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Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.

> I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.

But going from, say, a Sony Trinitron CRT [1] to one the first LCD was a huge step backwards, which is what GP is saying.

I did wait for the first LCD with DVI support before switching: for the difference in crispyness between an analog video cable and a DVI one was night and day (I also won many points when I helped friend set up a startup in southern california and we realized one person out of two had picked the VGA cable instead of the DVI one when setting up its desk / computer: so with the CTO late at night we went through every PC and changed all those with VGA cables to the DVI ones).

We're not saying modern days flat monitors aren't better than old CRTs: we're saying the first flat screens were complete suckage.

[1] even though on a Trinitron you could see two faint horizontal lines (Trinitron were still amazing)

DVI or not didn't matter that much when your VGA had a good RAMDAC, and you had a good cable.

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

Which of course you could only see in direct comparison. Which most ppl didn't have the opportunity to do, so you needed experience instead to judge that. Which most ppl also didn't have, because they've been exposed to cheap stuff only.

To sellers, yes. The drop of visual quality when the top-down LCD push began was staggering.

Depended very much on the CRTs used, there were very wide gaps in quality.

Even a now obsolete HP ZR2240w (24" 1920x1200@60Hz) was a huge upgrade from a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm...

That thing was at least Trinitron equivalent, if not better, because it lacked the thin wires holding the mask from within.

Now you are talking about the start of all that, OFC there were bad and cheap ones, but there was also very good stuff from the beginning by Eizo, Sharp, NEC, and many more.

Just as with CRTs.

I don't miss them.

To buyers as well. I don't recall the switch to LCDs being particularly pushed, though I was admittedly quite young at the time. Especially keep in mind that people today are generally comparing the absolute top-tier of CRTs which were not what the average person had.

(Another thing to keep in mind is that the systems of the time generally could not drive the kinds of resolutions and framerates that make those CRTs shine in some of today's comparisons. At the time the difference in quality in practice was lower because of this)

Was there a top-down push? In general, people on average never really actually liked CRT displays all that much. They are annoyingly deep; they are heavy; the screen is flickery, or not quite pin sharp, or both; they use up a lot of power; they fail in annoying ways, and they're expensive to fix - and they have magnets in them.

I had multiple mediocre-to-crappy CRTs in the 90s and 00s and was glad to move away from them. I think the last one I owned was even one of the fabled trinitrons, and it was acceptable.

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