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

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

#221

Post by Nition » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 4:07 AM UTC

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.

Probably both. The CRT sound was between 15,625 and 15,734Hz which is high enough that you almost certainly lose it as you get older. It now lives only in our minds.

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

#222

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #217

ChuckMcM wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find this note[1] interesting to read. I would love to see a commercial off the shelf cathode ray tube (CRT) that could do 480 Hz, so please share with us a link if you can find it in your notes. A CRT monitor, with a refresh rate of 480 Hz, allows just 2 mS (2.083333 mS to be precise) for excitation of the phosphor. As you know, (here is a similar explainer [2]) the phosphor is excited by the arrival of el…

P22 phosphors are the ones used in all trinitron PC monitors. I get conflicting numbers on the actual decay time of these phosphors, but with a 240 fps camera the decay time is difficult to judge by flipping through frames. I’d have to make a proper set up to try and even give an estimate. I can safely say the P22 decay time is below 1 ms. Here [0] it is stated to be 100 us for G & B and up to 1 ms for red. A commonl…

Excellent data! Now you need to add the time to saturation (TTS) which gives you how long the beam has to sit on the phosphor to achieve the maximum amount of light. Different tubes do this differently from moderating the energy in the beam itself to modulating "time on spot".

What you end up with at the end of all this research is a really nice ideas of the "hard bits" around engineering a CRT for a particular application. When we looked at CRTs in depth in the EE program one of the things that came across was how so many of the things you had to vary were interconnected. The professor suggested that was why there were so many different models to choose from, even when they were all the same form factor.

Thanks for the links too, I've added the bunkerofdoom one to my collection.

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

#223

Post by jsrcout » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

IronWolve wrote: post #207

I was using my 24 inch sun monitor for a long long time when LCD's came out, wouldnt want to downgrade to a 17 or 19. Also It was running at 1920x1200, going to a 4:3 lcd with smaller display seemed wrong. Funny, I bought first 24inch LCD, a dell, color matched, and they gave me a free pc. Put a nvidia 8800GT in and gamed for quiet a while, it came with a pentium D 820, after a few years put a 960 in it. Think I got…

Some of the Sun monitors were incredible, back in the day. I remember using a GIS system on, IIRC, a Sun 4 workstation with Sony Trinitron monitor. Just razor sharp and fast as hell.

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

#224

Post by jsrcout » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

vidanay wrote: post #125

jeffbee wrote: post #112

Ah 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.

> Except you could never un-see the embedded wires once you noticed them.

So true. Seeing those wires for the first time was a major WTH moment. And you could sort of forget to notice them for a while, but they always came back.

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

#225

Post by lostgame » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 4:37 AM UTC

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...…

This noise bothers me intensely, has since I was about 4 years old; and still very much does. (31 atm)

It's why I don't keep any iMac G3 units around any more, even though they are gorgeous art pieces. The iMac G4 obviously does not emit such a similar tone, being LCD-based. :)

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

#226

Post by robomartin » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

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…

> f you consider the amount of RAM and processing power you have to have inside the monitor at 4K resolution

You need nearly zero memory inside an LCD monitor of any resolution. Technically all you need is 256 bytes for EDID and that’s it. You can drive the panel directly from the graphics card from DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, often with a single format conversion chip.

In fact, Apple’s HD Cinema Displays were built using LG panels with a DVI interface built right into them (which isn’t the norm).

Source: I designed custom FPGA-based LCD panel interfaces for many years.

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

#227

Post by imhoguy » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

rthomas6 wrote: post #205

imhoguy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still waiting for a decent size e-ink screen (22"+) without backlight which should be enough for low-FPS stuff like backend coding, slack, terminal and text content web pages. Existing solutions are still too small - Dasung and Onyx Boox are 13.3" with HDMI.

Syntax highlighting is too important to me to use this.

It is only color coding one may miss, although it is going to change with faster color eink panels. There is a still a lot of other ways to mark syntax: font, borders, underlines, cursive, grascale tones, background inversion.

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

#228

Post by jaimex2 » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

elric wrote: post #21

I remember reading something by John Carmack back in the early Oculus days, where he was basically saying he wished he could use small CRTs in VR headsets for many of the same reasons the article highlights.

What stopped him?

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

#229

Post by cozzyd » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 5:25 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #216

hvis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this? https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/age-related-heari... https://playback.fm/hearing-test and "gradual loss of sensitivity to higher frequencies with age is considered normal" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range )

I wish there was audiophile equipment for older people that took that into account. Headphones and speakers, say, that only go to 14 KHz instead of 20 KHz. By not needing to design for as wide a frequency range, they should be able to either make them less expensive, or more accurate, or both.

I doubt most headphones can reproduce sounds above 14 kHz.

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

#230

Post by asdff » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #38

ptx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the base has to have depth or else the monitor will fall over. you can also pop the screen off from the base and do whatever you want with the loose screen. at least for mine. wires also typically are inserted parallel with the screen so no trobule there.