Hacker News Reader

Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related but back in my university days, I spent practically all my savings from a summer part-time job to buy a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT. I absolutely loved that thing, but at the end of each year I dreaded having to lug it home and then haul it back to the dorms again.

The elevators often didn’t work and climbing 10 flights of stairs while carrying a 70 lb (31kg) cube was brutal. It’s not often you buy a piece of electronics and get a complimentary workout regimen thrown in.

View on HN

Some time in the early 1990s I worked with a Macintosh of some variety that had a massively heavy CRT display. It was a real bummer when we were asked to do offsite customer demos, but luckily my back and knees were young enough to carry it upstairs. In retrospect, this is probably why my boss took me to the demos, which was actually quite useful career-wise.

In my own university days, I was once walking into the apartment building when some maintenance men called me over. (This building was part student housing and part normal families). They pointed me to a TV set in an apartment. Apparently a family had abandoned it. It was a big 27” or so set with some weird geometry problems, no visible brand, and menus exclusively in Chinese. Thankfully we had an elevator! I was pretty stoked despite the weird pincushion effects (maybe side effect of being imported from at least 100° of longitude away??) because our apartment’s only TV was a 13” which looked funny in a comically big living room.

Some CRTs had a button to degauss the display, to remove the distortion on the screen. You could also purchase a tool that could be used to degauss a CRT.

I think I’m legitimately traumatized by how heavy CRTs were. The memories of the pain carrying them induced is etched in my body.

I dont feel nostalgic in the least about them.

I am nostalgic about their operational principles, but I was already willing to give these up for the convenience of an LCD panel circa 2003. We had a lot of LAN parties to attend back in those days.

The draw of the LCD in the 2000s was the idea that the image you were seeing was a pixel-perfect representation of the creator’s intent.

Funny that—I'm literally using a shader on my SNES emulator to get a sense for how the graphics would look on a CRT!

I think it was a time before the vintage feels for CRTs really. Sure, there were greybeards naysaying the coming of the LCD due to motion artefacts and smearing but the rest of users just wanted something high-res and flicker-free.

It’s less the feels (though the glow from a CRT in a dark room is entirely different from an LED) and more that the games especially were designed for the bleed and flow that CRTs have.

It’s similar to how subpixel antialiasing really depends on the screen design and what order the colors are in.

The pixelated 8bit aesthetic is more reminiscent of early emulators in LCD than how it actually was “on hardware”.

Yeah—this was my rationale. My first game was Chrono Trigger, which the graphics are stunning for, so I was happy with chunky pixels. I started playing Earthbound though, and the graphics are much more underwhelming. The CRT shader has made it look a lot better though.

When LCDs arrived it was not only greybeards not liking them. I certainly wasn't old enough for that title - but for a while, CRT screens were just so much better! Those early panels (at least the ones I saw) were horrible, sooo slow, totally muted colors and minimal viewing angles.

As another person going to LAN parties. I am nostalgic about many things. CRT screens and CRT TVs are not on that list!

SNES/N64 games might look a little better on them, but I take that over the downsides. I can also look longer and more comfortably at modern screens.

On the other hand my current desktop PC with a huge GPU and CPU cooler is not particularly carry friendly either..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com