I remember reading something by John Carmack back in the early Oculus days, where he was basically saying he wished he could use small CRTs in VR headsets for many of the same reasons the article highlights.
A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
21–30 of 288 posts
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#22My 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.
Many LEDs have an annoying flicker as well, which can be very annoying and distracting for me. Especially around christmas time, when everyone and their grandmother puts out thousands of cheap LEDs. Even when they're not trying to blink, they're still flickering. I suspect I'm sensitive to this kind of stuff because I suffer from migraines, but still, I can't imagine I'm the only one.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#23I 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…
Yeah I have no idea why the lowest levels on monitors are so bright. Are there models that can go really low without the PWM flicker effect kicking in (that's another problem I have with monitors, I can notice the damn cheap PWM backlight)? Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
After lowering brightness to 0 the brightness can be lowered by lowering the contrast ratio. It’s obviously not perfect but does work.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#24CRTs 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 sites. It also did 1600x1200 at 60hz for non-gaming.
I still don't know how those refurbished sites stayed in business because they offered free shipping, but a decently sized CRT back then used to weigh like 60 pounds (30 kg).
Back then I remember waiting so many years to get an LCD because the input latency, refresh rates and color accuracy were horrendous for so long despite being 3x the price.
[0]: https://hardforum.com/threads/24-widescreen-crt-fw900-from-e...
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#25I 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…
Yeah I have no idea why the lowest levels on monitors are so bright. Are there models that can go really low without the PWM flicker effect kicking in (that's another problem I have with monitors, I can notice the damn cheap PWM backlight)? Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
I’ve always wished the Macbook’s lowest brightness setting was subdivided two or more times. It’s still too bright when I feel like reading in my dark room perhaps on the way to sleep. I have to use an app called Shady to cover the screen in a dimming overlay.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#26I 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…
Yeah I have no idea why the lowest levels on monitors are so bright. Are there models that can go really low without the PWM flicker effect kicking in (that's another problem I have with monitors, I can notice the damn cheap PWM backlight)? Laptop (and phone) displays don't seem to have this problem, the brightness goes really low...
Yes, there are a bunch of monitors now that do not use PWM for brightness control. And since PWM became known as a problem PWM rate is tested in professional benchmarks. So you definitely can get monitors that do not have that flicker, where the minimal brightness will also not be too high.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#27I stumbled upon this article while trying to figure out if i could hook up my ipad to a crt. If any one has any wise words for me on my journey, I’m all ears.
Apple sells both USB-C to VGA and Lightning to VGA adapters, just buy one of those depending on which iPad you have.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#28I used to have one of these (GDM-FW900) at an old job, a long time ago. They were great monitors for the time, top of the line. They weighed almost 300lbs, IIRC. And like all CRTs they can put out some heat.
LCDs at the time still left much to be desired so VFX houses weren't rushing to replace them with inferior, at the time, technology.
I remember running mine at a higher refresh rate. 75Hz and 100Hz was easily reachable. 120Hz and you started to drop resolution and the coils would sing. I miss the wide range of resolutions you could run. LCDs still haven't been able to replicate that without making everything a blurry, boxy mess.
I was able to take the broken smaller GDM-F500 (21") home. It was dim and after a bit of research I found out replacing a capacitor and a few resistors would bring it back. But it was terrifying working directly on the HV board. Once it was working I had so much screen. Almost getting electrocuted was practically it.
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#29I 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…
They took up a huge amount of desk space though, which was quite inconvenient. But perhaps they could be made flatter?
Re: A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)
#30Gaming LCDs these days boast response times in the low single digit millisecond range. Even at 144Hz that’s less than a frame. If there’s framebuffer-to-photons lag, I’d point my finger at DVI decoding before the physical movement of liquid crystals. Also, for all the focus on “physical changes” there’s no mention of phosphor fade rate, which is a physical property of the CRT screen with a built-in trade off between…
The gray to gray response time is heavily gamed. There's some tech reporter investigation on it that shows how most monitors that game the GTG response time have slower overall response than monitors with a ~7ms time.
TFT Central's reviews are a great source for detailed measurements of response times: https://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/asus_rog_swift_360hz_pg...