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)

#261

Post by m463 » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 1:41 PM 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…

Yeah but could you play duck hunt?

And in the old old days you could skip the scanning and just go draw what you wanted where you wanted with vector graphics. (as long as there weren't too many "what"s)

There were even tricks like defocusing the beam.

:)

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

#262

Post by Yizahi » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

I feel like CRTs today belong to the same nostalgic area as cast iron skillets, vinyl players and manual gearbox cars. Sure, they are good for certain things, and they excel in some of them, but really they are usually way to much hassle to use and acquire, and need too much sacrifices in other areas in which they don't excel. Articles which compare such products usually completely ignore or outright forgive any disadvantages for "nostalgic" product, something which they wouldn't even think of doing for product created in 2020, instead of several decades ago.

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

#263

Post by IshKebab » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #3

TL;DR: For gaming, because ‘input lag’. [In a CRT] the electron-to-photon exchange happens instantly. While CRTs do have some sources of lag —namely, the time spent buffering each video frame and scanning each line of the frame from top to bottom on the screen —those delays are on the order of microseconds. When you move your mouse or press a button on the keyboard, the response time is imperceptible... By contrast,…

This whole article is nonsense. A 60 Hz CRT is going to have more input lag than a 144 Hz LCD (with a decent response time), purely because of the lower frame rate.

Why is nobody calling this out?

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

#264

Post by Yizahi » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

peatmoss wrote: post #17

I 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…

Next will be hobbyists longing resurrection of plasma TVs :)

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

#265

Post by ashtonkem » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

wdqwfdqwfqwf wrote: post #242

ashtonkem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually have panel lights for this precise purpose that I turn on during meetings.

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

#266

Post by leetcrew » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

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.

at least on a 27" display, I mostly agree 2160p is overkill for games. it's hard to notice the additional sharpness over 1440p, and it breaks a lot of old games that don't support UI scaling. the performance hit isn't necessarily that bad though; at 2160p, I'm satisfied with much lower AA settings which almost splits the difference between 1440p and 2160p. if the game is really demanding, you can always drop down to 1080p with perfect scaling. it wasn't too long ago that 1080p was an acceptable resolution on a 27" display. not really an issue for me anyway. my 1080ti can do better than 60 fps in most games I play.

knowing what I know now, I'd almost rather have a higher refresh rate 1440p monitor. but now that I'm working from home, I really appreciate the higher dpi for coding. the difference in font rendering really is night and day. I can't unsee it.

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

#267

Post by ardit33 » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #104

ardit33 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the flickering at 60HZ unbearable, but at 75HZ it was barely noticeable. My sweet spot wast at 80-85HZ. I tried until 90HZ, but you had to sacrifice resolution and past 90HZ, I didn't notice much difference. I think for today's LCD/OLEDs 90-120hz should be the sweet spot, especially for gaming and motion. More than that is a waste of computing. (there are monitors that offer 144-200Hz refresh rates, but that…

An LCD with 20hz won’t give you a headache - an LCD pizel is always on (but only changes on refresh). A crt pixel is on for only a very short time, while picture results from eye’s persistence of vision (which is also why in movies CRT screens flicker)

Any kind of Motion, scrolling, movies, games... etc... refresh rate matters.

Sure, cinema movies are 24fps, and they do manage, but you are usually not 2 feet away from the screen.

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

#268

Post by nottorp » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #208

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 suspect that people leaving LCDs at their eye-burning default brightness (looks great in a store demo competing against the lighting and other monitors, but not at all for long-term work) is at least part of the reason for all the excessively low-contrast websites.

If you calibrate your LCD monitor you'll also end up with eye burning brightness as far as i know :)

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

#269

Post by boomlinde » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

bserge wrote: post #8

My 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.

This sensation may be caused by the flickering as the phosphor fades towards black before the screen is retraced. There are CRT monitors with long persistence phosphor that mitigate this, but it makes them unsuitable for motion video.

My favorite concept is that of the Tektronix vector terminals. They trace the image to a long persistence phosphor as necessary and then retain the image without retracing it by constantly bombarding the whole screen with just enough electrons for the already lit phosphor to stay lit. As a result, once the image is drawn the screen may have a little brighter black than a "normal" CRT monitor, but no flickering. I've never seen one in real life, but it seems like it would be great for ergonomics.

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

#270

Post by nezgar » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #43

thedanbob wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

I’m fine with 60 but I’m in a PAL region so all of my 90s consoles run at 50Hz. That is seriously uncomfortable to look at now and I have no idea how we all put up with it.

May not have been bad in the earlier sets as they would have used phosphors that persisted longer to compensate, but later on, manufacturing costs were driven down and the same tubes/coatings from 60hz sets were being used in 50hz sets, making the flicker much more apparent.