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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

If I was in charge of a big corporation that still made displays, I would not want to preserve CRTs because it could hurt the narrative that modern technology is strictly superior to old technology. If people thought about CRTs in a positive light they might realize that no modern display can match them in latency and motion quality when it comes to displaying 60fps content (as found in console and arcade games). I'd prefer that all CRTs were destroyed and forgotten.

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I don’t think any large screen manufacturer would give a second thought to this, the average consumer will still want the 4K, HDR, flat screen that is wall mountable.

The market the CRTs would steal is practically non existent, surely. I’d love this in my house for retro gaming purposes, but I’d still have my LG C/Gx or Samsung N95x or whatever the newest, fanciest models are for movies and modern use cases.

As much I appreciated the experience of no input latency CRTs they always gave me headaches after some hours due to the refresh rate flicker. LCDs were an immense relief even despite having very noticeable input latency for the same Hz (eg: cursor movement, which one gets accustomed to).

And that high frequency whine that many people (myself included) can hear, that gets infuriating after a few hours of a TV remaining on.

And the elephant in the room (literally): A moderate-sized CRT weighed a TON, burned through power, and took up substantial desk real estate.

They definitely have their perks but I only own one CRT for retro gaming, and I wouldn't trade any of my newer monitors or TV's for a bulky old tube if you paid me. Hardest conceivable pass please.

I used to run a dual 23” crt monitor setup, the day I replaced them with IPS LCDs I couldn’t believe how much desk was freed. On a side note i used to work on CRT TVs and i remember the 36” and how massive and heavy they were, I imagine this beast, specially being a trinitron as they were heavier than other brands of the same size, probably because they were flat on the vertical axis so the glass had to be thicker. Tri-tube projectors were also popular and you could project 150” easily on a dark room, the Sony models were mostly analog so probably the lag is not that bad.

There's no need for this. If you want to make sure consumers don't want to return to CRTs, all you have to do are the following:

1) point out how heavy they are. Give them a facsimile to lift to show them, after making them sign a waiver that they may permanently injure their back doing so.

2) show them how deep they are, and how far away from the wall they must sit because of this.

3) show them two power meters, showing the power consumption of a CRT and a modern LCD for comparison. Also show the actual costs for that power, and how much typical usage of these displays will cost per day and per year.

The last one alone should dissuade most people from wanting to go backwards.

Most people don't give two shits about latency, and modern LCDs with >= 120 fps capability already exist.

I nearly collapsed while moving my CRT out of the house. I have no recollection of the size, but putting it on my shoulder by myself was a terrible idea, and I’m very lucky I didn’t injure myself.

Nothing could persuade me to voluntarily go back to CRTs.

The only really good reason I can see to use a CRT is because you want to fix/rebuild one of the old 1980s vector arcade games (like Tempest or Star Wars) and want it to be a truly authentic reproduction.

It's even easier than that. You can get a 43-inch LCD for 300$. CRTs, with their inherent complexity, can NEVER compete on price.

Yeah, I left out the price aspect. Forget a 43-inch CRT: how about a 85-inch CRT? You can get an LCD (or better yet, OLED) TV this size easily for not that much money. But it's basically impossible to even make a CRT this size, and even if you could, it would be so expensive, heavy, and large it would be completely impractical. Lots of people now have 50-85" TVs in their living rooms, but those are all impossible for CRT technology.

However, the OP was trying to claim CRTs are superior because of latency and refresh rate for gaming applications, specifically, so I was just focusing on those aspects. The refresh rate part is silly; high-refresh-rate LCDs and OLEDs are common now. The latency part might have some validity, but compared to all the other factors it's really not that important.

For maximum motion quality the refresh rate needs to match the frame rate. Modern gaming LCDs can beat CRTs in refresh rate, but only a minority of games support such high frame rates. For any given refresh rate the CRT will always have better motion quality.

>If you want to make sure consumers don't want to return to CRTs, all you have to do are the following:

Nothing. Why would any folk down the street go out of their way to try and find a TV: More expensive, Heavier, Non-smart, power hungry, smaller. They are like classic cars, everyone loves them but not everyone wants to put up with all the hassles that come with them.

There is no way CRTs would be a competition to modern displays. Modern displays are strictly superior for all practical purposes. The microsecond latencies don't matter in practice, we are getting to the point where even esports pros won't get significant benefit compared to modern gaming displays, which are well beyond 60Hz. Some CRT monitors could do more (like 180Hz at low resolution), but not TVs.

The only thing CRTs are really better for is for content that is designed for CRTs, i.e. oldschool video games. And of course, that's what they are demonstrating. But it is just about giving the right context to historical video games.

I’d compare this to large format film cameras. By raw resolution, large format film cameras are still far and above what is achievable digitally. Yet, of course, no one would argue that they pose a threat to the practicality and efficiency of digital, and few people appreciate/care about/need so much resolution.

And those cameras don’t take up a good part of the room!

I know I moved into the LCD monitor era kicking and screaming because the CRTs I used with my computers were far superior for text sharpness and didn't cause me near the eye-strain when doing long programming sessions.

Good point TBH.

not really true anymore as the latest oled tech surpasses crt in almost every spec. And the spec it does not the difference is detectable by devices not human senses so practically makes no difference.

The difference isn't subtle. This is perfectly sharp and clear on a CRT, but blurry on an OLED:

https://www.testufo.com/

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