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The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

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Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#81

Post by xcv123 »

dbttdft wrote: post #78
xcv123 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#82

Post by CliffStoll »

A decade ago, I taught physics to some high school students; they were amazed by the old CRT Tektronix oscilloscope. "So many knobs and controls!" "Does it only show green?" "Can it show pictures from the web?" Two of them figured it out and we used it to measure the speed of sound.

Recently, I dusted it off and let a couple neighbor teenagers fool with it (displaying speech, music, sine waves, and Lissajoius patterns. Again, they were fascinated.

Good stuff there!

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#83

Post by dbttdft »

dbttdft wrote: post #78
xcv123 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#84

Post by EvanAnderson »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #68
EvanAnderson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's still a decent chance the tube itself is salvageable.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#85

Post by dbttdft »

theamk wrote: post #42
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…

Wait what, "HD"? Sales pitch where? I don't think I ever watched traditional ads for monitors, it was always catalogs (with dry specs) and computer magazines / friends (which always mentioned latency). And if there were any resolution-related acronyms, it would be SVGA, XGA and other weird things no one took seriously. Here is a period shopping catalog: https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper_2000-07/page/n5...…

This is the correct history. LCD was pushed with only 3 points:

- sharp image

- less power consumption

- less space taken and less weight

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#86

Post by rnewme »

CliffStoll wrote: post #82

A decade ago, I taught physics to some high school students; they were amazed by the old CRT Tektronix oscilloscope. "So many knobs and controls!" "Does it only show green?" "Can it show pictures from the web?" Two of them figured it out and we used it to measure the speed of sound. Recently, I dusted it off and let a couple neighbor teenagers fool with it (displaying speech, music, sine waves, and Lissajoius pattern…

I got raised eyebrow at "pictures from web" a decade ago, but then realized decade ago was '13/14 and not '03/04...

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#87

Post by userbinator »

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.

Stopping the heart is no problem --- that's what defibrillators do, after all! The heart stops, and then starts again with all its muscles in sync.

The problem is when the shock is not enough to stop the heart but causes it to lose sync and go into fibrillation.

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#88

Post by rokkitmensch »

lttlrck wrote: post #64
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.

"I don't hire programmers who spell correctly, I hire programmers who misspell consistently" or how does it go

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#89

Post by garaetjjte »

CliffStoll wrote: post #82

A decade ago, I taught physics to some high school students; they were amazed by the old CRT Tektronix oscilloscope. "So many knobs and controls!" "Does it only show green?" "Can it show pictures from the web?" Two of them figured it out and we used it to measure the speed of sound. Recently, I dusted it off and let a couple neighbor teenagers fool with it (displaying speech, music, sine waves, and Lissajoius pattern…

>Can it show pictures from the web?

Even better, you can play Quake on it! https://www.lofibucket.com/articles/oscilloscope_quake.html

Re: The Secret Life of XY Monitors (2001)

#90

Post by colanderman »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #43
didntcheck wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It it was that loud then I'd expect something was wrong with it. I can no longer hear those frequencies, but I could when I was a kid, and I don't remember it being annoying at all. Just one of those things you only really notice after it stops, like when the fridge stops humming. Our cat also didn't react at all from my memory

I tried to show off an Apple II to my then 5 y/o daughter using a CRT monitor. She the sound (presumably somewhere around 15Khz) and was really annoyed by it and clasped her hands to her ears. My wife and I were completely oblivious. We didn't see if she could acclimate to it. The monitor works okay but it's early 1990s stock so, presumably, something might be wrong w/ it, too. I definitely remember hearing CRTs as a…

My family's Apple //e monitor has always emitted a high pitched whine, since I was a kid. (I can't hear it anymore but my niece tells me otherwise.) What worked for us has always been to wedge a folded up piece of paper underneath the bezel of the screen. Don't know why this stopped the sound but it does.
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