Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

jmargolin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 108 posts

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#61

Post by layer8 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #55
autoexec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When LCD monitors/TVs came out they were a huge step backwards in terms of quality. They were relentlessly pushed on consumers because they were cheaper to make, cheaper to ship, and took up less space in stockrooms and on store shelves. I doubt the CRT will make a comeback. Even today's TVs are inferior to CRTs in some ways and so we're still compromising, but at least current LCD screens are so much better now than…

> Even today's TVs are inferior to CRTs in some ways Get a high-end OLED. Totally exceeds the real and imagined advantages of CRT.

Motion blur is an area where impulse displays like CRTs still excel compared to sample-and-hold displays like LCD and OLED.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#62

Post by autoexec »

xcv123 wrote: post #51
autoexec wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LCDs were garbage at just about everything. It was so much worse when the screens were new, but even today I have yet to see an LCD screen that can display an image with even a single solid color accurately. Correctly representing an image on a screen is their one job and they still fail at it. See my reply here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec#39670782 ) for a list of just some of the ways LCD scre…

> even today I have yet to see an LCD screen that can display an image with even a single solid color accurately Have you tried professional calibrated monitors? https://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/

I doubt it. They aren't even terribly expensive.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#63

Post by xcv123 »

autoexec wrote: post #62
xcv123 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even today I have yet to see an LCD screen that can display an image with even a single solid color accurately Have you tried professional calibrated monitors? https://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/

I doubt it. They aren't even terribly expensive.

Well those cost tens of thousands of dollars. But even a cheap (by comparison) Apple XDR display is properly calibrated and surpasses the color gamut of professional CRT monitors. (100% of DCI-P3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI-P3)

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#64

Post by lttlrck »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #3

> It's also a safety issue, since the Cathode voltage might be substantial. When I was a small kid, my father had a TV set repair side hustle. I was 7-8yo but I would sometimes be called to help him a bit. Once he asked me to clean a bunch of CRT tubes from substantial amount of dust. What he forgot is that he was just testing one of them and the charge wasn't properly dissipated and it did not have time to dissipate…

I was thrown across a room twatting around in the back of a TV. Many years later I still wonder if there were any sdiefeftcs.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#65

Post by LorenPechtel »

colechristensen wrote: post #4
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #3

> It's also a safety issue, since the Cathode voltage might be substantial. When I was a small kid, my father had a TV set repair side hustle. I was 7-8yo but I would sometimes be called to help him a bit. Once he asked me to clean a bunch of CRT tubes from substantial amount of dust. What he forgot is that he was just testing one of them and the charge wasn't properly dissipated and it did not have time to dissipate…

>Probably not enough to cause lasting damage unless you are extremely unlucky about where the discharge went You don't have to be that unlucky. Discharge across your heart can stop it, no problem. It is not at all difficult for that energy to route through your chest. You were lucky.

But that takes current, not merely voltage. It's very hard to do with the discharge of static energy.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#66

Post by demondemidi »

RetroTechie wrote: post #14

It's a pity such monitors aren't made any more. In the late 80s, I owned a small (12..13" or so) amber monochrome CRT monitor. Lovely phosphor color, non-flickering superb for text-based work, single composite video input. Let go when it didn't seem to matter much, and CRTs were still everywhere. But today I'd love to have such a screen. Commercially this would be a small niche market, but probably a stable one. And…

This is a pretty good emulation:

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#67

Post by EvanAnderson »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #47
autoexec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that there were CRTs that performed worse than others and that glare was an issue. CRTs could develop some weird image issues when they started failing too so for a lot of people used to old CRTs that needed repair getting a new LCD probably did seem like an upgrade. Very few people who'd been using a well functioning Sony Trinitron would have felt that way though.

There's a Sony Wega that's been sitting outside my back door for 10 years because it could only handle a toddler pouring apple juice inside it twice. Should probably make a trip to hazmat drop off one of these years. Anyway, no. The reason said toddler was able to damage it was because I replaced that sucker with an LCD TV the instant they didn't cost an arm and a leg and moved the CRT into the basement for the kids…

I'd post it on your local craigslist, etc, as a free pickup. No more Trinitron tubes are being made. It's possible it has value to somebody. No point in it going to landfill if somebody can make something good out of it (and you potentially don't have to move it).

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#68

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #67
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Sony Wega that's been sitting outside my back door for 10 years because it could only handle a toddler pouring apple juice inside it twice. Should probably make a trip to hazmat drop off one of these years. Anyway, no. The reason said toddler was able to damage it was because I replaced that sucker with an LCD TV the instant they didn't cost an arm and a leg and moved the CRT into the basement for the kids…

I'd post it on your local craigslist, etc, as a free pickup. No more Trinitron tubes are being made. It's possible it has value to somebody. No point in it going to landfill if somebody can make something good out of it (and you potentially don't have to move it).

> been sitting outside my back door for 10 years

I'm thinking you missed that part :-)

He and I talked about it today and it's probably been out there for closer to 12 years.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#69

Post by nyanpasu64 »

autoexec wrote: post #35
didntcheck wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I just had poor ones, but my memory of CRTs was inferior blacks in practice due to the much higher reflectiveness of the glass surface. So while technically it was a perfect black in terms of direct emissions, it didn't help much when I could see the room behind me reflected in that "black" patch. In a dark arcade it's fine of course, but most of my monitor use is in a well-lit room. And I still dislike gloss…

It's true that there were CRTs that performed worse than others and that glare was an issue. CRTs could develop some weird image issues when they started failing too so for a lot of people used to old CRTs that needed repair getting a new LCD probably did seem like an upgrade. Very few people who'd been using a well functioning Sony Trinitron would have felt that way though.

Sadly with CRT monitors (at least today) there's a tradeoff where at low brightness (black level) settings, dark areas of the image are underexposed, and at high brightness even pitch-black emits a bit of light. The ideal solution would be a nonlinear gamma-like curve where dark areas of an image have a higher slope than the rest (but without decreasing the slope of whites compared to mid-tones).

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#70

Post by autoexec »

xcv123 wrote: post #48
autoexec wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sales pitch was that "HD" was all anyone was supposed to care about. What we got in exchange for HD and some extra desk space was terrible color accuracy, worse contrast and grey blacks, low refresh rates, high latency/input lag, motion blur, dead/stuck pixels, poor viewing angles, fixed resolutions, backlight bleed, and DRM. We also lost the degauss button. Kids today will never know how fun that was. Some of th…

I remember the constant eye strain from years of CRT monitor use. Blurry and flickery pieces of shit. I dumped mine in the trash and never looked back. Good riddance. > it'd be nice if in 2024 we had screens at least as capable as what we had several decades ago You don't know what you're talking about. Try using a high end LCD that was manufactured in the past 10 years. The screens today are way better than the shit…

I fully admit that they have improved, but they still do not support everything CRTs did. I haven't tried that particular monitor. I'm unwilling to pay for the $1,000 monitor stand (sold separately), or the $20 proprietary Apple Polishing Cloths, but I really should stop into an apple store sometime to see in it in action for myself.
Post reply on HN