I remember my Sony Trinitron and Iiyama monitors fondly. RIP.
A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
31–40 of 288 posts
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I have no idea why the lowest levels on monitors are so bright. Are there models that can go really low without the PWM flicker effect kicking in (that's another problem I have with monitors, I can notice the damn cheap PWM backlight)? Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
I’ve always wished the Macbook’s lowest brightness setting was subdivided two or more times. It’s still too bright when I feel like reading in my dark room perhaps on the way to sleep. I have to use an app called Shady to cover the screen in a dimming overlay.
Have you tried using option-shift-[f1] to subdivide? or the brightness slider in the settings.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#33Better at some things than some LCDs maybe, like taking up desk space, heating the room, that sort of thing.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve always wished the Macbook’s lowest brightness setting was subdivided two or more times. It’s still too bright when I feel like reading in my dark room perhaps on the way to sleep. I have to use an app called Shady to cover the screen in a dimming overlay.
Have you tried using option-shift-[f1] to subdivide? or the brightness slider in the settings.
Interestingly, on my early 2015 13" MacBook Pro, the very lowest brightness setting seems to have no change in brightness on those last three subdivisions. Once I get down to one full "block" of brightness, option-shift-F1 moves the slider down in quarter-block increments but the screen gets no (perceptibly) dimmer until it shuts off entirely. All the other brightness settings have perceptible changes in brightness at every subdivision level.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#35I have a different problem with LCDs. I still think they're too bright. With a CRT you could set everything to white on black and you had almost no light coming out of the screen. Also brightness meant brightness and you could turn it way down for when working in dim light or darkness. Of course i'm talking about text work here. Maybe when OLED monitors become affordable we'll go back to monitors that aren't basicall…
I’d recommend adding bias lighting to your monitor. It won’t make the monitor less bright, but it’ll light up the wall behind your monitor so there’s less of a contrast between the wall and your monitor, which reduces eye strain.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#36My eyes used to hurt a lot on CRTs. A few hours every day in front of one and I could not go outside without sunglasses, anything would make my eyes hurt. Everything was fine if I went a week without using a computer. With LCDs, that's not a problem anymore, and I like it.
I guess most people can’t see the flicker on a CRT set at 60Hz, but I can. It’s especially bad in a room with fluorescent lights. First thing I’d do upon sitting down at a new computer with a CRT monitor was to bump up the refresh rate to 75Hz so I didn’t get a headache. Taking standardized tests in the early 2000s on locked down computers in fluorescent-lit test centers was torture.
most people absolutely can see the 60hz, the effect is simply subtle. if you look at a CRT from an angle it's more visible, or you can wave your hand in front of you and observe the strobe effect.
i definitely do not miss 60hz CRTs, they made me miserable.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#37I wonder if there’ll eventually be enough demand for new CRTs, and if manufacturing technology has improved enough to make a CRT that is less of an ecological menace. If cost were only partly a constraint, how good could we build a CRT today? I am still mesmerized by new display technologies / display technologies that I haven’t seen in a long time. Like the vector CRTs that exist in old Asteroids cabinets. The phosp…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...
These have almost all the advantages of a CRT, but without a lot of the downsides like bulkiness and materials usage.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#38I wonder if there’ll eventually be enough demand for new CRTs, and if manufacturing technology has improved enough to make a CRT that is less of an ecological menace. If cost were only partly a constraint, how good could we build a CRT today? I am still mesmerized by new display technologies / display technologies that I haven’t seen in a long time. Like the vector CRTs that exist in old Asteroids cabinets. The phosp…
They took up a huge amount of desk space though, which was quite inconvenient. But perhaps they could be made flatter?
The obsession with device thinness and smallness is a cancer. Engineering gets put into the wrong efforts, and cost, efficiency, and repair-ability are all damaged.
Modern lcd screens seem to be the worst of this. The screen itself is quite thin, but then the base, and the cables coming out the back mean it’s still effectively 3-7 inches “thick.” The thinness accomplishes nothing, and has made the device worse.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#39As a former epileptic, the strobing that comes with CRTs is something i’m happy to be rid of. It wasn’t something I could see so much as perceive, but it’s a feeling my body still remembers.
That said modern monitor tech still has big problems. Quantum dot has a chance of shifting the field in the next 10 years but right now any monitor effectively excels at only 2-3 of: color gamut, color accuracy, pixel density, refresh rate, response time. HDR is a whole different topic that the industry hasn’t figured out.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#40I wonder if there’ll eventually be enough demand for new CRTs, and if manufacturing technology has improved enough to make a CRT that is less of an ecological menace. If cost were only partly a constraint, how good could we build a CRT today? I am still mesmerized by new display technologies / display technologies that I haven’t seen in a long time. Like the vector CRTs that exist in old Asteroids cabinets. The phosp…
They took up a huge amount of desk space though, which was quite inconvenient. But perhaps they could be made flatter?
Not without significant consequences. The closer the electron gun is to the phosphor, the lower the incidence angle of the electron beam becomes - think of aiming a laser at a card perpendicular to the beam, and gradually rotating the card toward the parallel. The same thing happens to an electron beam hitting an acutely angled screen as to a laser dot hitting an acutely angled card. So you lose power density as the beam spreads out, which both dims the target phosphor dots (as they receive less energy) and causes adjacent dots to light dimly (as they receive energy "smeared" off the target point). To passively counteract this effect, you need to increase the curvature of the screen, which causes pincushion distortion in the resulting image. To actively counter it, you need to vary beam intensity with scan position, but that still doesn't resolve the loss of focus away from center. That can only be fixed by using a narrower beam, so that the incidence angle matters less. Whether that's feasible I don't really know - this is about where my understanding of the relevant physics and electronics plays out, unfortunately. But if it can be done at all, I would intuitively expect the required control and drive electronics to be very expensive to produce, and maybe also needing regular tuning in a way that ordinary CRTs largely avoid.