I remember my Sony Trinitron and Iiyama monitors fondly. RIP.
Had both, don't remember them fondly at all because I moved a lot.
These 35kg monsters were the perfect combination of unwieldy and delicate at the same time...
A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
121–130 of 288 posts
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#122> Taylor said in an interview that he's willing to pay up to $500. I 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.
I feel the same way about CRTs. Things are so much better now (to me anyway). I also feel the same way about loud keyboards. The current fetish for "clackety clack" keyboards cracks me up.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#123I 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?
At least back then we got to have desks that were bigger than a cabinet door, if only because they had to accommodate the CRT.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#124Heh, everything is better on Tubes whether it is guitar amps or gaming monitors? :-) I 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…
The CRT monitors do have a faster response time and higher refresh rate (I've seen up to 640x480@480hz But you would be sacrificing fidelity for this "competitive advantage".
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#125Ah man, memories, and not from 20 years ago, either. I bought a top-of-the-line 21" Trinitron in 1999 and after 4.99 years of the 5-year warranty something stopped working inside it so I shipped it back to Sony and they couldn't or didn't want to fix it and they didn't have any more to replace it so they shipped me a new 24" GDM-FW900 for free, which gave me years of trouble-free service. Eventually I had to get rid…
Trinitron were great monitors. Except you could never un-see the embedded wires once you noticed them.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#126> On a CRT monitor, the screen is coated in millions of phosphor dots, with one red, green, and blue dot for every individual pixel.
Not true. The number of dot triads is usually greater than the number of pixels. The distance between them is specified as the “dot pitch,” which serves as a physical resolution cap. In aperture grilles they’re continuous RGB vertical lines, with the dot pitch being the horizontal distance between them.
Framebuffer pixels don’t align exactly with the dots, and that’s one reason why CRTs are so blurry. The other reason is that the DAC analog output doesn’t transition discretely between pixels. As the refresh rate and resolution get higher, the DAC has to spend less time on each pixel, so the output becomes blurred horizontally.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#127My 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 remember when I switched from a CRT to an LCD monitor. The difference was so dramatic I remember my head aching. For me it wasn't the brightness it was the curve vs flat. Going from looking at a curved screen for years to a flat one was a massive change.
Out of curiosity, did you ever have similar issues with flat CRTs?
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#128Ah man, memories, and not from 20 years ago, either. I bought a top-of-the-line 21" Trinitron in 1999 and after 4.99 years of the 5-year warranty something stopped working inside it so I shipped it back to Sony and they couldn't or didn't want to fix it and they didn't have any more to replace it so they shipped me a new 24" GDM-FW900 for free, which gave me years of trouble-free service. Eventually I had to get rid…
Trinitron were great monitors. Except you could never un-see the embedded wires once you noticed them.
`xsetroot mod 2 2` and I rarely thought about them.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Christmas LEDs are technological abominations. They literally hurt to look at.
I don't understand what it is about some LEDs that make your eyes hurt when you look at them. Best way I can describe it is that my eyes can't focus on them and are constantly trying to.
I can't focus properly on bright blue things. There's a football stadium not far from where I live and its name alternates between red and blue in big text.
I know what it says but I cannot read it at night when it is blue.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#130CRTs were really good. They really were. I remember back in the day the HardOCP forum[0] had massive threads about people buying the FW900 in the mid-2000s. It definitely achieved legendary status. Sadly I never had a chance to use one. I remember having a 21" NEC that let me play Quake 2 / 3 at 120hz at 640x480 in the mid-late 1990s and I think I paid like $120 for it back then from one of those refurbished monitor…
In 2005, I went and bought a $400 19" LCD.
In 2006, I pawned it off on the family and bought a $65 21" Sun-branded Trinitron CRT. Used it for a couple years then sold it to a co-worker for $25.
It wasn't til 24" 1920x1200 LCDs became available that I felt like there was a wild improvement over a CRT. Yeah, the FW900 would be the same story, but you never saw those for sale locally.