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Do CRT monitor, given today's technology advance, still offers any benefits? Does it still wins on colouring and latency when we have OLED?

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CRTs give the excitement of science

Electrons are coaxed away from matter, then shot through an artificial vacuum near the speed of light. Then they're meticulously guided by magnetic forces to SMASH into a pinpoint of phosphor to excite the release of photons, thousands of times every second, in perfect harmony.

LCDs are just really really smart Christmas lights. Very practical, but a bit boring.

Also, horizontal storage space, like having a shelf in the most ideal place to have a shelf.

With 15 kV acceleration voltage (which I think is typical), the electrons only go 24% the speed of light.

Many high-end late-era CRTs can do 1600×1200 or above at 60Hz or more while also being able to do 800×600 at esports-friendly refresh rates of 100Hz or above, all on a screen with an area which is still good by today's standards and with very low latency. You can now get a flat-panel monitor which does both a higher resolution and a higher refresh rate (and at the same time) but that basically wasn't true until a couple of years ago: and you'll pay quite a lot for that high-end gaming screen, and it still won't do 4K.

I have a cheap trinitron (here is hooked on a retro PC running Quake [1] and here it is running a retro game i'm working on [2]). As far as colors go, it has hands down the best looking image in any of my other monitors, including a Dell U2713HM which i bought because all the artists in the (gamedev) company i worked at used it and recommended it to me (and i also used it myself at work, but wanted other opinions too), especially when it comes to contrast. Black looks like black, not washed out gray and white looks like white.

The only issue it has is that it has been used a lot (i got it used) and the guns are wearing out so it is a bit dim. I opened the case to calibrate it a bit using a guide i found and it was mostly fixed, but i avoid using it for too much because, well, things are only going to get worse. So i only use it in short bursts mainly to play older 2D games, like Fallout, that look way better in a CRT than any flat panel tech.

Which basically leads me to the main thing that CRT has over any modern tech: native support for multiple resolutions. Pretty much any resolution between 320x200 to 1280x1024 looks as good as it gets (although 1024x768 is the best resolution for this monitor due to size and refresh rate which maxes at 85Hz in that). With flat panels you are locked at whatever the native resolution and everything else looks blurry (if only Nvidia and AMD allowed integer nearest neighbor pixel scaling so we could at least get some resolutions crisper - that would also solve my main issue with 4K monitors, but that is another story).

As far as OLED goes, OLED seems to have the potential to match and perhaps surpass the best CRTs (and certainly my cheap one) but it first needs to come in the form of a PC monitor - preferably one that doesn't get discolored areas within the year. I have one of the first gen PS Vita handhelds which have OLED monitors and the image quality is great, so i'd like a monitor that looks like that.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/AdLcOGu.jpg [2] https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg

There's a method (a bunch of slightly different ones, actually) for rejuvenation of cathodes to improve emittance. This can significantly prolong the life of a tube and has been applied by many with great success to expensive measurement equipment.

I know CRT is better than LCD, that is why i specifically mention OLED.

The prices of OLED will come down, expect the WOLED which LG current uses to be around the same as Top Range LCD in 2019 or 2020.

MicroLED, will fix every problem OLED has. Or may be MiniLED which allows up to 250ppi will be good enough.

Just wondering if there are anything CRT still wins, because even latency problem is an non issues with OLED, HDMI connection and software issues aside.

My problem isn't the price, it is that there is no actual OLED PC monitor. There are OLED handhels, OLED mobiles, OLED tablets even OLED TVs, but no OLED PC monitors. Dell was planning to release one, but a) it was way too big (30") and b) they cancelled it.

So in terms of CRT comparison, CRT at the moment still wins when it comes to colors and latency (since OLED doesn't exist yet for PC) and the ability to support multiple resolutions. OLED (or any other *LED) will solve the first two, but i doubt it'll solve the last one unless perhaps if we go to 500+ DPI where the inaccuracies of fractional scaling wouldn't be visible. Assuming Nvidia and AMD finally gives us the ability to scale without bilinear filtering, of course.

They are still sought after by the retro gaming community, although there are many who like the professional studio monitors Sony made (BVM and PVM series) which have a cylindrical tube.

A friend of mine has one for this reason. He actually manages equipment and medical devices for a company that runs hospitals and was able to get one that one of their hospitals was going to throw away. It’s a really nice display for gaming on a CRT, but, to my eyes, not that much nicer than the Sony Wega he otherwise uses.

The Trinitron studio monitors also have RGBS (red, green, blue, composite-sync) BNC connectors, meaning that it's fairly easy to directly hook up bare arcade boards and get that real arcade experience.

The competitive Super Smash (Melee) community still uses them, and the good ones (like the trinitrons) are highly coveted.

Why? What actual competitive advantage do they offer? Or is it more an abstract look and feel thing.

Latency. A purely analogue path gets the signal to the screen quicker (in some cases multiple frames faster) which can make a serious difference in the fighting game community where input timing is typically calculated at the frame level.

Modern LCDs have a display lag that CRTs don't. Hardcore fighting games' units of measurement for moves are frames (as in frames per second). E.g. "it takes this character 17 frames to execute this move, and you have 5 frames from the start of the animation to block it." Under those conditions, a 5ms delay matters.

The other comments have hit the nail on the head.

The game is considered "very fast" mechanically so a slight change in screen rendering is a big deal.

People claim they can see the difference between a CRT vs LED with the same input latency, in how they differ in rendering the frame (I don't know technical details on this, but they do "feel" different).

It's an interesting scenario that the community is actively trying to migrate from.

I still remember playing a PSX for the first time. It felt so... slow. I complained to my cousin about it, 3 years younger than me. He made fun of me.

When it was finally my money to spend on games, I bought an N64. The only thing the Playstation seemed capable of was RPGs. And with the sole exception of FF7, the SNES ones were better.

As far as I know only pre-digital game consoles provide a competitive advantage with CRT TVs. In Melee, a fairly "fast" game in terms of inputs and timing, the Gamecube/Wii can produce noticeable input lag when connected to a digital display due to the step of converting the signal. Analog CRTs alleviate this and are thus preferred for practically all levels of competitive play. Senior members of the Smash Melee competitive community have been known to keep their own personal stores of CRTs, making organizing large events easier.

I've known a few people in the scene to prefer these Trinitron TVs specifically, usually because the colors "pop" more, making it easier to discern movement on the screen. Or so they tell me.

For more modern consoles that output digital signals, no conversion is needed and you will typically see LED TVs being used instead.

Interestingly, Smash Bros. Melee also has a PC-based online community, where Gamecube emulators are used to play a modified version of the game over the internet. On an emulator, it's actually possible to provide less input lag than on a real console + CRT.

http://smashladder.com

http://fastermelee.net

A few years back I booted my beloved diamondtron. It felt ... better. It's no scientific measure, but even compared to 4K OLED, there's something pretty that is visually pleasing. Kinda like looking at kodachrome films.

This video about retro-console users seeking out CRTs and PVMs is interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAi8AVj9GV8

Nothings wins a CRT on latency

You can get a top of the line(or close to it) high performance CRT for free if you look around a bit, both PC monitors and TVs. Even the pro grade displays with RGB in. I haven't been able to find even a used OLED display of any kind that wasn't in a phone or tablet under $800

Additionally, OLED is stuck at one native resolution. A multi sync video monitor or PC monitor can natively display any resolution up to the highest the dot pitch can really resolve

They have space to place stuff on top of them, any LCD setup gets messy if you have to add an external box like a decoder without a specialized TV table.

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