Advantages of CRT over LCD | Hacker News Reader

Advantages of CRT over LCD

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The biggest advantage of CRT is that my cat could sit on one. He would be drawn to that heat generating machine, lay on top of it with his fore legs dangling over the edge of the screen and snooze while I played whatever video game was the current hit well into the night.

I miss that cat-butt-warmer. I miss my cat too.

One of my cats loved snoozing on my big 19" CRT as well. When I replaced the CRT with my first LCD monitor, he tried to hop onto the non-existent top of the screen. In a mad scramble to not fall he put all of his front claws in the plastic cover of the screen. The LCD went from zero to hundreds of bad pixels within a day :-(

I still miss that cat too.

My cat used to sleep on my crt during 36 -48 gaming sessions of Everquest during school holidays with my best buddy. Two computers next to each other. Too much cola. Huge amounts of rage when we would die. Most likely because we barely slept. Heh.

Then when I got my first MacBook Pro around 2007 my cat decided that the hot as keyboard was the new sleeping spot. No more computer use for me when he wanted to sleep haha.

I miss that cat too.

Upvoted for wholesome cat love. I miss your cat on your behalf.

for me it was that I could play videos for the cat where it would attack the screen - the vhs tape that I played was called "video catnip".

I wouldn't dare do that with an lcd display, even (or especially?) if it were mounted to a wall.

the death of the monitor toy

not sure about cat hair in the vents though!

It wasn't until I was shopping for an LED TV that I really understood a lot of the important details in how a sequence of images can be made to look like the images are in motion.

The biggest revelation was the difference between showing a still image for just a moment vs holding that still image on screen for a long time. Illuminating the screen pixel-by-pixel with a short duty factor gave CRTs sharp crisp motion compared to LED and LCD screens. The UFO tests really drove the point home (along with a lot of other visual phenomena).

https://www.testufo.com/blackframes

What got me hung up for so long was that so much of the conversation has been about frame rates and shutter speeds, when it's really a different (but related) effect. I've been wanting to play around with high framerate video with frames combined to mimic slower shutter speeds. That is, 120 Hz open shutter video blurred with a 4-frame sliding window to look like it was shot at 30 fps. Or other such tricks. I thought high-end cameras might do such things automatically but it seems like they don't and I want to figure out why not. (does it look bad?)

https://kevinlisota.photography/2020/04/understanding-video-...

https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/tv-motion-blur-...

That would not look like 30 fps necessarily.

The keyword you want to learn about is “Shutter Angle”

That's right, my example was off because film is 'usually' shot 180 degrees. So 30 FPS has an effective shutter of 1/60", and 120Hz open shutter needs a 2-frame sliding window to match that look. Or use a 3-frame window for 1/40", a more blurry film (1/48") look. There's power in being able to make that choice when editing.

What I'm not sure about is how similar merging two images together will be compared to doing it natively with the camera. I'm guessing it will look slightly different, but I'll find out when I try it.

I can't imagine loving a monitor the way I loved my iiyama Vision Master Pro. 1600x1200 at 71Hz driven from a Matrox Millennium (4MB VRAM and no 3D acceleration whatsoever) with soft-edged pixels and no visible grain or mesh. It was by far the best computer-related object I had ever owned. But that would be so impractical now, given its bulk and what else is available.

We actually still have a CRT as our main TV here - a 28" Sony - not for any exciting retro reason but just because we've had it from new and it still works. We have a bigger LCD in another room. We bought that to watch films on, but it was always disappointing for that - it's too clean, it feels as if you're watching the making-of documentary rather than the film itself. So we hardly ever use it and mostly stick with the CRT. It's satisfying to watch, but part of me hopes it'll stop working so we can get the space in the corner back.

> feels as if you're watching the making-of documentary rather than the film itself.

Isn't that because of many picture enhancers that come with modern tvs? I think major offender is the interpolation to go from cinematic 24 frames to higher frame rate. I believe it's commonly called soap opera effect...

Yep, but there's no reason to use it. Just go to the settings menu and turn it off. While you're in there, set the color settings to "movie" mode too so the colors are more faithful.

Modern TVs look absolutely horrible out-of-the-box, because they're made to look cool in showrooms, but if you fix those settings they look great. Even better, turn on a YouTube video that shows how to adjust the black and white levels and tune them.

The Matrox cards were awesome, I had a 21" sony monitor that could be pushed up to 1800x1600 with those cards. I probably have some in the stack somewhere still.

Be aware of the energy you are wasting, a modern tv uses much less power than a crt.

Depends on what modern TV since most people are buying bigger TV's now. An 28" CRT uses about the same amount of power as a 55" OLED so replacing the former with the latter does not improve energy use.

Besides that, energy is not wasted if it's used to make pretty pictures ;).

Of course but to make an intelligent decision, one needs to be aware of the costs.

A good point. I just checked - the CRT draws about 120W and the 40" LCD about 70W. The latter is more than I expected, given that it's not particularly big by modern standards - though it is a few years old itself by now.

LCD monitors have strong backlights but most of it is lost. You have diffusers, polarizers, color filters, opaque elements between pixels, and this is before the blocking done to construct the final image. I think the overall intensity loss is over 90%.

Residential TV power use is probably not a big factor (unless you have a TV problem), and even though CRTs got nice and warm, modern OLED TVs do just the same. Many even have cooling fans for the panel.

Manufacturing the new TV costs energy. When you buy brand new you’re just paying the energy cost upfront. Depending on the usage this may or may not break even.

Be aware of the energy you are wasting, a modern AI uses much less power than a human.

Now you listen, If I’m going to be replaced by an AI it’s not going to be for some boring economical reason.

It’ll be because I‘ve been deemed surplus to requirements by the algorithm and smooshed down into base nutrients with everyone else, thank you very much.

Older technology like paintings just sitting there in a museum and Greek sculpture used way less power than AI.

Things I don't miss from CRTS: Their weight, the heat they put off, eye strain caused by low refresh rates (below 75hz for me), having to adjust the rabbit ears or outdoor antenna when one of the 4 channels got too snowy, image burn in.

Things that I miss from CRTS: black is black not grey, console tvs and tv's as furniture, better viewing angles as people didn't mount their damned tv over a fireplace or up high in general, turning the brightness knob down if it too bright at night, video games (of course),

Adding one not-missed item to the list: the annoying high pitch whine

Even worse when your grandparents couldn't hear it and thought it's perfectly OK ta have TV buzzing 24/7 in the background.

15KHz aprox. Not every body notices it

At what age does it go away to hear this?

I'm in my late 30s and I still hear it. But seemingly none of my co-workers can.

I know because once one put a "test your hearing" website and they all thought it was a sham until I told them to cut it out with the annoying whistle.

But I thought by now I would no longer be annoyed by those.

Probably I'm less annoyed than before.

That's only for TVs, though. Computer monitors had higher refresh rates and were not audible.

I could hear them. They can't have been that high.

What you hear is the horizontal refresh rate, scanlines per second. For NTSC television and CGA video, that's 15.7 KHz and within the audible range of quite a few humans. 640x480x60fps noninterlaced VGA is twice that at 31.4 KHz, which mostly isn't audible although a very few exceptional cases might. Higher resolutions are higher still, of course. That said, as with anything involving analog frequencies, there might be harmonics or resonances that could be in a range you can hear.

I could definitely hear CRT monitors at resolutions well above 640x480, so it can't have been the horizontal refresh rate.

I remember that I always noticed the sound when someone turned on a TV or CRT in my house when I was growing up. I miss that.

That depends on the age of the computer monitor. Older ones could whine.

Try OLED it solved the black, the viewing angle, the video games look insane, the near zero bezels make the image seem floating and well a remote control can adapt brightness well.

It did? I thought they're advertising themselves based on how effectively they can blind you.

You could turn down the brightness on a CRT down to 10% or less at night and still use it.

Why can’t you turn the brightness down on your lcd?

https://www.howtogeek.com/294307/TURN-UP-YOUR-TVS-BACKLIGHT-...

Random explanation :) It tells you how to blind yourself more, but it's valid if you want the other way too.

Although they say it's for TVs, it goes for LCD monitors too these days.

Not to mention that whatever you turn down on a LCD monitor will mess up your colors beyond a point.

You can, but people aren't going to bother, when it's three levels deep of on-screen menus, accessed with tiny buttons, mounted in an awkward place, labeled with cryptic icons. Much more cumbersome user experience than turning a single dial on a CRT.

I'll turn my LCD down, but it uses LEDs for back lighting and will only go so far at night or else it would start flickering. Most CRTs I had had a knob you could turn, and you could keep turning it down till you can't see the image anymore.

I do this almost daily.

Daytime is bright. Nighttime is not. Why shouldn't my monitor follow?

The biggest advantage is that CRTs can have variable geometry pixels which match a lot of older resolutions and aspect ratios. While it's a lot easier to deal with non-square pixels on higher resolution displays (i.e. 1600x1200 can properly emulate a 1.2:1 rectangular pixel of a 320x200 display) CRTs still have effectively infinitely variable shaped pixels.

Let's not forget that you could freely adjust the refresh rate to resolution ratio to the maximum bandwidth supported by the monitor. On my old 21" CRT, I would have the desktop at 1600x1200 @ 75Hz for maximum productivity and when gaming I would switch to 1024x768 @ 120Hz for "pwning n00bs" in Unreal Tournament '99/Quake 3 Arena.

Meanwhile my 2019 4K display is a fixed 60Hz regardless of how much I lower the resolution. What a downgrade.

I heard some modern gaming displays now also let you crank up the Hz as you lower the resolution, but every cheap CRT could do this back in the days as everything was purely analog so the limit was the bandwidth of your monitor and you were free to experiment with any resolution to refresh rate ratio between the available bandwidth in your GPU control panel as the RAMDAC of the GPU did all the heavy lifting in driving the display, while now, the driving is handled internally by the LCD control board so whatever the manufacturer decides, you're stuck with.

Most CRTs also supported overclocking beyond factory spec, but you really ran the risk of frying some internal components after long term use. Ask me how I know.

There was nothing quite like Quake 3 in 800x600 @ 120hz. The smoothness and incredibly low input lag. I maintain that it was better, in many ways, than my current position 1440p @ 180hz setup.

Sadly, UT99 was capped at 85 or 90 hz. It was very noticeable, especially at the time when my body was still young. I am still twitchy but not even close to what I could pull off 20 years ago.

Mid 2000s to early 2010 were tough for monitor enthusiasts. LCDs were total crap and the vast, vast majority of gamers, let alone regular consumers, couldn't even wrap their heads around the whole FPS / Hz thing.

The stupid 3d TV push didn't help much either because the masses were convinced all these TVs could do 100/200/400 etc. refresh rates even though the hdmi input was capped at 60 hz. Scary times

>Sadly, UT99 was capped at 85 or 90 hz.

Such were the days when videogame engines tied the physics to the framerate, as having too many FPS would basically ruin the game. Just ask present day Bethesda :D

Sadly CRT SDTVs don't allow increasing the horizontal refresh rate beyond around 15.7 KHz (480i or 240p). I wish I had a CRT monitor, but don't have a space set out for it, and haven't looked for one.

You get the same with OLED TVs. You often have a practical choice between 4k @ 60HZz and 1080p @ 120Hz, whether you're using a PC or a console.

I never could reconcile the "variable geometry pixels" with my meagre understanding that they all had a matrix / mesh / mask at front, I think for separating individual colour pixels... Didn't they?

Edit : here it is - shadow mask and trinitron. These feel like extremely fixed, physical native resolution?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask

A subpixel on an LCD can only have a single brightness value across its whole area. The dots or stripes on an CRT have no such restriction, they are effectively little monochromatic pictures themselves.

Don't think of those dots as fundamental elements of the image, the CRT doesn't address them and doesn't care about their shape. They are really just a color filter on top of the three greyscale images projected by the electron gun. The shadow mask ensures that each of those three electron streams land on the right color.

See the TechnologyConnections video for more details.

So TechnologyConnections made two Vids about that very topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX649lnKAU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea6tw-gulnQ

It's...complicated.

That sounds really similar to subpixel rendering as used in AMOLED displays and their diamond/pentile subpixel arrangements.

I found a demo online illustrating this

http://www.clivemaxfield.com/area51/do-not-delete/pentile-rg...

LCDs and their ineptitude with non native resolutions deeply annoys me.

Sure, pixels in an LCD are fixed, but even resolutions that are multiples of 2 of their native resolution look like crap. 4K monitor? Surely it can handle 1080p, it's just dividing by 2; four physical pixels for one logical pixel, right? Nope! Looks like horseshit. Seemingly LCD monitors can't divide by 2.

CRTs can handle any resolution within their spec range, so I could render a game at a lower resolution to have more video processing power for other stuff. LCDs? Gotta render everything at native or it looks like horseshit.

Modern graphics driver finally have the ability to do integer scaling[1][2], but they only learned that a few years ago. There are also some TVs[3] that can do it, but to my knowledge it's still an extremely rare feature, despite being so simple.

Sharp-Bilinear[4] is also worth a mention, this is only available for some emulators, but allows integer-scaling-like quality without being restricted to exact multiple of the resolution.

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/dh3-034

[2] https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en...

[3] https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=67116

[4] https://github.com/rsn8887/Sharp-Bilinear-Shaders/blob/maste...

Integer scaling still isn’t as good as CRTs because the gaps between the pixels don’t change. The grid of black between pixels is a key tool to make pixel art (and low resolution content in general) look good

It's because there always has to be some retarded-ass "enhancement" going on fucking with the colors, fucking with the image in any which way possible. Bullshit sharpening filter, bullshit edge detection filter that produces shitty artifacts around actual sharp edges that don't need to be fucked with.

The early LCDs were shit because they did only nearest-point sampling. The new LCDs are shit because they "enhance" the image to shit, even in native resolution.

>The new LCDs are shit because they "enhance" the image to shit, even in native resolution.

If you're talking about motion interpolation and that kind of thing, that can all be easily turned off.

The fact that many in-depth reviews contain a long section of "set these settings to these values to get an undistorted look" and the creation of filmmaker's mode belies this being easy to turn off.

That's why you should use GPU scaling instead.

Isn't this less of a problem nowadays as most LCD's are high density (retina)?

In the Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive scene we still use CRTs for in-person tournaments because of the input lag on LCDs. Most original hardware available to play the game doesn't have a digital display output unless you have an early model GameCube and purchase a ~$100 HDMI adapter. Even if you get the hardware setup for modern digital output, most LCD monitors still have poor response times without spending the extra money for a "gaming" monitor.

There has been a lot of work by modders to reduce the input lag introduced by the game engine itself to offset the lag introduced by LCD monitors, but I hope someday LCDs can catch up in this last metric.

I can't think of anything else than some arcade games requiring the lowest possible latency. People are okay with 50 ping games so 2 ms really doesn't matter to most players.

50ms network latency is not the same thing as 50ms controller to display latency.

If your network latency is 50ms, you still have extremely low, almost zero latency for most operations like using the mouse to change the look direction.

50ms display latency would make a modern FPS utterly unplayable.

Games like SSB are extremely latency dependent.

My point is, it is not worth to change the whole lcd technology just for games like ssb. Which is probably 1ms latency for lcd is enough.

It's not just SSB. There are entire classes of games that aren't playable even at novice levels on modern LEDs like Guitar Hero style rhythm games.

LEDs often have much higher latency than necessary. Many have ALLM modes which disable certain features to decrease latency. We already have changed LED technology for this reason -- higher end computer monitors specifically focus on latency now. It's a really big deal.

LCDs may refresh pixels at a rate of 1ms, that does not mean the pixel displayed is only 1ms away from the input. You can get maybe 10ms of input lag with the very best setups. Modern TVs easily have 100ms of lag out of the box due to processing which you may or may not be able to bypass.

> it is not worth to change the whole lcd technology just for games

Nobody suggested this. {Parent} was merely pointing out one advantage of CRT tech over LCD tech in a specific use case.

The traditional way to play melee is local multiplayer only, so players most players are used to the incredibly fast response of a CRT. This and the muscle memory required to play at a high level makes LCD monitors (and especially TV's) noticeable.

Tech skill by good players in smash is pretty incredible. Online is a noticably different game than in person from the minimal online lag.

> work by modders to reduce the input lag introduced by the game engine itself

Can you link something about this? are people rewriting the core engine of melee?

There's a phenomenon known as Polling Drift where the 2x-per-frame input polling at 120 Hz is mismatched with the NTSC framerate that's 0.1% slower, leading to a variable 0-0.5 frame input lag. This can be patched out.

Additionally, they found that there is an extra frame of buffer hanging around that wasn't necessary so that can be removed.

There might be something else too?

That sounds weird to me. Old game consoles with analog video output didn't generate perfect NTSC or PAL timings (for example, the Megadrive would actually run at 59.92274 Hz in NTSC, and 49.701459 Hz in PAL), but it didn't matter as the CRT TVs had some wiggle room and would synchronize to the video signal. There was no such thing as input and output running at different rates and desynchronizing.

The problem isn't that the framerate isn't exactly the right frequency, it's that the controller polling frequency is not a whole multiple of the framerate.

The game uses the last poll, but the last poll could be up to half a frame old.

Another HN user mentioned a skipped frame every 20 seconds on a Dell monitor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582085

A few projects that are pretty widely used in the Melee scene are 20XXTE [0] and Slippi [1].

As far as I know, neither rewrite the core engine of melee, but there are some key modifications like UCF (Universal Controller Fix) in 20XXTE that modifies the way the game interprets analog stick movement to help standardize the effectiveness of gamecube controllers. Without that fix, it's very hit or miss on whether or not certain movement tech would work consistently on a controller due to joystick drift / deadzones.

[0] - https://github.com/dansalvato/20XXTE

[1] - https://github.com/project-slippi/project-slippi

I had a 20” Sony PVM (20M4E) for a few years for retro games. Playing anything intended for analogue video was an absolute joy. The characteristics of the display were factored into the creation of the art in a fascinating way (and sometimes even the characteristics of the display signal, like the transparency effects in Sonic the Hedgehog that only work over composite video).

I ended up selling it due to space and practicality concerns, plus some of the corner geometry was starting to drift in a way that would need physical adjustments to the tube to correct. I used the money to buy a RetroTink 5X scaler; it’s not the same by any stretch, but it’s a best-in-class scaler so at least I’m not adding a ton of latency and visual artefacts to the process.

I find it remarkable how much display tech can affect our perception of what is essentially the same image, and how this manifests with different types of content. It’s not even just legacy stuff—OLEDs have very different motion characteristics to LCDs due to the pixel response time, for example.

The article doesn't even mention the only true advantage of CRT: that they work with lightguns for video games. I miss games like Duck Hunt and Vampire Night!

I would love to see modern CRTs but we have to be honest with ourselves about the negative environmental side with their lead components. Perhaps we could build a more environmentally friendly CRT with our processes nowadays.

It’ll be very niche gadget so who cares about environment.

You'd think that about mechanical keyboards too, but there you go.

Mechanical keyboards are a small niche. I would be suprised if they make up more than 0.5% of the keyboards in use today.

In addition to this, once OLED monitors for PCs (or similar) become commonplace, a lot of the complaints I had about LCD/LED are no longer relevant. My LG CX looks absolutely stunning, and the input lag is unnoticable.

One advantage is that you can have another kind of fun with it, as displayed in the amazing demo "Copper" by Surprise!Productions (1992).

Most of the effects in that demo are made possible by varying values in the CRT Controller registers of the VGA card. Fond memories!

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2048

We are still waiting for the infinite precision displays "pixels are dying at alarming level, but they are individual atoms so no matter". Was this from William Gibson?

Anyways. I have already planned how this display is constructed. Instead of individually addressing every pixel, the display is backed with layered pyramid of guad-decoders, which divide the display to four smaller displays. The picture or quad-message Q={Q,Q,Q,Q} can be of any precision, but when the decoder does not see sub-decoders but just pixels, it just calculates the average and turns the pixel on.

The beauty of display of mine is that they can be stacked. You just add another decoder-level behind the display. Or may they are constructed that way, so you can repair a display by replacing one 64x64 pixel module.

BTW. This display is many ways similar to CRT or rather vector displays. When gaming you can send Q-messages to areas of intense activity and the rest remains the same. Q-message needs to have ignore flag (Ign).

As an example this message turns the lowest-rightmost pixel Red on 256x256-display:

    (Ign Ign Ign
     (Ign Ign Ign 
      (Ign Ign Ign
       (Ign Ign Ign
        (Ign Ign Ign Red)))))

Q-messages are in Lisp, of course.

I do wish display manufacturers used more display tech in parallel. I'd love the option to buy a modern CRT or a modern LCD or a modern OLED, etc. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, but it seems like on the market, CRT being fat outweighed all other concerns.

Pun intended.

I miss degaussing my monitor.

Have there been any attempts to make something like a CRT with phosphors and an electron gun in a thinner form factor?

What if we had a grid of smaller electron beams targeting a small display section instead of a single large one? Can it be done without vacuum tubes today?

Yes, that’s basically what a plasma TV is.

Also there was going to be field emitter (FED and SED) flat screen TVs, basically an array of electron guns.

But they were killed by the low cost of LCDs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-emission_display

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...

Oh neat, I didn't realize that. I guess it didn't work out very well.

I have a plasma TV that I use for gaming (Panasonic Viera). It's a great display with none of the contrast or ghosting disadvantages of an LCD, but it's heavy, delicate, and most importantly, it puts out a ton of heat. A plasma TV is basically a grid of tiny neon lights.

Like any active display (CRT, plasma, or OLED) it can suffer from burn-in, but I haven't found that to be a problem for my usage.

Between a very old Panasonic Viera 42" upon which a buttload of Halo was played over many years, and the current Samsung Not-Smart Plasma which gets a bit less game play, I've yet to see the slightest hint of burn-in. I did get some ghosting on the Panny before I sold it, but I otherwise take plasma burn-in to be an artifact from TVs made twenty years ago.

It's a problem with every plasma TV ever made. I've got one of the last Panasonic Viera's which, after almost 10 years, has a slight dark patch around the place where subtitles tend to appear (I'm from the Netherlands where almost all non-dutch content is subtitled) It's only really noticeable when looking at a uniform gray screen which is not my content of choice, but it's there.

Plasma TVs are out there and have advantages and disadvantages to LCDs.

The Sony Watchman[1] had the electron gun at the bottom shooting at a tilted screen instead of shooting at it from the back. This allowed to make a GameBoy-sized portable CRT TV.

There is also an interesting LCD/CRT hybrid from JVC[2], it's not flat by itself, but the way it adds color to an otherwise black&white screen could be used in slim designs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ZTQ5BvNIQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-q8ehzHeQQ

There're two competing technologies, before LCD came to dominate the display sector, utilizing electron emitters energizing phosphors in thin form factor, essentially an evolution of CRTs, SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) and FED (field-emission display).

There's something so comfy looking about CRT monitors. I know it's just nostalgia, but there's something in that.

I've been playing a lot of Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) recently. The games are alright, but honestly they kind of suck when objectively compared to modern games. I still enjoy them though, but that's because they take me back to simpler times.

I'm not sure I'd use a CRT monitor for any of it's tech specs, but would I get a huge amount of satisfaction from setting up a CRT monitor just so I can recreate my childhood experience of playing Jedi Knight II again? Probably.

I don't think a lot of them sucked at all compared to modern games. Forced constraints lead to wonderful creativity and strong - even if simple - game design.

Sure the games might not have had as much breadth or depth at times, but I feel today's games are far more generic in general, you have to go searching for interesting concepts, rather than just browsing what is 'on the shelf' at the shops.

My recommendation is to watch speedruns of that game as I recall them being hilariously insolent.

The best thing about CRTs was holding a magnet near the screen to twist the electron beam. Gives you an intuitive understanding of the sideways force experienced in a magnetic field.

EDIT: Also, it was heaps of fun!

I think CRTs let your brain do some antialiasing so free details. I have some old 600mb divx rips that still look pretty damn good when viewed on a CRT.

Did you know that the JPEG image format is 'designed for CRTs'?

You can use different look up tables in a JPEG image and Mozilla did this to make JPEGs work for digital screens where there isn't that blurring for free.

The Mozilla encoder went way over most people's heads and the default JPEGturbo algorithm most operating systems and applications use is from the CRT era when compute cycles cost thousands more than they do today.

CRTs also smoothed out details on screen, it was a shock for TV world going from standard resolution 4:3 CRT to 16:9 Digital Full HD because analog TV had this wonderful way of magically hiding scratches in a set so long as you threw tens of kilowatts of light at everything in the studio. With digital the sets had to be rebuilt because everything looked shabby.

Not your brain so much, but the combination of the non-mapping of phosphors to pixels, and the fact that the electron beam ramps up and down, rather than instantly turning on or off, causes the pixels to be softened, moreso across a scanline than between them.

Your brain helps too, but in the same way that it helps with every color display device that uses RGB or some variant. Get close enough and you can perceive the individual phosphors or subpixels in either case.

I just had this idea and I cant be the only one though, what about just a slightly blurry physical glass/plastic overlay?

Apple's Studio Display has a “nano‑texture glass” option, which is designed to reduce reflection/glare, but also subtly-but-noticeably blurs the image.

Looking at them side by side, I somewhat preferred the blur/bloom of the nano‑texture glass, perhaps due to retro CRT nostalgia. At 5K it's still incredibly crisp compared to 1x pixels (e.g. 27" 1440p).

(But… for looking at code/text all day in a room without ambient lighting problems, I chose the crisp image of the plain (antireflective-coated) glass instead)

I had the exact same realization when testing my beloved diamondpro, the image was just nicer, warmer .. it was shocking.

It's also because LCDs cannot display collours as good as CRTs. Only the latest HDRs come close.

It is simply adding a tiny bit of blur to the entire image.

If you do that the image just looks blurry.

The magic is that it looks soft on a CRT. soft != blurry

In my experience a simple scanline filter surprisingly helps in softening upscaled low res. The draw back is that the overall brightness is reduced.

You can't win with LCD.

I don't think it's that simple. Old videogames look really ass on modern displays, even with ostensibly remastered releases that should be doing that tiny bit of blurring.

When I was a desktop tech, visiting a user with a problem, I carried a laser pointer with me. I could point to elements on the screen without getting my fingerprints on the glass and without invading the user's personal space. Laser pointers are pretty much useless on LCD. Not that I would ever go back; but it was a nice feature at the time.

> Laser pointers are pretty much useless on LCD.

What do you mean? An LCD will reflect a laser pointer just fine (I just tested it).

They're vintage enthusiast items. Someone who likes classic cars will probably not want to replace everything with modern digital stuff. CRTs will always have that, as long as they are available.

Definitely not something I'd want to own though. They're bulky, significantly hot, sometimes noisy, full of lead glass. And... HD is pretty nice.

> Definitely not something I'd want to own

Not something I’d ever want to return to. Back when I finally had an LCD, it was so amazing. When every place had LCDs, it was even better, no more annoying sounds!

Obviously the biggest advantage of having a CRT again is reliving the glory days of pointing my SNES Super Scope at it and blasting away at Yoshi's Safari, Battle Clash and Metal Combat!

They have sad sadly in a box for far too long, I really need to go find an old crt and stop living in shame.

>>>> Usually when there are limitations, the computer and display are able to negotiate compatible options and hide the incompatible ones.

Ejem... there was a time were X configuration was black magic, and only the bold venture to change it.

Recall as a teen installing Linux and then reading the monitor manual, looking for the specs to add it to the configuration after reading to be careful that you could break it, and starting X holding my breath.

The article points out that LCDs have more lag, but then it states this:

> And if there is scaling involved, there is probably going to be some lag

The lag that's introduced by a scaler is trivial, and measured in microseconds...

If the article does not consider: "slapping the shit out of the monitor when you're angry at the computer", then it's scientifically inaccurate.

Next up, article on the advantages of eating cyanide.

Doesn't matter about the advantages - the disadvantages far outweigh them.

What’s the disadvantage of crts that outweighs all the advantages?

It is mostly the weight and physical space the tube requires. They use a lot of desk space and require a decent quality desk to hold them. They also use somewhat more power than LCDs but I suspect LCDs more modern look and space saving qualities drove their adoption much more than the power usage. The way their refresh rate works also seems to cause a lot less eyestrain on LCDs, particular when comparing a low quality CRT to a low quality LCD.

What I call the "square eyes" syndrome.

After you use one for ten hours, you go home with a weird tension/buzz in your head. Doesn't happen with LCDs.

1) flickering

2) fuzzy pixels

Missing from the article: "Advantages of LCD over CRT"

1. they're Thinner And Lighter™

2. ...err...

3. ...that's it...

And also vastly higher resolution, pixel density, contrast ratio, brightness, color depth, and display sizes. Oh and vastly lower energy consumption and heat output.

No to contrast ratio and color depth.

Contrast: The electron gun can turn off (OLEDs as well btw), LCDs will always bleed some backlight (although they have region dimming now).

Color depth: only limited by GPU's RAMDAC, 10 bits were available in some Matrox cards.

No no no, CRT's weren't THAT bad. They were actually pretty good on all your points except energy. We definitely made some compromises on resolution, color depth, latency on LCD's.

More comprehensive list or trade offs between the two: https://www.displaymate.com/crtvslcd.html

Wow, that list is so outdated, it's not even funny.

Most of the negatives listed on the LCD side have been non-issues for years (e.g. viewing angles).

There are many different panel technologies, and some do have poor viewing angles as a tradeoff for other features.

I own a 10-bit 4K Innolux VA panel from 2013 that washes out with vertical orientation, and a similar spec LG TV from 2019 that does the same. Both are better than TN panels but still make it hard to look at while standing or laying down.

That seems to be a decade out of date at this point.

What is the latest in CRT technology so that one can compare?

The real biggest advantage is Time Crisis

None.

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