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Comment by voidwtf | Hacker News Reader

I had the benefit of growing up on the during the transition period from CRT to LCD. I had a friend who got an awesome Sony Trinitron WEGA and had the opportunity to play PS1 and PS2 games on it. I struggle to see the appeal of the CRT for modern day anything. For games designed on a CRT, the allure is obvious. Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT because of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the graphics were designed around. The games weren't meant to look like pixelated blocks with clearly defined edges like they do on a modern screen, and they didn't look that way on a CRT.

However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water. The vibrancy of the colors, the overall quality of the picture, not having that CRT 'glow', readability of text is all improved in my opinion. CRTs also had a number of maintenance items, the screens attracted dust like a magnet, having to adjust vertical and horizontal alignment, color adjustments (both which often ended up out of whack for some reason).

I'm sure there are benefits, for older games I see it, but for modern games I sometimes wonder if this is people waxing poetic or being nostalgic. I'm sure there are some people who will make claims about gaining an edge in online shooters, but I'm curious how much of that is real considering other losses in the pipeline like digital to analog conversion and how low the refresh rate is compared to modern gaming panels.

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I worked for a video titling company in the 80s during their transition from Analog titling to Digital titling. One key thing I learned there is that CRTs have about three times the horizontal resolution folks give them credit for. Most folks measure horizontal resolution in how many clear pixels you can go from light to dark and back. What they don't account for is the pixel-shift, you can position those start and end transitions at three or more times that resolution.

Nowadays we call that sub-pixel rendering or antialiasing. But in the 80s so many people were convinced TVs could only do 640x480. Our titling systems were typically doing 2400x480 to get good quality character aliasing and image shading on CRTs. This is still somewhat true today analog-wise but common sub-pixel rendering or antialiasing does achieve the same effect on LCDs.

Strictly speaking, because the signal is continuous, analog video doesn't really have horizontal resolution, does it?

Exactly. Black and white TVs worked very much like oscilloscopes and had almost no definition of horizontal resolution. Very few color broadcast TVs were made with three separate beams and three separate color filters (like rear-view projectors). Your typical color TV effectively created "pixels" by their use of shadow masks and three separate beams. The analog signal, however, could still be in transition along the entire horizontal sweep. The biggest difference between high-end studio monitors and your average TV was how packed the shadow mask was.

I don't think that's quite how it worked.

The colour was created by different phosphors on the inside of the screen, there was nothing different about the electron beams. The number and pitch, the resolution, of these different phosphor dots determined the resolution of the screen.

The shadow masking was to prevent the beam for, say, the red phosphors sweeping blue/green subpixels when moving from one pixel to another, since it wasn't practical to turn the beam off and then back on once the steering coils had been changed. Steering was continuous, so without shadowmasks, you would illuminate on the neighbour subpixels you pass on the way.

You could have done it all with a single beam, if you really wanted, but it's not very practical - you'd need to sweep slower since you could only illuminate 1 subpixel at a time, it'd take much longer to to steer, illuminate at the right level, and move to the next with the right beam power selected.

> I don't think that's quite how it worked.

I think he described exactly what you did (in fewer words) in the second half of his post. ("Your typical color TV ..."

The first half discusses that some projection screens had 3 different tubes. ("Very few broadcast TVs ...")

Either that or he edited his post.

My objection is:

> Your typical color TV effectively created "pixels" by their use of shadow masks and three separate beams.

It's true that almost all colour TVs are pixelated and have shadow masks and three separate beams, but it's got the cause and consequence the wrong way around.

The pixels are created by the phosphor dots, not the mask/tube design. It's possible to use this design without three tubes or the screen, strictly, but a consequence of this design suggests the optional addition of a shadow mask and additional tubes as a natural, later progression for improved performance.

> It's possible to use this design without three tubes or the screen, strictly,

Without shadow masks or an aperture grille seems pretty dang hard. Even ignoring the alignment concerns, it requires a much, much higher bandwidth.

The shadow mask and aperture grille approaches were the only approaches that ever really worked for color CRTs.

Phosphors and some kind of masking is how you make different colors on a single tube. Indeed, the shadow mask or aperture grille was offset 3 times and used to etch for the phosphor coatings in most manufacturing processes.

> l addition of a shadow mask and additional tubes as a natural, later progression for improved performance.

There's just one tube-- multiple guns/beams, though.

That really opened my eyes. I played GTAIII a long time ago on a portable black and white TV, and I vividly remember it looking so much better than our main TV (which was still a tube at the time)

AFAIK, you're still limited by the bandwidth of your analog signal. If you tried to treat it as if it had unlimited horizontal resolution, you'd use so much bandwidth that you'd end up stomping over the color subcarrier (and probably the audio subcarrier too).

No, I think it's the other way. The horizontal lines are digital, the meridians are continuous.

Think about it this way: lines are discrete, because they are separated by an HSYNC pulse that is used to fly back the electron beam from right to left. But the 'pixels' within a horizontal line are continuous: there is nothing in the video signal that delineates them.

To the number of horizontal pixels is essentially limitless (if you ignore the bandwidth limit and the CRT scan raster) while the number of vertical pixels/lines is always discrete.

there are a fixed number of horizontal lines. The number of implied vertical lines is determined by Nyquist's theorem.

To realign your decoder to interpret the earlier poster: their "horizontal resolution" is the frequency along the horizontal axis, i.e. the density of signal changes within one scan line.

No, resolution is not a digital concept. Pixels are a digital concept[0], but in an analog signal there is still a limit on how much frequency content you can resolve.

CRTs additionally impose their own limit on how sharp the picture can get horizontally. Confusingly, these are called "television lines", even though you'd think that refers to the horizontal scanlines that do discretely divide up the picture vertically. Color CRTs further limit the amount of color resolution independent of luminance resolution, and how they do that depends on what specific phosphor pattern they use, how they separate electrons from each color gun, etc.

[0] And one that's just as misleading as sample-and-hold diagrams of digital audio that make people go out and buy really expensive DACs for reproducing ultrasonics they can't hear

It has the NTSC Subcarrier of ~3.58Mhz, and that limits color resolution.

Let's say you're displaying a 640x480 screen on a TV. Your chroma information is sampled from an area about 2.1 pixels wide. So even if the signal is continuous, your color information is the result of sampling a boxed area centered on that pixel.

And because you don't want the wave pattern to be displayed as luma, you also take the average luma of that area. Now you have a blurred fat color pixel, but it can be positioned anywhere continuously.

NTSC is just one specific implementation of analog color video transmission, has nothing to do with CRT functionality outside of North America/Japan/a few other places and generally when speaking about CRT monitors for computers, arcades and the like they operate on discrete RGB signals with a wide variety of timing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Video_Timings, NTSC isn't a thing.

Furthermore, even when using NTSC video timings, the 3.58 MHz subcarrier is specific to transmission of composite video (carrying brightness and color combined in the same signal). A DVD player for instance with a component or SVideo output produces NTSC timing but there is no subcarrier because the color signal is discrete.

the screens attracted dust like a magnet

You just brought back vivid memory of something I haven’t thought about in years!

For those who never experienced it: the constant firing of electrons into the screen caused it to become statically charged over time.

It would, yes, attract dust - and if you ran your hand over a TV that had been on for a while, you could feel the ‘fuzz’ of the electric charge directly with your fingers. I can remember the feeling so vividly now!

And the great big thunk if you had a model that supported degaussing.

Loved doing a degaussing.

Fingers? Wasn't it the hair on the top of your hand that felt it? I might remember wrong!

You could definitely feel little pops/tingles on your fingertips if you touched the screen. A little while it’s on, but even more strongly immediately after it turns off and the fields all collapse.

But also, hair itself has no living tissue or nerves within. You can feel hair standing on end because it’s anchored in your skin, which does have nerves.

The core argument for CRT's is their low latency and high refresh rate. Nobody is using a CRT for picture quality (outside the aforementioned blurred retro gaming look)

However this article is from 2019, and I know they have some pretty snazzy gaming monitors today that might well be better than old top-end CRTs.

The low latency only works when the source is sending an analog signal which is essentially controlling the electron gun. An NES for example, could decide between scan lines what the next scaling to emit would look like.

Most modern systems (and computers) are sending digital signals where entire frames need to be constructed and reconstructed in a buffer before they can be displayed. Many HD CRT televisions have terrible latency because they’ll take the analog scan line signal, buffer it into a frame, scale it to the native CRT resolution, then scan it back out to the screen. A high end PVM might allow a straight path, but there is maybe one Toshiba HD CRT that doesn’t introduce several frames of latency (iirc).

That said, from 1999 to 2008 I ran 1600x1200 on 19in CRTs and except for professional LCDs, nothing had resolution, pitch, and color that came close. For 2008 was the inflection point where cost and quality of LCDs exceeded CRTs.

> Most modern systems (and computers) are sending digital signals where entire frames need to be constructed and reconstructed in a buffer before they can be displayed.

HDMI and DVI-D are a digital representation of a tv signal --- there's all the blanking and porches and stuff (audio data is often interleaved into the blanking periods). You could process that in realtime, even though most displays don't (including CRT HDTVs; I trust your maybe one doesn't).

It makes little sense to buffer a full frame before up scaling. Why would you do that? It’s a total waste of DRAM bandwidth too.

The latency incurred for upscaling depends on number of the vertical filter taps and the horizontal scan time. We’re talking order of 10 microseconds.

The only exception is if you’re using a super fancy machine learning whole-frame upscaling algorithm, but that’s not something you’ll find in an old CRT.

What you're describing is fully a product of the display controller architecture, not the digital signal. You can "chase the beam" with HDMI/DVI just as well (or better) as you can with analog. There's no need to buffer the whole screen and be even one frame latent.

I've done it in Verilog on FPGA, for example.

But we do so on our machines because that's how the GPU/display controller pipeline works easiest from a software POV. That latency would be present on a CRT as well. What would be missing is the internal latency present in some monitors.

I was doing the "chase the beam" approach, but never got it off the ground (home project, mostly curiosity). But always on the back of my mind was: even if you're doing everything in low latency HDMI signals, there's no guarantee that the display isn't still buffering it, even if you have "game mode" on on your TV.

yes, absolutely, the monitor vendor can do whatever they want

still, it's usually only 2 or 3 frames in game mode on a good display

> on a good display

This is a thing in the last 5-10 years, but was absolutely not a concern to the majority of display manufacturers before gamers complained. 100ms is significant in twitch games where network latencies are 20ms or lower.

As someone who almost never plays video games but owns several CRTS for the sake of media I can attest to the fact that at least some of us purely own CRT's for their picture quality, or in my case the fact that I think pre 2000's 4:3 media was also kind of intended to be watched on screens like that (much in the same way I see video gamers arguing)

I'll take a wild guess though that my group (crt media watchers) is slightly less easy to take advantage of with actual hardware than video gamers which I'd guess to be the reason why there are few articles or HOLY GRAIL crt's like this fw900 widescreen in the media watching community. Not that we aren't often suckers for things like ORIGINAL VINTAGE POSTERS and SEALED MEDIA lol.

How about NOS?

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

> The core argument for CRT's is their low latency and high refresh rate

The article is outdated (like you said) because LCD/OLED displays have long since surpassed CRTs in latency and refresh rate.

A modern gaming LCD can refresh the entire screen multiple times over before an old CRT scans the entire frame and returns to the top to redraw the next one.

Yeah, and 90% of the commenters in this discussion clearly haven't looked at TV or computer monitor made in the last few years; they're at least 5 years behind the market.

There are Samsung TVs that have around ~6ms input delay, and many, many gaming monitors have 1-2ms input delay.

If you spend $400 you can get a 1440p monitor with 1ms input delay, 2-3ms grey-to-grey timing, that will do 240hz.

All with more contrast, color gamut, and resolution.

Point being? Your modern LCD still uses buffers and sample and hold. They will always have inherent input latency compared to CRT regardless how fast they can refresh.

They will have inherent _output_ latency.

I mean, a decidedly smaller argument (but still an argument!) for CRTs is you could put doodads and action figures on top of the box.

Rhythm gaming is a big one for me. All other display devices commonly used for gaming have at least a small amount of lag between input and final display. I have a midrange LED set that gives me something like 12ms lag calibration when I play Rock Band 3 on it. It's a very slight difference, but it is noticeable, and I'd much rather have the 0 calibration that a CRT could provide.

I've played modern games on CRTs through HDMI->VGA convertors, and still felt lower latency than LCD. OLEDs will eventually catch up, I think, but LCDs are always going to have some lag.

And it's not the refresh rate, it's the time from input -> display picture updates. With a CRT that can happen during the current field being displayed, but it will take at least one frame for any LCD.

This is just not true.

You can update an LCD in the middle of the screen just the way you can for CRT.

The only hard limit to the latency of an LCD panel is the finite amount of time that’s needed to flip the fluid in the LCD cells. There is nothing that requires a full frame delay.

Most LCD monitors have a frame buffer to look back in time for things line overdrive compensation, but you can easily do without. In fact, some of the monitor scaler prototypes that I have worked on were initially direct drive because we hadn’t gotten the DRAM interface up and running yet.

Desktop LCD panels themselves typically don’t have memory, laptop panels do but that’s for power saving reasons (to avoid the power of transferring the data over a high speed link and to allow the source to power down.)

> You can update an LCD in the middle of the screen just the way you can for CRT.

And in fact this is such an annoyance there are multiple different ways people try to deal with the screen tearing, between V,G,and FreeSync.

That monitor scaler without DRAM was the prototype of the first G version. ;-)

> and I'd much rather have the 0 calibration that a CRT could provide.

Would it really be 0 though? Assuming 60Hz, the bottom of each frame is scanned out 16ms after the top. Assuming that Rock Band 3 renders an entire frame before displaying it (definitely true) and that it actually renders at 60FPS as opposed to rendering at a higher resolution and tearing (definitely true on console, might not be true on an emulator?), the video latency will range from 0ms for the top of the frame to 16ms for the bottom, for an average of 8ms.

Admittedly, I don't know what Rock Band 3 calibration numbers actually measure, e.g. whether they already take into account factors like this.

If you can manage to render at a high frame rate then you could reduce latency by tearing, but at that point, I feel like you're leaving a lot on the table by not using a 240Hz OLED or something, which can show the entirety of every frame.

Supposedly OLED has comparable response times to CRT anyway. The article says that OLED gaming monitors are unattainable, but it's 5 years old and things have changed.

CRTs far exceed 60Hz though. This FW900 for example goes up to 160Hz.

I agree that Rockband almost certainly does render a whole frame before scanout. So, yes, there's necessary latency there between the input processing and game logic and everything and the output. Higher refresh mitigates that, but that's not really an option on the kinds of gaming machines Rockband runs on; hopefully it's all locked at 60Hz, because that's what TVs run on (unless maybe ew PAL, but ew), and all the machines have a 240p mode, if they're not cool enough to run 480p or better.

But modern displays add unnecessary latency on top of that. HDTV CRTs often did too. Input devices sometimes add latency too. It's really not too awful as long as it's consistent, real musical instruments have latency too (especially pipe organs! but organists manage to figure it out). It's not as much fun if you need to hit the note when it's visibly far from the 'goal' section, or if the judging becomes visible a long time after the note --- shortening the feedback loop is good.

Rock Band's core game logic is fairly well decoupled from frame rate for the most part, actually. I usually run Rock Band 3 (with a fan mod called RB3 Deluxe installed) on an emulated PS3 at 75Hz and it runs perfectly. The only real issue is certain venue post processing effects behave weirdly at high frame rates (like the handheld camera shake effect) but with the aforementioned mod we can disable that.

An analog CRT is as close to zero latency as the source (in this example, Rock Band 3) can provide[0].

More-modern displays (obviously including LCD and OLED, but also CRT displays that themselves have a framebuffer, as was also a thing) always add additional latency.

0: It's not like we can just somehow convert an existing closed-source thing like Rock Band 3 into a 240Hz source.

The game is pretty good about taking things like that into account. Even aside from that, a CRT generally adds no lag of its own, displaying the scanline as soon as it begins receiving it, assuming a stable set of sync pulses.

The company that made Rock Band, Harmonix Music Systems, has amazing beatmatching technology that has been used in countless games and is even available in the newest versions of Unreal Engine, thanks to being currently owned by Epic Games. They've been developing this technology since the mid 90s.

The main difference between CRTs and other display types, is that the other display types are all largely sample-and-hold - they display the whole frame line by line, hold it for an amount of time, then begin the process again. They generally lack the decay that happens with a CRT, where the image fades by the time the next frame is to be drawn. Some displays can do black frame insertion, but this is a poor substitute. It requires double the frame rate of the intended output, and it reduces effective brightness. I'd like to see an OLED display that could simulate the phosphor decay on a per-pixel basis, to better simulate the scanning process of a CRT.

Look at a Beatmania IIDX Lightening Cab or a Sound Voltex Valkyrie cab. Modern flat panels are are providing better rhythm gaming experiences than CRTs ever did.

I can definitely agree on this point. Same for the newer Taiko versions utilizing a 120 Hz panel as well.

High refresh rate displays have been gaining a lot of traction in the past few years with 1080p or 1440p displays running at 120 or 144 Hz being affordable.

I don't think this is as simple as that (and it's not entirely the display's fault). 120hz iidx is a big upgrade over the previous lcds but I'm not sure it is over the games that ran on custom hardware that wasn't just a Windows PC.

I've got a firebeat at home that I play Pop'n on and it feels magical to play with absolutely minimal difference between when the audio and visuals are to where they game expects you to hit notes. Same cabinet but with a windows PC plugged in for modern games feels worse thanks to all the extra latency you get going through Windows (it's especially bad with the audio).

I know modern iidx and sdvx use newer audio apis that are lower latency but it's still more delay than the pre-PC systems imo.

> I'm not sure it is over the games that ran on custom hardware that wasn't just a Windows PC.

It is. I've played on both modern ligthening cabs, and on a variety of old official hardware setups in the CRT and Twinkle era. I'd rather play on a Lightening.

Specifically there is a source of lag even greater than the display lag introduced on almost all of the official LCDs. The input lag, or lag between a button being pressed and the game engine registering the input, is critically important in keysounded rhythm games. The bio2 board introduced in the IIDX25 hardware upgrade made a bigger reduction of this lag than the lag that was introduced in official LCD monitors.

The "custom hardware" or Twinkle system used by Konami for IIDX 1-8 is essentially modified PS1 hardware. It's really not much different than building ontop of Windows Embedded with the amount of custom hardware inside the cabinets.

sub-6ms TVs are common and many, many gaming monitors have 1-2, maybe 3ms delay. If you only need 1080p, it doesn't even cost much.

> However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water.

You can find some modern screens that do better at certain things than others but compared with what most people have CRTs are still likely to have better color accuracy, better contrast, zero motion blur, no dead/stuck pixels, far better viewing angles, no fixed resolutions, higher refresh rates, and zero backlight bleed. It's not all nostalgia (although I really do miss the degauss button) but CRTs were also before DRM, data collection, and ads being pushed at you and it's hard to not be nostalgic about that.

The best CRTs may have been ok but most CRTs in the history of their kind were not what you describe. I've seen and used my share of them over many decades. Even in the 2000s any of the hundreds of CRTs in an office would have been rather characterized by some CRT glow ruining the contrast particularly around text, constantly needing focus and geometry adjustments if yours was fancy enough to offer the option, commonly 60Hz but somehow always flickering, a bulging screen, in time weird color distortions or fading in some corner of the screen that never went away, the inevitable scratch of the antiglare coating, peaking at 1080i resolution if you were willing to sell your aunt for it, the fine stabilizing wires from the aperture grill creating OCD triggering shadows, huge but still realistically limited to 24-32" screen (in reality most were still huge but only 15-17"), hernia inducing heavy, and above 32" gave your dolly a hernia (300lbs worth), hard to adjust ergonomically, likely some buzzing noise, dust magnets, the smell of overheated plastic and dust being burned off the tube, and I'll stop here before it starts looking like CRTs stole my girlfriend and spit in my coffee.

Don't get me wrong, that smell will always take me back to a time when I had hair and it will without a doubt put a happy smile on my face any day. But it's all nostalgia anchored by a couple of technical advantages that pale in the face of overall tech today.

Limited to 1080i? That's a 16x9 aspect ratio... I had a CRT that did 1600x1200 back in like 1995. Are you thinking of just TVs? Because most of them did suck. There were lots of excellent computer monitors however...

One thing that does make me chuckle when I see "retro" setups on reddit is the use of a crappy 13"-14" monitor from 1993 surrounded by hardware from 1998 or 2002 or so.

This doesn't surprise me though. The high end Sony monitors always had trouble with flyback transformers and people that had those were quick to replace them with whatever the latest tech at the time was. The crappy 14" monitors were cockroaches that never broke. Now they get to torture zoomers with 60hz 800x600 lol.

The limit was mainly due to lack of hdmi support. There are obviously some crts with hdmi but they’re fairly uncommon as display manufacturers basically abandoned crts quickly in favor of significantly lighter yet larger display tech that was much more popular with average consumers. Obviously crts can do much higher resolution over dvi or even vga. with home av stuff they abandoned those connectors as well as component early on in favor of hdmi.

One of the other niceties associated with crts as a result. A monitor that you could just plug in to a source and it would work, from a time when manufacturers didn’t have the ability to kneecap your setup with handshake bullshit. Now hooking up stuff is just a bit more likely to be frustrating and nonstandard setups are much more likely to simply not work without pricey extra hardware. Want to split your bluray player or playstation 5 between a an oled television and a projector? It may just work with a basic hdmi splitter, or it may not. It may only work with certain hdmi splitters. It may only work if one display is on at a time. With dvi you could’ve gotten a basic splitter and it would’ve worked guaranteed regardless, but hdcp means that hdmi splitting will give you headaches because god forbid you hook up a secondary source to record a copy of content you purchased. Despite that, it’s still easily defeated with relatively cheap hardware, making it completely and utterly pointless as well

> compared with what most people have CRTs are still likely to have better color accuracy, better contrast, zero motion blur, no dead/stuck pixels, far better viewing angles, no fixed resolutions, higher refresh rates, and zero backlight bleed

You're comparing the best CRTs ever made with the "average" modern LCD.

The run of the mill CRT that "most people had" was dim, blurry, flickery, and bloom-y.

Most people have IPS or OLED phones with accuracy, gamut, brightness, contrast, density, and responsiveness that the best CRTs don't come close to.

You're absolutely deep in nostalgia land lol

> CRTs are still likely to have ... better contrast,

This isn't true, and hasn't been true for decades. CRTs have relatively poor display contrast due to all of the light bleed. CRT contrast in real scenes (that is, not just comparing all-black to all-white screens) can be around 100:1 or 200:1. LCDs have been better than that for a very long time. Even the cheap oens.

> zero motion blur,

Also not true. CRT phosphors have some persistence. Even the best CRT monitors back in the day had several milliseconds of persistence, depending on what you're measuring. Definitely not zero!

Modern LCD monitors have motion blur in a similar range, perhaps less if you're getting a gaming panel.

> no fixed resolutions

At the cost of some very blurry text, of course.

> You can find some modern screens that do better at certain things than others but compared with what most people have

It's almost certainly easier to find a high performing LCD than a quality CRT. A working FW900 CRT can easily fetch $1000-2000, which will buy a modern OLED display that completely blows it out of the water.

The only reason to buy a good CRT monitor is for the nostalgia/retro effects.

The current oled panel with total blackness + hdr is way beyond crt now. The only drawback is that it could have burn in.

CRT can also suffer from burn in. I have seen some retro arcades with text like "insert coin" burnt in.

I mean OLED has the reverse issue, they burn out specifically on Blue and it mostly depends on the brightness/screen on time as well as heat can affect it too.

> However modern content on modern, decent, LCD panels and especially on OLED panels, blows CRTs out of the water.

Sure, if you like motion blur that makes your content look like a slideshow. I personally don’t. It’s embarrassing that I’m still faced with worse motion qualities than I had 30 years ago.

The sample and hold motion blur of LCD/OLED ruined gaming for me for a long time. 240FPS OLED panels have begun to just make it bearable again when such rates can be achieved.

Have you tried a DLP projector with a high-speed color wheel? When I still owned one, the sample-and-hold slide show effect was far less pronounced than it is on any LCD display I've used (assuming the same frame rate).

Yup, until just a few years ago I gamed almost exclusively on a DLP projector on a 120" projection screen when using displays outside of my CRT's. I miss it and have considered going that route again, that or picking up a nice late generation 1080P plasma.

> Sure, if you like motion blur that makes your content look like a slideshow. I personally don’t. It’s embarrassing that I’m still faced with worse motion qualities than I had 30 years ago.

What crappy panels are you buying?

I know 10 years ago, IPS panels were known for having terrible response times, but there are other types of LCD that have pixel response times in the 1 ms range.

Manufacturers quote those response times, but worst-case response times are often at least a full frame, and sometimes multiple frames.

Unlike with CRTs, response time is a factor of what color you're switching to and from, and their intensity, it's highly-variable, and it makes me so sad whenever an otherwise-lovely game happens to put colors together that very obviously smear on my monitors. (Also, see above for my report on the laughably bad color smearing on my Pixel 5a.)

RTNGS usually has more-detailed breakdowns of best and worst-case color transition times for the monitors they test, as well as over- and under-shoot reports... which is a phenomenon that's just as bad as slow transitions between colors.

> What crappy panels are you buying?

Exactly zero. I own the highest end panels you can buy, regardless of whether it's OLED or LCD. I have a variety of CRT displays, desktop and broadcast on top of this.

> I know 10 years ago, IPS panels were known for having terrible response times, but there are other types of LCD that have pixel response times in the 1 ms range.

The vast majority of motion blur on todays displays is due to sample and hold, not pixel response times.

https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/

Ahhh...I understand now.

You're talking about motion blur created from eye tracking, rather than slow pixel response like I had assumed.

Meh, I don't see it as a problem, really. And as frame rates get higher, it becomes even less of a problem, as the distance an object moves across the screen between each frame is less. I'm already running at 144 fps, and I'll probably be looking for 240 fps in a few years.

> Meh, I don't see it as a problem, really

You personally might not see it as one, but it objectively is. Whether or not you personally are bothered by it is irrelevant to the reality of sample and hold displays poor motion handling. I am happy to hear it does not bother you, and I wish I could be you, however I am not. Probably a side effect of until not too long ago, having spent my entire life with displays that were not complete garbage in this aspect.

> And as frame rates get higher, it becomes even less of a problem

I have the best hardware today money can buy, but cant reach my 240hz capability now in any relatively modern title. It mostly only helps in esports/far older content. It also ignores the fact that we have decades worth of content that will never exceed 60FPS that looks terrible today on modern displays, and will continue to do so.

> I'll probably be looking for 240 fps in a few years.

240fps has made my usage of modern displays far more tolerable, still cant touch a CRT though. I'll be moving to 480hz OLED soon enough to further improve that. However all of these increased refresh rate displays suffer from the same issue.

Not everything can or will run at the refresh rates required to take advantage of the reduced motion blur, not even with top of the line hardware. This will probably eventually be resolved with software/hardware based framerate amplification, but we aint there today and probably wont be for at least another half decade or more.

OLED has near instant pixel response times. No idea what display you are looking at, but if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED

> ...if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED

I have a Pixel 5a.

It has _comically_ slow switching times between dark-ish colors and blacks that's most obvious with dark blue-family colors.

If you have such a phone, go check out the "Gunnerkrigg Court" webcomic (<https://gunnerkrigg.com>), scroll down to the border between the comic and the blog part, and jostle the viewport up and down.

If you go check out today's episode (comic 2929), you get an especially long trail of slow-transitioning pixels in the art that is particularly noticeable in the bottom panels of the comic, itself. (Examine the black borders of the people's hair, as well as the black frame of the comic panels. If you're not noticing it, scroll at a rate of travel of roughly one-quarter of the screen's height per second.)

This is a limitation/downside/flaw of "VA" LCD panels. OLED panels will not experience this, and neither will several other LCD technologies.

> This is a limitation/downside/flaw of "VA" LCD panels. OLED panels will not experience this...

I don't know what to tell you, man. I'm seeing this behavior on a Pixel 5a. Purchased _directly_ from Google's store. Google says this model of phone has a OLED display... an HDR one, at that. [0]

Not even the worst color transitions for my my VA monitor (a BenQ EWE3270U) streak this badly.

[0] <https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel5a-with-5g-new-googl...>

I realize that this is not even on topic, but _what a jolt of nostalgia_. I haven't even thought of that comic in what feels like a decade. Perhaps that's the optimal way of reading a webcomic (waiting until it's binge-able)? It's tripled in length since I last read it, and now my phone actually will display it :D (now if only the web interface tracked what page I was on, so that coming back months later didn't show Today's page, and instead showed where I last read ...)

On-topic, I have tried jostling the page on my Pixel 6a (also a 60hz OLED screen), and I don't notice _at all_ the display latency or issues that you mention. The only time I've noticed any kind of delay or ghosting like that is when I have it in extremely low brightness settings (reading at night in the dark), with "extra dim" enabled.

> Perhaps that's the optimal way of reading a webcomic (waiting until it's binge-able)?

Man, I tend to think so. (Though... I say that, and I've been reading Gunnerkrigg thrice a week for what seems like five years now, so sometimes I think one thing and do another sometimes. ;))

It's a good comic, IMO.

> The only time I've noticed any kind of delay or ghosting like that is when I have it in extremely low brightness settings (reading at night in the dark), with "extra dim" enabled.

I would have never thought to play with the brightness settings.

So, I nearly always have my screen on "8->10% brightness, automatic brightness adjust, 'extra dim' disabled.". I played with the brightness settings just now and discovered that I have to get the brightness up to 100% before the smearing is _nearly_ gone. At 50%, the trails are much, MUCH smaller than at ~10%, but still obviously there. 75% is not _that_ much better than 50%.

> [I have a] Pixel 6a

Hmm! Maybe in the year between the 5a and the 6a's release, they got on display manufacturers' collective asses to substantially reduce the amount of color smearing in the display that they selected for their next phone.

> OLED has near instant pixel response times.

Pixel response times are one small part of the equation. The vast majority of modern display blur comes from sample and hold motion blur, not pixel transition times.

https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/

> No idea what display you are looking at, but if you're getting smearing of any kind it wasn't an OLED

I am looking at a 27" LG27GR95QE. A 240hz WOLED panel produced by LG. Just one of multiple OLED panels I currently own. This is just in addition to a few high end LCD FALD panels, a couple of 21" Trinitrons and a handful of JVC broadcast CRT's.

> Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT because of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the graphics were designed around. The games weren't meant to look like pixelated blocks with clearly defined edges like they do on a modern screen, and they didn't look that way on a CRT.

This seems to suppose a world where, had LCDs been common, people wouldn't have used low-resolution bitmaps. But... there were not a lot of alternative technologies available! There are a few vector-art CRT arcade games out there, but generally very black-and-white/virtual-boy-style, and I believe bitmap graphics even without super-high-resolution would've won out anyway.

This also suggests that you couldn't tell the difference as much between NES/SNES/Playstation resolutions of bitmap-art games, when you DEFINITELY could. The old games never looked "great", it was just the best we had.

> This seems to suppose a world where, had LCDs been common, people wouldn't have used low-resolution bitmaps. But... there were not a lot of alternative technologies available

It's less about "They would not have used low res bitmaps for displaying graphics" and more about "The artists would likely have arranged the pixels in the bitmaps in different ways"

There are some really interesting articles out there about how the artists for old NES and SNES games designed the sprites to look better with scanlines, and without scanlines (like when playing on modern emulators) everything kind of looks worse than it did when it was rendered on CRTs

It's not the impact that's claimed at all. No sprite magic in the world will get around trying to display 200 pixels of image on a 65" modern TV. Play an NES game on a super-high-quality 13" flat panel and it looks a lot better than on a 75" one even without any fancy scanline filters or such.

Which pixels in Mario them would you move around, exactly, to prevent big square pixels from being really obvious?

Hell, those games didn't really look great on 60" RPTV CRTs either. (For anything other than 4x split-screen, my friends and I always preferred a smaller screen since the big screen exposed all the limitations of the graphics and by the N64 era PC games had advanced to the point that we knew what we were missing.)

And of course anything Mode 7 or full-3D era suffers all the same problems of looking bad blown up to modern display sizes without "CRT optimized sprites" being a factor anymore since the models are seen from all sorts of perspectives and sizes.

They looked better back then because it was new and magical and there were no 4k games to compare against, not because 256 pixels looked more like 1000. Like with VHS vs DVD - it was absolutely easy to tell even on a pretty small CRT.

Look at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNx89J0MBHA - the pixels are perfectly apparent even just viewing it on a laptop screen in a browser on a video from a fairly big CRT.

That's all nice, but you can't draw on an LCD screen with a whiteboard marker.

I just want to clear the myth that pixel art style wasn't real and it's just an artifact of running games meant for CRT displays on modern screens: portables had LCD screens since the beginning and their art style was absolutely intended to look blocky. I'd say the biggest influence for pixel art today is the Gameboy generation, problably the pokemon games.

CRT versus modern screens is a lot like vinyl versus FLAC. Hipsters gonna hipster.

> Games designed for CRT often looked their best on the CRT because of the subtle blending and screen pattern which the graphics were designed around

No. They looked their best because CRT were able to reproduce more colors than an a LCD.

Only now, after more than 10 years, LCDs with HDR come close to CRTs.

I remember vividly my first LCDs who were marketed as 24 bit but you could see the colour gradient like in 16 bit mode on CRTs.

> No. They looked their best because CRT were able to reproduce more colors than an a LCD.

> LCDs with HDR come close to CRTs.

This is pretty meaningless and conflating gamut with dynamic range. The vast majority of CRTs back in the day would be driven with 8-bit per channel RGB DACs, so not HDR, and most CRTs would have an sRGB or similar gamut (so not a wide gamut). It is true that both the dynamic range and gamut of cheaper LCD panels is pretty poor (~5 bits per channel) and not even complete sRGB, and this set the tone for many low cost TN displays of the early 2000s (and still adorns the lowend of laptops and even some Thinkpads to this day).

However affordable LCD monitors have been around for YEARS with wide gamut (ex Adobe RGB or DCI-P3), superior to all but the most expensive reference CRT monitors that virtually no one owned, and long before HDR becoming commonplace. I bought a 98% Adobe RGB monitor about 14 years ago for less than $800, color reproduction and contrast wise completely blowing any CRT out of the water I ever owned. But even a cheap <$300 IPS display on sale for the past 15 years including all MacBooks will exceed most CRTs as well. In practice CRTs also have middling contrast ratio as well unless you work in a pitch dark room, which almost no one does.

> I remember vividly my first LCDs who were marketed as 24 bit

IPS and true 8-bit TN panels have been mainstream for a long time now. Nothing to do with recent uptake of HDR.

> unless you work in a pitch dark room, which almost no one does.

Is that actually true? In the very early 2000s I worked at a start-up (with not quite well defined target, ended up in the game industry) with darkened office. At that time CRTs were still common and iirc we all used them and I don't recall to have minded. Twenty years later I worked again at a small software shop which had the main office darkened for unclear reasons (I suspect a personal quirk of the fellow running that part of the company) as we now all had LCDs (of course) and there was little to no visual media produced. In between, I visited the earlier company, which grew and moved a few times since, but still kept the office dark (not sure if to benefit content creators or as a fashion statement).

Personally, I rather not sit in the dark during the day for prolonged times; at the very least, it messes with the sleep rhythm.

Oh, flash-back to having visited the lab of a physics PhD student who was working on ultra-short pulse lasers in the early nineties. The underground lab was totally dark all day, only every five minutes or so briefly flooded in light meant to pump the lasers. That was the time I decided that physics isn't for me ...

> CRTs were still common and iirc we all used them and I don't recall to have minded.

I am addressing some CRT enthusiasts claim or pine for near infinite contrast ratios which of course is much better than any LCD - because the beam can theoretically be completely off or full on, unlike an LCD that is a filter. But the reality is that amazing contrast ratio is only with no ambient light and very little bright material displayed. Look up on/off CR and ANSI CR. These figures of merit are also distinct from black level.

At the end of the day it’s a box with a huge glass window.

Here's my €0.02:

In 1998, I liked the active matrix LCD on my Gateway laptop a lot more than the GDM-17E11 Trinitron on my SGI because the Trinitron had these 2 fucking wires across the picture, which annoyed me, and also the RGB convergence was off on the edges, and the geometry was poor and heavily bowed by about 0.5" on the bottom. Gross.

In 2020, I bought a cheap new-old-stock CRT monitor for retro nonsense, and threw it on an underpowered Linux system in my office for funzies, and I was like HOLY FUCK the response time on this is INSANE, and the blacks are UNREAL. I felt a Responsive Computer-Feeling I hadn't felt since using my CRT'd dual PPro Debian system in college. Blew away every aspect of every LCD in the house, even my overpriced top-of-the-range Sony LCD TV-- apart from the abysmal, headache-inducing max 60Hz refresh rate at a low 1024x768 resolution, distracting flyback transformer whine, and high-ish power consumption, that is.

Conclusions: every monitor sucks. Always have, always will. CRTs flicker, LCDs muddle, OLEDs over-contrast and burn in. With apologies to Dorothy Parker: you might as well live.

But the glow is real! Gorgeous! I want it on my 70s terminals, but don't need it on my workstation.

I had the oppertunity inthe early 90’s to work woth Sony analog HDTV products. The picture was the best I have ever seen and it immediately demonstrated how bad digital HDTV is compared to analog HDTV.

Eh... I don't understand current fashion for "pixelart" games... It was done on purpose in the past to look good on CRT but nowadays it just looks terrible...

i suspect the appeal is the constraints. That you can tell a story and express emotion with 16x16 figures is an interesting counterargument to the "we need a trillion polygons per second to render a few hairs".

Erm, but do we always have to end up with extremes?

I think that pixelart games became somewhat of a cult at this point...

And no you don't need gazzilion polygons and GPU that requires private power plant to tell a good story - a while back I played Limbo and it was amazing.

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