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.
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.
the solution is to be in your mid-30s
Unless you have tinnitus.
Then you’re possibly going to hear it very frequently.
you could say in a…
high frequency
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
and here i’d been blissfully unaware of it for days now. damn you all.
(wear earplugs to concerts kids, especially if you’re playing)
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
(me too)
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.
On this note, anybody know where I can get a 1600x1200 crt these days?
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).
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.
It even took some weird proportions where “pro” gamers set their game to display 4:3 on their widescreen lcd.
Habits die hard.
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.
I had a flat CRT. It was even heavier than a regular one.
They’re under a pretty high vacuum inside, so the flat glass has to be thicker to be strong enough
Yeah I suspect there’s some lensing going on in there too which adds more weight.
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)
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 !
There was always push back in esports
Smash uses CRTs today because of how much pushback there was/is
Melee uses CRTs because it’s an old ass game lol
Ultimate is not played on CRTs
They don’t have to use them, it’s a choice
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.
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.
You know we had 1080p 120hz displays 10 years ago, right?
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.
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.
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
I have never heard of an LCD making a high pitched noise like that, I think your monitor may be haunted
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
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!
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
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.
ah right, TVs do that
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!
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!
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.
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
And that scales nonlinearly with volume, so smaller monitors are even denser than big monitors.
🤣 that’s so true, how much can a damn vacuum weigh?
it’s all the magnetons
That pic reminds me of something. Anyone else remember when “flatscreen” was the cool marketing hype for monitors/TVs?
Anyone else remember when “flatscreen” was the cool marketing hype for monitors/TVs?
We got to move these refrigerators, we got to move these colour TV’s.
That ain’t workin
thats the way you do it
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.
They probably were in terms of viewing angles at the time of release, and probably were better if you had a technician which was able to come and adjust it or could adjust it at the store before it was sold, but I think the flatscreen CRTs have a much higher tendency for image warping over time.
Technician? More like some early 2000s teenager sweating bullets as they fiddle with settings and knobs they barely understand.
I took that sucker to LAN parties and always had to recalibrate after bumping it up and down stairs. I actually had that damned thing in use through 2013.
God that shit was so dope. LAN parties are the shit.
Good’old Warcraft III
Removed by mod
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 miss my CRT
I’m sure he misses you too, buddy
It’s ok, if anyone wants them back the smash brothers melee community has them all in the back of their car
Wider fov
The amount of CRTs I own has actually been increasing lately.
I cared enough that my first flat screen monitor was a modern IPS display; I still had a CRT well after the iPhone.
