192 points
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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.

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100 points

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.

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43 points

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.

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36 points
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There is not one crt I ever encountered that I couldn’t hear. So I’m having trouble believing you information.

I could time it out most of the time, but it was always there.

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9 points

Oh neat, thanks for the explanation! That makes sense as most of my crt exposure for the past 10 years has been classroom TVs and museum exhibits.

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23 points

the solution is to be in your mid-30s

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16 points

Unless you have tinnitus.

Then you’re possibly going to hear it very frequently.

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9 points

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(me too)

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9 points

Ditto, lcd’s were a godsend.

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3 points

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.

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2 points

This and the scanlines actually make it feel so weird to look at for me, I hate crts with a passion

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34 points

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.

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4 points

I forgot that! PS/2 mice and keyboards were hoarded.

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16 points

beeing

🐝

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7 points

They do hum and buzz.

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12 points

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!

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3 points

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.

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3 points

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.

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2 points

It even took some weird proportions where “pro” gamers set their game to display 4:3 on their widescreen lcd.

Habits die hard.

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2 points

On this note, anybody know where I can get a 1600x1200 crt these days?

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1 point

ebay? If you can get an IBM P77 or Sony G220 (they are the same) in good working condition you should be golden. Those are awesome. They go up 170Hz, 75Hz at 1600x1200. And can even do 2048x1536 although that would be out of specs and only 60Hz (barely usable but fucking impressive).

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2 points

You will 100% overpay if you get one on eBay. Best place is to try asking businesses, schools, or local news stations if they have old CRTs you can look at they’d be willing to sell to you. News stations preferrably since they usually had very high quality BVMs.

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84 points

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.

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36 points

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.

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15 points

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

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11 points

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

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2 points

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)

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10 points

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.

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6 points

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.

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10 points

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

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5 points

Schdoing !

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8 points

There was always push back in esports

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

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2 points

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

Ultimate is not played on CRTs

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1 point

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

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62 points

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?

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106 points

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.

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3 points
*

Perfect response, thank you

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55 points

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.

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48 points

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.

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7 points

Thanks for the explanation.

OP’s point is a weird flex though, like pointing out that a bicycle never runs out of gas…

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23 points
*

Of course there’s buffers. Once RAM got cheap enough to have a buffer to represent the whole screen, everyone did that. That was in the late 80s/early 90s.

There’s some really bad misconceptions about how latency works on screens.

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8 points

Those are on the graphics adapter. Not in the CRT.
You can update the framebuffer faster than the CRT can draw. That’s when you get tearing. Same VSync then as now.

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2 points

CRTs (apart from some exceptions) did not have a display buffer. The analog display signal is used to directly control the output of each electron gun in the CRT, without any digital processing happening in-between. The computer on the other end however does have display buffers, just like they do now; however eliminating extra buffers (like those used by modern monitors) does reduce latency.

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8 points

That makes 0 latency in the monitor, but how much latency is there in the drivers that convert a digital image to analogue signals? Isn’t the latency just moved to the PC side?

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2 points
*

I warn you before you dive in, this is a rabbit hole. Some key points (not exact, but to make things more layman): You don’t see in digital, digital is “code”. You see in analog, even on an LCD (think of sound vs video, its the same thing). Digital-only lacked contrast, brightness, color, basically all adjustments. So the signal went back and forth, adding even more latency.

Maybe think of it like a TVs game mode, where all the adjustments are turned off to speed up the digital to analog conversions.

Or like compressed video (digital) vs uncompressed video (analog), where the compression means you can send more data, but latency is added because it is compressed and uncompressed at each end.

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5 points

No such thing as instant. There is always some latency.

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17 points

Ok fine, at the speed of light then.

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4 points

When one of your times is in milliseconds, while the other requires awareness of relativistic effects, you might as well call it instant.

The propagation speed in copper is 2/3 C. With analogue monitors, that was effectively amped and thrown at the screen. The phosphate coating is the slowest part, that takes 0.25-0.5ms to respond fully.

By comparison, at the time, “gaming” LCD screens were advertising 23ms response rates.

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3 points

Well yes, the speed of light in this case.

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31 points
*

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.

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18 points

Actually 60 Hz was too low to comfortably use a CRT. I think it started to work well at 75 Hz, better 80 or 85. Don’t know if I ever had a 90 Hz one, especially at a resolution above 1280x960. But if you valued your eyes you never went down to 60.

No idea why 60 Hz on an LCD works better, though.

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17 points
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No idea why 60 Hz on an LCD works better, though.

Because LCD pixels are constantly lit up by a backlight. They don’t start to dim in between refresh cycles. They may take some time to change from one state to another, but that is perceived as ghosting, not flickering.

On a CRT the phosporus dots are periodically lit up (or “refreshed”) by an electron beam, and then start to dim afterwards. So the lower the refresh rate, the more time they have to dim in between strobes. On low refresh rates this is perceived as flickering. On higher refresh rates, the dots don’t have enough time to noticably dim, so this is perceived as a more stable image. 60Hz happens to the refresh rate where this flicker effect becomes quite noticable to the human eye.

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9 points

60Hz is what any NTSC TV would have had for consoles. Plenty of older computers, too. Lots of people gamed that way well into the 2000s.

Incidently, if you do the same calculation above for PAL (50Hz), you end up at 10ms, or about 2ms more lag than NTSC. Many modern LCDs can have response times <2ms (which is on top of the console’s internal framerate matched to NTSC or PAL). The implication for retro consoles is that the lag difference between NTSC CRTs and modern LCDs is about the same as the difference between NTSC and PAL CRTs.

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5 points

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.

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5 points

If that’s how TFTs worked we wouldn’t have vsync settings in games.

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2 points
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No? Afaik vsync prevents the gpu from sending half drawn frames to the monitor, not the monitor from displaying them. The tearing happens in the gpu buffer Edit: read the edit

Though I’m not sure how valid the part about latency is. In the worst case scenario (transfer of a frame taking the whole previous frame), the latency of an lcd can only be double that of a crt at the same refresh rate, which 120+ hz already compensates for. And for the inherent latency of the screen, most gaming lcd monitors have less than 5 ms of input lag while a crt on average takes half the frame time to display a pixel, so 8 ms.

Edit: thought this over again. On crt those 2 happen simultaneously so the total latency is 8ms + pixel response time (which I don’t know the value of). On lcds, the transfer time should be (video stream bandwidth / cable bandwidth) * frame time. And that runs consecutively with the time to display it, which is frame time / 2 + pixel response time. Which could exceed the crt’s latency

BUT I took the input lag number from my monitor’s rtings page and looking into how they get it, it seems it includes both the transfer time and frame time / 2 and it’s somehow still below 5 ms? That’s weird to me since for that the transfer either needs to happen within <1 ms (impossible) or the entire premise was wrong and lcds do start drawing before the entire frame reaches them

Although pretty sure that’s still not the cause of tearing, which happens due to a frame being progressively rendered and written to the buffer, not because it’s progressively transferred or displayed

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4 points
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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.

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1 point

Those pixels appear basically as soon as the signal arrives at the back of the monitor, and they’re gone within a dozen scanlines. Watch slow-motion video of a CRT and you’ll see there’s only a narrow band that’s bright at any given moment.

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0 points

The motion blur thing is complete nonsense. It’s never been a benefit of CRT and reveals this greentext to be fake and gay.

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60 points

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!

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19 points
*

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.

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1 point

Oh boy do I miss DC++

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35 points

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.

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23 points

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.

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15 points

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.

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3 points

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.

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11 points

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.

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10 points
*

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

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-5 points
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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.

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13 points

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.

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