Interesting video, I wonder if I still have any of my old CRTs in the garage.
Can't get behind a CRT anymore, the flickering is almost killing me. Glad that LCDs exist
Depends largely on refreshrate. I doubt anyone has problems at 120Hz as they talk about in the video.
Flicker is the reason they look so good in motion even.
I dislike LCD. OLED can and has surpassed CRTs, though. They can even flicker like CRTs, though consumer grade equipment, at least for now, does not go that far. Some professional sony monitors do, though. I think I have seen measurements of that.
edit: monitor sized displays are still missing as well i guess.
I've been using a CRT a LOT lately for retro gaming. It's a Philips 109P - a professional grade CRT monitor from around 2000. It can do 85Hz at 1600x1200 which is crazy and go up to 1856 x 1392 (!!). 85Hz is high enough for it to feel easy on the eyes but 100Hz is ideal.
The main benefit I see from CRT monitors, is that the image just looks nicer for movies and games by a long shot because it's less harsh and sharp. I remember getting a 1280x1024 LCD monitor back in 2005 and it looked CRAP to me. Every sharp pixel got burned into the back of my skull and every flaw in a game was so clearly visible. LCDs is why anti aliasing is even a thing and now you got crap like supersampling all to fight that problem and in the mean time, a CRT can make a game run at half the resolution and still look better.
For business work, it's better of course since you want nice & crisp graphics and text. For games ... I forgot how nice and soft a CRT was.
You make me wish I had my good old 19” monster back just for the nostalgia.
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
i took my 21 inch crt to lan parties, if only it was not that bulky, crts would still be around if they had just had found a way to be much thinner like one third or fourth its size at a reasonoble price
i took my 21 inch crt to lan parties, if only it was not that bulky, crts would still be around if they had just had found a way to be much thinner like one third or fourth its size at a reasonoble price
Its only the last few years lcd+ tech has reached quality that matches / exceeds CRT, the flickering is required to completely eliminate ghosting, blur etc that virtually every new panel since suffers from. If your interested in the technical side, this site is the king + provides blur testing utility that will shame likely shame your current monitor:
Nope, nope, nope, ... I'm not missing my Samsung 19" that weighted 25kg+. Fuck that.
I had a FW 900 for a while. 42kg!
That's like the most desirable CRT right now. I've seen a guy offer 2,000$ for it plus 500$ for freight shipping.
I've started collecting CRTs this year, got three 19" monitors (ViewSonic G90f+, Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450, LG F900P, all "professional" grade or whatever) and a 17" (Sony CPD E-250, a budget line of monitors - can still do 96 kHz) so far. Too bad I can't find 21" monitors anywhere in this country... I use them for old games as well as emulation (though I will soon get an Olympus OEV-203, so no need for emulation for me any longer).
You can run super resolutions in Retroarch, for example 2560 x 240 @ 120 Hz and get real scanlines, though the experience varies from monitor to monitor. For example, my barely used G90f+ (shadow mask) looks way too sharp, I don't like the look. On the other hand the 450 (Diamondtron, also barely used) has way less pronounced scanlines and has more natural colors this way and a bit of a softer look. It really looks amazing.
You'll have to enable Black Frame Insertion to get rid of image doubling and noticeable motion lag though. Not every monitor can get bright enough for this to look good with BFI enabled however (especially if it has been extensively used). You can use a fake scanline filter at 640 x 480 @ 60 Hz to overcome this - I haven't personally tried this but people have said that it looks indistinguishable from 240p.
It's also possible to play modern games with modern GPUs on these monitors by buying an adapter - a Sunix DPU3000 (discontinued, costs a lot), a Delock 87685 (identical to the Sunix, costs about a 100 euros) or IcyBox IB-SPL1031 (same chip, costs about 70 or so euros).
I even got a i1 DisplayPro to calibrate these... Yes, I am deep in the rabbit hole.
how many repairs did u have to perform on the iiyamas ? My 21 inches from them all broke down electricly, a white flash and then the image dissapears into a black hole and never comes back and u have to restart it and wait an hour , then after repairs works a few months again and then dies again, gave up on them, really crappy components , didnt even last 3 years, died 2 months out of warrantly back then and that was a 1000 EUR purchase in 2001 GRRRR , bought another off ebay for 45 eur in 2015 . same shit after a few weeks, the guy sold me a dieng monitor im sure , the components cant handle the strain
regarding this :" It's also possible to play modern games with modern GPUs on these monitors by buying an adapter - a Sunix DPU3000 (discontinued, costs a lot), a Delock 87685 (identical to the Sunix, costs about a 100 euros) or IcyBox IB-SPL1031 (same chip, costs about 70 or so euros)."
why the need for an adapter? u can just use BNC/DSUB from the monitor and plug it into your motherboards Dsub port and it will run games using ur videocard with no isseus in win7/10 (at least on my intel hd4000 drivers )
I've had no need to repair any of them yet, the two of them weren't used for years and appear lightly used based on how bright they can get. I've only had to tweak the G2 pot on the flyback for the LG F900P because it was dim as hell, which indicates heavy use.
Yeah, the biggest problems with these monitors are the capacitors leaking (and there are upwards of 100+ of them), cold solder joints and flybacks dying (you need the exact same flyback and finding them is close to impossible). Oh, and basically all Sony monitors made from circa 1999-2002 will need to be adjusted using WinDAS because the brightness is controlled electronically and as they age, an algorithm was supposed to keep the brightness levels, but they fucked up the algorithm.
You need a CPU with an integrated GPU for that though. I'm also not 100% sure it's going to use your main GPU. (...also, the GTX 980Ti was the last GPU with analogue video.)
I finally found a 22" (20" viewable) a few months back - Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510 (curved Diamondtron) with less than 800 hours on it. Its horizontal refresh rate is 130 kHz so it can do 2048x1536 @ 80 Hz or 1920x1440 @ 85 Hz. It's probably best at 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz though.
I also found a GDM-W900 (FW900's older brother), which is one of the few widescreen CRT monitors. It's 24 inches (22.5" viewable curved) and weighs about 41kg (for comparison, I have a 29" CRT TV that is 43kg). Horizontal refresh rate is only 96kHz, but that's enough for 1920x1080 @ 80 Hz and 1920x1200 @ 76 Hz (this monitor's aspect ratio is actually 16:10 and not 16:9). It's even rarer than the FW900 (fat chance of finding that one). Guy told me he paid 5,000$ in 1999 for it. I'll donate it to a museum one day.
I also got a lead on a LaCie Electron Blue IV which has a horizontal refresh rate of 140 kHz (2048x1536 @ 85 Hz).
I have 12 CRTs now.
Last edited by Frolsa84 on Mon, 30th Aug 2021 09:20; edited 1 time in total
yes a very good rule to test a monitor is to have it on at least 20 minutes, when u buy, if its flakey it will start showing signs by then of black screens or funky electrical flashes
i got conned on my pro 510 and learned my lesson
my oldest 21 inch, philips 21B straight from a philips engineer i bought as a kid for like 500 eur second hand in 2000, still works flawlessy to this day expect losing some brightness , all my others are failing or doing weird shit
like my samsung syncmaster 1200nf, it does this weird warping bending as if a magnet is nearby after a while and ive never been able to figure it our, its random when it happens but sticks untill next day
Turn ON and OFF the Power Switch while pressing the MENU Button. Turn ON the Power Switch again while pressing the – Button and you are in the Factory Mode. The following menu appears on the screen when you press the MENU Button. Turn OFF the Power Switch to exit.
I suspect "current-carrying time" is how much it was on, though I'm not 100% sure. Also it could be counting stand-by hours as well (I know that LaCie IV keeps track of both). My 450 has about 7k hours and the 510 shows time below 800. Page 22 also mentions in the "Sub microprocessor specifications" that pin 26 is "ON-TIME POWER-ON time detection", so it probably can keep track of time.
Here's a good overview of the pros and cons of CRTs:
I skipped LCDs entirely. I tried to switch from a CRT monitor to a plasma in 2009. But black level 0.04 cd/m²) and other issues made me go back. I think I made a permanent switch in 2013 to a plasma, the last generation Panasonic built. And despite having the lowest black level (~0.004 cd/m²) in the industry at the time (as Pioneer dropped out much earlier), it was still not black. In most scenes it destroys CRTs in picture quality, due to contrast, though. But there were still scenes a good CRT would score points in
And I think 2 years ago I switched to a Panasonic OLED (LGD panel of course). Perfect black is just awesome.
Motion clarity is a super annoying issue. Due to the way plasma typically work, they had much higher clarity than a hold-type display (like LCDs, OLED), with significant issues specific to plasmas (Samsung actually successfully addressed that in their plasmas).
With my OLED I can activate black frames. But I get noticeable flicker, because its running at 60Hz. Not CRT levels of flicker i think, as the "duty cycle" of the image is higher (50%). B ut this is the first technology, that has no transition issues for most content (there is some with transitions between very dark colors and black...). LCDs are just sluggish and CRTs, in my experience, have visible phosphor decay (and plasmas have more complicated nonsens). Because there are no additional issues, I think it is more acceptable to deal with on an OLED.
And this is with ideal content for the refres hrate. If you watch videos with a lower frame rate than your refresh rate (say 30 fps at 60 Hz, or 24fps at 72Hz) you have an additional problem with low persistence displays (like CRTs or plasmas), because the necessary frame repetitions are potentially visible (to me they always were). Makes the low frame rate even more apparent and stuttery, even if motion clarity is still higher. This might be irrelevant to you, if you only game on yours
I still want to switch to an OLED with support for 120Hz and variable refresh rates to hopefully get rid of most motion issues.
The thing about resolution was always a bit suspicious for me though and this video finally made it clearer to me. CRTs have a kind of fixed resolution at the end of the day and only the 'painting', as the youtuber calls it, is actually dynamic. So if you drive the display with a lower resolution than its its pixel mask/pattern, each source pixel affects multiple "pixels" in the mask. What is the difference between this and an algorithmic scaling of images for a modern display? It seems to me as though this is only a matter of finding the right scaling algorithm to match a CRT on a 4K OLED if one wanted to.
Got around to testing the W900 yesterday and today. I bought this monitor blind (the guy selling it to me didn't even have pictures of it turned on) and it was shipped via van some 400km to me. The stand came off and there were 2 tiny cracks on top of it. Thankfully it survived. I didn't bother to tell the seller to pack it or any of that shit because I thought somebody would beat me to this monitor as it is really rare and it was listed cheap.
Fired up the 360 right quick. Red tint. Oof, thought it had the G2 drift that many Sony monitors from 1998-2002 suffer from. Thankfully not, the contrast was just cranked up. Course, that doesn't mean it won't develop this fault later on and I have no idea what cable I'm gonna need for WinDAS (or DAS) as it's different than the FW900.
Even at 30/60 brightness/contrast, it's remarkably bright (in a dark room of course). Then it started flashing red and blanking. Thought it was a problem with the flyback, but it was just a loose VGA cable (couldn't screw it in).
I calibrated it this morning at 55/55 brightness/contrast and at 6500K color temperature. I couldn't get it on the table as I'm afraid I'll damage it, so it's on the floor next to me. I actually have bruises on my arms from lugging this thing around. I can't quite grasp it from the front either, even though I'm 191 cm and have a (presumably) similar wingspan. Thankfully it has indentations on the bottom.
I tried using DisplayCAL, which is what I normally use, but tinkering with the monitor's menu for hours on the floor didn't seem to be that appealing, so I just used i1Profiler and got the best results for any monitor I've calibrated so far, at least from the eye test. I'm a beginner at calibrating and kind of lazy to do it, so I'm kind of pleased with the result.
Not sure if black luminance level of 0.097 cd/m2 is good or not though.
It's not in a great cosmetic condition (some yellowing, 2 tiny cracks, screw covers have brittle plastic), but the tube is in amazing condition, like it came out of the factory yesterday. The removable anti-glare filter is O.K., I might remove it later on though.
Wish I could take pictures of it, but all I got is a shitty smartphone camera.
Not sure if black luminance level of 0.097 cd/m2 is good or not though.
A CRT can do MUCH better than this on a black screen. 0.04 cd/m² should be the ball park of an LCD. And 0.004 cd/m² is still noticeably brighter than what a CRT can do under ideal circumstances.
But a CRT cant keep black this low with much else on screen, so depending on how you measure black, you can easily end up with much higher numbers.
Also measurement devices differ in their capabilities as well. My i1 Display Pro bottoms out at around 0.002 cd/m² and I believe it (or rather newer revisions) is still the best device for speed, accuracy and low level readings for consumers. I had an earlier device that only read down to ~0.05 i think.
Yeah, I'm using the i1Display Pro, I'll have to ask around about this.
Initial test before being admitted into the hoarder's palace, contrast way up, wrong aspect ratio (4:3):
Spoiler:
Made in June 1999, quite late... Pretty sure they started making FW900s in this year, so not sure why the guy even bought a W900 (first released in 1996?) in 1999 instead of the FW900:
Spoiler:
Re-attaching the stand which I washed. The stand's alright, but Iiyama stands seem more sturdy and substantial.
Spoiler:
Calibrating...
Spoiler:
Jeremy Irons (Night Train to Lisbon, 1080p)
Spoiler:
Guacamelee, 1920x1200 @ 76 Hz (not sure if this game even supports 16:10 though, I didn't bother with 1920x1080 as I'd have to resize everything). Probably not the best game to showcase, kind of pastel-y.
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