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A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

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Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#161

Post by formerly_proven »

bserge wrote: post #9
nottorp wrote: post #4

I 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…

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...

Most better monitors and everything targeted at office use does not use PWM for backlight brightness control.

LCDs have poor blacks because they're a filter put in front of a lamp, so to render black, they have to try and block as much light as possible, but our visual perception is logarithmic and adaptive, making them look quite bad. The workaround is to add bias light behind the monitor; it quite literally provides a bias for the eye to keep it inside a certain adaption range, which reduces the perceived poorness of dark tones. (It also is more ergonomic.).

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#162

Post by quesera »

tuxracer wrote: post #139

Please don't let CRTs come back in style. After a while they tend to develop this headache inducing high pitched tone almost akin to tinnitus that is emitted constantly while they're powered on. It seems to be so high pitched most people cannot hear it at all but if you're one of the lucky few who can it can actually be really disruptive. Unfortunately it's also often loud enough to hear through doors, walls, etc...…

That was the flyback transformer. I could hear them too, but it never really bothered me much.

It was useful ability if you were responsible for closing up a computer lab at night.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#163

Post by ImaCake »

titanomachy wrote: post #144
tuxracer wrote: post #139

Please don't let CRTs come back in style. After a while they tend to develop this headache inducing high pitched tone almost akin to tinnitus that is emitted constantly while they're powered on. It seems to be so high pitched most people cannot hear it at all but if you're one of the lucky few who can it can actually be really disruptive. Unfortunately it's also often loud enough to hear through doors, walls, etc...…

When I was a kid I would always hunt down and turn off CRTs left on anywhere in the house since the sound annoyed me so much. Either my hearing has gotten worse or all the CRTs are gone now... probably both.

I read somewhere that you lose high pitch hearing first, which is why the young could hear the CRTs when the elderly could not. I tried to google for this (actually DDG) but all I got was SEO spam.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#164

Post by formerly_proven »

therealidiot wrote: post #129
bserge wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I can't focus properly on bright blue things.

No one can, for a bunch of reasons. The eye is mostly corrected for red-green wavelengths; the eye is a lot less sensitive to blue light; there are far fewer receptors for blue light, which reduces spatial resolution.

Monochromatic blue displays are an extreme UI antipattern and should not be used for anything. If combined with high luminosity, they become essentially unreadable unless close up. E.g. ultra-blue seven segment LED displays. VFDs can suffer from this, but this is also the reason why many of them use green-blue phosphors, and not blue phosphor (which would be possible).

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#166

Post by formerly_proven »

nickjj wrote: post #82
paulcole wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This reminds me of weekend warrior bicyclists dropping $5k on components to save a few ounces of weight and go a tiny bit faster. I think anyone who is a step up from a casual gamer would recognize the difference between 60hz and 120hz if they were somewhat familiar with a game. Especially games that required tracking your opponent with a mouse, such as aiming a hit scan weapon like a lightning gun where your goal…

60 vs 120 Hz is obvious enough that you don't even need a shooter to notice the big difference. The mouse cursor is enough, scrolling is enough, dragging windows around is enough, scrolling in an RTS is very obvious etc.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#167

Post by jiggawatts »

skybrian wrote: post #120
ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

Heh, 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…

It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.

I've had 4K monitors on both my work laptop, my PC, and my TV for as long as that was possible. Nearly 7 years.

This has cost me thousands and thousands of dollars.

My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at. I don't sit next to the case staring at RGB LEDs. I can't "experience" a processor in any aspect except speed, and that's been perfectly acceptable for a decade.

But I'll stare at the screen for 8 hours a day for work, and an additional few hours at home.

Spending money on improving the image quality of something I look at for 10+ hours a day is absolutely worthwhile!

This is also the advice I give people: Buy a bigger, better monitor than you planned, and make sacrifices elsewhere. A larger 4K monitor is a very visible upgrade in the literal sense versus, say, a few hundred more megahertz on the processor.

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#168

Post by fock »

skybrian wrote: post #120
ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

Heh, 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…

It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.

yeees. Just look at the crappy Netflix 4k, which is less bandwith than a 1080p Bluray (like 30% less iirc). Now, obviously, it's a better codec, but h265/VP-9 (or whatever they use) won't give you a > 400% increased efficiency over h264. So, people are buying new Fire-TVs/TVs/GPUs all so that they can enjoy a 4k artifact show.

Meanwhile I've fallen under the hedonic treadmill and bought a TV. Sitting 3m from this 49inch screen, I play Netflix in 540p (on Linux) – and it totally looks fine. Well...

But, truth be told: I'm typing this on a 32inch 4K monitor. For work it's gorgeous (yet some people still buy FHD...).

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#169

Post by badsectoracula »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #160
badsectoracula wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD monitor it will look better than your CRT :-) Since you bring up the refresh rate, then i'd assume that you include motion in the "look better" - in which case, i can easily respond with "no, it absolutely does not". I have a CRT next to me which can do 120Hz at 640x480 (which is a low resolution but the CRT is also very small and i use it on a mid-…

My experience is the opposite, a high refresh rate LCD is far more pleasant than my old CRT ever was.

What do you mean with "far more pleasant"? If it is about eye strain, your old CRT was probably either bad or you had it at a very low refresh rate. But a bad modern flat panel will have a lot of its own issues too (e.g. a very cheap Fujitsu monitor i bought some time ago had colors so washed up and awful, it was straining just to look at a static image on it).

If it is something else... i'm not sure what that would be. Can you elaborate?

Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

#170

Post by wazoox »

skybrian wrote: post #120
ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

Heh, 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…

It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.

Even worse, you can't see in 4K. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM
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