[HN Gopher] LCD displays still don't match the responsiveness of...
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LCD displays still don't match the responsiveness of clunky CRT
screens (2019)
Author : hestefisk
Score : 77 points
Date : 2024-04-16 09:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| zactato wrote:
| I recall seeing this photo back in the 90s and it seemed like the
| pinnacle of display technology
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/...
| birracerveza wrote:
| It was.
| gtk40 wrote:
| I used to spend so much time on geek.com and I completely
| forgot about the website!
| jsheard wrote:
| This article is a few years old, so the mention of OLED monitors
| is behind the times. They're available in desktop sizes (27-32")
| for around $1000 now, still expensive compared to LCDs, but
| getting more accessible.
|
| https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/oled
| TylerE wrote:
| I'd never own a OLED for desktop use due to burn in.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| 3 years isn't nearly enough. My average screen lasts about
| a decade.
| kube-system wrote:
| Your LCD is out of warranty by then too.
| riversflow wrote:
| but no burn in on my LCD.
| o11c wrote:
| Warranties are irrelevant if the LCDs don't _actually_
| fail though.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| One man's "active management" is another's "blatantly
| obvious pulsing". My barely a year old OLED TV reduces
| brightness so aggressive it makes bright white menus look
| lime they have an animated background. They don't, it's
| just the white dripping to almost gray after a second or
| two as the whole display dims.
|
| 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.
| neRok wrote:
| 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).
| smrtinsert wrote:
| I tried the Samsung OLED, a recent one. It was absolutely
| burning my eyes. Headache, eye strain, the whole nine yards.
| Switched back to my ancient Samsung LCD and it all went away.
| My working theory was something about PWM modulation in the
| backlighting. Either way I don't need it.
| NikkiA wrote:
| I had one of them, it was a great monitor except for 3 things, 1:
| it's interlaced mode was literally painful, and it was all I
| could ever get at higher than 1080p, 2: it weighed 50kg, and
| partially related to 2, 3: it was so deep a tube that the only
| place it would go on my desk was on a corner section where it
| made the whole thing sag badly.
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Was this 1080 mode a limitation of your graphics card? I drove
| mine with a Matrox G400 Max (360MHz RAMDAC) and it was good for
| 1440p.
| voidwtf wrote:
| I had the benefit of growing up on the during the transition
| period from CRT to LCD. I had a friend who got an awesome Sony
| Trinitron WEGA and had the opportunity to play PS1 and PS2 games
| on it. I struggle to see the appeal of the CRT for modern day
| anything. For games designed on a CRT, the allure is obvious.
| Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT because
| of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the graphics were
| designed around. The games weren't meant to look like pixelated
| blocks with clearly defined edges like they do on a modern
| screen, and they didn't look that way on a CRT.
|
| 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.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and
| especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water.
|
| 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.
| foresto wrote:
| 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).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
| LocalH wrote:
| Rhythm gaming is a big one for me. All other display devices
| commonly used for gaming have at least a _small_ amount of lag
| between input and final display. I have a midrange LED set that
| gives me something like 12ms lag calibration when I play Rock
| Band 3 on it. It 's a very slight difference, but it _is_
| noticeable, and I 'd much rather have the 0 calibration that a
| CRT could provide.
| timw4mail wrote:
| 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.
| tverbeure wrote:
| This is just not true.
|
| 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.)
| comex wrote:
| > 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.
| sjm wrote:
| CRTs far exceed 60Hz though. This FW900 for example goes up
| to 160Hz.
| toast0 wrote:
| I agree that Rockband almost certainly does render a whole
| frame before scanout. So, yes, there's necessary latency
| there between the input processing and game logic and
| everything and the output. Higher refresh mitigates that,
| but that's not really an option on the kinds of gaming
| machines Rockband runs on; hopefully it's all locked at
| 60Hz, because that's what TVs run on (unless maybe ew PAL,
| but ew), and all the machines have a 240p mode, if they're
| not cool enough to run 480p or better.
|
| 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.
| LocalH wrote:
| Rock Band's core game logic is fairly well decoupled from
| frame rate for the most part, actually. I usually run
| Rock Band 3 (with a fan mod called RB3 Deluxe installed)
| on an emulated PS3 at 75Hz and it runs perfectly. The
| only real issue is certain venue post processing effects
| behave weirdly at high frame rates (like the handheld
| camera shake effect) but with the aforementioned mod we
| can disable that.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| An analog CRT is as close to zero latency as the source (in
| this example, Rock Band 3) can provide[0].
|
| 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.
| LocalH wrote:
| The game is pretty good about taking things like that into
| account. Even aside from that, a CRT generally adds no lag
| of its own, displaying the scanline as soon as it begins
| receiving it, assuming a stable set of sync pulses.
|
| 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.
| gamepsys wrote:
| 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.
| mbilker wrote:
| I can definitely agree on this point. Same for the newer
| Taiko versions utilizing a 120 Hz panel as well.
|
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The core argument for CRT's is their low latency and high
| refresh rate. Nobody is using a CRT for picture quality
| (outside the aforementioned blurred retro gaming look)
|
| 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.
| jonhohle wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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).
| tverbeure wrote:
| It makes little sense to buffer a full frame before up
| scaling. Why would you do that? It's a total waste of DRAM
| bandwidth too.
|
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What you're describing is fully a product of the display
| controller architecture, not the digital signal. You can
| "chase the beam" with HDMI/DVI just as well (or better) as
| you can with analog. There's no need to buffer the whole
| screen and be even one frame latent.
|
| 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.
| mabster wrote:
| I was doing the "chase the beam" approach, but never got
| it off the ground (home project, mostly curiosity). But
| always on the back of my mind was: even if you're doing
| everything in low latency HDMI signals, there's no
| guarantee that the display isn't still buffering it, even
| if you have "game mode" on on your TV.
| WHYLEE1991 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| kmacleod wrote:
| I worked for a video titling company in the 80s during their
| transition from Analog titling to Digital titling. One key
| thing I learned there is that CRTs have about three times the
| horizontal resolution folks give them credit for. Most folks
| measure horizontal resolution in how many clear pixels you can
| go from light to dark and back. What they don't account for is
| the pixel-shift, you can position those start and end
| transitions at three or more times that 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.
| grishka wrote:
| Strictly speaking, because the signal is continuous, analog
| video doesn't really have horizontal resolution, does it?
| kmacleod wrote:
| Exactly. Black and white TVs worked very much like
| oscilloscopes and had almost no definition of horizontal
| resolution. Very few color broadcast TVs were made with
| three separate beams and three separate color filters (like
| rear-view projectors). Your typical color TV effectively
| created "pixels" by their use of shadow masks and three
| separate beams. The analog signal, however, could still be
| in transition along the entire horizontal sweep. The
| biggest difference between high-end studio monitors and
| your average TV was how packed the shadow mask was.
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| I don't think that's quite how it worked.
|
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I don't think that's quite how it worked.
|
| 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.
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| My objection is:
|
| > 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.
| cesarb wrote:
| AFAIK, you're still limited by the bandwidth of your analog
| signal. If you tried to treat it as if it had unlimited
| horizontal resolution, you'd use so much bandwidth that
| you'd end up stomping over the color subcarrier (and
| probably the audio subcarrier too).
| jgalt212 wrote:
| No, I think it's the other way. The horizontal lines are
| digital, the meridians are continuous.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Think about it this way: lines are discrete, because they
| are separated by an HSYNC pulse that is used to fly back
| the electron beam from right to left. But the 'pixels'
| within a horizontal line are continuous: there is nothing
| in the video signal that delineates them.
|
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| No, resolution is not a digital concept. _Pixels_ are a
| digital concept[0], but in an analog signal there is still
| a limit on how much frequency content you can resolve.
|
| 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
| Dwedit wrote:
| It has the NTSC Subcarrier of ~3.58Mhz, and that limits
| color resolution.
|
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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.
| buran77 wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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.
| Yeul wrote:
| CRT versus modern screens is a lot like vinyl versus FLAC.
| Hipsters gonna hipster.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Eh... I don't understand current fashion for "pixelart"
| games... It was done on purpose in the past to look good on CRT
| but nowadays it just looks terrible...
| theodric wrote:
| Here's my EUR0.02:
|
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT
| because of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the
| graphics were designed around
|
| 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.
| epcoa wrote:
| > 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.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| That's all nice, but you can't draw on an LCD screen with a
| whiteboard marker.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT
| because of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the
| graphics were designed around. The games weren't meant to look
| like pixelated blocks with clearly defined edges like they do
| on a modern screen, and they didn't look that way on a CRT.
|
| 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.
| TheCleric wrote:
| My back hurts just thinking about picking up my Trinitron. Those
| things felt like they were made out of lead.
| jsheard wrote:
| They kind of were, there was a substantial amount of lead mixed
| into the glass for radiation shielding. Bigger ones had several
| kilograms of lead in them IIRC.
| convolvatron wrote:
| its also hard to image now exactly how much space they take up.
| even when you put it back in the corner of an angled desk, it
| still reaches most of the way towards the front
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I worked at a high end stereo store in the 90's. When new
| models of things came out, sometimes the older ones would get
| sold (or given) to employees as a perk.
|
| 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I saw one for free on Craigslist, but I happily paid two guys
| $100 to come and help me lift that beast. Even with three of us
| it was a job.
|
| I have no idea how I moved my 36" WEGA back in the 90s. I've
| blanked the pain out.
| tombert wrote:
| I still kind of have PTSD from having to lug my old RCA TV up
| four flights of stairs in my dorm in college. I'm not in
| spectacular shape now, but I was a scrawny guy who never
| exercised when I was 19, and so I was sore for like a week
| after that endeavor.
|
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| physicsguy wrote:
| My overwhelming memory of CRT monitors is struggling to see what
| was on the screen when there's daylight shining on them at all.
| Computer rooms at school and university always used to be dark
| caves (even more so than they are now) because they had to have
| heavy blinds so that you could do anything...
| kiwijamo wrote:
| That's still an issue with LCD as well though.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I stupidly gave myself a hernia by trying to lift one of the big
| CRT widescreen TVs in the late 90s. It was a really nice picture
| though, PAL was decent resolution for back in the day.
|
| 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)
| bombcar wrote:
| 4K is nice, but even that it is a bit much at "TV" sizes; I
| swear the main reason it sells so well is that the line of TVs
| at Best Buy or Walmart is right next to you, so you're a few
| inches away from the pixels.
| yardie wrote:
| Hacker tip:
|
| 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.
| jve wrote:
| > 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
| yardie wrote:
| 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
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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...
| mcbuilder wrote:
| I'm glad to have a 19in CRT nearby my desk, I do enjoy the retro
| vibes, but the big disadvantage has gotta be their weight and
| heft. There is no way the average consumer wants a FW900 taking
| up their entire desk. It would be cool if the CRT industry didn't
| completely die and instead it existed as a niche product.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It weighs 40 kilos.
|
| 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.
| deadlydose wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The big advantage for these was the flatness of the screen,
| created by what seemed to be inches of glass to refract the curve
| straight.
|
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| You know, zero-latency is cool, but I gotta admit that I do not
| miss cathode ray tube TVs. They are really heavy, the picture was
| fuzzy, I never personally liked the scanlines, they're bulky, and
| I never liked that high pitch squeal that they make. I'll confess
| a little nostalgia for the CRTs sometimes, my first TV was a
| hand-me-down RCA from my parents and that served as my only TV
| until I was 20, but the second that 1080p (or better) LCD TVs got
| cheap, I never looked back.
|
| 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.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| They spray x-rays into anyone behind them too. The leased glass
| only protects the immediate user.
| morsch wrote:
| If you were around when CRTs were popular, the high pitched
| squeal is probably not much of an issue for you anymore :P
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| Most people were playing SNES via composite video or RF
| out. MiSTER is going to be using RGB. RGB cables for SNES
| didn't really happen in the US (YPbPr component video
| seemed to come out with DVDs, and there weren't
| contemporaneous cables for that for SNES, although they
| exist now), but S-Video was available and is much better
| than composite.
|
| 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.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Huh? What? Speak up!
| gamepsys wrote:
| My current main display (Odyssey Ark) weighs 91 pounds, so I
| think I'm at the point where "small size" is not longer a
| benefit of modern displays
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think there's a human sense of global experience. I do miss
| some stuff that, by all measures, is bad. I still miss them,
| they make for a strange blend on noise, curves, sensations and
| limitations. It's another plane of judgement entirely, one that
| is a bit less reductionist.
| axegon_ wrote:
| For the longest time I thought I was having survivorship bias +
| nostalgia. Back in the late 90's my dad coughed up a lot of money
| on then the second family computer with all sorts of peripherals
| and accessories. One of which being a 17 inch Sony Trinitron CRT.
| I had this monitor until the second half of the 2000's when I
| went to study abroad. None of the computers and monitors I had in
| the future felt like a downgrade compared to the Trinitron, even
| till this day, even with a few several high end oled monitors at
| home. Seems it wasn't survivorship/nostalgia...
| mbreese wrote:
| (2019)
|
| 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.
| Yeul wrote:
| CRTs were ridiculously tiny. I wouldn't want to play games on
| anything smaller than 55 inches.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| 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.
| sjm wrote:
| CRTs are still unmatched for gaming. Aside from input lag, they
| don't degrade low resolutions the same way that LCDs do. For the
| longest time I stuck with a 19" flatscreen 4:3 CRT that did 170Hz
| at 800x600, an absolute beast. As a kid I'd lug it around to
| QuakeWorld and Counter-Strike LAN tournaments.
|
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You kinda forget how low latency feels like until you relive it
| and thinks 'oh ye this is how it should feel like'. Like the
| reaponsiveness of a PS/2 keyboard.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| A lot of people are saying there are advantages to visual quality
| for CRT monitors. I don't disagree, but most what I remember from
| my gaming obsessed childhood are strong headaches from prolonged
| sessions, which disappeared after move to CRT.
|
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| Interesting, because I still think lcd monitors BLIND ME a lot
| more than the old CRTs.
|
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| They're always turned down as much as I can without losing
| contrast and I do have light in my office.
|
| 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.
| nutshell89 wrote:
| Unrelated to anything in the article, but I'm curious as to why
| there haven't been OLED or LCD panels manufactured specifically
| for general-purpose CRT emulation in hardware + software (via
| curved panels, artifacts unique to CRTs such as pixel blurring,
| phosphor persistence, scanlines, etc) for retro video games, film
| preservation, and artwork.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Filters for scanlines, blur, etc have existed for years. No
| need to bake that into the panel - it can be done in software
| easily.
| p1mrx wrote:
| 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/
| dekhn wrote:
| Oh hell no. We celebrated when I finally got my 36"(?) Sony
| Triniton WEGA out of the house. It was so heavy it took 2 strong
| people to move. It was enormous and hot. The image quality was
| great, but quickly eclipsed by LCDs. But the weight. It just made
| it impossible to move.
| moudis wrote:
| I had the fortune of owning a Dell P1110 (rebranded Sony
| Trinitron CPD-E500) many years ago, bought quite cheaply at a
| surplus auction while in college. 21", flat glass, and weighed in
| right at 70lbs. Lugged it to a few LAN parties here and there.
|
| It wasn't until OLED monitors came around that I finally felt
| like flat panel displays had really caught up.
| M95D wrote:
| I still have my Dell P1130. I too lugged it to a LAN party.
| Only once. It bent the table and I still have back pains after
| 20 years.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I'm sorry but I really don't believe a 540 Hz or even 360 Hz LCD
| is going to be beaten in total end-to-end latency by any kind of
| CRT. I've yet to see any real world tests to the contrary.
|
| And of course, modern OLED beats the pants off of both in that
| regard.
| xcv123 wrote:
| CRT has zero input lag. It is pure analog electronics with no
| buffering. "Racing the beam". Digital buffered displays are
| down to a few milliseconds but cannot ever be as low as CRT.
| imtringued wrote:
| Tell that to people having problems with screen tearing.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Yep. CRT has zero input lag from signal to phosphor (maybe
| a few nanoseconds due to speed of electronics and the
| electron beam itself) but it will take a few milliseconds
| to scan an entire frame.
|
| 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.
| maxrecursion wrote:
| I play retro games regularly, and as good as emulation is, there
| are tons of old fast paced games that are unplayable for me on
| modern TVs due to input lag.
|
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| FWIW, these days display lag/input lag on good gaming
| monitors/TVs is well under 15ms, which is the point at which
| some people can notice it. ("Good" is anything <25ms.)
| https://displaylag.com/display-database/
| dtgriscom wrote:
| For a while I owned a Tempest arcade game. It had a CRT, but
| driven as a color vector display. Beautiful lines, rapid updates.
| Very cool.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game)
| RajT88 wrote:
| One of the gems of my retro collection is my 36" Sony WEGA which
| has a native 720p resolution.
|
| HD image which works with the many retro light gun games.
| g42gregory wrote:
| LCDs still can not change resolution away from native max,
| without screen getting blurred. As I recall, LCDs started to get
| wide adoption about 2004 or so. It has been only 20 yrs. Why
| can't they make them to be able to run on resolutions other than
| native? CRT could do that with no problems.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| I held on to the last Sony XBR Trinitron, the KD-34XBR970, for an
| unreasonable amount of time because the picture was so lively.
| Eventually sold it to a retro gamer, who was thrilled, and so was
| I.
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