People Who Hunt Down Old TVs
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It's hard to describe but the image is completely ephemeral. All display technologies involve sleight-of-hand that exploits visual illusion and persistence of vision to some degree, but the CRT is maybe the most illusory of the major technologies. It's almost entirely due to persistence of vision. With colour TV and fast phosphors the majority of the light energy is released within a few milliseconds of the spot being hit by the beam. If you had eyes that worked at electronic speeds, you would see a single point drawing the raster pattern while varying in brightness.
A bit of TEMPEST trivia: The instantaneous luminosity of a CRT is all you need to reconstruct the image. Even if it's reflected off a wall or through a translucent curtain. You need high bandwidth, at least a few megahertz, but a photodiode is all that's necessary. The resulting signal even has the horizontal and vertical blanking periods right where they should be. Only minor processing (even by old school analog standards) is required to produce something that can be piped right into another CRT to recreate the image. I'd bet it could be done entirely in DSP these days.
I enjoy CRT nostalgia now and then, but modern high resolution games are absolutely amazing. The blurry, low resolution, low refresh rate CRT look is fun for old games, but playing in 4K at 100+ fps on a modern monitor is an amazing experience on its own.
GamersNexus has a great video on it. I feel lucky that my golden era of gaming used 3DFX, early ATI and NVIDIA cards.
I don't have the space, time and enthusiasm to put together a compute-capable-space-heater to play games with great graphics but with meh stories, microtransactions, DLCs and thinly veiled gambling.
Then I went and played lots of recent games in lower resolution, but could turn on lots of expensive effects even with such underpowered card, because I could do low-res with anti-alias disabled and no scaling and have decent results.
But true pleasure was playing for example Crypt of Necrodancer on that screen, the game felt so easy. I eventually stopped playing after that screen died, I could never nail the timing anymore on modern screens, the response time is not the same.
Static would hold them in place, and when people would go to manually turn on the TV they would suddenly become energized with thousands of volts of static electricity from the ray gun in the tube and leap out like an electric snake to zap the everloving snot out of the unfortunate bastard that turned the tv or monitor on.
Which was usually me, because I liked the challenge, but if you ever have that combo available with kids who didn't grow up around them and know any better, it would be a good prank.
For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created by the spinning platter) came in and blew all other technology away.
And, likewise, we had liquid crystal technology since the 70s, and probably could have invented it sooner, but no need, because Cathode Ray Tube technology appeared (a mini particle accelerator in your home! Plus the advanced materials science to bore the precision electron beam holes in the screen grid, the phosphor coating, the unusual deflection coil winding topology, and leaded glass to reduce x-ray expose for the viewers) and made all other forms of display unattractive by comparison.
It's amazing how far CRT technology got, given its disconnect from other technologies. The sophistication of the factories that created late-model "flat-screen" CRTs is truly impressive.
The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").
Someday, maybe given advances in robotics and automation, I hope to start a retro CRT manufacturing company. The problems, such as the unavailability of the entire supply chain (can't even buy an electron gun, it would have to be made from scratch) and environmental restrictions (lead glass probably makes the EPA perk up and notice).
I'm not one of those people who ever thought vinyl sounded better than a properly recorded and mastered digital version and I've always believed a high-bandwidth digital audio signal chain can recreate the "warmth" and other artifacts of tube compressors well beyond the threshold of human perception, however a broadcast-quality, high-definition CRT being fed a pristine hi-def analog RGB signal can still create some visuals which current flat screens can't. This is only controversial because most people have never seen that kind of CRT because they were incredibly rare.
I got to see one of the broadcast production CRTs made to support NHK's analog high-definition video format in the 90s directly connected to HD broadcast studio cameras and the image quality was simply sensational. It was so much better than even the best consumer CRT TVs, that it was simply another thing entirely. Of course, it cost $40,000 and only a few dozen were ever made but it was only that expensive because these were prototypes made years before digital hi-def would be standardized and begin mass production.
In fact, I think if it was A/B compared next to a current high-end consumer flat screen, a lot of people would say that CRT looks more pleasing and overall better. For natural imagery a CRT could render the full fidelity and sharpness of a 1080 image but without that over-crisp 'edginess' today's high-end flat screens get. And those "cathode rays" can render uniquely rich and deep colors vs diodes and crystals. Of course, for synthetic images like computer interfaces and high-dpi text, a flat screen can be better but for natural imagery, we lost something which hasn't yet been replaced. I'd love to see an ultra high-end CRT like that designed to display modern uncompressed 4K 12-bit HDR digital video.
One day she said there is a simple way to prove it. Certain stringed instruments have the string move on their own to the correct note if you put them near a source of similar sound. If you put these instruments in front of a speaker playing from an analog source and have the strings move, then play the exact same music but from a digital source on the same speaker, the strings stop moving, even if to most humans it sounds exactly the same.
Sadly I never had the gear to test this, I am not a professional musician and was learning from that person as a hobby (she is a teacher for professional musicians).
Retuning digital audio to 440Hz equal temperament is an industry norm now, even for (say) re-issued 1970s stuff. You just won't get modern digital versions that are the same as the analogue versions, and the equal temperament stuff thus won't pass a resonance test unless the test instrument is also equal temperament, which most string instruments of course are not.
The far easier test for amateurs nowadays is not to buy a whole string instrument, but to use pitch monitoring applications, which all too readily show when a sound is bang-on the specific equal temperament frequencies.
Obligatory recent Fil Henley:
> The problem is that all other things are no longer equal
There are many digital recordings which have no pitch correction or other tonal manipulation applied. In those cases, all things are still equal for the purposes of the statement above.
As a separate matter, I agree auto-tune and other manipulation can be inappropriately or excessively applied, however over manipulation isn't unique to digital, it occurred in the analog era too – such as dynamic range compression and multi-band dynamic equalization. Those tools existed in tube-based, purely analog form long before digital recording became the norm and caused similar complaints when they were misapplied. There were even analog pitch correctors although they weren't nearly as flexible or precise as today's digital versions.
I agree. In both cases a continuously varying voltage is driving speaker cone deflection. If the voltages of two different signals vary in precisely the same way, the cone will deflect to exactly the same degree and the resulting pressure wave will generate the same resonant response from any surface it encounters. When properly implemented, today's high-end, esoteric ADC and DAC converters have insane bandwidth, frequency response and fidelity far exceeding these requirements.
Some of the confusion comes from the fact that back when consumer audio transitioned to digital and these production workflows were new, some early digital recordings were incorrectly engineered or mastered creating artifacts such as aliasing which critical listeners could hear. Some people assumed the artifacts they heard were innate to all digital audio instead of just incorrect implementation of a new technology. Even today, it's possible to screw up the fidelity of a digital master but it's rarely an issue because workflows are standardized and modern tooling has default presets based on well-validated audio science (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_shaping#Dithering). But even in the analog era it was always a truism in audio and video engineering that "there are infinite ways to screw up a signal but only a few ways to preserve it." And it remains true today. To me, one of the best things about modern digital tooling is it's much easier to verify correctness in the signal chain.
All of these displays are unique tools each with differing capabilities. I own and use them all for what they are best at. Flat panel technologies can produce incredible visuals with certain strengths no CRT can replicate (when properly calibrated and given a high-quality source signal). However, the reverse is also true, extremely high-end cathode ray technology, with an appropriately high definition dot/shadow mask and phosphors, can generate visuals with traits no current flat panel display technology can duplicate. To be clear, I'm not talking about any CRT consumer television you've ever seen. A decent OLED display of today can look far better than even the best 1990s televisions, but consumer televisions were standard definition and hard-limited to less than 6 MHz of signal bandwidth (usually much less), so any comparison between the fundamental display technologies ('cathode ray-irradiated phosphors' vs 'light emitting diodes') is meaningless if not evaluated with the same resolution and bandwidth input signal. And you've never seen a high-definition CRT like a KW-3600HD fed with a 30 MHz HD source signal. But they exist and I've seen one.
Everything in display engineering involves trade-offs. CRTs and light emitting diodes are based on different materials with fundamentally different optical properties and underlying physics. Each has their own unique strengths. Neither can fully replicate the entire range of the other in every respect. This is not a personal aesthetic opinion, it's a carefully qualified technical assessment based on objective measurement and it's consistent with the physical capabilities of the respective technologies.
It's pretty neat how smoothly the technology progressed through every intermediate step. There weren't many huge revolutionary leaps, just steady progress
I don't know enough to say where CRTs could be today if they had gotten the development $ that went into other tech. But to be as good as OLEDs they would have had to find something else than phosphor as the inner coating.
For response times, CRT will always remain the king of dark-to-light response times, but afterglow for bright-to-dark would always be a factor unless a different coating was developed. OLEDs have no such issues. Subjectively, the claimed < 0.1 ms response times are real and there are zero artifacts, no afterglow, no ghosts, just extremely sharp and defined motion.
And China is still building, today, brand new CRT boards for CRT TVs and monitors. You can buy them on AliExpress.
I don't know if CRT themselves are still being built though.
I'm hanging on to my vintage arcade cab from the 80s with its still-working huge CRT screen. Hope I fail before that thing (and I hope it doesn't fail anytime soon!).
CRTs don't have particularly good refresh rates. There is very little delay on the output scan, but 99% of the time the delays built into rendering make that irrelevant compared to fast screens using other technologies. And the time between scans doesn't go very low.
I have no idea what you mean by internal glow.
https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why...
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e...
Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.
Back when I first started playing things on emulators we were using 12" to 20" CRTs or LCDs with much higher resolution than a TV, so whether CRT or LCD the pixels were chunkier.
None of the nostalgia is how I remember it at all.
The average CRT TV had crap color and poor brightness and going from that and the flicker of 1-to-1 size NTSC on a 20-something TV to an emulated "chunkier pixel" rendition on a progressize-scan 72+hz 1024x768-or-higher CRT or an LCD looked way better.
Take the side by side pictures and zoom WAY out on a high-res screen or go stand several feet away from your monitor so that they're the size they were designed and expected to be seen at, and the vast majority of the perceived improvement from making the CRT subpixels visible goes away. And then put them into motion - especially vertical motion - and those lines in between, and losing half on each frame becomes more noticable and distracting.
The 4th image there of the yellow monster is a good example. Even zooming to 50% on my high-res display makes the "bad" version suddenly look way sharper and detailed as the size starts to show how frequently "rounded dots with gaps between it" just looks like fuzziness instead of "better".
And these comparisons tend to cherry-pick and not show examples of things that lose clarity as a result of the subpixels and scanlines instead of gain clarity.
These were different beasts to civilian TVs, even top of the line Trinitron. They had none on the RF circuitry of a regular TV and the inputs were typically component, or, in the late nineties, digital, but not the digital we know today, that signal came down one BNC connector.
We had an outside broadcast company which had massive trucks full of screens for televising sports, concerts and public events. A new boss decided to outfit the new trucks with domestic TVs rather than the expected mega-expensive D1s. The trucks did not last long, much to the amusement of the crew. The TVs rattled themselves to pieces before they made it to their first event.
Unlike the civilian TVs, the Sony D1 monitors were designed to be repaired. We had people for that and you could often see the innards of one of them if you went to see the engineers in their den. They generally did not need to be repaired, but, if you have hundreds of the things then you raised the odds of having a few need a little bit of servicing.
In the studio environment they were rack mounted with air conditioning and extremely neat cabling to some type of desk where you had the buttons to choose what camera, VT or other source went to the screen. Lighting in the gallery was also controlled, so the picture you saw was the definitive picture, with no fiddling of brightness or contrast necessary. The blacks were black, which flat screens were only really able to achieve decades later with AMOLED.
In the basement with the DigiBeta tape machines we had smaller D1s in the racks, often with an adjacent oscilloscope. You could tell if the content was 'adult material' by the oscilloscope, which I always found amusing.
The magic of TV in that era was the analog nature of the CRT. The studio set was usually very battered and yet you could put a few tens of thousands of watts of lighting onto it for the cameras to show something beautiful on the D1 monitors. The advent of HD was problematic in this regard as every dent and scratch would show, along with every wrinkle and blemish on the presenter's faces.
Video games of the era were designed around the hardware, in Europe this meant 720 x 576 PAL, with lots of that image as 'overscan'. Note that JPG was also designed for the magic of analog, with slow CPUs. You can change the look up table in JPG to make it work for digital and fast CPUs but only MozJPEG does that.
You mention flickering, and most CRTs would be flickery, think of electrical shops of the era and what you would see out of the corner of your eye. Clearly you would not want this in a studio gallery lest anyone collapse with an epileptic fit. In Europe we had 50Hz rather than 60Hz, so, even with interlacing, flicker was a thing but only in the electrical shop, not in the studio gallery. This had more to do with genlock (for analog) than phosphor persistence trickery.
Regarding the article, I am pleased that the D1 monitors of old have found a new fan base that truly appreciate them. In period we put a lot of work into our setups and, to this day, I struggle to come to terms with all of that expertise and expense having gone forever.
In broadcasting there has always been an 'old guard' that can remember the 'good old days'. I now feel like one of those fuddy duddies!!!
I mean I can tell that hdmi cables never introduce chromatic abberation something which was quite common on these old TVs when the SCART cables I used to use got old and I never had a LCD screen catch fire something which happened to me twice with aging CRT screens.
I really don’t get the nostalgia or whatever it is called when some of the people who think it was better then weren’t born at the time.
Usually it is effects involving transparency, some games for example literally rendered some things only on some frames and not the others, to achieve 50% transparency, others tried alternating scanlines, or the most crazy one: Sonic that made a transparent waterfall by relying on the fact that cables common at that time blurred pixels horizontally, thus it renders one column that is water and one column that is not, and hope they will be blurred into one single column that is 50% transparent water on top of the background.
Screenshot of the waterfall effect: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1cGAP1i_4xQ/maxresdefault.jpg
Can't be shown with a screenshot: Axelay. I never seen that game running on a real CRT to compare, but on emulators that game look horrible, with distortions and flickering things everywhere, I was told this was not the intention at all, instead they relied heavily on CRT hardware to create pseudo-3D and transparency.
If you're sitting computer desk to monitor distance (close enough to read text), you probably can tell a difference. From there, I think there is some false nostalgia at worst or subjectivity at best. Did computer monitors even have (noticeable) scanlines? I don't remember them while playing Wolfenstein or playing around in MS paint on windows 3.1... Maybe playing gorillas in DOS, but I can't remember...
If you're emulating snes on a modern PC, people like to say "games were developed with scanlines in mind", but they were also developed assuming you'd have a small TV and would be sitting ~8ft away from it!
Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)
Most modern displays are going to show the square too late, some might not be bright enough.
If you have an LED matrix and the right driving circuitry, you could probably replicate the timing, and that might work too, but I've not seen it done.
More details and options for LCDs https://www.retrorgb.com/yes-you-can-use-lightguns-on-lcds-s...
To be fair, with modern "retina" HDR displays, it should be very very close.
https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks...
It should. It isn't. For some obscure reason, VGA colours look different on every modern LCD.
Why is that? It's the same phosphors.
I found something more useful though: https://www.panasonic.com/business/plasma/pdf/evaluationplas...
"Professional CRTs were manufactured to the SMPTE‐C standard gamut, which closely matches the NTSC standard and slightly exceeds the EBU (PAL/SECAM) standard. Any limitations on the reproduction of certain color shades were due to the maximum saturated levels of red, green, and blue phosphor compounds used in these monitors. While coverage of SMPTE‐C and BT.709 color spaces isn’t difficult to accomplish with a CRT, coverage of new, extended color gamuts such as xvYCC and the digital cinema P3 minimum standard gamut is problematic for CRT phosphor imaging. At best, a well‐designed CRT monitor could expect to cover about 60% ‐ 70% of these wider spaces, which typically push deeper into the green section of the 1931 CIE “tongue” color diagram."
This shows plasma as a little bit better than CRT, and again lists the limits of CRT gamut.
Lots of modern screens can do P3 and beyond. Some even get within a few percent of Rec.2020 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/CI...
Maybe better phosphors are possible? Or you could put a quantum dot layer on top of CRT if you really wanted to? But I'm okay with dropping CRTs.
Part of the issue is that so many things are calibrated for sRGB and that is a pretty small gamut.
I appreciate the CRT modeling in emulators, but a hardware device that passes thru a display signal and provided sub-frame CRT artifacting and phosphor modeling (particularly if it supported 240P) would be bitchin'.
Growing up my dad was a Mac guy and he had all kinds of Apple stuff. The weird page sized monitor, performa 600, trackball mouse, ergonomic keyboard. Granted my father was in software and this was the early 90s but it would _definitely_ define my initial passion for computers.
I’ve been looking for this monitor so that I can restore his setup. I have his Performa, peripherals, and restored those. I just need that giant monitor he used to use.
My father passed away last year. My world has been different ever since.
But you've now got me mulling over the implications of a CMYK-based subtractive colour process 'monitor'. I'm guessing the refresh rate wouldn't be too hot..!
Yeah, sounds like one of those CRT monitors that has separate BNC connectors for each of RGBHV.
Pre-WW2 televisions seem to be quite rare:
> To put this special set in some context, there are more 18th century Stradivarius violins in existence than pre-World War II TVs and, to make it that bit rarer, this TV has only had two owners. “I’ve handled 38 pre-war tells and this is the finest and even comes with the original invoice,” said Bonhams specialist Laurence Fisher. “It cost a huge amount and the owner must have had wealth and means…It is a very rare thing and there are collectors who would love to have it.”
* https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/05/do-not-adjust-your-set-...
> Pre-WW2 televisions seem to be quite rare
Pre-war television was rare. Electronic television came to maturity during the Great Depression. Early TVs were horribly expensive and given the economic situation of the 1930s almost no one could afford them! The UK started regular TV broadcasts in 1936 and by 1939 there were about 20,000 televisions in the whole country. And that was much further along than France, Germany, or the USA.
Most of those 20,000 were scrapped or sold during the war or they served as TVs faithfully into the 40s and even 50s, and then were retired. There are only a handful of working televisions of that vintage in the world.
By the mid 80s, it was maybe more typical to buy a dedicated CRT monitor, and the computer connected via composite, or maybe even an RGB feed to the monitor, allowing higher resolution and much improved quality.
For the well healed, this route also led to the holy grail, a trinitron tube!
At each of these changes, the aesthetic of the display technology changed, but probably the best memories come from the original blurry stuff as the magical moment of actually getting something out of a home computer.
(funnily enough, when I finally got a PC years later, the only monitor I could afford was a Philips monochrome VGA -- I guess they now sell for multiples of the original retail price? https://www.ebay.com/itm/176945464730)
It sits in a cabinet that currently holds an NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and PS2.
It doesn’t get a ton of playtime, but when my now 21- and 18-year-old sons were young, I’d play on them quite a bit (they were already retro even then), and as they got older, they would too.
My oldest is particularly fond of the retro consoles and playing on the CRT, so he’ll hop on it when he gets the itch for something retro.
I feel like there’s a charm that will never fade, not only with retro consoles, but also playing them on a CRT.
I’ll never get rid of our CRT.
My oldest son wouldn’t let me, even if I wanted to.
4k OLED looks really good in dark scenes, but something about turning that plasma up to its full 800 watt+ vivid mode is a completely different universe.
Practically unusable during the summer in Texas though. The efficiency is really bad and you essentially need a custom hvac solution if you want to put it in a proper "theater" room. The noises it made in high brightness scenes were also a bit distracting. It had to move a lot of power very quickly.
They're just surprisingly good when paired with a good signal and an old gaming console. I still would love to have a professional monitor but they are too pricey for me. I also need to get myself a CRT monitor.
I still have one tiny CRT, the size of the screen is very small - roughly a banana from corner to corner.
CRTs are absolutely required for in person melee tournaments. Playing not on CRTs introduces input lag of a few frames.
There are 60 frames in a second in melee - so it's roughly one frame per millisecond.
You may not think that is that big of a deal - but when a specific move has a 4-7 frame window, input lag becomes a problem.
If you ever watch a melee tournament on YouTube or in person, you will either see CRTs everywhere, or computers emulating melee.
When emulated there isn't input lag. The lag comes from the conversion needed to display melee on a non CRT TV I believe.
When I was a kid, I'd go to the TV repair shops and take old "unrepairable" vacuum tube TVs (no transistors!) off their hands. At home I tried to fix them. I had no idea how to fix them. But I had a lot of fun trying.
One of the fun things was to randomly swap around the vacuum tubes and see what would happen. Very entertaining! I used to have a box full of scavenged tubes. Sadly, I eventually tossed them out, never realizing how valuable they'd be in a few years.
My mom was convinced I was going to electrocute myself, and finally made me get rid of the sets.
But don't worry, TV tubes are practically worthless. I've been to swap meets for an antique radio club in my area. Sometimes, there will be a few boxes of tubes from TV sets there (400-500 tubes) and people literally can't give them away. Tubes from audio equipment are the only ones people are after.
Even though there were some aspects of the tube that were nicer, I'm not going back. I don't want the giant box, and now that I have a 70" OLED, I don't want to go back to a tiny screen.
We have roku, which at some point in the last 4 years, it went rogue and auto updated itself for who knows what telemetry . We almost never use it now.
I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.
Most probably a plasma, not LCD. LCDs from that time had extremely bad colors.
If you're looking for an upgrade, try to find a Panasonic Viera VT/ST/GT50 or *60, but check for burn-in before you buy.
> I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.
If the TV has HDMI CEC, then get yourself a RaspberryPi 4 (lowest memory model is enough) and LibreELEC. You'll thank me later.
And thinking about it, yes its a plasma after all :)
(I even programmed an old Sony remote to kludge sending theequivalent of the PS5 controller logo button, for the PS5 that the TV is plugged into, for streaming and gaming. And found the trick to get the TV to go to standby when the PS5's HDMI signal disappears, which isn't a standard feature, though waking is.)
I'll probably only upgrade if I relocate cross-country, and have Bay Area levels of money to spend on a much more expensive non-'smart' setup.
I bought a 40" plasma around 2001 and it cost as much as a used car.
Truly incredible workmanship.
Hooked up my spare PS2 and got a light gun for it. Wish i had a way to play duck hunt though.
The plan is to have all the light gun systems hooked up to it. Being able to get 1080i out of a PS2 while having the light gun work is a challenge I have not yet surmounted.
If you're US based, you would probably use component video (YPbPr) to connect to your 1080i display; you can hook a ps2 light gun to the Y cable (usually green) and it should work if everything else is cool.
Gran Turismo 4 will output 1080i correctly, I've done that before, but the internal horizonal resolution is very low, so i actually prefer to play in 480p on my LCD, ymmv
There's Pelican brand wireless light guns NOS on eBay that work with both PS1 and PS2 games that I've so far had good luck with
I started this hobby JUST as it started to become a little more popular. Terrible timing.