People did care, which is why people who played games competitively continued to use CRT monitors well into the crappy LCD days.
Heck, some people still use CRTs. There's not too much wrong with them other than being big, heavy, and not being able to display 4k or typically beeing only 4:3.
Idk if it's just me but I have pretty good hearing, so I can hear the high pitch tone CRTs make and it drives me crazy.
This only happens with TVs or very low quality monitors. The flyback transformer vibrates at a frequency of ~15.7k Hz which is audible to the human ear. However, most PC CRT monitors have a flyback transformer that vibrates at ~32k Hz, which is beyond the human hearing range. So if you are hearing the high frequency noise some CRTs make, it is most likely not coming from a PC monitor.
Its a sound thats a part of the experience, and your brain tunes it out pretty quickly after repeated exposure to it. If the TV is playing sound such as game audio or music it becomes almost undetectable. Unless there is a problem with the flyback transformer circuit, which causes the volume to be higher than its supposed to be.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
(me too)
Ditto, lcd's were a godsend.
For me it was the refresh. If a CRT was at 60Hz, I could see it flashing when I wasn't looking directly at it. I had to have it set to at least 75 Hz (>80 Hz preferably) or it would give me a headache.
This and the scanlines actually make it feel so weird to look at for me, I hate crts with a passion
You beat me to the punch.
We were absolutely considering output delay and hoarding our CRT monitors.
Some of us were also initially concerned about input delay from early USB until we were shown that while it is slower that it was unnoticeable.
I forgot that! PS/2 mice and keyboards were hoarded.
beeing
🐝
They do hum and buzz.
I bought a Sun Microsystems 24" widescreen CRT for $400 on eBay back in 2003ish? iirc. It was 100lbs and delivered on a pallet lol. There's a reason why they didn't get very big and were mostly 4:3. 1920x1200 and like 30" deep! But, they did exist!
I know it. I myself have 2, a 1981 JVC UHF/VHF radio 4.5", and a Sylvania 27" with a DVD/VHS combo unit built into it.
They even made a curved ultrawide CRT once, surprisingly. Though it cost a fortune when it came out.
Yeah, right?
The fact that we know about this decades later is because people actually did care about it.
When LCDs (then later LEDs) improved this concern kinda faded away. Which makes sense.
It even took some weird proportions where "pro" gamers set their game to display 4:3 on their widescreen lcd.
Habits die hard.
On this note, anybody know where I can get a 1600x1200 crt these days?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I miss the <thunk> sound of the degaussing function.
Schdoing !
Can someone please explain why CRT is 0 blur and 0 latency when it literally draws each pixel one-by-one using the electron ray running across the screen line-by-line?
The guy inside it drawing them is insanely fast at his job. That's also why they were so bulky, to fit the guy who does the drawing.
Perfect response, thank you
Because it is analog. There are no buffers or anything in between. Your PC sends the image data in analog throug VGA pixel by pixel. These pixels are projected instantly in the requested color on the screen.
And no motion blur because the image is not persistent. LCDs have to change their current image to the new one. The old image stays until it’s replaced. CRTs draw their image line by line and only the the last few lines are actually on screen at any time. It just happens so fast, that, to the human eye, the image looks complete. Although CRTs usually do have noticeable flicker, while LCDs usually do not.
They don't have zero latency. It's a misconception.
The industry standard way to measure screen lag is from the middle of the screen. Let's say you have a 60Hz display and hit the mouse button to shoot the very moment it's about to draw the next frame, and the game manages to process the data before the draw starts. The beam would start to draw, and when it gets to the middle of the screen, we take our measurement. That will take 1 / 60 / 2 = 8.3ms.
Some CRTs could do 90Hz, or even higher, but those were really expensive (edit: while keeping a high resolution, anyway). Modern LCDs can do better than any of them, but it took a long time to get there.
Because it draws those "pixels" as the signal reaches the monitor. When half of a frame is transmitted to a CRT monitor, it's basically half way done making it visible.
An LCD monitor needs to wait for the entire frame to arrive, before it can be processed and then made visible.
Sometimes the monitor will wait for several frames to arrive before it processes them. This enables some temporal processing. When you put a monitor in gaming mode, it disables (some of) this.
The transmission is still the same with the exception of things like VRR and DSC. We still send a VBLANK signal which is the electronic signal to tell a CRT to move up to the top of the screen. We don't change the way things are sent. It's still top down, left to right. VSync and HSync are still used but make less obvious sense on LCDs. Digital displays translate this.
Because LCDs convert these signals, we call the time it takes to do the conversion "draw time" but this isn't as important today. What matters now is the time it takes for a pixel to change one color to another (response time). Because a CRT would fire electrons, the next frame would essentially vanish pretty quickly. LCDs don't do this.
Conversely OLEDs are plenty fast, but can't reproduce the same pixel response without inserting a blank frame with Black Frame Insertion which sacrifices brightness and is being slowly removed.
Still, most "lag" comes from transmission time. It takes 1/60s of a second to transmit a full frame at 60hz. Divide that 2 to get the "average" lag and CRTs would measure at 8.3333ms. LCDs were happy to get to 10ms.
Now we can do 120hz which is way more important since even if CRTs are faster, you can get the whole image out in half the time, which "averages" at 4.1666ms, making even a "4ms" slow LCD on PC better than the console running at 60hz on CRT.
And while CRTs could reach high resolution, these were limited by their HSync speed which usually means lower resolution, because a CRT could only move ever so quickly horizontally.
Today that translates to an OLED is best for emulating any console that ran at 60hz and better or as good pixel response time if you are willing to do BFI. The main reason why the competitive Melee community still uses CRT is mostly pricing, second to FUD.
The motion blur thing is complete nonsense. It's never been a benefit of CRT and reveals this greentext to be fake and gay.
First rule at our LAN parties: You carry your own monitor.
We'd help each other out with carrying equipment and snacks and setting everything up. But that big ass bulky CRT, carry it yourself!
Not necessarily if you’re the one walking in with the DC++ server. Getting that thing up and running was suddenly priority #1 for the entire floor.
Oh boy do I miss DC++
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
0 input lag lmao
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.
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.
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!
That pic reminds me of something. Anyone else remember when “flatscreen” was the cool marketing hype for monitors/TVs?
Those flatscreen CRTs were pretty great for their time though. Maybe/probably rose tinted glasses but man I remember them being plain better monitors overall.
God that shit was so dope. LAN parties are the shit.
It was a dark day for gamers when the competitive things crawled out of their sports holes.
Good'old Warcraft III
It's ok, if anyone wants them back the smash brothers melee community has them all in the back of their car
I miss my CRT
I mean, I have some nostalgia moments, but while I think that while OP's got a point that the LCD monitors that replaced CRTs were in many ways significantly technically worse at the time, I also think that in pretty much all aspects, current LCD/LEDs beat CRTs.
Looking at OP's benefits:
0 motion blur
CRT phosphors didn't just immediately go dark. They were better than some LCDs at the time, yeah, which were very slow, had enormous mouse pointer trails. But if you've ever seen a flashing cursor on a CRT and the fact that it actually faded out, you know that there was some response time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_plasma,_and_OLED_displays
Response time: 0.01 ms[14] to less than 1 μs,[15] but limited by phosphor decay time (around 5 ms)[16]
0 input lag
That's not really a function of the display technology. Yeah, a traditional analog CRT television with nothing else involved just spews the signal straight to the screen, but you can stick processing in there too, as cable boxes did. The real problem was "smart" TVs adding stuff like image processing that involved buffering some video.
At the time that people started getting LCDs, a lot of them were just awful in many respects compared to CRTs.
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As one moved around, the color you saw on many types of LCDs shifted dramatically.
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There was very slow response time; moving a cursor around on some LCD displays would leave a trail, as it sluggishly updated. Looked kind of like some e-ink displays do today.
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Contrast wasn't great; blacks were really murky grays.
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Early LCDs couldn't do full 24-bit color depth, and dealt with it by dithering, which was a real step back in quality.
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Pixels could get stuck.
But those have mostly been dealt with.
CRTs had a lot of problems too, and LED/LCD displays really address those:
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They were heavy. This wasn't so bad early on, but as CRTs grew, they really started to suck to work with. I remember straining a muscle in my back getting a >200lb television up a flight of stairs.
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They were blurry. That can be a benefit, in that some software, like games, had graphics optimized for them, that lets the blur "blend" together pixels, and so old emulators often have some form of emulation of CRT video artifacts. But in a world where software can be designed around a crisp, sharp display, I'd rather have the sharpness. The blurriness also wasn't always even, especially on flat-screen CRTs; tended to be worse in corners. And you could only get the resolution and refresh rate so high, and the higher you went, the blurrier things were.
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There were scanlines; brightness wasn't even.
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You could get color fringing.
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Sony Trinitrons (rather nice late CRT computer displays) had a faint, horizontal line that crossed the screen where a wire was placed to stabilize some other element of the display.
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They didn't deal so well with higher-aspect-ratio displays (well, if you wanted a flat display, anyway). For movies and such, we're better-off with wider displays.
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Analog signalling meant that as cables got longer, the image got blurrier.
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They used more electricity and generated more heat than LED/LCD displays.
Also a lot of CRT nostalgia comes from whatever display a certain person had. With a lot of my CRTs, the screen were sharp enough for a more pixelated look, and required me to turn off scanline effects in emulators as they just turned everything quite bad looking instead. Except a really bad monitor I owned, because the previous owner lied it could do 1024x768@75Hz (it was an old VGA monitor, and didn't like that resolution).
Yeah "zero motion blur" tells me OP has literally never seen a CRT and is just repeating something he heard his grandpa say.
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I'm sure he misses you too, buddy
Guy on the left has this maniacal smile. Like he just got an A on the midterm at Clown College for Advanced Villainry.
Wider fov
I cared enough that my first flat screen monitor was a modern IPS display; I still had a CRT well after the iPhone.
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.
I like how no one mentions that CRT pixels bleed into each other.
And it worked as AA wasn’t as important in that “fuzzier” screen when graphics aren’t as good as they are today.
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.
Fr, if your worried about 2 ms input lag than it isn't the lag, your just bad
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.
That's what I thought, input lag isn't related to displays at all
I thought that dude is a woman with hair ties up
The amount of CRTs I own has actually been increasing lately.
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.
plasma TV?
Plasma TVs had burn-in problems, especially with cropped content with black bars.
