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Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

blog.uchujin.co.uk

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Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#51

Post by LocalH »

jerf wrote: post #35
simias wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reluctantly discarded my last CRT a few years ago. They're not just heavy to move, they also take a lot of room on my desk and they generate a lot of heat. For a long time LCDs really couldn't compete with CRTs. They had bad resolutions, terrible viewing angles and terrible colors (and especially horrendous blacks). Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily imp…

"Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving." Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/ The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there…

Black level is the biggest tell. Any set based around an LCD panel will never generate truly dark blacks, unless you have addressable backlighting where you can turn off or dim the backlight behind individual pixels.

That is, until they improve LCD's ability to block light. When you can turn off an LCD pixel and block virtually all light from coming through (or around) that pixel, then you'll get much deeper blacks

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#52

Post by LocalH »

VLM wrote: post #21
deadwing0 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a low refresh rate damage eyes? Got a link? Legit question, not looking for an argument.

The counter proof is TV viewing skews extremely old, and there's plenty of elderly who've been staring into 60Hz screens for multiple decades with no obvious TV related illnesses.

To be fair, there is a significant perceptual difference in flicker between a 15KHz interlaced display, and a 31KHz progressive display. With interlaced video, the flicker is distributed across the scanlines, whereas a progressive display will seem to flicker the entire screen at once.

Edit: added "seem to", as I'm fully aware that CRTs scan the tube rather than doing anything to the entire screen "at once".

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#53

Post by lisper »

RHSeeger wrote: post #50
ahje wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He will. Kids try to find loop-holes in every single rule, and they will deliberately misinterpret everything you say in order to use it against you later on. :)

When my daughter asks me "Daddy, can you ", I usually reply with "Yes" and then leave it at that. Then should responds with "WILL you ", and I do it. I very clearly taught her the difference between can and will by doing so. And now she does the same thing to my wife. And I get in trouble for it. It's great.

May I humbly suggest training her to say "Will you please ..."?

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#54

Post by LocalH »

mnw21cam wrote: post #38
cm2187 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are typically not watching them at the same distance either, and the fact that TV screens are interlaced might also affect the flickering effect (I understand 1990s monitors weren't). I remember that my 67Hz macintosh monitor was really stressing my eyes as a teenager, while I never had this problem with a TV.

You're misunderstanding interlacing. Interlacing was a way to still keep 50Hz (or 60Hz in some parts of the world) while having twice as many rows. It didn't give you a higher refresh rate than that.

No, but the difference in scanning pattern does provide a quite stark perceptual difference between 15KHz interlaced and 31KHz progressive at 60Hz. The scanning of fields seems to provide a higher chance that field 1's bottom lines won't have disappeared by the time the monitor is scanning field 2's bottom lines. Of course, it's largely dependent on a monitor's specific phosphor persistence, and why high-persistence monitors were so common in the earlier days of personal computing.

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#55

Post by LocalH »

yardie wrote: post #29
digitalsushi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was 14, my dad got us dialup internet in 1994. At the ISP, I had never paid more attention in my life, and when we got home I rushed to install the tcp software and 'internet in a box' for windows 95. My dad got irate at how quickly I was moving through it and told me that he wouldn't help me fix it after I messed it up. When he came down an hour later and I was transfixed with the primordial web, he gave me a…

So many memories. I remember riding my bike to the local ISP's office to get my internet welcome packet. Because I wasn't going to wait 5-7 business days for it to arrive in the mail. It came complete with a dozen floppies for Mac and PC, account details, and the Internet Yellow Pages. Which is sitting on a shelf in my parents garage. At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was…

I remember learning about the existence of the Internet from encountering a local ISP's kiosk in the mall in 1995. They had an ISDN line serving the kiosk, and as long as I didn't outright block anyone from trying the Internet out they didn't mind me sitting there and surfing. That was also when I discovered the concept of emulation, and I feel I was very fortunate to have been able to had my first experiences with both concepts simultaneously.

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#56

Post by cr0sh »

yardie wrote: post #29
digitalsushi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was 14, my dad got us dialup internet in 1994. At the ISP, I had never paid more attention in my life, and when we got home I rushed to install the tcp software and 'internet in a box' for windows 95. My dad got irate at how quickly I was moving through it and told me that he wouldn't help me fix it after I messed it up. When he came down an hour later and I was transfixed with the primordial web, he gave me a…

So many memories. I remember riding my bike to the local ISP's office to get my internet welcome packet. Because I wasn't going to wait 5-7 business days for it to arrive in the mail. It came complete with a dozen floppies for Mac and PC, account details, and the Internet Yellow Pages. Which is sitting on a shelf in my parents garage. At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was…

> At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs.

In some areas - probably. Here in Phoenix, I got the internet in 1993 - dialup shell access - from Internet Direct.

Yes - that Internet Direct.

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#57

Post by Diederich »

cr0sh wrote: post #56
yardie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many memories. I remember riding my bike to the local ISP's office to get my internet welcome packet. Because I wasn't going to wait 5-7 business days for it to arrive in the mail. It came complete with a dozen floppies for Mac and PC, account details, and the Internet Yellow Pages. Which is sitting on a shelf in my parents garage. At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was…

> At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. In some areas - probably. Here in Phoenix, I got the internet in 1993 - dialup shell access - from Internet Direct. Yes - that Internet Direct.

Do you remember netcom.com? https://web.archive.org/web/19981212031322/http://www.netcom... I got dialup access from them in 1992 or 1993 after college. My first access to the Internet was in 1988 via https://web.archive.org/web/19970628122429/http://www.csupom... (Of course that was before the www. Everything was via telnet, ftp and gopher.)

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#58

Post by cr0sh »

dillonmckay wrote: post #13
katzgrau wrote: post #9

At about the age of 14 I somehow came into ownership of 5" black and white TV. I wasn't allowed to have a TV in my bedroom, but this thing probably looked useless to my parents so they didn't say anything. Little did they know, while they were at work, I went up into the attic and ran a coaxial cable from a splitter down into my room and into the back of the VCR, all neatly tucked behind my desk. I spliced an old mon…

Ha. I did something similar, also to watch late night comedy. However, I used two 300 to 75 ohm converters and speaker cable to connect with a splitter to the TV. I remember proving my father and RadioShack salesman wrong about the proper adapter needed to go from 3.5mm mono to the female coax connector. I recently bought two 5” black and white portable TVs at a flea market for $5 total. One of them does have a video…

You had speaker cable?

My friend and I did something like that to get cable to his room. He lived in a double-wide, his bedroom in the back, and the cable was in the front. We scrounged.

Came up with an adapter here, wire there, and some cellophane tape. Oh, and some thumbtacks.

Some of the wire was speaker cable, the rest was telephone cord. A pair of scissors, some cutting and splicing and taping and tacking - we had it ran.

Other than a very janky signal (gee - why's that?) - he had cable TV. We then proceeded to wire up his stereo to the TV (because we wanted better sound for the Sega Genesis, dangit!). In the end somehow it all worked, and didn't burn his mother's home down.

A month later his older brother saw what we did, and ran a proper run of coax under the trailer, and cleaned up our stereo/tv mess.

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#59

Post by kennyadam »

fock wrote: post #25

came here for the FPGA and got instructions on buying premade-adapters

Yep, a blog post that teaches you nothing except 'adapters exist' and is also poorly written. Not sure what the criteria are for making the front page is, but I'm baffled how this could meet them.

Re: Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness

#60

Post by quelltext »

RHSeeger wrote: post #50
ahje wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He will. Kids try to find loop-holes in every single rule, and they will deliberately misinterpret everything you say in order to use it against you later on. :)

When my daughter asks me "Daddy, can you ", I usually reply with "Yes" and then leave it at that. Then should responds with "WILL you ", and I do it. I very clearly taught her the difference between can and will by doing so. And now she does the same thing to my wife. And I get in trouble for it. It's great.

What's the point of that "lesson"? In English and many other languages politeness in asking for something is achieved by beating around the bush. That's just how it works.

"Could you do me a favor and look into that issue?". Answering yes implies you'll do it. Same goes for the "woulds" and "cans" and "mind doing ... s".

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