I mean, a decidedly smaller argument (but still an argument!) for CRTs is you could put doodads and action figures on top of the box.

> and I'd much rather have the 0 calibration that a CRT could provide.

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.

Look at a Beatmania IIDX Lightening Cab or a Sound Voltex Valkyrie cab. Modern flat panels are are providing better rhythm gaming experiences than CRTs ever did.

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.

sub-6ms TVs are common and many, many gaming monitors have 1-2, maybe 3ms delay. If you only need 1080p, it doesn't even cost much.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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).

> 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

> 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.

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".

No, I don't think it is, a friend of mine got one recently and I could only just barely hear the squeal, and I suspect that in another year or two I won't hear it at all.

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.

Huh? What? Speak up!

Citation needed.

Until you consider a CRT 1/4 the screen dimensions would have weighed the same and now you don't have to lug the equivalent of a large oven on to your desk :p.

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.

I couldn't find any generally-available 55" CRT that ever sold; the largest I could find was the 40" Sony KV-40XBR800, which some quick Googling seems to indicate weighed upwards of 300lbs.

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.

Do you use the Ark for software developement? How is it? I've been trying to decide whether to take that plunge since it came out...

They haven't solved it completely but it's getting better, we're at the point now where some manufacturers like Dell are confident enough to cover burn-in under warranty for 3 years. If they can get that up to 5 years I'd probably be okay with just upgrading after that point when it starts showing burn-in.

This is a completely reasonable take, though do note that they’ve come a long way over the past decade, in both improvements to materials and active management to reduce burn-in risk. I use a newish OLED TV for gaming and it’s both glorious and I’m not actually worried about burn-in.

I’m not sure I’d risk full-time desktop use, but in a couple of years? Maybe.

My Gigabyte OLED monitor is 2 years old now and gets used for many hours on most days and shows no changes. I bugged out the time counter for a few months by putting the panel in to service mode, but still it is up to 4040 hours, or 5.5 hours per day for 2 years.

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).

That's a tradeoff like everything else in life. You're trading visual quality for longevity.

For me the pulse width modulation is just too annoying: it causes terrible headaches.

I use LG C2 OLED's and I experience eye straining that I don't on LCD monitors. I haven't had the time to look into the cause.

Yeah. PWM is used to control brighness of OLEDs. Some people are sensitive to PWM frequencies as high as 200Hz.

It's usually the exploded looking one, but not always. I have replaced a great number of blowed up RIFA film caps in ancient Apple hardware. https://www.crackedthecode.co/replacing-failed-capacitors-in...

This was during the bad caps era [0] of computing. Visual inspection and then testing with a multimeter was more than enough. The 10k volts was my bigger worry! But I was fearless for a free, large monitor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

I have a 4k@120 Hz projector and it's downright amazing on my 120" "screen" :)

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'm a big believer that if the story isn't good enough to "suck you in" then pixels isn't going to help.

There was a period of time there where a friend of mine, real estate agent, was complaining about bigass rear projection big screens which had been overtaken by modern flat panel tvs, often living in dens, rec rooms or basement man caves. And per seller's wish, bequeathed to stay there because they did not at all want to go to the effort of removing the unwieldy beasts. Included with the house along with other bulky stuff like a washer and dryer or a pool table.

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.

I've jumped from a small ish CRT directly to LCDs, but I've helped a friend move the same 16:9 huge diagonal CRT TV twice. We still reminisce about those two back breaking experiences.

> I still think lcd monitors BLIND ME

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.

Back in the day, 85 Hz was the absolute minimum that I could tolerate. Less than that and I would get serious eye strain very quickly.

Meanwhile, I like my 27" monitor and don't want anything bigger and am annoyed by the trend of bigger and bigger monitors.

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.

Less than it used to be, though. There’s several 600+ nit panels that are plenty usable in even sunny rooms.

These aren’t going to be cheap, though. Most LCD monitors with good brightness are midrange and up.

There are software solutions that exist yes, (DOSBox Staging as mentioned below, certain RetroArch shaders look very good) but neither really represent an actual product — DosBox Staging is supposedly zero config but simultaneously requires configuring a DOS environment. Replicating a shadow mask, or curved screen for example requires fiddling with shaders, not to mention aspect ratio, the size, or display resolution.

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.

DOSBox Staging has the best CRT emulation I've seen. It's subtle, but it really feels like going back to a VGA monitor.

See the screenshots on https://dosbox-staging.github.io/

Most certainly yes. I can't recall which card I had the experience with, but around that time I upgraded from a G200 to a Geforce 2 Ti of some type, whichever it was, it was almost certainly not beefy enough a RAMDAC for it, and resulted in a ~43Hz interlaced mode. It was a rare enough occasion that I needed to run with a Y resolution of > 1280 that it wasn't a huge deal, but it physically hurt when I did. The viewsonic that I'd used previously to the FW900 had a more palatable interlaced mode.

It was never the weight of them that bothered me it was the uneven distribution of the weight. 40kg isn't much until it's all shifted to one side (the front) of a cumbersome object.

Is it though? Could you really say a 200 Hz CRT is going to beat a 540 Hz LCD with backlight strobing? Has anyone actually done thorough testing to confirm it? Motion clarity is made up of a lot of parts, it can't be ballpark guessed.

See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bEKOp1GLDs

As an FPGA engineer that has developed custom monitors, I see no technical reason why an LCD panel cannot be driven with zero latency or buffering. It may just be that almost all monitors/TVs sold on the market happen to implement some type of buffering to have room for image enhancements etc. but it is not a requirement.

I don't see how you do a fair comparison. How do you even drive a CRT with a modern graphics card? Presumably you have some sort of digital to analog converter box, but wouldn't that add a touch of latency and defeat the purpose of the CRT?

Depending on the display and the input type, some CRT displays do digitize and buffer the signal so that they can do some of the filtering and decoding digitally. The amount that they buffer is generally only on the order of a few lines, though.