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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)

#241

Post by louhike »

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…

"I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD"

It depends what you will plug on it. CRT are considered the best solution to play unmodded old consoles (up to the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox/Gamecube generation, and even the Wii) or VHS tapes. Games and consoles were made to look good on CRT, and to take advantages of specific features of these TV.

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

#242

Post by wdqwfdqwfqwf »

ashtonkem wrote: post #35
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…

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.

In the age of video conferences, this will also improve your appearance a lot. Soft, indirect light coming from behind the camera… you just build your own softbox.

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

#243

Post by mping »

gknoy wrote: post #236
coldtea wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at. Sure. But that doesn't get over the law of diminishing returns. It might not be 4K that, but would you buy 8K or 16K because "it's the monitor I'm looking at", when the only thing it does is waste CPU/GPU, resources, and battery -- for angular resolution lost to the human eye anyway?

>for angular resolution lost to the human eye anyway? Personal experience tells me that the resolution difference between 4k and lower resolutions (for the same size screens) are Very Noticeable on my 27 monitors. (I have one 4k and one 1440p.) Text is noticeably easier to read on the higher resolution monitor. I think this is primarily because we sit much closer to monitors than to TVs. (I don't think I can tell whe…

If you have poor eyesight it's even more noticeable! Personally, the higher dpi the better for me. I have a 24in 4k monitor and want to buy another but these sizes with 4k are rare

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

#244

Post by ChuckMcM »

louhike wrote: post #241
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…

"I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD" It depends what you will plug on it. CRT are considered the best solution to play unmodded old consoles (up to the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox/Gamecube generation, and even the Wii) or VHS tapes. Games and consoles were made to look good on CRT, and to take advantages of specific features of these TV.

I agree with this and it is key. Video that has been "designed to be displayed on TV" looks better than stuff that wasn't designed to be shown there. The same is true for LCDs of course.

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

#245

Post by ChuckMcM »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #222
willis936 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appli…

And to be clear, the time it takes for a phosphor dot to go from "off" to "full bright" to "off" again is its frequency response. And every dot of phosphor has to be "visited" by the electron beam on every frame. With those two numbers you can get the absolute fastest you can scan through the dots with full dynamic range.

In the CRT designs we looked at in college they typically used a fixed "dwell time" of the beam, so it was on each pixel for a fixed amount of time, and modulated drive power to get different intensities. (some phosphors are non-linear in their response so you can correct that in the drive table).

And as I was reminded in email, the beam has to visit every pixel AND get back to the top of the screen for the next frame. So on a 480i screen that is 640 x 240 per frame at 30Hz, that is 30 frames per second / 640 * 240 pixes per frame so you have just 195 uS to spend on each pixel. (less than that actually since with overscan you have 720 pixels per line but it is a very short time).

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

#247

Post by nottorp »

bee_rider wrote: post #143
smusamashah wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrolling would be painful on e-ink

This is why vim has multi-character movements. The problem here doesn't seem that different from coding over a slow network, something that's been possible for quite a while.

Coding over a slow network is the sole reason I know to use vi :)

But i'd rather not do it daily.

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

#248

Post by eru »

02020202 wrote: post #114
02020202 wrote: post #2

that was a surprisingly good read

lol, thanks for the downvotes. so i guess it was not that good of a read after all :D

Ignore downvotes, especially early downvotes. There are some knee-jerk reactions these days.

(But do keep in mind that your initial comment didn't really add anything to any conversation. So it didn't really deserve any upvotes, either.)

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

#249

Post by zargon »

nickjj wrote: post #24

CRTs 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…

I had three FW900s that I got used around 2007. One from Craigslist and two from a liquidator. The liquidator ones had taken a bit of a beating. The craigslist one was great except for a couple inch diameter splotch of tinted image in one corner. I got rid of them during a move. Now that I know more about electronics repair I think they all could have been fixed. Doh.

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

#250

Post by 0-_-0 »

liquidise wrote: post #50
simcop2387 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you've ever had the chance to see an oled monitor in person and if it reacts similarly to a CRT for you. They have a global refresh/flash instead of one that's rasterizing so it might not have the same effect and they don't have the same phosphor fade of a CRT either. I'm also curious about the LCD monitors that strobe the backlight to reduce apparent motion blur (basically they shut the backlight off…

I own a 77” LG oled that I positively love and have not noticed any strobing. I’m also no longer epileptic, so maybe that also plays a role?

It might be a much higher frequency which you're not sensitive to. My Galaxy S5 had 240 Hz. You can figure it out using a digital camera. Set the shutter speed to e.g. 1/10s, and take a picure of a bright spot displayed on a dark background while moving the camere so you get "motion blur", and count the number of times the object repeats. Multiply by 10 and you have your refresh rate.
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