The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)

https://www.datagubbe.se/crt2/

65•phaser•3mo ago

Comments

leakycap•3mo ago

I still have two CRT displays and it's a joy to use them when playing an old game or typing something up.

It is insane how much space they take up. Landfills must be full of these huge things.

em3rgent0rdr•3mo ago

CRTs are mostly empty vacuum and won't take that much space when crushed.

D13Fd•3mo ago

I don’t know. I grew up on CRTs and have never missed them one bit. I have to disagree with the idea that CRT images were somehow better overall. A high-DPI LCD or OLED screen with decent color range runs circles around any CRT, IMO.

People also forget that most video game CRTs ran at a headache-inducing 60hz, which had an unpleasant strobe effect.

aidenn0•3mo ago

A good CRT makes a better image than any LCD screen I've ever seen. There are plenty of caveats: an aperture-grille CRT will look better when ambient light is high, but will wear out a lot faster than a shadow-mask. My last CRT monitor could handle 1600x1200@75Hz and the IPS panel I replaced it with was a huge downgrade in image quality.

The IPS panel was cheaper (19" vs 27" diagonal), larger, lighter and widescreen (both were 1200 vertical lines).

D13Fd•3mo ago

But that 1600x1200@75hz is awful by today's standards. I'm typing this on a 120Hz 4K monitor, and my other monitor is a 240hz 4k monitor.

I'm not saying they are better because the numbers are bigger, either. The subjective feel of using the screens is much improved, plus just about everything surrounding it (the menus, the colors & calibration, the interfaces).

And the comparison to the LCD at the time is irrelevant -- I was making the comparison between modern high-DPI LCD and OLED monitors and CRTs.

bayindirh•3mo ago

Panel quality matters.

I'd take my HP EliteDisplay 1440P monitor over any of these ultra high refresh rate monitors, all day, every day.

Dell & HPs "Business" monitors are made to be stared at all day, and I can use them all day without any eye fatigue. They also come calibrated from the factory.

Interestingly, my old Asus 24" monitor is very close to them, but that monitor is also designed to be used for longer hours (better panel, blue light filter, flicker free backlighting, etc.).

aidenn0•3mo ago

I replaced it less than decade ago; I'm still using the LCD that replaced it now, so it's not like I'm comparing it to a '00s LCD panel.

I would not be surprised if OLEDs are better; I've never seen an OLED panel in person.

Froztnova•3mo ago

I remember back in the 90s, when I was REALLY young, having a computer in my room that I figure was basically my dad's old hand-me-down computer, with a few basic toy programs like Kid Pix and the like. The CRT was a bit of a mess, and would occasionally 'go yellow' and need to be degaussed and otherwise fiddled with to get the color tone back to normal.

I can definitely appreciate the draw of the old monitors, and I wouldn't mind owning a few myself for when I get the fancy, but it feels like a very 'vinyl' sort of impulse. There are certainly attractive factors, but I think in the pursuit of those people are willing to overlook the inherent flaws. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's an interesting quirk of psychology.

I think LCD/OLED is definitely an improvement, though I've never been a fan of the 'softness' in comparison to the rigidity of the glass CRT screen. It's always seemed fragile to me.

D13Fd•3mo ago

Yeah, if I had unlimited space, I'd love to have a 486 or earlier Pentium PC set up with a CRT monitor for true classic games. Not because it's better, but just for the nostalgia factor.

glimshe•3mo ago

I find CRTs horrible. Just like vinyl. But I understand this is a matter of taste combined, of course, with some nostalgia.

I know some pixel artists did great work with CRTs, but I still dislike the fuzzy look.

em3rgent0rdr•3mo ago

Let's not forget the cost for making and transporting a large thick glass tube and the associated electronics and energy required to heat metal and liberate electrons and guide them using magnetism. I too am much happier with LCDs and OLEDs.

WesolyKubeczek•3mo ago

> I have to disagree with the idea that CRT images were somehow better overall.

This is about artists working in this medium, and how they had to resort to tricks so that the pixel art looked good on CRTs. Newer technologies expose how flawed the workarounds are.

tuna74•3mo ago

The most interesting part of the article is the difference between different connection types/signals and the discussion around artistic intent and how the artwork is supposed to be viewed.

Also, with 4K+ high refresh displays we are getting closer and closer to emulate the look of CRTs!

naet•3mo ago

We still have a large toshiba CRT as our primary tv. I always use composite cables for the old Nintendos but use component cables for hooking up a computer to watch something modern. It also has S video but I've never used it.

An old video game just looks and feels right on a CRT in a way that it doesn't on a modern hd tv, to me at least. That doesn't necessarily mean it looks "better", however you might define it.

It's like listening to a record. Records are lower quality than CDs or other digital options due to limitations of the analog technology, but they can still be a real joy to listen to on an older stereo system. There is a certain warmth, a little bit of crackle or pop, maybe a different dynamic range and other things that make a record sometimes more enjoyable, even though the "quality" is technically far lower. I think sometimes we can get lost in the technical specifications of pixel density or color range or audio bitrate and end up missing out on things that can prove the human experience.

A couple other random things about CRTs: there are so many that are 4:3 or standard aspect ratio instead of the widescreen that dominates today. Watching something 4:3 that fills the whole screen (without the black letterboxing of a widescreen) feels so good and makes me miss the aspect ratio. On the flip side, I also want to find one of the HD CRTs that is widescreen to run some of my more modern devices through.

tuna74•3mo ago

Off topic, but Zac Snyders's Justice League looked really good in its intended 4:3 ratio!

fleabitdev•3mo ago

I'd like to see a fantasy console which comes with built-in CRT emulation. Some of the features of CRT displays seem artistically interesting, especially the steeper gamma, soft pixel edges, and lightness-dependent bloom; it would be great to see modern pixel artists explore these old techniques again.

superfamicom•3mo ago

I grew up with CRTs and bought one at a retro game conference to put on my desk for some gaming. I had all but forgotten the deafening noise they make. The sound is hard to describe if you have not heard it. The sound hits different than an arcade with a bunch of noises and music and everything going on, but in my generally quiet office you can hear it from 2 rooms away when it is on. I tend to prefer how the SNES looks on the CRT compared to any modern screen with super sharp pixels, but that is easily (expensively?) fixed with a RetroTINK 4K to get the CRT style filters. The noise is just something to consider I don't see discussed often. My cats had never heard that noise and it freaked them out the first time they heard it.

https://www.retrotink.com/shop/retrotink-4k

LargoLasskhyfv•3mo ago

Then it's a bad CRT, or degraded.

I remember this from decades ago, there were big differences even in new ones.

Where the silent ones not necessarily were satisfactory for cats, since their hearing is more sensitive, and perceives higher frequencies.

OTOH some cats really like to sleep atop of them, maybe because of the warmth? Or what the electrostatics do to their fur?

WesolyKubeczek•3mo ago

Back in my childhood it was hard for me to go to sleep if the TV was on, no matter how quiet the actual program was.

musicale•3mo ago

15KHz flyback transformer noise.

A similar (but likely louder and more irritating) high-pitched noise was weaponized as the "Mosquito" teen repellent device.

cout•3mo ago

I find the noise of a crt much more pleasing than the noise of a bad lcd. To me the crt is musical but the lcd is shrill.

I think hard drives are similar. There was something pleasing about the the 30MB ESDI in my first computer, but as hard drives got larger and faster, they also got more scratchy-sounding. Now I have a cheap PCIe M.2 adapter, and the sound it makes is like the newer hard drives, only less rhythmic. That alone makes it an irritant.

kelseyfrog•3mo ago

I can't wait for someone to just make a data-derived CRT filter and just be done with it. We can literally pipe whatever data we want into a CRT monitor/tv as input and then capture the response and just build a model trained on ground truth. It's like a weekends worth of work and instead of doing it we have years of people trying to derive CRT emulation from first principles.

fzeroracer•3mo ago

If it's a weekends worth of work, then do it yourself and see how well it works. This kind of comment is insanely silly because CRTs behave physically different than how modern displays work. The closest approximations we've got all require incredibly high resolution displays to approximate the way the phosphors worked in CRTs. And we're not even close to attaining the level of response time yet.

kelseyfrog•3mo ago

I lack the hardware. Interested in funding it?

cout•3mo ago

The best argument made against comparing lcd and crt technologies comes at the end of the article. The author points out the absurdity of discussing what it's like to read a book using a zoomed-in image of one of the book's pages.

I almost find this argument compelling, but I'm still as fascinated as when I was a kid with what makes an image on a crt look different from the pixels in my head.