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r00ty Admin ,
r00ty avatar

I think most people that were gaming held onto their CRTs as long as possible. The main reason being, the first generation of LCD panels took the analogue RGB input, and had to present that onto the digital panel. They were generally ONLY 60hz, and you often had to reset their settings when you changed resolution. Even then, the picture was generally worse than a comparable, good quality CRT.

People upgraded mainly because of the reduced space usage and that they looked aesthetically better. Where I worked, we only had an LCD panel on the reception desk, for example. Everyone else kept using CRTs for some years.

CRTs on the other hand often had much better refresh rates available, especially at lower resolutions. This is why it was very common for competitive FPS players to use resolutions like 800x600 when their monitor supported up to 1280x960 or similar. The 800x600 resolution would often allow 120 or 150hz refresh.

When LCD screens with a fully digital interface became common, even though they were pretty much all 60hz locked, they started to offer higher resolutions and in general comparable or better picture quality in a smaller form factor. So people moved over to the LCD screens.

Fast-forward to today, and now we have LCD (LED/OLED/Whatever) screens that are capable of 120/144/240/360/Whatever refresh rates. And all the age-old discussions about our eyes/brain not being able to use more than x refresh rate have resurfaced.

It's all just a little bit of history repeating.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

I had a 20-odd inch CRT with the flat tube. Best CRT I ever had, last one I had before going to LCD. Still miss that thing, the picture was great! Weighed a ton, though.

ColdWater ,
@ColdWater@lemmy.ca avatar

I thought that dude is a woman with hair ties up

figaro ,

It’s ok, if anyone wants them back the smash brothers melee community has them all in the back of their car

Liz ,

I like how no one mentions that CRT pixels bleed into each other.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

And it worked as AA wasn’t as important in that “fuzzier” screen when graphics aren’t as good as they are today.

Liz ,

Sure, and in fact some developers used the fuzziness to their advantage, which can make certain games look weird when you display them on anything modern. But, my point was more that some people are in here acting like every part of a CRT experience is better than flatscreens.

starman2112 ,
@starman2112@sh.itjust.works avatar

Most notable roundening I can think of is Lara Croft’s boobs. They weren’t triangles when you played on a CRT!

RememberTheApollo_ ,

They were good for the time, and they still do offer some benefits, but those benefits are overshadowed by the advantages of modern gaming LCDs. I wouldn’t want one today if I had to pick.

r00ty Admin ,
r00ty avatar

Are you sure it was CRT technology? Because bear in mind, colour CRTs had to focus the beam so accurately that it only hit the specific "pixel" for the colour being lit at that time. What there was, was blur from bad focus settings, age and phosphor persistence (which is still a thing in LCD to an extent).

What DID cause blur was the act of merging the image, the colour and the synchronisation into a composite signal. All the mainstream systems (PAL, SECAM and NTSC) would cause a blurring effect. Games on 80s/90s consoles generally used this to their advantage, and you can see the dithering effects clearly on emulators of systems from that period. Very specifically, the colour signal sharing spectrum with the luminance signal would lead to a softening of the image which would appear like blurring. Most consoles from the time only output either an RF signal for a TV or if you were lucky a composite output.

Good computer monitors (not TVs) of the time were extremely crisp when fed a suitable RGB signal.

Etterra ,

It was a dark day for gamers when the competitive things crawled out of their sports holes.

ssj2marx ,

love me tower, love me CRT, simple as

Vilian ,

0 input lag lmao

fallingcats ,

Just goes to show many gamers do not infact know what “input” lag is. I’ve seen the response time a monitor adds called input lag way to many times. And that mostly doesn’t in fact include the delay a (wireless) input device might add, or the GPU (with multiple frames in flight) for that matter.

Hadriscus ,

Once I tried playing Halo or Battlefield on a friend’s xbox with a wireless controller on a very large TV. I couldn’t tell which of these (the controller, the tv or my friend) caused the delay but whatever I commanded happened on the screen, like, 70ms later. It was literally unplayable

Rev3rze ,

My guess would be the TV wasn’t in ‘game mode’. Which is to say it was doing a lot of post-processing on the image to make it look nicer but costs extra time, delaying the video stream a little.

Hadriscus ,

ah right, TVs do that

PieMePlenty ,

Lets see If I get this right, input lag is the time it takes from when you make an input (move your mouse) to when you see it happen on screen. So even the speed of light is at play here - when the monitor finally displays it, the light still has to travel to your eyes - and your brain still has to process that input!

vardogor ,

seems pretty pedantic. the context is monitors, and it’s lag from what’s inputted to what you see. plus especially with TVs, input lag is almost always because of response times.

pewgar_seemsimandroid ,

plasma TV?

FleetingTit ,

Plasma TVs had burn-in problems, especially with cropped content with black bars.

Bytemeister ,

I remember CRTs being washed out, heavy, power hungry, loud, hot, susceptible to burn-in and magnetic fields… The screen has to have a curve, so over ~16" and you get weird distortions. You needed a real heavy and sturdy desk to keep them from wobbling. Someone is romanticizing an era that no one liked. I remember the LCD adoption being very quick and near universal as far as tech advancements go.

Kit ,

As someone who still uses a CRT for specific uses, I feel that you’re misremembering the switch over from CRT to LCD. At the time, LCD were blurry and less vibrant than CRT. Technical advancements have solved this over time.

Late model CRTs were even flat to eliminate the distortion you’re describing.

Pulptastic ,

I had a flat CRT. It was even heavier than a regular one.

Soggytoast ,

They’re under a pretty high vacuum inside, so the flat glass has to be thicker to be strong enough

Pulptastic ,

Yeah I suspect there’s some lensing going on in there too which adds more weight.

Hadriscus ,

yeah my parents had a trinitron, that thing weighed a whole cattle herd. The magnetic field started failing in the later years so one corner was forever distorted. It was an issue playing Halo because I couldn’t read the motion tracker (lower left)

rothaine ,

Resolution took a step back as well, IIRC. The last CRT I had could do 1200 vertical pixels, but I feel like it was years before we saw greater than 768 or 1080 on flat screen displays.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Sure, but they were thin, flat, and good enough. The desk space savings alone was worth it.

I remember massive projection screens that took up half of a room. People flocked to wall mounted screens even though the picture was worse.

ILikeBoobies ,

There was always push back in esports

Smash uses CRTs today because of how much pushback there was/is

WldFyre ,

Melee uses CRTs because it’s an old ass game lol

Ultimate is not played on CRTs

ILikeBoobies ,

They don’t have to use them, it’s a choice

deegeese ,

I miss the <thunk> sound of the degaussing function.

UnsavoryMollusk ,

Schdoing !

Bezzelbob ,
@Bezzelbob@lemmy.world avatar

Fr, if your worried about 2 ms input lag than it isn’t the lag, your just bad

sugar_in_your_tea , (edited )

And it’s not input lag, it’s screen refresh. Input lag has more to do with peripherals and game update loops than screen rendering.

Hadriscus ,

That’s what I thought, input lag isn’t related to displays at all

mindbleach ,

CRTs perfectly demonstrate engineering versus design. All of their technical features are nearly ideal - but they’re heavy as shit, turn a kilowatt straight into heat, and take an enormous footprint for a tiny window. I am typing this on a 55" display that’s probably too close. My first PC had a 15" monitor that was about 19" across, and I thought the square-ass 24" TV in the living room was enormous. They only felt big because they stuck out three feet from the nearest wall!

JackbyDev ,

The heavy part truly cannot be overstated. I recently got a tiny CRT, not even a cubic foot in size. It’s about the same weight as my friends massive OLED TV. Of course, OLED is particularly light, but still. It’s insane!

mindbleach ,

And it’s a vacuum tube. How does nothing weigh this much?!

Plasma screens weren’t much better, at first. I had a 30" one circa 2006, maybe three inches thick, and it you’d swear it was solid metal. A decade later we bought a couple 32" LCD TVs, then a few more because they were so cheap, and the later ones weighed next to nothing. Nowadays - well, I walked this 55" up and down a flight of stairs by myself, and the only hard parts were finding somewhere to grab and not bonking any walls.

JackbyDev ,

🤣 that’s so true, how much can a damn vacuum weigh?

don ,

The vacuum itself might not weigh anything, but the glass strong enough to resist the implosion the vacuum would cause has to be pretty thick, which is where the weight is

mindbleach ,

And that scales nonlinearly with volume, so smaller monitors are even denser than big monitors.

Hadriscus ,

it’s all the magnetons

Psythik ,

Hell, modern displays are just now starting to catch up to CRTs in the input lag and motion blur department.

It was brutal putting up with these shitty LCDs for two whole decades, especially the fact that we had to put up with 60Hz and sub-1080p resolutions, when my CRT was displaying a 1600x1200 picture at 85Hz in the 90s! It wasn’t until I got a 4K 120Hz OLED with VRR and HDR couple years ago that I finally stopped missing CRTs, cause I finally felt like I had something superior.

Twenty fucking years of waiting for something to surpass the good old CRT. Unbelievable.

Aux ,

If input lag is the only measure for you, ok. But LCDs have surpassed CRTs in pretty much every other metric at least a decade ago.

Psythik ,

Not just input lag (I mean I literally mentioned other things too but you obviously didn’t read my entire comment) but also contrast ratio, brightness in LUX, color volume and accuracy, response time, viewing angle, displaying non-native resolutions clearly, flicker, stutter… Should I go on?

All things that LCDs struggled on and still struggle on. OLED fixes most of these issues, and is the only display tech that I’d consider superior to a CRT.

ZILtoid1991 ,

Most people didn’t own a CRT capable of 1600x1200@85Hz, most were barely if any better in resolution department than your average “cube” LCDs (one which I’m currently using besides my main 32" QHD display). I have owned a gargantuan beast like that with a Trinitron tube, I could run it at 120Hz at 1024x768 and at higher resolutions without much flicker, but it had issues with the PCBs cracking, so it was replaced to a much more mediocre and smaller CRT with much lower refresh rates.

Heavybell ,
@Heavybell@lemmy.world avatar

LCDs came in just in time for me to be attending LAN parties in uni. Got sick of lugging my CRT up the stairs once a week pretty quickly and was glad when I managed to get my hands on an LCD. I can’t even remember if I noticed the downgrade, I was so thrilled with the portability.

Wilzax ,

You know we had 1080p 120hz displays 10 years ago, right?

Psythik ,

In an OLED? They weren’t affordable 10 years ago.

A 10 year old LCD is not good. The resolution and refresh rate is irrelevant if it’s not an OLED, which as I said, is the only display tech good enough to replace a CRT.

Wilzax ,

Not an OLED, in an IPS LCD. You’re asserting that OLED is the only tech good enough (which is not true, QLED displays are also starting to get good enough to surpass OLED, they’re just more expensive), but the response time of IPS displays frequently got under 10ms as long ago as 2014, and that’s fast enough to be imperceptible by humans. Any other drawbacks of IPS compared to OLED were far worse with CRTs.

And they don’t make that annoying high-pitched shriek.

Hadriscus ,

I have an Asus proart 23" from twelve years ago that’s great in terms of color (contrast and response time, not so much) but it produces a high pitched sound when at full brightness. I wondered if that was due to the panel tech itself

Wilzax ,

I have never heard of an LCD making a high pitched noise like that, I think your monitor may be haunted

Hadriscus ,

It’s likely. It’s not even a faulty unit, I returned it and the next one did the same thing. Better call a hardware exorcist

HEXN3T ,
@HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The amount of CRTs I own has actually been increasing lately.

PriorityMotif ,
@PriorityMotif@lemmy.world avatar

Wider fov

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