Damn! Too late.
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Modern LCD drivers are great at upscaling. The idea that the round scan area of the CRT is somehow better is pure hogwash. Sure latency is better but that is it.
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Ever noticed how left/right panning in a football match looks blurrier than static shots on an LCD? This is a classic example of poor motion resolution - something that simply isn’t an issue on a CRT.
I think the writer may be confusing the blur reduction “in-betweening” that LCD TVs often do which makes for the “soap opera effect.” You can disable this feature on most sets.
There’s also improved blur reduction of high refresh monitors that can also reduce any “pixel transition” blurring by stoving the backlight. It’s interestingly close to what CRTs do during vertical blank: Motion Blur Reduction (ULMB, LightBoost, etc) | Blur Busters
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Or perhaps even confusing the jitter on long pans you get on compressed digital video tweening (especially obvious on high compression satellite feeds and VCDs / SVCDs) vs analog video sources (VHS, Laserdisc) and low compression digital video (HD ATSC free-to-air TV broadcasts).
If you read TFA he he’s got a Sony GDM-FW900 which goes up to 2,304 x 1,440 (and 160Hz), which is pretty damn nice. And he was testing it with modern games, I think Control has been out less than a month.
In fact that Sony monitor probably sidesteps a lot of the downsides of CRTs that people have been bringing up, because it looks to be probably the pinnacle of CRT design, Trinitron tube, wide(ish)screen resolution, high refresh rate, all kinds of fancy self calibration, and even a USB hub in the base. Mind you, they go for about £1500 second hand, which is approximately the cost of my entire computer and the two LCD monitors I use.
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Not mentioned yet, but major:
LIGHTGUNS.
Generally only work with CRTs. Wanna play Time Crisis?
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There’s a Kickstarter for a light gun that’s intended to work with LCD TVs, so those old lightgun games might not be totally lost to history. Or you can bodge using something like a wiimote with varying degrees of complexity.
Right! I came across that kickstarter during a quick pre-BBS-post search to refresh my market knowledge - good to see, looks interesting for sure.
I’ve also used Wiimotes in the pistol carrier on supported Nintendo games, it works fine, but doesn’t help when I need that Time Crisis fix 
I still keep a Mitsubishi TV with a PS1 connected for those increasingly rare but not unheard-of sessions, but am lucky to have the space, it won’t be there forever.
Lightgun games are gone out of fashion/popularity now, and may have always been a bit niche anyway, but I wonder sometimes if that’s because the interest fell or the hardware diverged. I still like 'em, once in a while.
haha. now the statements make a bit sense; what doesnt make sense then however, is the headline (as usual) which doesnt adress this specific Sony-CRT (which was the top of the line and cost something about $2300 in 2000) but CRTs in general
Why CRTs are great for modern video games
clickbait again. fckng hate it.
The problem with CRT TV sets is actually that they aren’t disposed correctly and left near at trash bin, then scavengers see them and took away the deflection yokes and cabling for the copper and leave a mess.
Even in some recycling facilities CRT were stored in warehouses without reprocessing, because there’s no market now for leaded glass. In CRT times was reused for making new CRTs, but nowadays, barring hospitals and laboratories using radioactive materials leaded glass is rarely used.
By the way I wonder why nobody has the idea to use the leaded glass to make leaded panes and sell to people explaining that they were blocking radiations.
CRT’s are murder on the eyes. I much prefer the LCD.
Transition from CRTs to LCDs is one of those technology changes where the new tech is unquestionably all-over better than the old.
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Unless you’re pro enough playing Quake 3 arena or equivalent at e-sports level, those extra 1-2ms delay in a good LED panel won’t make a difference. I used to think the same when I played with CRTs long ago (when flat panel technology wasn’t that good), and although I wasn’t an e-sports level player, the difference was negligible compared to the advantages of good flat panels, specially if you value your eyes and space. And if we’re taking about color Fidelity or black levels, then again, that’s the least of the concerns when playing at pro level, where players mostly turn the graphics down to simplify geometry and enhance visibility. 2ms delay is nothing and your brain adapts pretty quickly to it, is not like you’re trying to predict mouse movements due to the extreme lag, not even close.
Now, early flat panels were indeed laggy and blurry. Not the case anymore.
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I think the argument overall is a bit silly (even more than, say, vinyl vs CD), but I get it. It’s like with a lot of transitions from analog to digital technology: the new thing is theoretically better, but it erases all the cultural knowledge that people used to make the old thing work for them.
Like, that “motion scaling” (“parents mode”) that’s set by default on new TVs. In principle, the worst new TV is better than any CRT, but the reality for a lot of people is that movies look much worse on the new TV. It doesn’t matter how trivial that is to fix; if people don’t have the cultural understanding of what the issue is, then it’s no different to a hardware defect. The same goes for bad upscaling algorithms, poor resolution choices, tearing-type issues and (99% of) high latency. I mean, those problems can’t always be fixed by the user, but the solutions are well-known and don’t really cost anything; they’re just not overlooked because we don’t have a universal standard for what is acceptable in these details.
Meanwhile, in deploying new display technology, the screen industry has standardised things like color rendering and gamma, which were perennial headaches with the old technology. So it’s not even a question of sloppiness, it’s just hard to foresee what details will end up mattering to people.
The Sony GDM-FW900 Flat Widescreen 24" FD Trinitron was the last CRT that I owned and it was fantastic. Bright and crisp. Heavy as a full fish tank and sucked power like a fridge. I had my PS3 connected to it and movies looked great. It was gluttonous for sure, but worth it.
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“CRTs do not operate from a fixed pixel grid in the way an LCD does - instead three ‘guns’ beam light directly onto the tube.”
This is just not true. The three guns spray electrons onto the tube. Electrons excite phosphor, causing it to glow. There are dots of the three phosphor colors painted on the inside of the tube. On the way, the electrons pass through a shadow mask (a metal grill) to block electrons that are not correctly aimed. CRTs do indeed have a native resolution corresponding to the dot geometry.
The Sony Trinitron design improves on this, painting vertical lines of phosphor instead of dots and sending electrons through a fancy aperture array instead of a shadow mask. But the horizontal resolution was still fixed.
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… as was preparing a q3a lan party.
Lead…better…
Definitely an issue. (Part of the problem of disposal in a society that has always been too used to trashing things outright instead of repair.)
The writer thinks the electron guns are “light guns” ??
