Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mildly annoying but easily fixed with a touch of ambient lighting or a software tool looks f.lux. Brightness isn't nearly as bad for eye strain has contrast between the screen and ambient light.
Better even than f.lux was Nocturne ( https://github.com/strider72/blacktree-nocturne ), though it hasn’t worked in years. (Maybe a decade? I can’t even find screenshots.) Nocturne would let you invert your entire screen, then shift it to monochrome (ideally red). Obviously useless for gaming or color work, but I’ve not run across anything since that’s so great for late night text work across the whole OS.
A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
91–100 of 288 posts
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#92My 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.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And yes, the flicker is easy to spot if you just sit in front of the screen and look just above it, prefferably in a dark room. Or wave your hand in front of it. With LED lightbulbs you can also use your phone camera, move it realy close to the lamp and if you see banding, it's not good.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#94As 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, r…
The history of LCD monitors and TVs is a history of the industry increasing prices while finding new corners to cut by removing functionality that reviewers and users didn't know they needed to test for.
When users first realized that IPS was vastly superior to TN for most purposes, the industry responded by making low-quality 6-bit IPS panels, which the industry happily described as 'IPS' without disclosing that the panels can't display color gradients--and often flickered badly due to FRC. Early 6-bit panels were worse than TN in everyday use.
6-bit IPS is now essentially unavoidable in smaller, non-4K, screens.
Another fun scam the display industry concocted was releasing one production run of good quality 8-bit IPS monitors, to get positive professional reviews and user word of mouth, then making subsequent production runs under the same model number with 6-bit fraud-IPS, PVA, or even TN panels.
The low-frequency PWM backlighting scam (which probably saves all of ten cents per display) is now known well enough that reviewers will test for it, but the industry has developed other ways of preventing users from purchasing good-quality hardware at a fair price.
Dynamic contrast is a particularly insidious problem. This piece of joy from the display industry changes the backlight intensity and RGB pixel values depending on screen contents. As a result, the color tint of the display changes depending on screen contents. These constant color shifts make dynamic contrast monitors unusable for even non-professional design/photo/video work and prevents color calibration entirely. This technology is even applied, with no user option to disable it, to monitors sold as sRGB pre-calibrated and marketed towards mid-range color work. Officially, dynamic contrast is intended to save energy, but the actual intent is likely to force people who want stable colors to buy professional displays at ten times the price.
A new scam that's emerged since the start of the pandemic is color gamut restriction; it's now very difficult to get displays--especially laptop displays--that support more than 50% of the sRGB gamut. Displaying actual red is now something the industry has decided to exclusively paywall into professional panels targeted at the design market.
The problem with displays isn't technology; it's an industry that's built on the premise of ripping off consumers.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
For work, LCD is absolutely superior. Gaming - especially shooters -, however, are a totally different use-case: Refresh rate is absolutely necessary for quick reaction times, while something like readability is not as big of a factor (Games tend to use big and easy-to-read fonts). Of course, you still need some color quality to spot enemies, but it's very different from reading text for several hours.
> Refresh rate is absolutely necessary for quick reaction times This reminds me of weekend warrior bicyclists dropping $5k on components to save a few ounces of weight and go a tiny bit faster. Most people are average enough at video games (or whatever their hobby of choice is) that they’re still going to be average whether they have a CRT or an LCD (or whatever pricy pice of gear they “need”). Sure it’s fun to spend…
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this had a lot to do with low quality fluorescent light ballasts in offices. I agree that it seemed to happen a lot more with CRT, but I have experienced it with LCD too.
In 2008 or so, I ended up going to a neurologist because I was getting these brutal headaches that couldn’t be resolved by my GP. They couldn’t find anything either. And then I quit my job and no longer spent my days starting at a CRT under shitty fluorescent lights, and all the problems went away. Magic!
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#97I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD monitor it will look better than your CRT :-) But it is perfectly valid to say "What is the best experience I can get for $X?" and find that CRT solutions out perform LCD solutions at various price points.
That said, I suspect it is less about the "superiority" of the CRT than it is about the corners cut by the LCD manufacturer in terms of display fidelity. A lot of the early "high res" displays got there by sacrificing video image quality.
That those monitors aren't great for gaming is not surprising, it is also not surprising if that was the only monitor you've ever gamed on, when you saw gaming on a better image experience you would be impressed.
If you consider the amount of RAM and processing power you have to have inside the monitor at 4K resolution you start to understand why there is a thing like nVidia's G-Sync technology. That is a lot of bits to throw around. Similarly, a monitor that processes the 4k video stream down to 1080p, and has 10 or even 12 bit dynamic range on the pixels with full motion emulation might give you a better looking display than a 4K display.
So many ways to optimize for particular markets.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#98I wonder what the shipping cost of those heavy monsters are.
Me, I've used CRTs for 25 years. I have zero nostalgia for them. I don't want to ever use one again. There's nothing about them I prefer.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#99Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
what is your minimum refresh rate needed for coding?
Scrolling would be painful on e-ink