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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

It's been pretty amazing how stagnant the monitor space is. I too am really craving an 8k@120 monitor, although there's a decent chance I'll balk at the price.

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It’s crazy how much of a regression there was in resolution and picture quality when we went from CRT to LCD displays. In the late 90’s you could get a CRT that did 2048x1536 no sweat with great color and decent refresh rate. Then suddenly LCD displays became the standard and they looked awful. Low resolutions, terrible colors and bad viewing angles. The only real advantage they had was size. It took a decade or so to get back to decent resolutions and color reproduction.

How much did a 2048x1536 CRT monitor cost though? That's usually high and I bet it probably priced similar to what a 6K or 8K monitor is today.

Not at all! Your common as milk Philips and ViewSonic 19-21” could do that easily!

Also that CRT was probably 21" max, and weighed 20% of the human looking at it.

You are way too optimistic about the weight. ViewSonic p225f with 20" visible display, that reportedly was capable of 2560x1920/63Hz weighted 30.5 kgs!

I am not sure with that dot pitch of 0.25mm it was worth it.

[1] https://www.backoffice.be/prod_uk/ViewSonic/p225f_viewsonic_...

If anything - you can get it waaay cheaper now.

I'm struggling to remember how much they did cost, but with $2000 price tag for the top of the notch machine the monitors on the low end tended (well, AFAIR, don't take my word for it) to be less than $150, and hi-end were like $700 for not the ultra-uber-special cases.

> The only real advantage they had was size.

And Moore's Law. LCDs are semiconductors so their price goes down by a factor of 2 every 18 months.

However, even size would be enough. CRTs were ridiculously heavy. My GDM-FW900 was almost 100 pounds. And I used two side by side. I had to shop specifically for a desk that wouldn't collapse when I put them on it.

It's still not reached a point where you can just choose high resolutions with no drawbacks.

2048x1536 19" (135ppi) at up to 72Hz was common at reasonable prices in the late 90s if my memory is correct. Although OS scaling sucked and text looked weird due to the shadow mask at that size. 1600x1200 (105ppi) was the sweet spot for me. And actually in my first job in 2004 I had two 20" 1600x1200 (100ppi) LCDs that I recall were reasonably priced and they were nicer overall. This was around the time LCDs became the default choice. Then "HD" became a thing a couple of years later and you are right, for the next ten years virtually all monitors were "widescreen HD", which was 1280x720 if you fell for marketing of the lower-priced units or or 1920x1080 at best. Anything higher was very expensive.

In 2012 the retina macbooks came out and I got a 13(.3)" with 2560x1600 resolution (227ppi). This was the first time for me that LCDs were finally great. But you couldn't get a resolution like that in an external display. So at that time I mostly just didn't use external monitors until 2016 when suddenly 4K 27" (163ppi) became reasonably priced. So I used 2 of those for years and they were good enough but still left me wanting.

Now still to this day, 4K is the max for external monitors at reasonable prices at any size. About 2 years ago I got an M1 macbook and realized it only supported 1 external monitor. I felt like I needed to keep the real estate I was used to and anyway, with the pandemic and WFH, managing multiple monitors with multiple (work and personal) machines sucked. All I could really find at a reasonable price was 32"/4K and 49" ultrawide. I begrudgingly downgraded to a 49" 5120x1440 monitor (109ppi). I will admit that going from 60Hz to 120Hz was nicer than I expected.

So in 2023 my laptop screen is great and has been great for 10+ years but this was my story about how I am still using the same pixel density as I did 25 years ago.

IBM T221 (2001, over 4K) was popped up from the future.

Very cool but not really relevant to what was/is available for reasonable prices.

Second hand one was very cheap ($600?) in 2010 IIRC, still futuristic at the time.

LCDs didn't replace CRTs because they offered better quality to consumers. They were worse for all the reasons you mentioned and then some. LCDs were cheaper to make, much lighter and less frail so they cost less to ship, and they took up much less space while in transport, and while sitting in warehouses, or on store shelves. We were sold an inferior product so that other people could save money. Gradually, some of those savings made it to consumers, especially when it became possible to generate profit continuously though TVs by collecting our data and pushing ads, but it was always a shitty deal for consumers who wanted a quality picture.

I imagine that in the future, people will look back at much of the media from recent decades and think that it looks a lot worse than we remember because it was produced on bad screens or made to look good on all of our crappy screens.

While I appreciate a bit of sarcasm, I'm not sure if this is what actually happened. In the CRT era, you either had good monitors which were expensive or a bunch of actually crap monitors. I had the former, but most of the people had latter and using those monitors for any extended period of time would give you headaches and dry eyes because of poor refresh rates, and terrible flicker.

As a personal anecdote: when I was choosing components for my first desktop computer (instead of using dad's work laptops), I selected components which are affordable. Also, as a coincidence a local IT magazine had a big test of desktop CRT monitors. So I've chosen some inexpensive one which wasn't terrible and as every kid asked parents for money. My mum who was already working on computers on her job had a look through that magazine and said that she'll pay for the whole computer only on the condition we buy the best monitor on that test. So we did (it was a trinitron Nokia @ 100Hz which was a lot), and I think with that move she saved my eyes long term, as I'm in my early 40ties and the only healthy thing I still have are my eyes. In any case, I've soon realized when I got that monitor is that I'll never save money when buying stuff which I use all day long.

Back to the topic. CRT monitors also were space heaters, and had a large volume which was only fine when being permanently placed on a geek's desk.

When LCDs arrived they actually were considerably better than average CRTs. The picture was rock solid without flicker or refresh rate artifacts, perfectly rectangular (a big problem with an average CRT as a matter of fact) and very sharp and crisp. All for a little bit more money. After two or three years they were actually even cheaper than CRTs. And I forgot to mention, they took much less space so you could place it on a POS counter or wherever. It took much more time to replace the top end CRTs, but I guess this is always the case when talking about some tech product.

The power draw is also lower for LCD.

I agree, but we got LG's 16:18 DualUp monitors a year ago. Having a 43'' monitor in the middle and these two on the sides creates a better setup than it was than what was previously possible.

That's basically what I do. 24" 4K in the middle and 2 17" eizos beside it. They're 1280x1024 though so I have 200% scaling in the middle and 100% at the sides. This causes some OS issues in FreeBSD (I mitigate with xrandr) and Windows which is still screwy to this day. On Mac it works perfectly but I don't use Mac much anymore.

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