31–40 of 101 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it should be very very close It should. It isn't. For some obscure reason, VGA colours look different on every modern LCD.
Most modern displays are calibrated, to some reasonable level, and can easily accommodate the very limited gamut of an old CRT, especially anything supporting HDR10. I suspect this is more of "they need to be fudged so they're wrong" more than anything.
i have a 55" panasonic LCD. no apps or wifi.From 2003. Still works. We have roku, which at some point in the last 4 years, it went rogue and auto updated itself for who knows what telemetry . We almost never use it now. I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.
Most probably a plasma, not LCD. LCDs from that time had extremely bad colors.
If you're looking for an upgrade, try to find a Panasonic Viera VT/ST/GT50 or *60, but check for burn-in before you buy.
> I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.
If the TV has HDMI CEC, then get yourself a RaspberryPi 4 (lowest memory model is enough) and LibreELEC. You'll thank me later.
I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean…
Also don’t forget to rub your palm across the screen to collect the fuzzies that built up.
Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took. For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created…
> like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better" I'm not one of those people who ever thought vinyl sounded better than a properly recorded and mastered digital version and I've always believed a high-bandwidth digital audio signal chain can recreate the "warmth" and other artifacts of tube compressors well beyond the threshold of human perception, however a broadcast-quality, high-definition CR…
When I was a kid, I'd go to the TV repair shops and take old "unrepairable" vacuum tube TVs (no transistors!) off their hands. At home I tried to fix them. I had no idea how to fix them. But I had a lot of fun trying.
One of the fun things was to randomly swap around the vacuum tubes and see what would happen. Very entertaining! I used to have a box full of scavenged tubes. Sadly, I eventually tossed them out, never realizing how valuable they'd be in a few years.
My mom was convinced I was going to electrocute myself, and finally made me get rid of the sets.
Those aren't old TVs. When I was a kid, I'd go to the TV repair shops and take old "unrepairable" vacuum tube TVs (no transistors!) off their hands. At home I tried to fix them. I had no idea how to fix them. But I had a lot of fun trying. One of the fun things was to randomly swap around the vacuum tubes and see what would happen. Very entertaining! I used to have a box full of scavenged tubes. Sadly, I eventually t…
By the mid 80s, it was maybe more typical to buy a dedicated CRT monitor, and the computer connected via composite, or maybe even an RGB feed to the monitor, allowing higher resolution and much improved quality.
For the well healed, this route also led to the holy grail, a trinitron tube!
At each of these changes, the aesthetic of the display technology changed, but probably the best memories come from the original blurry stuff as the magical moment of actually getting something out of a home computer.