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The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

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Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#71
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LOL the $1k stand. It wasn't until I bought a $200 stand when I realized how they can justify $1k for something that works properly.

These days I'm using a Chinese "professional 4k" monitor that covers 98% of DCI-P3 color gamut and the entire monitor costs less than the Apple stand. Can't compare this to any CRT I used in the 90s.

https://www.innocnmonitor.com/products-category/4k-professio...

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#72

> 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 got zapped once as a kid. My grandfather's TV, I was pulling the tubes to take them to the testing machine. Fairly small screen but I knew it probably had some residual charge that I most definitely didn't want to come into contact with. The layout was such that I could pull the tubes while staying far away from it. It never occurred to me that safety would require keeping him from looking on in curiosity and bumpi…

> My understanding is that tasers are AC, thus involuntary movements will be back and forth rather than just in one direction.

Tasers AC output is at low frequency but still significantly faster than human muscles can move, if you watch any video of a tase you'll see it causes the victim's muscles to seize up and not oscillate.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#73
post #61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

OLED can easily be implemented with black frame insertion. You could even do it yourself at from the GPU/software level given a sufficiently high refresh rate if the monitor units are still too stupid to provide it as a working option. I'm more worried about the terrible spectrum of light they emit as with seemingly all LED tech, and the viewing angle.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#74

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…

I turned on a crt recently and it was so noisy I could hear it outside, through the walls. My cat ran and hid. Did we really all collectively just tolerate that noise back then, or do these things decay over time somehow and get louder?

CRTs have some slight noise when you provide certain video signals, as others said it will usually be quieter than a CPU fan. Many LCDs will make the same kinds of sounds.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#75
post #48

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…

You don't know what you're talking about.

LCDs were completely unusable until the mid 2000s, even then they were all 60Hz/75Hz with no black frame insertion, which made any animation what so ever, even text scrolling blurred to crap. It took me years to figure out that this was why I suddenly couldn't read any text scrolling on logs on terminals.

Yes, CRTs, flicker, it's a feature, it prevents motion blur. You're meant to put them up to 85Hz or so and flicker becomes less of an issue. There are two different types of flicker, the flicker fusion threshold, which is when humans still see flicker when looking directly at a flickering light source, and just general perceptible flicker, which can be seen easier at the corner of your eyes and in my experience goes up to 100s of Hz. The latter is an issue for all CRTs, and basically all LCDs up until 2015 or so when they started pushing flicker free. Before 2015, basically all LCDs flickered, typically between 100Hz-300Hz, and it was always visible, and also left artifacts on the screen during image panning (such as in a 3D game or when scrolling a map).

Yes, low end CRTs had lots of blur but by the late 90s any mid ranged model had somewhat acceptable levels of blur, and moreover much less blur than you get the moment an image pans across an LCD. As an experiment, if you simply move an image across the screen at 15pixels per frame on a 60Hz LCD, it will already be blured to hell.

Those Apple monitors have terrible grainy coating which some monitors choose to have for some reason. There's no tradeoff there, since there are plenty of LCDs without it. They also have bad viewing angles like all IPS contrary to marketing. The only advantage they have is high pixel density, and high color gamut which may or may not be functional or desirable but this is another can of worms. Wide gamut on a monitor is not just automatically good.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#76
post #75
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't know what you're talking about. LCDs were completely unusable until the mid 2000s, even then they were all 60Hz/75Hz with no black frame insertion, which made any animation what so ever, even text scrolling blurred to crap. It took me years to figure out that this was why I suddenly couldn't read any text scrolling on logs on terminals. Yes, CRTs, flicker, it's a feature, it prevents motion blur. You're mea…

> You don't know what you're talking about.

I used CRT for years until 2024 and I've lost count of how many Dell Ultrasharp and Apple LCD screens I've owned.

> LCDs were completely unusable until the mid 2000s

We're talking about monitors today. 2024. I switched to LCD in the mid 2000's when they became usable.

> Yes, CRTs, flicker, it's a feature, it prevents motion blur. You're meant to put them up to 85Hz or so and flicker becomes less of an issue.

It's a feature that I hated and caused a lot of pain. Maximum mine could do was 75 Hz. An 85 Hz screen was very expensive back then. And the flicker would still be crap even at 85 Hz.

> As an experiment, if you simply move an image across the screen at 15pixels per frame on a 60Hz LCD, it will already be blurred to hell.

Talking about the blurry low resolution. LCD is sharp. Not talking about pixel response time. We have 144hz+ LCD screens now. There were no 4k CRT displays BTW. Pixel response time on gaming LCDs is 1ms nowadays.

> Those Apple monitors have terrible grainy coating

Apple displays are glossy, not matte. The matte coating is optional on external XDR displays. Typing this comment now on my Apple 16" XDR display which is glossy, like a CRT. No grainy matte coating on this screen.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#77

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…

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…

CRT black levels compared to LCD are night and day. Even a game like Genshin Impact (shit game I know, but it has good graphics) looks unimaginably better on CRT than any LCD, due to the high contrast as a consequence of the low black level. CRTs generally have less reflection than a glossy LCD due to some different kind of coating or glass treatment hard to find info on it). Last summer I used a CRT that is 99% dead (99% brightness / contrast) with the windows open every day letting sun in on a ~90 degree angle, and there was never an issue, nor with cheaper ones.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#78
post #76
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know what you're talking about. LCDs were completely unusable until the mid 2000s, even then they were all 60Hz/75Hz with no black frame insertion, which made any animation what so ever, even text scrolling blurred to crap. It took me years to figure out that this was why I suddenly couldn't read any text scrolling on logs on terminals. Yes, CRTs, flicker, it's a feature, it prevents motion blur. You're mea…

> You don't know what you're talking about. I used CRT for years until 2024 and I've lost count of how many Dell Ultrasharp and Apple LCD screens I've owned. > LCDs were completely unusable until the mid 2000s We're talking about monitors today. 2024. I switched to LCD in the mid 2000's when they became usable. > Yes, CRTs, flicker, it's a feature, it prevents motion blur. You're meant to put them up to 85Hz or so an…

When 85Hz CRTs were expensive, so were LCDs. CRTs were basically free by the time LCDs became remotely usable. There was basically no reason to ever buy an LCD until way after 2010. Everyone here who thinks otherwise has some dumb embarrassing reason like they thought they could finally get laid if they made their desk less cluttered.

> And the flicker would still be crap even at 85 Hz.

Oh yes, I'm sure, and you are just magically fine with 100Hz LCD flicker that existed in most of them until 2015+ and even then only on every odd model. You clearly know what you're talking about and not just assuming the values that matter align with your beliefs. Listen, you have zero clue what you're talking about. Please at least take the time to understand this next fact:

Practically all LEDs flicker, usually at some absurdly low level like 100Hz or even 60Hz in really cheap ones. This is on 99% of modern vehicle tail lights, light bulbs, shaver LEDs, dishwashers, microwaves, practically all electronics such as even an external hard drive bay or USB stick, laundry and every appliance. And it annoys me. Why? Because it's at the corner of my eye. A human's eyes are highly sensitive to flicker, but only for stuff on the sides of their head, not directly in front. Which brings me back to CRT. When I'm using CRT, I'm looking directly at it, and this makes the flicker imperceptible even as low as 75Hz or so. Only if I turned my head to the side such that the CRT was on the edge of my vision it would become noticeable. For this reason, outside of this backwards world, one would have non flickering lights everywhere, and the only thing that flickers would be their monitor (because this is needed to prevent motion blur, the only alternative is to have a huge refresh rate like 500Hz+ and software that can keep up). And you are implying things work otherwise. They don't.

> Talking about the blurry low resolution. LCD is sharp.

Which part did you not get? I said a panning object on LCD will not be sharp or anything remotely close to it, it will be worse than the worst CRT.

> Not talking about pixel response time.

As I said LCDs have motion blur. It has nothing to do with pixel response. We had 200Hz CRTs in 1999. 144Hz LCD is still badly blurry, and these "gamer" LCDs tend to have weird bugs adding more pixel response artifacts than there would be if the "gamers" didn't design the firmware.

> Pixel response time on gaming LCDs is 1ms nowadays.

No, they are not. Why did you even edit that in. Those marketing numbers are simply false. In reality you have a different pixel response for every pixel transition (0-255), (0-40), etc. And you continue to not know what you're talking about by thinking this would reduce the motion blur. The motion blur in LCD has absolutely nothing to do with pixel response.

> [i have the glossy apple]

Okay, and the glossy ones have terrible glare. Somehow glossy LCDs always have worse glare than most CRTs, probably because the vendor only cares about the wow factor of what can be achieved by just ripping off the anti glare coating of any $2 monitor. LCDs also have worse image clarity on a glossy screen than a CRT. A plain screen set to show one color on even a glossy LCD looks gritty, while on a CRT it looks clear.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#79
post #20

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…

I don't remember LCDs needing any "push" in the customer segment, and they certainly co-existed for a while, until people stopped buying CRTs. Initially they were wildly expensive, so all we could do is to sit and watch; but the moment they got affordable, people just started buying them. I remember swapping my CRT for a (smaller) LCD.. the extra space on my desk was so nice! And in a few years, I bought an LCDs disp…

That's because expensive models, and the only ones with any remotely decent picture (maybe scratch that as the sandy coating is abysmal) like the $1000+ Dell 2408WFP, had miles of input lag to the point where you couldn't even control your mouse on the desktop. Like most TVs now. However all LCDs also just do have high input lag, you're just not sensitive to it. On the more tame LCDs like any random TN from 2005+, it's just a minor annoyance, although it does make mouse based 3D games unplayable.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#80
Always wondered how difficult it would be to hook up one of the old multicolor vector screens to an emulator and be able to play games like Star Wars and Asteroids in true vector presentation instead of a raster approximation. Going to guess the emulator would need a completely different rendering subsystem and the computer would need a custom video out to drive the vector monitor. Maybe without a good source of working multicolor vector monitors it wouldn't be worth the effort but it would be nice to have something closer to the real deal without needing to collect a large number of cabinets.
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