This probably explains that clip I saw recently of a Tetris competition where they were playing on CRTs.
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No thanks, nostalgia dude. I used to have two 24" CRT’s on my desktop, the type professional editors used to use. This was when the market was crashing because everyone was moving to LCD’s in droves by then. I got them super cheap, $60 or less for each.
I now have a 34" ultrawide screen that is 1/20th the weight of one of those monsters, looks incredible, draws 1/5th the power of one of them, and doesn’t bow the middle of my desk from the sheer gravity pull of the damned things. Plus I don’t break my back when I want to shift it a little.
And there’s no way they looked better than my current setup. I remember well how they looked, and it can’t come close given modern resolutions. There may be a slight reduction in gaming lag on the things, but unless you’re a professional gamer, who the hell cares? Geesh.
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That’s the other specialty use. Console and arcade games designed for CRTs often don’t run quite right on flat panels. Developers often exploited the way CRTs worked to create effects or quality that wasn’t possible otherwise or programmed things in ways that were linked or relied on how the screen refreshed or drew images. So there are even some games that don’t function on a flat panel. But that’s still about niche use. Competition and preservation. I think CRT computer monitors are a thing with competitive Super Smash Brothers, as they’re easier to come by than good CRT TVs at this point and the first game has some weird on flat panels.
That’s more to do with what @anon75430791 is on about. Tetris from an arcade machine or on the NES probably runs closer to its “original” self back in the day on a CRT in some fundemental way that’s considered important.
Kind of like the article earlier this week about the Donkey Kong guy who lost his records because they were set with emulators. Aside from save states and other things that can be used to cheat a record. Emulated retro games often run slightly faster and have different bugs that can be exploited or convey a benefit that original hardware didn’t have.
So for competitive retro gaming original equipment is used whenever possible to give a stable consistent baseline for all competitors and across all competition.
Generally speaking with retro games. And even most competitive modern games. You aren’t doing the low res, insanely high frame rate thing that likes a CRT monitor. They just don’t run properly without a CRT screen.
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My office desktop is still on a CRT, a 21" Trinitron that was very pricey back in the day. I prefer it for almost everything to LEDs (though I do most of my work nowadays on a laptop with a good resolution screen). However, I have not been able to get Windows 10 to run it at any refresh rate greater than 60hz, so that machine is still on Windows 7. I might have better luck with Linux – the machine it replaced a year ago was dual-boot Linux-Windows 2000 – but haven’t had an urgent need to try.
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I had a 19" trinitron. I hung onto until HD monitors started coming out. Until you could get a 1080p, wide screen flat panel in a larger size for a couple hundred bucks there really wasn’t enough benefit for me to give up on the giant beige box. And it was really the close enough on specs in a bigger screen without crazy balls prices that got me to switch. In a lot of ways it was technically a better screen than the TN panel I replaced it with.
Gave it to a friend who was looking to make a Mame cabinet and wanted a CRT screen, don’t think he ever finished the project but I’d like to think it’s still kicking.
Another place where CRTs want to make a comeback, is quadcopter racing. An old-school monochrome videocamera viewfinder can deliver an image with far less latency than a modern display. They’re just not being manufactured anymore, is all.
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Also CRTs are literally toxic waste. Most of which is lead, use to counteract the fact that your shooting an ionizing radiation beam at your head.
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It’s a CRT conspiracy
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I remember when electronics stores first started hanging big flatscreens on the wall that you could watch from across the street. There was never any such experience with CRT’s of any size.
CRT’s are smaller and heavier and blurrier and dimmer. They just suck. Let them go.
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But it’s not. I mean, I don’t know about vinyl per se (I can’t seem to hear much difference, really, maybe I’m not an audiophile—I just tend to use what I have, regardless), but CRTs do have use cases which you can actually measure, and I can literally see them in CRTs. Whether that matters is subjective, but you can’t characterize it as woo.
Oh, and don’t forget XY displays (aka vector displays)! Pretty different experience with those vs. LCD/LED displays for sure.
As other posters point out, these are all limited to some pretty specific use-cases, but if you have it set up already, why not just use it?
That’s “electronics.” Generally I’m in favor of keeping it all out of landfills.
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Nine out of ten cats prefer CRTs over LED screens.
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When arcade game repair places change out CRTs for flat panel displays, they sometimes use what are known as scan line generators (SLG). It’s more real than real!
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Where to begin…
Analog signal processing systems have no buffers or packetizers, so they have less lag. However, the image quality of a CRT is vastly lower than that of an LCD screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if the 1080p LCD in front of me has 10 times the resolution in lines/inch than the 1280x1024 CRT it replaced.
I currently have both a CRT and an LCD set up in my living room to play retro games, with Dr. Mario running on the Switch, and Tetris running on the NES into the CRT. When the CRT filter is enabled in the Switch settings, it looks quite like the CRT, except for the screen curvature and color impurity and geometry distortion and misconvergence and all the other faults of CRTs that we have forgotten about.
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I’m not an electronics genius, but this:
LCD technologies all use a technique known as ‘sample and hold’ which results in motion rendering at a significantly lower resolution than static imagery.
Makes no sense to me. “Sample and hold” is something analog-to-digital converters do. Pixel-addressable displays like LCDs are doing the opposite: digital-to-analog conversion. They have no reason to perform sample-and-hold as I understand it.
What’s more I never noticed a digital screen having any different character in terms of resolution in the face of rapid motion, although low-quality TV signals do.
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So I started out my time at a large aircraft manufacturer in the pacific northwest as doing desktop/dos server support during the day and packing/taping up that kind of workstation for moving in the evenings. Yeah I don’t miss CRTs much.
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LCD screens don’t have a direct path from the incoming video data to the pixel on the screen, although the newer ones have a very low latency path. But the term ‘sample-and-hold’ is wrong. It’s a digital scan converter, which feeds the pixel data to a series of row and column drivers, which send the data to the pixels.
I’m slightly familiar with the way this is done on modern active LCDs. Each pixel has a transistor, which must be addressed sequentially since they’re all strung together in rows and columns. However, there are one or two data lines per column, so the pixels don’t have to wend themselves through all of the screen before being displayed. I expect that the latency is on the order of a few milliseconds on average.
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A lot of stuff is processed locally - e.g. in a twitch shooter, your view changes as you move the mouse without any network lag being involved; so the relevant lag is just from your input, to processing the input, rendering a new frame, and displaying it, all locally on your machine.
And most online multiplayer games have complicated netcode which compromises between deciding whether, for example, your shot hit or missed your opponent locally, before the server has made its authoritative decision and sent it back. And the server’s decision tries to account for lag and compromise between honoring your computer’s prediction (it’s only fair that if you were aiming at where your target appeared on your screen, you should hit) and your opponent’s (if they dodged before they could possibly have seen you shoot, then it’s unfair if they get hit…)
That stuff is super complicated, even before you try to account for players running modified versions of the game to cheat in online play. I don’t envy the programmers who have to maintain that code and update it in response to new ways of cheating. I read a fascinating blog post which went into some of the algorithms, I think it was from Valve, but I can’t find it now.
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I assume it’s referring to the way LCDs display an image for the full duration of the frame, whereas a CRT only emits an appreciable amount of light for a fraction of a millisecond. The result is two distinct frames on the CRT, but a gradual and visible transition between them on the LCD, causing fast-moving, high-contrast objects to be perceived as being smeared across the screen.
I couldn’t stand early LCDs for that reason, but they’ve come a long way since then. The only thing I miss about my CRT now is the way it would lure guys into a false sense of security when I showed up at LAN parties with it.
Thanks. I came to say the same. Not to mention literally hot. And use a ton of energy. No thanks indeed.
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I’m pretty sure this phenomenon is the biggest reason I always preferred plasma to LCD, and still prefer film projection to digital. VR headsets are starting to intentionally strobe the display (displaying each frame briefly and black in between frames) which supposedly helps reduce motion sickness.
