A Small Ode to the CRT
axio.ms
axio.ms
In 1895 Röntgen was messing with such a device trying to understand cathode rays when he discovered and published on x-rays (leading to medical diagnostics, x-ray diffraction, understanding of ionic bonds and modern chemistry, and the discovery that DNA had a double-helical structure).
This caused much excitement. Soonafter Becquerel was looking into x-rays in CRTs when he discovered natural radiation (leading directly to the field of nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants).
In 1897, J.J. Thompson discovered (using a CRT) that those very cathode rays were actually new particles known as electrons (leading to the photoelectric effect, general relativity, quantum physics, solar panels).
Right after that, people turned the CRT into the vacuum tube (leading to long-distance telephone networks, radio amplifiers, the electric guitar, the Beatles, Katy Perry).
And then of course if you stick some electromagnets around the CRT beam you can shake them around and draw out moving pictures, and you get the CRT we all know and love (and is written about in OP article).
I blogged about it a bit here [1]
[1] https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-modern-era-passed-th...
Amazing all those various silly spinning disk systems peppered throughout the magazine...and then buried on page 48 there's Philo T. Farnsworth[2] and his "scanning electric pencil"! Huzzah!
[1] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Television-News/Televi...
My dad told me around 1970 that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall like a picture and a typewriter that could fix mistakes.
He was right on both counts :-)
Today, fuzzy pixels for text are available in E-ink displays. They produce good sharpness and no visible pixels at resolutions lower than you'd think.
I knew the sound would be good.
But I was surprised how great the image is. It just look good from all angles and in all condition, when it gets a good input. And I do not notice the lower resolution much.
I am sure a modern B&O is better. But they cost from $6,675 (the B&O Harmony from $18,250) A used Beovision 1 can be bought for $30.
The interesting thing is that I never enabled anti-aliasing in games with that screen. I just didn't feel the need for it.
Once I got an LCD (I was late to that party), I immediately gawked at how its sharp rectangular subpixels made jaggies pop out.
I've never once pined for them. I really don't miss moving them. I don't miss 17" displays (and lets be honest most people weren't using high end ones). I don't miss 21 inches being the biggest you could get unless you had insane money. I don't miss 1024x768.
Yeah the blacks were good but I wouldn't go back to using a '90s CRT monitor as a daily driver even if you paid me a thousand dollars.
The only thing I do miss is the 4:3 aspect ratio. If someone could do a nice large high dpi 4:3 LCD monitor that would be "shut up and take my money!".
On top of that, games meant to be played on a vector monitor just won't look right on an LCD.
iPad Pro is a 3:4 aspect ratio, and if you have a Mac you can use it as a second display.
1600x1200 was readily achievable in the 90's through 00's when LCDs were gimped by an industry unwilling to exceed 1080 lines.
The "HD" craze and flat panels that started off with even less than 1080p was hilarious coming from such a CRT.
https://www.cdw.com/product/barco-coronis-uniti-mdmc-12133-l...
Currently enjoying working on my ridiculous 31" concave-curved gaming monitor.
Retro games on CRTs are an obvious one (CRTPixels on Twitter[0] is great). It’s not just the displays themselves either, some games on the Mega Drive/Genesis used the specific qualities of a composite video signal to produce a transparency effect from a dither pattern.
Even today with all-digital displays there are differences. The very high response time of an OLED panel causes lower framerate content to look stuttery to some, whereas the slower response time of something like an IPS LCD causes a natural interpolation of sorts.
I miss my PVM, but the geometry was starting to drift and I have neither the time nor the inclination to adjust and/or recap it.
https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/williams-demon...
Or, on a broader basis, education within a human population (we spend 15 years sinking information into the infosponges of children and hope that enough of that keeps over a lifetime to sink it into the next generation of infosponges).
Or of manuscript documents, rewritten by hand by scribes. Or palimpsests.
All data storage is ultimately a palimpsest, I'm increasingly convinced.
See also, BTW, delay-line memory:
If you're a retro fetishist or an analog gaming nut, then I could see how you might get something out of it. For everyone else, save your money and buy anything else. The price that good CRTs demand is simply absurd when compared to their cheaper, flatscreen alternatives.
Nearly any given color CRT (in the 90's era) has a far flatter visual spectral response than modern ubiquitous displays. Each color has meaningful contrast; whereas the typical blue-LED is heavily weighted towards blue.
Even if a new display measures better, your brain interprets color from a tube better.
The only established displays today that approach that flatness (exceed them) are genuine three-color OLED displays, which are prohibitively expensive as packaged as a computer monitor.
I have some mild hope for new display technologies that I'm hearing about. I'm betting we are five years, at a minimum, before displays with that color quality are common.
For example, playing on 720p+ displays causes upscaling, which introduces variable latency into the game and renders it unplayable at a competitive level.
These days there are monitors that you can get instead, but the demand for CRTs is still high since they're cheap.
Over 20 years ago we had 1600x1200 CRTs at 85hz.
I had a big Barco that had this to a ridiculous degree. That thing was also scary to degauss.
(The output lag in LCD displays is really significant. Switching between LCD and CRT feels remarkably different in games where reaction speed matters.)
No.
Not sure we're going to have anything quite like it with LCD, despite the amazing developments over the last decade
640x480 with r_picmip 5!
It is kind of crazy though. In 2001 I was running a CRT 120hz monitor but today in 2022 my 2560x1440 LCD monitor is 60hz. I know they make 120hz/144hz+ LCDs nowadays but it feels like it took forever for them to get decently main stream considering we had 120hz displays before 2000. I remember waiting until 2008 to finally switch to an LCD which was a Dell 2007FP 1600x1200, it still works. The last time I checked it was last year when I needed a temporary 2nd monitor in a pinch.
Oh dear. I can still hear it. Really, retrocomputing is my hobby. One of.
I used to manage a network of about 400 computers. People would turn off their computer but the monitor would stay on, and if there were any loose components in there, I could hear the noise. I would wander around the building, trying to find the beast.
It was relatively rare to have a monitor that was that loud when it was synced up and busy showing the computer display.
Mass-market televisions, though... every damn one.
Yes! Back then I could see a computer failed without looking at the screen.
Other than that: you may be able to varnish the coil and get the whine to become inaudible, make sure you use the right kind (HV suitable). Capacitors can also make quite a bit of noise.
It can do 1600x1200, though I run it at 1280x1024 as my eyes aren't what they were when I acquired it second-hand for $50 so many years ago - yet I can still hear the mosquito buzz when its not plugged into anything so maybe I'm not completely old yet?
Its days are numbered now, not because of the electrics but because the plastic casing is getting very brittle and cracked. I can see there will come a day it won't survive the short walk back to my storeroom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-emission_display
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...
[0] http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,161189.0.htm...
[1] http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=160517.0
well, if the kids just want to experience pointing and shooting there are plenty of modern VR games that provide that. And, BTW, my short description of "Pistol Whip" is "rhythm Time Crisis in VR"
Pulling the displays out of the cabs to work on them is also a huge pain. The size/weight has been mentioned here a few times; imagine having to pull a giant one out of an abdomen-height hole in a cab, and putting it back in without resting it on the plastic shell framing it.
Who knew? I guess the old game programmers knew how to take advantage of CRT weirdness.
If you find an old (studio, rather than consumer) CRT in good condition in the back of some old company's shed, you can pretty much demand whatever you want for it.
Look at the reflection of an LCD (not LED) panel in a non-conductive surface and try tilting it! (A glass window at night, a glass bathroom door, or a piece of furniture with a shellac finish works.) Hint: Brewster’s law.
Doesn’t detract from the article, just ... LCDs have some of the good kind of magic in them, too! Feynman talked about “sun reflecting on bay”[1], but “tablet reflecting in bathroom door” is even better I think.
[1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm
The CRT still performs well and there is no sign of the picture blooming or losing focus (that's to say its vacuum and cathode emission are still OK).
As far as I'm concerned, CRTs are still alive and well.
The tech was much worse, but people seemed happier anyway. Maybe because what was actually on those screens was better("better" interpreted relative to the potential of the tech)
Same here, and now I'm looking for a CRT monitor because I don't remember anymore how it is to use one. Did the low resolution games look better on them? After more than 10 years I can't really recall the difference.
Yes.
The standard way of seeing pixel art in modern indie games, the edges of everything are too harsh. CRT filters exist, but most kinda suck, though there's an occasional good one (Cyber Shadow does an excellent job).
There's also the issue of input lag. CRT's have virtually zero input lag beyond just their refresh rate, whereas for LCD/Plasma/OLED it's more substantial. In more recent years things have gotten better, with more and more TV's getting decent latencies (< 25ms) at least in game mode, but for a while there you were commonly looking at like 80-120ms lag times with no recourse for a given TV.
I do have a projector that does it, but it only works after dark.