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Comment by zbuf | Hacker News Reader

I feel old; I came here for a guide to repair a "VGA monitor" and instead got a flat panel.

LCD monitors only used VGA because customers didn't know enough to demand DVI. A pixel array is inherently digital, so it makes no sense to put DAC/ADC in the path.

> customers didn't know enough to demand DVI

Really, it was more that we didn't have DVI outputs.

Its the smartest way to break the chicken-egg situation -- for many (I'd wager the majority) the advantage of a flat panel at first was more about space saving then picture quality.

DVI output was easy; just buy a video card.

The problem is, you can't add DVI to a VGA-only LCD monitor, and those things were everywhere.

It's a VGA monitor. You may have expected a CRT rather than LCD, but that's a different confusion.

Don't worry, I'm not confused...

I am old. I did not even open the link until you mentioned it was an LCD. I was thinking: "Why would you repair a CRT?"

Comes up fairly often as a nostalgia thing for old Macs, Kaypros, Compaqs, arcade games, and so on.

Also, some home computer games from the 80s can be really hard to play with any extra latency so a CRT helps.

For most of the last 15 years, if you had an old CRT television or computer monitor, you had actually to pay someone just to get rid of it. Because of the lead shielding used in CRT tubes, they are considered hazardous waste. (Of course, most people were irresponsible or just didn't know any better and just chucked theirs into a dumpster.)

But in the past few years, retro tech has become sufficiently popular due to certain YouTube channels that a CRT TV or monitor in good working condition can now command a worthwhile price.

> I was thinking: "Why would you repair a CRT?"

Same here. And I didn't think I was that old...

Lots of older equipment require a CRT to function properly.

Or maybe if you want to play arcade games ;)

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