@@tamegaming1768 I'm now realizing that everything looks so much better and is more enjoyable to play on CRT, it's a combination of near perfect motion clarity and CRT being able to retain 99% of resolution when motion is fast and things get busy on the screen, which is incredible for games, LCD/OLED drops to less that 20% of the intended resolution with just modest motion on screen, that's terrible for gaming on, not to mention CRT has zero response times, incredible vibrant colours, perfect natural blacks that manages to retain detail even in the darkest of scenes, then there's the awsome image depth CRT can have that looks so awsome in some games, FPS games with targets in the distance look so much more realistic because the depth is there, it's such a cool aspect of CRTs. Watch movies on CRT is amazing too, especial Anime content, CRT is the defacto gaming display tech no doubt.
@wobble2007 yes and no. I've owned a lot of different displays. Now I've never owned a crt monitor as awesome as these guys have but I've owned many crts a plasma,, a high end pioneer elite rear projection tv and currently own 2 of the best qleds ever made. I even own 2 vector monitors. My poineer elite pro 710 was amazing for movies but sucked for games. My Panasonic plasma was great for a couple years till the blacks turned more of a gray and I had image retention. My crts were all great at the time. Had too many standard crts to remember and even had 2 hd crts that I enjoyed. Currently I have 1 trash non led lcd that's in my kids room. Another just barely ok budget 4k led in my other kids room. Samsung q90 55 for my sim rig and 75 q8fn for my series x, ps5 and movies. The q8fn has been calibrated and you would tbink you are looking at oled, but no burn in worries. The blacks on it will match even the best plasmas and crts. For retro gaming I have a 32" jvc D series thats rgb modded. It's great for that, but for movies... lol nope. I also picked up a 27" Sony trinitron a few days ago, but haven't fooled with it yet. I'm going to try and snag a 36" Sony and rgb mod it. If I ever get a chance for a nice pvm/bvm then maybe.
This is reminding me of when HDTV's were starting to become mainstream and people were upset that their standard definition DVD's looked worse on their new flat panel HDTV.
Actually I remembered ironically enough more people hating on Blu ray feeling it was a completely useless format that really didn't change the game too much. Meaning ether most shund it for not being radically innovative enough or the idea that people were making the outrageous claims that they hardly saw a huge difference between Blu-ray over DVD. Then there were the complaints that it was Sony's excuse to sell the PS3 at a $600 price tag or an excuse to stop pirating of movies. In fact to this day DVD still ironically enough has out sold Blu-rays even to this day.
@@NIGonzo Everyone thinking in terms of ''profit'' is exactly what is wrong with everything in the modern world and society. Remember kids, there is no profit without loss, this is a zero sum game where everyone is bound to lose to an increasing climate of unchecked greed.
The lack of blur is absolutely huge and cannot be understated. When I got back into CRT's after being on flat panels for so long the motion clarity was noticeable right away. Really is a night and day difference
@@wakaflockaproject Plasma's were so under rated. I think the death knell was the initial lower resolutions compared to LCD televisions, and people bought based on resolution. I was even guilty of this. I remember scoffing at the 480p and 720p panels of Plasmas, and the burn in issues. Now when I see older Plasmas it's clear as day they were better then the LCDs of the time
Its crazy looking at a crt for the first time in years. The magic effects in games seem so much more tangible, like they are actually glowing in a space, even the text glows and looks more solid
@@Chance57 pump and dump CRTs? hilarious. you can goto any thrift store, yard sale, online (ebay, fb market, craigslist, etc.) and buy a crt for peanuts. there is no way anyone could 'pump' the price of crt monitirs or tvs. theyre for a niche market at this point. they still do some things well, as pointed out in the video. the same video that says youre not going to want to get rid of your new tv/monitor and replace it with crt, just that a crt to compliment it is a nice place to be especially for retro titles, and possibly newer titles as well.
We're one step away from John standing outside a supermarket with a portable speaker proclaiming to disinterested shoppers that "CRTs are the truth, renounce your flat screens!"
I would love to see the kind of ridiculous CRT monitor that could be made with todays technology. I'd bet it's capability would easily surpass any method of video output we currently have.
I would also...we ditched those beautiful analog TVs and monitors for saving space and because of the slim factor, but unless you're in the military and have to move a lot you ain't gonna need to move the TV much anyway.
CRT's are a funny thing, they are actually quite fun to collect as different ones have strengths and use cases. I currently have a few and use each one differently. They are by far the most authentic and pleasurable way to enjoy retro content and I hope that seeing these videos saves a few more from the dumpster, after all once they are gone, they're gone no-one is making them anymore.
I started collecting CRTs and noticed between different models they stand out for different systems and uses, some are good for VHS I have, some are good genesis gaming and others pop more with stuff like the GameCube and ps2
@@Valrax I had a Sony Trinitron up until the mid 2000's and it was great for GC games because it supported 480p. I couple of years ago I acquired and older NOKIA CRT TV to play my Wii VC games at 240p, and it looks just amazing, plus it's a 32" TV, can be played from quite a distance. However I was slightly disappointed as native Wii/GC games look a little blurry ( especially the text ) and flickers too much for my eyes pleasure since it's only capable of 480i. Now I know that I need a second CRT TV just for that. It never occurred to me to collect more then one ..😮
A properly tuned CRT had the ability to throw an amazing looking image. The real pinnacle of Crt tech was probably around early 2000's with wide screen HD rear projection sets such as the Ponieer Elite series or the Mitsubishi Diamond series sets or front projection Sony G80 or G90 units. They were absolutely incredible when calibrated.
When I play house of the dead 3 on my wii on my expensive 2011 samsing lcd and cheap 2006 Pioneer tv the colors are wayyyyy better...I thought my connection was broken for the lcd...I might connect my xbox 360 to the crt and play in 480i just to see if all the games have better color
New gen games on older crt tv's actually make the games feel like a movie. as good as the resolution is on newer monitors, you can really hide the imperfections from 4k monitors and things like that, which actually work in favor with the games.
Just buy a n64 and a tube TV and enjoy your retro gaming ...personally I enjoy the fuck out of playing games that run in 60- 100 fps maybe not all can pull it off but high definition looks sharper more crips more fluid and if a lil blur is making you want to play on old tech buy a better TV or dont
For movies and video games, it can definitely get to a point where everything's oversaturated, everything's too "sharp" and the frame rate is so high that it feels like it's sped up. Modern televisions and monitors can make things "look fake," especially to Millenials and Gen X people who grew up with CRTs and watching movies that are 24 frames per second.
Been messing with a nice old Yamaha dual cassette deck, don't let anyone fool you, cassettes still sound great even pit against my fancy modern Fiio M9 hifi digital music player. But it's a monster peice of hardware so not nearly as portable but still cool, kinda want at least a small CRT to go with my PC and ol' 360
Not a shocking sentence from the guy who shoehorns "bespoke" into every sentence, and ends all his sentences with the word "then" He got some snoot on him.
I never thought i would actually go so far as to transition back to CRTs but i did, i have stocked up on units, one of the greatest changes i noticed was i got far far less eye fatigue over any flat screen, motion is so smooth, colors really pop, it's a very pleasant image.
My eyes tear up not more than an hour after playing on my 1440 Acer or Samsung 4k TV. I was just thinking yesterday, how did I ever manage to binge so much world of Warcraft if my eyes do this after moderate gaming. Idk, your comment was insightful and I'm going to look into this more 🌠
@@frogfarmer3551 A proper 1440p monitor with anti glare and other things shouldn't make your eyes tear up. I use low brightness and I can look at my screen for hours. Maybe your eyes are different? Try crt and tell us. My screen is a g27q if that helps.
I picked up an old Sony CRT TV a few weeks ago on a whim that was just put out on the street as trash. I'd been wanting one for a while. Didn't think it would work, but I took the chance and busted my ass picking it up by myself lol and what do you know - it worked perfectly! I even have an old remote that works for it too, so I immediately plugged in my PS1 to run some old school Resident Evil. I can't begin to explain the satisfaction and the excitement that it gave me seeing the old startup screen the way it was intended. For those who miss these displays, I can't recommend them enough. The nostalgia is palpable.
@@dotmatrixmoeI have a PS3 hooked up to a CRT. In my tests, I found PS1 games look better with AV cables than Component (RGB). Images just seem more tangible and dithering works the way it was intended to.
@@ericstaples7220Thanks for replying, but since my comment I actually already RGB modded my set :P dithering became a lot more noticeable on PS1, but honestly the pros outweighed the cons for me
Thank god i saw this CRT craze coming early on. I went on craiglist and found a 35inch year 2000 trinitron for free, then a 34 inch Wega CRT with HDMI moden KD970 for 60 bucks. Leme tell ya, Wii U, PS3 and even PS4 and Xbox One X look amazing on the HDMI CRT. avoid ebay, go to craigslist, people give away CRTS like candy
Same. Had a Sony G400, moved to a new house, thought aahhh it’s too heavy to handle and gave it to a friend for free. Then , first LCD TN 60hz and OMG that was a BIG disappointment for FPS games……
There is no loss of detail on an OLED with "sample and hold". LCD has this because the pixels take too long to update, so they blend into each other. OLED doesn't have this issue. Pixels update instantaneously, without the need to flicker to black first, resulting in a cleaner image. Rtings test is not a good one, as the camera is moving at a constant speed, while frames update once every 16ms. The camera moves while the frame stays in place until the next refresh, so the 1/15th shutter speed would display blur even on your CRT example, even though the CRT is perfectly crisp. Just like an OLED. The difference is the black flicker will halve the camera's blur as the object is only present half the time, but the object is just as crisp on an OLED. It's just present for longer, for a cleaner transition from one frame to another. Keeping the camera still and using a shutter of maybe 1/75th of a second would give a more accurate depiction of how clean motion is. And really the biggest factor for CRTs in this video is resolution, and nearly every current gen game is going to be running at or very near native 4K. Downscaling that to 1080p will look worse, even if that 1080p is crisp. (although even then, not perfectly crisp, because pixels won't align perfectly either, which IS a problem) I know John has a fetish for CRTs, and I'm glad he can enjoy this, but I really don't agree with all of his claims in these videos.
I don't miss CRT TVs as they lacked support for higher refresh rates, I do miss CRT monitors. Like he said, being able to run a 1440p 120hz video on it today basically makes it good enough for modern consoles, if they recognized it.
@@Skylancer727 The problem is, in order to use a CRT these days, you would need to use an active, powered HDMI to VGA converter. This conversion process does add some delay, meaning any potential latency benefits you would've gained are lost or at least minimised anyway, compared to a decent modern LCD. So you're still better off using a high-refresh TN LCD panel, if all a person cares about is latency.
@@prltqdf9 Earlier generations of LCDs were absolutely terrible, yes. But luckily we're not living in the past anymore. Any higher-end LCD or OLED panel these days far surpases the capabilities and image quality of even the best CRT's. I think too many people are looking at the past with rose-tinted goggles, and are taking for LCDs for granted, completely forgetting all the good reasons we switched over to begin with.
I wouldn't buy a CRT used anyway, they don't have a long life span compared to LCDS or even Oleds, they are 10 or more years old, it's likely they already heavily, degraded in Image quality at this point. Sadly.
@@theprophet2444 yeah I think for Retro consoles they are good, retro consoles like PS1 or PS2 on an modern TV looks very bad. But if you have an PS5 OLED HDR is the way to go.
would love to see a video detailing the process of fine-tuning display settings in order to get the most out of a CRT. I've heard that it can be a bit of an ordeal, in some cases
The first time I remember realizing how awful LCD's were for motion was playing Super Metroid and watching Samus' world SMEAR across the screen when you change rooms. On a CRT (or even a half decent plasma), you could really track just about every pixel in smooth, glass like motion across the screen.
While you hear that on (non-HD) CRT TVs, you won't hear it on PC CRTs. TVs horizontal refresh rate was around 15.7 kHz but PC (at VGA or higher) is above 31.5 kHz, outside of human hearing. You can often run many PC CRTs above 100 kHz.
The funniest thing is that only young people can hear it, the ear loses sensitivity to higher frequencies with age. So the engineers probably never knew it was a problem.
I've found from personal experience (with a good but not great phone camera) that it can be very hard to properly capture the vibrancy of the image of a CRT on camera. Most recently, I tried recording footage of a black and white TV a few weeks ago, and I was shocked at how dull it looked compared to in-person. Cameras and eyes work differently.
There are a few Sony CRT models which are ridiculously good. They are still very expensive and hard to get. 80% of the PC gamers are still on 1080p setups and almost all of them on 60hz. Cant imagine how these TVs were above that 20 years ago + all of the CRTs advantages... they were/are years ahead. There is a saying like i never got fired for buying a Sony. So true
I had a huge extremely heavy industry grade EIZO CRT my dad were allowed to bring home from his work place.. Monitors like these is very deep in its dimensions, requiring much more space, it can't get close to the wall, so there is downsides! but yea, I would always run that monitor at some 800x600 240hz.. The image were carved in stone, no matter how fast you would pan the camara in Half-Life it would be dead stable and Rock solid, I've owned expensive 144hz Gsync LCD's, but CRT monitors are simply vastly superior, even that old CRT I played around with some 25 years ago..!
Used to have a Sony Profeel monitor that got thrown out of the place I worked. Amazing CRT, but Jesus, what a lump it was. Like, two people needed to lift it, huge footprint and power consumption, compared to a modern LCD. After a while, it was just too much of a liability to own and I got rid of it. Kind of regret it now, but not really because I’d literally have nowhere to put it now.
This is actually partly true. It's also one of the reasons why a game like Star Fox on SNES was much more impressive to us back in the day when played on a decent CRT than most people judge it now on some emultor and output to a display with no blending or a crap filter and lots of input lag and so on. It not only looked much better on a good CRT, but it also ran much smoother, with the display blending between the images at the lower framerate much better than modern displays do, as well as without any input lag too. So, yeah, we've lost a lot in going all modern, at least when it comes to retro gaming.
My best friend had to use a CRT to play all his games up until like 2016, but I remember when we would play Brawl or GTA 5 on PS3, it looked really sharp and made those lower resolution games look a lot nicer over any HDTV
Actually I found the N64 to be the platform which benefits the most for being plugged into a CRT. Even using composite, compared to a LCD all the blur is gone, texture details are more pleasant and the game is smoother. A huge upgrade if you want to play N64 games on original hardware without any video mods.
CRTs just hid flaws really well because of their softer image than LCDs at native resolution. This means they hid aliasing well, and scaled perfectly with games running at low resolutions.
was thinking the same thing, yet people are selling these for crazy prices on ebay meanwhile you can find them for $5 in local markets (consumer ones obviously)
Sorry, but a get headache and eyes popping out from CRT flickering. Will never go back. Never. F-that. All the "problems" of LCDs you talk about are software (interpolation - pixel reconstruction) issues. Not the panel itself.
@@colbyboucher6391 Yeah, We know it sounds like a weird religious cult but you REALLY have to see it to understand, all these small things add up and you get this much more true to life image.
@@colbyboucher6391 It's not your display that's the bottleneck. It's the way the video was recorded, the camera (its capabilities and settings), and the compression (and color compression) used that mainly limits how true-to-life a recording looks. Your display only acts as a kind of filter to this that's significantly less impactful than ALL the latter. It's why standards such as SRGB was developed; to make everything look decent and consistent across all screens, regardless of hardware capability.
I think most of this 'CRTs are awesome' stuff has got to be due to how amazing these particular high end monitors are. As someone who lived through the transition I can tell you that your average, or below average CRTs warped images (especially around the corners), had brightness issues when running in higher resolutions, and pretty much just were not as good for your average computing tasks as LCD. LCD was crisper at native resolutions, brighter and probably most important of all, didn't give you a headache due to refresh rate mismatches with the overhead lights in office buildings. Refresh and response times, and ghosting were a big issue in the beginning for gaming but once we got past most of that it was such an upgrade I can't even begin to describe it. That all said, if I had had a CRT that did 1080p I'd still own it. This thing looks incredible.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills watching these vids, because I have zero fond memories of CRTs. I just remember them looking washed out and gross. Maybe you are right in that these professional monitors are why. Because none of the CRTs I ever used had picture quality that I would consider good, let alone even remotely comparable to a modern day tv/monitor.
@@nerdstrangler4804 Yeah and this "can display any resolution" BS is so tiring. While you can't call it a "native" resolution, you can say that a CRT is BEST at a particular resolution. I had monitors that were "800x600" on the box but had unfixable geometry problems if you ran it above 640x480. Brightness was absolutely effected by resolution. I have an old first gen iMac and an old PPC quadra-something and the monitors on both stretch the picture on the edges like crazy. 16x9 monitors were incredibly rare and I bet this has a flatter screen then then 12 inch class balls us plebs had to use.
@@frankie5821 Exactly what do you find disturbing about Megan's profile picture? Did she change it already? Because currently her profile picture is a picture of what i assume is her human face. And if human faces disgust you, then you really should consider getting some therapy for that, because that's not a very sociable response to have to seeing images of other human beings. Stop isolating yourself from the rest of the world to a point where you have alienated yourself from other human beings.
@@RobotronSage I think it's her run through one of those "Pixar me" filters. I don't consider it disturbing, but could see why someone would get some uncanny valley feelings from it. Just as bad is why he's peeping her profile in the first place.
Hi! Yes and no. It still had a fixed pixel grid but every subpixel is a CRT. The whole display is made up of millions of tiny CRTs. It would've been what plasma TVs wanted to be.
I think your view is a bit tinted with these professional CRTs. I remember one CRT I sued to play the PS2 on. It had green horizontal lines + black was gray and the glass was so curved the image actually looked weird on the edges, more like a fishbowl than a window.
@Rory Yes. The consumer TVs were very poor in quality. PC monitors were way better, but also crazy expensive and small. This CRT he shows, truly is the 1% of the 1%.
@@wildechap It really is. CRTs are objectively better at some things (like displaying lower resolution images and motion clarity) than even the greatest OLED HDR TV/Monitor. It's actually a lot more than that once you get specifically into retro gaming, like how 2D (And maybe some early 3D) games way back when were designed from the ground up to look best on a CRT, and look much worse on an LCD. If you want examples of this, look up "CRT Pixels" on Twitter, they post images of what old games actually look like on a real CRT display and compare it side by side to the raw pixels that you'd see on an LCD.
@@TexelGuy don't worry i understand that, but i don't think that is the reason why games looked beautiful back then. They were nkt beautiful back then, it's just our frame of reference that changed. Im talking about those 3d games not 2d. And his sentence is also based off of some internet meme , like how GTA SA looked really beautiful back then.
@@wildechap Part of what you said is true but no games really did look better back then because of the displays we had back then vs now. There is a significant difference.
watching this on my old DELL 19" the one with Trinitron tubes, ten years ago i was about to give it for free but the guy didn't pick it up because it was so heavy, a year ago (when i saw the first video) i rushed to my parents house and i found it in the garage all dusty but still working, it has some cable issues though
We should just get new high end CRTs out in production. They could be made relatively slim as Samsung did with their flat-ish crts. Combining it and refining it further to even higher level than last of high end Sony CRTs could give us the best displays around. I would liken it to how cars with internal combustion are still pushed to new and new highs in performance space. It doesnt matter than electric cars like Teslas are faster, they are inherently ruining or lacking the experience a well made internal combustion manual transmission sports cars offers. And electric car will never replace it. For same reason we should have CRTs put back in production and pushed when they still can be made until knowledge needed for it gets lost forever.
It would genuinely be interesting to see what modern engineers could come up with to improve the CRT technology. Making it all slimmer without sacrificing any of the CRT's benefits would alone create a new market for such screens. I'd definitely want one, since getting a hold of a good CRT is now an increasingly difficult and expensive undertaking, while the massive weight and size are also a problem I can't easily overlook.
Hey, if steam locomotives like the PRR 5550 can be made in the 21st Century with efficiency improvements, then I see little reason that CRTs cannot be manufactured in the 21st Century!
Lol, right? I don't know what drain cleaner these people are injecting into their veins, but CRT is dead and dying. I watched TV on a CRT over Christmas (mind u, I grew up on them), and when I got back home, I wanted to hug my OLED. I'm a videophille through and through, and the color reproduction, and infinite contrast ratio, a CRT stands no chance.
I was born in 1985 so I got to use CRTs for quite a long time, whether it was gaming on a TV CRT or PC CRT. I'm 100% glad they are gone, power hungry, hurts your eyes after hours of use and weighed an absolute ton. Made the switch to PC LCDs back in 2004 and never looked back, sharpness on the LCD was night and day, I could use it all day and night without headaches or eyestrain, used sod all power and it was light as a feather in comparison to a CRT. You had to make sacrifices by using native resolution and motion blur especially in 2004 was worse than a CRT but that was definitely worth the trade off.
Same. All I got was eye strain and endless migraines. As soon as I got my first 15'' LCD display I threw my two monitors out of the window (not literally) and never looked back. Out of curiosity I played Jedi Outcast on a CRT at a friend's house last week and after an hour => headache. Maybe things are different for high-end CRTs, but the cheap/consumer ones were very heavy and picture quality was mostly trash.
Lol on PC CRt Monitors I never had eye problems and I was born in 1998 and my country isn't that technologically fast and my first PC and of course TVs were all CRTs up to like 2010 or later. Never had eyestrain issues at 75hz or more
i don't regret replacing my 1080p 16:9 flat pannel with my "new" CRT 4:3 monitor that can max up at 1920x1440 60hz (mostly using 1600x1200 at 75hz) for playing modern games on my PC weight and space is a small price to pay for that superior quality and i love the 4:3 ratio for gaming (16:9 was too wide for my tastes)
I recently played the final duel of Ghost of Tsushima on a 34" Toshiba HD CRT and it really added to the atmosphere. Thanks for the video John, it was entirely my shit
It's also crazy how we take LCDs for granted now and forgot about all the good reasons we switched to LCDs to begin with. Sure, the first few generations of LCDs to replace CRTs were absolutely terrible panels, but these days, on a high-end IPS with local dimming HDR and high refresh, or HDR OLEDs, going back to CRTs would be insanity, fueled by nostalgia and nothing else. Even if you want to play at lower-than-native resolutions on a bigger screen, there's now perfect pixel scaling settings in your GPU driver panel that bypasses blurring when blowing up smaller resolutions. And failing that, you could just use a projector instead.
@@GENKI_INU High end IPS LCDs come with 750-1000:1 contrast ratio, which is a joke. Pixel response times are still around 3-10 ms even on top end "1ms" gaming panels. There is still no monitor in the market that does rolling shutter blur reduction. OLEDs are close to CRT quality, but it still have worse motion quality and you cant buy it in monitor sizes.
@@magyararon6918 Actual high-end IPS monitors with HDR 10 support have Full Array Backlight Dimming (available for everything, not just HDR enabled content). While not as precise as OLEDs, they are a match for CRT's near-infinite contrast ratios in a completely dark room, due to effect of CRT glow. In typical scenarios with moderate or brighter ambient lighting however, CRT's actually have contrast ratios that are similar, or worse than IPS/TN LCDs, due to the glare from the thick CRT glass screen and gray coating on the inside. Typical antiglare coats on LCD's handle ambient lighting much better, and give off deeper blacks under ambient lighting conditions. As for contrast ratios without Backlight Dimming Arrays or OLEDs, VA LCD panels have been around for ages in the TV and PC space, providing easy 3000:1- 5000:1 contrast ratios. These days, you can buy very affordable high-refresh VA LCD monitors with pixel response times that match faster IPS monitors at 144hz+. Also, many mid to higher-end LCD monitors (especially ones with FreeSync) have a backlight strobing feature you can enable, simulating exactly what CRT's do by rapidly flickering the backlight between frames. They are extremely effective at getting rid of any sample-and-hold blurring mentioned in the video. My 4-year-old $200 1080p 144hz VA FreeSync monitor has this feature, and it works well. If you're still comparing response times with CRT's, the bad news is if you wanted to use a CRT these days, you would need to use an active, powered HDMI to VGA converter, which inevitably adds a couple ms of latency, nullifying any real advantage you would've had to begin with on a CRT, compared to using a fast TN or IPS panel. And that's not even accounting for the much higher refresh rates on LCD's.
Great video I've been preaching the benefits of crt's for years. They just cannot be beat when it comes to games. You should have a look at the white balance on that Sony monitor though, the blue could be turned down a touch.
Find the best used Panasonic or Samsung plasma TV you can find. It'll blow away the image on the LCD, even a 4k, although it doesn't have the flexibility of all the resolutions and refresh rates of a CRT monitor. But no motion blur and great contrast. Great for consoles. And they're cheap.
@@ninetendopesaitama2107 I don’t own a CRT and was highly considering an OLED until I saw how quickly they can develop burn in. Imo not acceptable on something that should be lasting 5 years minimum. I should need to change TVs every 5 years minimum not every 2 years like a phone. While OLED is very nice I’ll skip it because of longevity issues and wait until either mini LED or micro LED becomes much more affordable
On pc, integer resolution scaling is amazing. It basically makes up for the resolution advantage of a crt, assuming your using a multiple of the monitors resolution
lmfao ''integer resoluton scaling'' does not really stack up to CRT-capable resolutions. Also i am wasting way too much time of my life arguing resolution semantics on the internet.
For the first time I can see a resurgence of the old (and heavy!) CRT's of the day. Running anything high resolution through a Composite or RGB Display is not limited to physical pixels (Triplets) so its like having built in High Quality Antialiasing! I made CRT's for Philips from 1986 up until 2000 and recall their demise under LCD/Flat
Oh man the old Phillips large size crt's with the built in speakers. Those things were barely unliftable for 1 person. I could lift it but forget about moving it more than 5 meters.
@@barryschalkwijk9388 we got this old 32 inch JVC CRT TV on the curb not too far down the road where I am, and it is so heavy. Built in speakers, and the fact that it's a *32 inch display* We used to move it to the basement during the winter and garage during the summer but we realized we're just going to leave it outside to be our outside TV. It still works like a charm, even with the radical temp swings from single digit temps in winter to the 80 to 90 degree heat we get during summer. I love using that thing though. I have another one that's more moderately sized but with a busted speaker, Zenith brand, and much older too with the only port being the RF coaxial port, but I do use an old VCR with it and "broadcast to channel 3" but with mere millimeters in range, and I tune an old radio to channel 3 to get audio for it. I love using that too. I have an old 10 inch CRT in my room with an antenna too. I feel like an 80s kid deep down, even though I was born in 2002.
Love my Sony trinitron and bang and olufsen crt with high quality scart on the sega mega drive. Would also recommend not skipping on the audio as it's just as important. Tried many set ups and settled on a Sony hi fi system of all things. Pulling stereo from headfone jack on Megadrive to music center is a joy to be had.
I'm glad I still have my 2005 Sony Trinitron TV, CRT with a resolution up to 1080i and has HDMI. One day I hope to get something high-end, but for my everyday use it suffices. I can use everything from my VCR and Genesis to my Chromecast and PS4. That being said, it's a 200 pound beast (about 91 kilograms).
I wish I could transition to OLED, but I pretty much know I'll get the screen burned in. Already got burn in on my phone's OLED display from playing too much Duel Links.
I've ditched LCD monitors for CRTs about 5 years ago and I never wish to go back. Absolutely everything I throw at my 17" LG looks stunning, from low, *low* resolutions of 320x200 (DOOM, Quake, etc.) to 1080p content, either from modern games and videos to older, remastered media.
... shame 4k would probably make most retro games look like dirt nowadays lol (not knocking OLED - it would be my personal choice for modern display tech)
@@TheKayliedGamerChannel-UA-cam I just switched from a 1440p ultrawide to an LG C1 48" for my productivity and gaming. For someone who's been around to see CRT monitors go from 2 colors to completely gone again, I can tell you, we're back on track display wise!
@@GENKI_INU Meh. I'm using an LG C1 48" as a monitor since a couple of weeks and I won't be going back. 4k120, g-sync and primo HDR. This has been an all-round great upgrade from my IPS 34" ultrawide. I was a bit hesitant at first, but 48" is perfectly doable.
Why do DF keep touting the 'benefits' of CRTs without mentioning the disadvantages? Those that actually worked through the CRT era, like me, most likely have to wear glasses now. Those damn things cause eye strain, affecting some more than others. I could not stare at a CRT at my job for more than a few hours at a time before I can FEEL my eyes start to ache. The consistent 'flash' as the CRT is updated each frame do put a strain on your eyes that a video capture of a CRT does NOT show! No, I DO NOT want to own a CRT nowadays, thank you.
You had what is referred to as the “shitbox special” since you mentioned the one at your job. Probably it’s max refresh was 75hz on whatever res you were using. If you run a CRT at 85hz you can greatly decrease the amount of eye strain you get from using them.
Forgot to add in my original comment but yes. I wish they would talk more about the disadvantages. There are a ton compared to what modern displays have to offer. Other than motion blur, input lag, and free choice of resolution and refresh there aren’t many advantages anymore.
@@josephboysuk686 Hah! Shitbox special, I'll refer to them as such from now on :) When my brother joined the Marines, back in the late 90s, he got what they call the contraceptive glasses... GI issued glasses... Damn thing was so thick, you can see the spacetime warp around the side of the glasses when you looked at his face lol. He later got Lasik and got 20/20 vision, I just get feather-light lenses, but still thicc AF as my vision are so bad. Couldn't go through that operation consciously. All thanks to CRTs.
I remember getting rid of my old 32" CRT and needing two of us to painfully carry it. It was so massive and heavy. Back breaking work moving those things.
I remember when i upgraded from my 1 ton CRT to one of the first gen 720p panels. I was disappointed with the colors, the viewing angles limitations. Going into a store and seeing a screen never made me excited to buy a new one. I expected incremental improvements to continue until high end 4k HDR displays. Seeing 4k HDR clips with perfectly tuned to the panel specs that seemed to come out of nowhere. It only took two decades to get to the point that I'm blown away. Although most content isn't optimized for HDR and each display manufacturer seems to have a different HDR format that isn't fully compatible across displays from the same generation of tech.
Well from my quick test on the Xbox I can tell you it’s awesome. Just can’t choose between 120fps or ray tracing lol. I know that the Xbox is higher resolution than the PS5 at 120fps as it says on the doom site and from what I’ve seen it’s locked 120 fps
I still use a CRT to this day, in fact its set up right next to my 4k TV. Current and last gen games are played on the 4k display. For everything else its CRT all the way.
I always thought it was my imagination moving from CRT to LCD back in the day when it became all you could get. In the back of my head I been thinking why do these flat screens always look so shitty. I just assumed it was because I was younger when CRT's were around and my eyes were better. Now I'm glad you've confirmed it wasn't my imagination.
From what I hear crt tvs don't really have a max resolution so if u use an rca to hdmi converter for your standard (480/576) crt tv and run your ps3 ps4 or ps5 at 1080p what resolution will the tv display?
The big problem with CRTs is that they flicker, noticeably. Even at higher refresh rates, you may not notice the flicker but it increases eye strain, a lot. The colours can also shift badly as they age, and electromagnetic sources nearby can affect the image. It’s also hard, even on a “flat” CRT, to get the image squared up, and they also “overscan” the image. I think some people remember CRTs with rose tinted glasses.
LCDs are flickering too from DC inversion, some of them are VERY fcking bad, you can get a strong migraine from it. Way worse than even a 60 Hz crt, but the thing is, if you had a little bit of brain, you were running your CRT at 75 or 80 Hz anyway, and it caused very little eyestrain at that refresh rate. The other issues are true, but its not like LCD is a perfect technology either, i would rather take a CRT if i had the chance.
@@magyararon6918 I'm not sure why people on youtube seem incapable of expressing an opinion without slipping an insult in. Does it make you feel somehow, superior? CRTs still flicker at 75 or 80hz, and for some people could reduce eye strain, but for others not as much. At any rate, at not point did I say that LCD's were a perfect or better technology, in fact, I said nothing about them at all.
With all due respect, but watching CRT footage on my OLED or LCDtv.. really defeats the purpose right? The whole thing is about CRT looking better in person, so I don’t think this translates well to UA-cam (when watching on anything other than CRT)?
Therin lies the problem.with this stupidity on display in this video. He dumbed down the 4K to play at max 720p. So all this proves is that at 720p the CRT is superior because the OLED is meant for 4k video consumption....this doesn't touch on how trash these things were on energy consumption, or how the tubes within were filled with gases that are extremely harmful once the TV was no longer able to work.
@@vidsurfer0725 CRT enthusiast here to say: I'm quite amused at how CRTs have become the vinyl of music. Objectively speaking they are an inferior tech for most use cases, hence why they are obsolete. Yet there are myths and defy common sense and science and people's own eyes and ears that tell them that the wobbly flickery mess is better than their 40+ inch 4k LCD with "HDR" (it just isn't) and that a medium that is so limited physically that the higher fidelity at the start of the medium meant tracks were actually shuffled around to get better sound... And of course, never mind that vinyl requires surprisingly extreme EQ to COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS audio. Just like with audio, it being analog actually has very little bearing on audio quality, aside from it being a destructive type. Analog audio can be heavily processed as can and is (at least on CRT TVs made from the late 90s and beyond). I love my CRTs, but I don't lie to people about their capabilities, and I honestly feel like this comes close to lying by omission. Myths like "it has perfect black levels" really get to me, since all you have to do to debunk them is turn on a CRT and turn off the lights but now I find it more funny, again, it's akin to how many people defy science and their own ears and actually think vinyl sounds better than high resolution digital formats (yes, I collect CDs too).
@@awesomeferret I appreciate the honest reply. Like don't get me wrong, I think CRTs are cool (I grew up watching them), and there is this retro nostalgia about them that is the pulse of 80s & 90s (early 2000s) entertainment, but they definitely have no place in the modern world. I think I get more anoyed they let this dude get on to discuss this type of thing....like who is going to run out and buy a horribly over priced piece of dinosaur tech, to hook up to either of the most powerful consoles ever made? I remember watching movies in the 80s thinking they were so cool, then got older and realized how cringy and corny they actually were...haha
@@vidsurfer0725 "who is going to run out and buy"... Idiots like me, that's who. Even though I criticize the absurdity of how mythological CRT tech has become, I get it. While it's very much the same as current TV tech (for example, for better or for worse, we are only now finally moving post 60hz in mainstream TVs) it's also very different and there's a certain appeal to it, similar to the "novelty" of OLED and how it can show a clock or something that just floats. CRTs, even the modern ones that deinterlace everything have video processing and thus lag, and have inherent flicker. I have a JVC D series (among others, that's my best one though) and it taught me a lot about CRT myths and the real world limitations of the tech (I grew up with CRTs but also with LCD, ironically we still have and use our first LCD TV which is 1080p IPS in 32 inches and has real front facing speakers that actually sound good (me also have newer TVs of course). Wii games really pop on this TV in a way that they don't on my D series (they pop in their own way on there, but it's not as sharp and you have a lot of geometry wobbling).
@@HumanManufactured I also did it because I got better performance running on there. I could do lower resolutions like 1280x960 and the game still looked spectacular and ran leagues better. Plus I love how the game natively supports 4:3 resolutions with now added tweaking or modding
PVMs are overrated, and wildly overpriced nowadays. You can still get an amazing picture with consumer sets and component output - I say this as someone who formerly had a PVM 20M4U. Not everyone needs a Lamborghini just to get to work.
@@Garbagehead5 they aren’t overrated but they are over priced as fuck. Please show me a consumer CRT that looks as good as PVM. The 20m4 that you have would blow away if it’s not a POS any sort of 20” consumer set. I know because I have 20” consumer sets they just don’t have the same look as that 800 line tube.
Depending on your tastes (and I'll admit it's different for everyone), it might not even be a clear upgrade. Retro console games were designed for blurrier consumer CRT sets, and the limitations those sets came with were incorporated into the games' aesthetics. See, for instance, Dracula's red eyes in Symphony of the Night. The artists designed his eyes so they have exactly one bright red pixel in each eye. Over a composite signal, that red pixel expands across multiple adjacent lighter pixels, filling his eyes. Over a clean RGB signal, you for the most part just see his eyes as having strange red dots in them. For the most part, your Triniton is in the sweet spot where it still has a great image quality for a consumer set while not eliminating many of the factors that the art designers of the 80s and 90s were banking on existing. The PVM is still great because it gives you a plethora of options, but I'd find it hard to justify the cost over a regular Triniton if you're just gonna do retro gaming on it.
I like gaming on my 32in jvc via component/svideo just as much or more than my 20m4u and 1354q. They definitely look awesome, but kicking back on the couch and playing on a big screen with the boys is where it’s at. High line count monitors also exaggerate 480i flicker. The 13” is really nice for bringing places though. Keep an eye out for a pvm or equivalent if you want one, but I wouldn’t obsess over it having used them now. A good consumer set with component input gets you almost all the way there, and I’d say it’s even better in some cases.
They're too expensive to produce, too large to store, and too big and heavy to ship. It's much easier to profit from flat panels, hence why forces in the industry was so eager to go in that direction without ever looking back. This was never a question about "what gives the customer the best quality"
@@lilpp4791 cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, the beams of which are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. This principle simply requires a gigantic heavy box. The tech is huge and weighty, it can't be downsized. Your question is absurd, it's almost like if you asked, why a car couldn't be made as flat as a flat screen TV..
I feel you. The folks from MyLifeInGaming and Retro Tech all have a freaking Sony PVM 20L5. It's a monitor that natively displays 240p, 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i all without lag and have like 800 TV lines of resolution. 😩
I'm visually impaired (meaning bad vision regardless of glasses/contacts), but the transition from CRT to LCD in the early 2000s was a big deal for me and I thought it was absolutely crazy that no one saw how badly they looked. I have to sit pretty close to the screen and all the issues I had with LCDs which I was never able to explain to anyone are explained here! I thought I was taking crazy pills because of how badly LCDs looked when anything was moving on screen and it's so jarring to me I still can't believe that sighted people on average tell me they perceive no quality issues. I used a professional CRT into the late 2000s because of it. It's pretty awesome seeing it finally addressed, though 20 years later.
What I've seen of CRT's is that the blues are far brighter and deeper... My dad reckons that LCD's were a massive brightness increase. I told him about Daytona USA and how much more shit, low-resolution and dark it looked compared to the arcades watching someone play it on an emulator on UA-cam. He told me "it was a special kind of screen in the arcades, then"
The FW900 is undoubtedly one of the best gaming monitors ever made, however one of the biggest strikes against it is the fact that it costs like $4000+ used. In a world when you can literally buy a 48'' LG CX or C1 for around $1000 new, it doesn't make much sense to acquire one these days, unfortunately.
It's not cost effective for most people to search out and buy a rare FW900. It's like buying a LaFerrari. Benefits are obvious. Cost is significant. Buy the Prius or even a Tesla equivalent of screens b/c the availability, profile, energy and cost savings. It's more practical. The Fw900, like a LaFerrari is a unique experience.
Good ol' CRTs man, how I miss them; still remember when I got me my first LCD (think it was an LCD) screen; the CRT I owned had gone the way of the dodo, and after so much hype over the next generation of flat screens, and having people all around me drooling at them, I got me one; BIF FUCKING MISTAKE! ...was beyond disappointed at how crap the quality actually was in comparison to a regular CRT Monitor, and the one I got was suposed to be one of the good ones at the time; what a major step back... Did I mention I miss CRTs?
A lot of the components that went into making CRT displays aren't available anymore. Any manufacturer would have to setup a whole lot of infrastructure.
The prices of CRT monitors increase by 1% for every second DF talks about them.
*checks Ebay*..... more like 3%.
Sad thing is it’s not even a joke.
FW190 has risen to 3k rn
CRT Headaches
$3,000 on eBay
John singlehandedly keeping the FW900 price out of my range.
yep 🤦♂️ guess I'll stick with my good old ge crt for retro consoles
@@producerevan88
Peter : "Ok"...
They'll be dead soon.
At least I have a pvm for my retro stuff, fw900 prices stupid
There's gotta be other good widescreen CRT options right?
I miss CRTs for games. The phosphor glow, crispness, and the almost perfect black levels. *sigh
honestly. for some types of content there's nothing like analogue video on a crt
@@tamegaming1768 I'm now realizing that everything looks so much better and is more enjoyable to play on CRT, it's a combination of near perfect motion clarity and CRT being able to retain 99% of resolution when motion is fast and things get busy on the screen, which is incredible for games, LCD/OLED drops to less that 20% of the intended resolution with just modest motion on screen, that's terrible for gaming on, not to mention CRT has zero response times, incredible vibrant colours, perfect natural blacks that manages to retain detail even in the darkest of scenes, then there's the awsome image depth CRT can have that looks so awsome in some games, FPS games with targets in the distance look so much more realistic because the depth is there, it's such a cool aspect of CRTs. Watch movies on CRT is amazing too, especial Anime content, CRT is the defacto gaming display tech no doubt.
@wobble2007 yes and no. I've owned a lot of different displays. Now I've never owned a crt monitor as awesome as these guys have but I've owned many crts a plasma,, a high end pioneer elite rear projection tv and currently own 2 of the best qleds ever made. I even own 2 vector monitors.
My poineer elite pro 710 was amazing for movies but sucked for games. My Panasonic plasma was great for a couple years till the blacks turned more of a gray and I had image retention. My crts were all great at the time. Had too many standard crts to remember and even had 2 hd crts that I enjoyed. Currently I have 1 trash non led lcd that's in my kids room. Another just barely ok budget 4k led in my other kids room. Samsung q90 55 for my sim rig and 75 q8fn for my series x, ps5 and movies. The q8fn has been calibrated and you would tbink you are looking at oled, but no burn in worries. The blacks on it will match even the best plasmas and crts. For retro gaming I have a 32" jvc D series thats rgb modded. It's great for that, but for movies... lol nope. I also picked up a 27" Sony trinitron a few days ago, but haven't fooled with it yet. I'm going to try and snag a 36" Sony and rgb mod it.
If I ever get a chance for a nice pvm/bvm then maybe.
Same I miss CRT I went through so many HD TV sets 😢
@@unknownwolf4046 go get one. I'm sure you can find one second hand, as a lot of people want to get rid of them.
This is reminding me of when HDTV's were starting to become mainstream and people were upset that their standard definition DVD's looked worse on their new flat panel HDTV.
DVD is really made for crt
DVD looks awful on 4k TV 😪
lol dvds are ass
Actually I remembered ironically enough more people hating on Blu ray feeling it was a completely useless format that really didn't change the game too much. Meaning ether most shund it for not being radically innovative enough or the idea that people were making the outrageous claims that they hardly saw a huge difference between Blu-ray over DVD. Then there were the complaints that it was Sony's excuse to sell the PS3 at a $600 price tag or an excuse to stop pirating of movies. In fact to this day DVD still ironically enough has out sold Blu-rays even to this day.
all southeast Asia still watches DVD
If your wifes think PS5 is big, just imagine when they see you entering the house with a CRT.
wait till your wife's boyfriend finds out you're using his PS5
@@user-xg6tv5hl6s Might take your Nintendo Switch away.
The Arabian peninsula sympathizes with your predicaments.
@@user-xg6tv5hl6s wait?
That’s what she said
I was always hoping, that someone would make use of the niche and create modern CRTs. Sadly nobody did!
Even small ones would be great
The cost of manufacturing CRTs these days would be mad. They could never be profitable again, sadly.
@@doltBmB But does anyone even do that any more? At a scale that is profitable, or even could be? I doubt it.
@@NIGonzo Everyone thinking in terms of ''profit'' is exactly what is wrong with everything in the modern world and society.
Remember kids, there is no profit without loss, this is a zero sum game where everyone is bound to lose to an increasing climate of unchecked greed.
@@RobotronSage good luck finding anybody with the resources to make you your new super crt that has that same attitude.
The lack of blur is absolutely huge and cannot be understated. When I got back into CRT's after being on flat panels for so long the motion clarity was noticeable right away. Really is a night and day difference
Same with plasma
@@wakaflockaproject Plasma's were so under rated. I think the death knell was the initial lower resolutions compared to LCD televisions, and people bought based on resolution. I was even guilty of this. I remember scoffing at the 480p and 720p panels of Plasmas, and the burn in issues. Now when I see older Plasmas it's clear as day they were better then the LCDs of the time
@@speedyink I still use plasma. Better than any led today even
@@wakaflockaproject I won't argue with you there. I would own a plasma if I didn't get an oled instead.
@@wakaflockaproject I might still get a plasma if one pops up for cheap. I don't know where I'd put it, but..
I just looked up that tv on eBay, they want $3000 lmfao
+800$ shipping, already 6 bids, end in 24h, people are crazy
Was like $1000 when I wanted one back in like 2012
At that point just buy a massive OLED 😂
people are on that r-word juice
I found one at my local pawn for $100 bucks and, with adapter few months back. Use it with my Xbox series X and, PS5 Guilty Gear looks awesome on it.
Its crazy looking at a crt for the first time in years. The magic effects in games seem so much more tangible, like they are actually glowing in a space, even the text glows and looks more solid
DF be like: "We already have a CRT TV so let's talk about how cool it is and let's the scalpers do the rest."
Yep
Pump, meet dump. Now they just sell this garbage TV after they've driven demand up.
@@shade221 it can't even do HDR lol. Opinions are best when you don't treat them like fact.
@@shade221 You're only further convincing me of how little this this TV is worth beyond the arbitrary hype.
@@Chance57 pump and dump CRTs? hilarious. you can goto any thrift store, yard sale, online (ebay, fb market, craigslist, etc.) and buy a crt for peanuts. there is no way anyone could 'pump' the price of crt monitirs or tvs. theyre for a niche market at this point. they still do some things well, as pointed out in the video. the same video that says youre not going to want to get rid of your new tv/monitor and replace it with crt, just that a crt to compliment it is a nice place to be especially for retro titles, and possibly newer titles as well.
We're one step away from John standing outside a supermarket with a portable speaker proclaiming to disinterested shoppers that "CRTs are the truth, renounce your flat screens!"
You mean we aren't already there?
I'll set up a CRT with this video playing in loop, how about that?
I would love to see the kind of ridiculous CRT monitor that could be made with todays technology. I'd bet it's capability would easily surpass any method of video output we currently have.
I would also...we ditched those beautiful analog TVs and monitors for saving space and because of the slim factor, but unless you're in the military and have to move a lot you ain't gonna need to move the TV much anyway.
BUT I WANT MY RCA AND COMPONENTS INPUTS BACK DAMMIT.
We have OLED today, nothing can beat this
@@dropdeadaf975 there's Micro LED, while expensive as sh*t, it has all the OLED Advantages, AND NO BURN IN
@@LennyQUMFIF no, the blacks aren’t deeper as the OLED, the response time isn’t as good as OLED, Micro-LED is a scam
CRT's are a funny thing, they are actually quite fun to collect as different ones have strengths and use cases. I currently have a few and use each one differently. They are by far the most authentic and pleasurable way to enjoy retro content and I hope that seeing these videos saves a few more from the dumpster, after all once they are gone, they're gone no-one is making them anymore.
I started collecting CRTs and noticed between different models they stand out for different systems and uses, some are good for VHS I have, some are good genesis gaming and others pop more with stuff like the GameCube and ps2
@@Valrax I had a Sony Trinitron up until the mid 2000's and it was great for GC games because it supported 480p. I couple of years ago I acquired and older NOKIA CRT TV to play my Wii VC games at 240p, and it looks just amazing, plus it's a 32" TV, can be played from quite a distance. However I was slightly disappointed as native Wii/GC games look a little blurry ( especially the text ) and flickers too much for my eyes pleasure since it's only capable of 480i. Now I know that I need a second CRT TV just for that. It never occurred to me to collect more then one ..😮
Some Chinese factories do make them, so the potential is certainly there.
I have a few and they're fun to collect but they take up so much space
Where do you store them? I have them in nice container full of bins.
This reminds me of the day I saw my grandmothers CRT tv and was blown away by the image. I wasn't crazy after all
Grandma actually knows a thing or two, contrary to popular belief.
A properly tuned CRT had the ability to throw an amazing looking image. The real pinnacle of Crt tech was probably around early 2000's with wide screen HD rear projection sets such as the Ponieer Elite series or the Mitsubishi Diamond series sets or front projection Sony G80 or G90 units. They were absolutely incredible when calibrated.
@@RobotronSage no she just got upsold by the sales rep
@@theripper121projection tvs were trash...but early 2000s CRTs that were not the clunky blurry projection tvs were freaking amazing
When I play house of the dead 3 on my wii on my expensive 2011 samsing lcd and cheap 2006 Pioneer tv the colors are wayyyyy better...I thought my connection was broken for the lcd...I might connect my xbox 360 to the crt and play in 480i just to see if all the games have better color
New gen games on older crt tv's actually make the games feel like a movie. as good as the resolution is on newer monitors, you can really hide the imperfections from 4k monitors and things like that, which actually work in favor with the games.
I've always felt that gaming wasn't ready for 4K yet. There's no hiding the low-poliness in the distance now
I thought it was just me! I always felt games were more immersive on CRT's and playing PS2 games always felt like an experience on them!
Just buy a n64 and a tube TV and enjoy your retro gaming ...personally I enjoy the fuck out of playing games that run in 60- 100 fps maybe not all can pull it off but high definition looks sharper more crips more fluid and if a lil blur is making you want to play on old tech buy a better TV or dont
For movies and video games, it can definitely get to a point where everything's oversaturated, everything's too "sharp" and the frame rate is so high that it feels like it's sped up.
Modern televisions and monitors can make things "look fake," especially to Millenials and Gen X people who grew up with CRTs and watching movies that are 24 frames per second.
I love the fact that old technology can still have relevance. Sometimes the old ways are best.
Viable yes
The best... Not even close
@@jayhovah5621 Hence the “sometimes”
Been messing with a nice old Yamaha dual cassette deck, don't let anyone fool you, cassettes still sound great even pit against my fancy modern Fiio M9 hifi digital music player.
But it's a monster peice of hardware so not nearly as portable but still cool, kinda want at least a small CRT to go with my PC and ol' 360
@@jayhovah5621 A CRT TV or Monitor has ZERO Input lag and response time and the TRUE COLORS, its NATIVE RGB.
Agreed
“I use a professional broadcast monitor, of course.” 😂
Not a shocking sentence from the guy who shoehorns "bespoke" into every sentence, and ends all his sentences with the word "then"
He got some snoot on him.
It’s a little ripe for sure, where is the editor? Delete the - ‘of course’, ‘obviously’, ‘makes sense’, ‘mind you’, ‘basically’s from the script..
@Jenny Melo UA-cam made, but I guess it is a profession nonetheless
@Violett Fem agreed.
@@mathias2277 digital foundry is part of eurogamer, so not really "youtube made"
I never thought i would actually go so far as to transition back to CRTs but i did, i have stocked up on units, one of the greatest changes i noticed was i got far far less eye fatigue over any flat screen, motion is so smooth, colors really pop, it's a very pleasant image.
My eyes tear up not more than an hour after playing on my 1440 Acer or Samsung 4k TV.
I was just thinking yesterday, how did I ever manage to binge so much world of Warcraft if my eyes do this after moderate gaming.
Idk, your comment was insightful and I'm going to look into this more 🌠
@@frogfarmer3551 A proper 1440p monitor with anti glare and other things shouldn't make your eyes tear up. I use low brightness and I can look at my screen for hours. Maybe your eyes are different? Try crt and tell us. My screen is a g27q if that helps.
Plus there's 0ms latency
The CRT just naturally makes games more like games - as 90s player
Agreed
Yeah sums it up perfectly. The CRT just gives the games a much more colorful and vibrant atmosphere.
Holy shit, that exact model sony crt is going for 3 fucking grand on ebay lol. Good god that's insane.
its over 4 grand now lol
Half the proceeds go to John for hyping the display.
John's alt ebay account 🤣
That's incredibly cheap though. Have you seen the pricing for Samsung's Micro LED TV? You could buy at least 50 of these for the price of 1 MLED TV.
Makes sense. High end CRT's have always been expensive, now it's about availability. Every year that passes the number of CRT's available drops.
I picked up an old Sony CRT TV a few weeks ago on a whim that was just put out on the street as trash.
I'd been wanting one for a while. Didn't think it would work, but I took the chance and busted my ass picking it up by myself lol and what do you know - it worked perfectly! I even have an old remote that works for it too, so I immediately plugged in my PS1 to run some old school Resident Evil.
I can't begin to explain the satisfaction and the excitement that it gave me seeing the old startup screen the way it was intended.
For those who miss these displays, I can't recommend them enough. The nostalgia is palpable.
I haven't seen anyone mention it, but have you considered RGB modding yours? I'm actually modding mine this weekend, universal to the chassis BA-4D.
@@dotmatrixmoeI have a PS3 hooked up to a CRT. In my tests, I found PS1 games look better with AV cables than Component (RGB). Images just seem more tangible and dithering works the way it was intended to.
@@ericstaples7220Thanks for replying, but since my comment I actually already RGB modded my set :P dithering became a lot more noticeable on PS1, but honestly the pros outweighed the cons for me
@@dotmatrixmoe Sorry, didn't see the date. But everyone does have their personal preferences and that's what's great about retro gaming.
This CRT game footage looks great in this youtube video playing back on an LCD monitor... 🙄
Everyone was invited to his house to check it out in person but your invitation must have gotten lost In the mail…
I wanna go!
@@P1EX lmao
@@P1EX he was not invited....
well lucky for you their camera also records motion blur so you get to at least see a difference. i can see it anyway.
woohoo Analog Foundry returns!
Thank god i saw this CRT craze coming early on. I went on craiglist and found a 35inch year 2000 trinitron for free, then a 34 inch Wega CRT with HDMI moden KD970 for 60 bucks. Leme tell ya, Wii U, PS3 and even PS4 and Xbox One X look amazing on the HDMI CRT. avoid ebay, go to craigslist, people give away CRTS like candy
One of my regrets is throwing away my old CRT monitor after buying a new one. That was in 2010.
BRO RIP, do you remember the model??
go to the market or ebay theres a bunch of CRTs for sale now but get them before the prices go up even higher.
My dad had one in perfect condition we threw away a year ago
Same. Had a Sony G400, moved to a new house, thought aahhh it’s too heavy to handle and gave it to a friend for free. Then , first LCD TN 60hz and OMG that was a BIG disappointment for FPS games……
@@pz106r FUck, can't G400s make 1800 x 1440 / 70 Hz? That thing is an underapreciated beast! what a loss
Can confirm they're still great on a BVM D24 too!
How’s your Dragon Ball Z 30th anniversary Blu-Rays treating you?
make a warzone gameplay on a CRT please.
-_-
There is no loss of detail on an OLED with "sample and hold". LCD has this because the pixels take too long to update, so they blend into each other. OLED doesn't have this issue. Pixels update instantaneously, without the need to flicker to black first, resulting in a cleaner image.
Rtings test is not a good one, as the camera is moving at a constant speed, while frames update once every 16ms. The camera moves while the frame stays in place until the next refresh, so the 1/15th shutter speed would display blur even on your CRT example, even though the CRT is perfectly crisp. Just like an OLED. The difference is the black flicker will halve the camera's blur as the object is only present half the time, but the object is just as crisp on an OLED. It's just present for longer, for a cleaner transition from one frame to another. Keeping the camera still and using a shutter of maybe 1/75th of a second would give a more accurate depiction of how clean motion is.
And really the biggest factor for CRTs in this video is resolution, and nearly every current gen game is going to be running at or very near native 4K. Downscaling that to 1080p will look worse, even if that 1080p is crisp. (although even then, not perfectly crisp, because pixels won't align perfectly either, which IS a problem)
I know John has a fetish for CRTs, and I'm glad he can enjoy this, but I really don't agree with all of his claims in these videos.
HE HAS USED AN OLED PANNEL FOR COMPARISON, READ
AND HE SHOWED THE TECHNIKEUSIAD, i thonkh
and there is "HDR" on a crt
for each pixel
because you dont need a backlight
had caps and didnt notice and then i didnt care
@@Name_cannot_be_blank I was specifically responding to that. I disagree with what he says about OLEDs.
I don't miss CRT monitors but I am shocked at how good it still looks.
I don't miss CRT TVs as they lacked support for higher refresh rates, I do miss CRT monitors. Like he said, being able to run a 1440p 120hz video on it today basically makes it good enough for modern consoles, if they recognized it.
I am not, since I still remember how big of a quality drop it was when I had to get an LCD monitor after my Samsung CRT died.
@@prltqdf9 exactly, major regression
@@Skylancer727 The problem is, in order to use a CRT these days, you would need to use an active, powered HDMI to VGA converter.
This conversion process does add some delay, meaning any potential latency benefits you would've gained are lost or at least minimised anyway, compared to a decent modern LCD.
So you're still better off using a high-refresh TN LCD panel, if all a person cares about is latency.
@@prltqdf9 Earlier generations of LCDs were absolutely terrible, yes. But luckily we're not living in the past anymore.
Any higher-end LCD or OLED panel these days far surpases the capabilities and image quality of even the best CRT's.
I think too many people are looking at the past with rose-tinted goggles, and are taking for LCDs for granted, completely forgetting all the good reasons we switched over to begin with.
Ffs, every time you guys do a video on CRT image quality, eBay prices jump another 10%....
Lol unlucky lad
Be faster.
Imagine a modern 21:9 widescreen 4k 120HZ CRT. Gaming on something like that would be insane.
would suck as much power as your rig plus the weight
@@gianmendez1921 that is absolutely true. It would also be amazing lol
@Røyål Læg3nd a car is different from a monitor, does your screen go 0 to 60 in 4 seconds?
@Røyål Læg3nd um false lmao way more power directly to the wheels than fossil fuels
@Røyål Læg3nd you have major dunning Kruger buddy
"If you're interested to buy I can't recommend it enough"
Goes to look on eBay: 3.000 U$
Me: I think I'm good, thanks.
I wouldn't buy a CRT used anyway, they don't have a long life span compared to LCDS or even Oleds, they are 10 or more years old, it's likely they already heavily, degraded in Image quality at this point. Sadly.
@@theprophet2444 yeah I think for Retro consoles they are good, retro consoles like PS1 or PS2 on an modern TV looks very bad.
But if you have an PS5 OLED HDR is the way to go.
3000? In my country it cost 20 or 50 dollars.
would love to see a video detailing the process of fine-tuning display settings in order to get the most out of a CRT. I've heard that it can be a bit of an ordeal, in some cases
So when I play a PS2 game on PS4-PS5 and think to myself “this looked much better back in the days for sure” I’m not wrong 😄
The first time I remember realizing how awful LCD's were for motion was playing Super Metroid and watching Samus' world SMEAR across the screen when you change rooms. On a CRT (or even a half decent plasma), you could really track just about every pixel in smooth, glass like motion across the screen.
Old LCD panels were horrible for motion but have significantly improved.
Your videos on CRTs two years ago made me buy two CRTs, and I couldn't be happier with it, never get tired of using them.
It's sad that not all of us can have an amazing CRT monitor like yours.
I don't want to spend 300$ for an old monitor
@@krakentoastOoohh, but why not😆
@@krakentoast No worries, many of US would surely spend it on a 24" and plus CRT monitor that did 1080p/4K, no lag and no motion blur for that price.
I don't miss CRT's. The size and permanent HF tone (I can hear that s*t) are reason enough.
While you hear that on (non-HD) CRT TVs, you won't hear it on PC CRTs. TVs horizontal refresh rate was around 15.7 kHz but PC (at VGA or higher) is above 31.5 kHz, outside of human hearing. You can often run many PC CRTs above 100 kHz.
@@Crlarl My PC CRT definitely produces an audible hum.
@@SinkingSage
Low or high pitch?
Not every CRT did that though!
The funniest thing is that only young people can hear it, the ear loses sensitivity to higher frequencies with age. So the engineers probably never knew it was a problem.
I miss my old CRTs for the motion clarity, but boy do those colors looked washed out compared to OLED HDR.
The fact that it needs HDR though makes it worse though
I've found from personal experience (with a good but not great phone camera) that it can be very hard to properly capture the vibrancy of the image of a CRT on camera. Most recently, I tried recording footage of a black and white TV a few weeks ago, and I was shocked at how dull it looked compared to in-person. Cameras and eyes work differently.
What did you watch the video on, was it a crt?
@@Dave_the_Dave probably not
You can't properly judge just from a video, unfortunately, you only get an impression.
Only in person you can truly appreciate it.
When it comes to Intput lag Crt have no match
There are a few Sony CRT models which are ridiculously good. They are still very expensive and hard to get.
80% of the PC gamers are still on 1080p setups and almost all of them on 60hz.
Cant imagine how these TVs were above that 20 years ago + all of the CRTs advantages... they were/are years ahead.
There is a saying like i never got fired for buying a Sony. So true
I had a huge extremely heavy industry grade EIZO CRT my dad were allowed to bring home from his work place..
Monitors like these is very deep in its dimensions, requiring much more space, it can't get close to the wall, so there is downsides! but yea, I would always run that monitor at some 800x600 240hz..
The image were carved in stone, no matter how fast you would pan the camara in Half-Life it would be dead stable and Rock solid, I've owned expensive 144hz Gsync LCD's, but CRT monitors are simply vastly superior, even that old CRT I played around with some 25 years ago..!
Used to have a Sony Profeel monitor that got thrown out of the place I worked. Amazing CRT, but Jesus, what a lump it was. Like, two people needed to lift it, huge footprint and power consumption, compared to a modern LCD. After a while, it was just too much of a liability to own and I got rid of it. Kind of regret it now, but not really because I’d literally have nowhere to put it now.
Yeah I still game on 1080p 60hz 😅
That’s why we thought Nintendo 64 had amazing graphics because it was the crt
This is actually partly true. It's also one of the reasons why a game like Star Fox on SNES was much more impressive to us back in the day when played on a decent CRT than most people judge it now on some emultor and output to a display with no blending or a crap filter and lots of input lag and so on. It not only looked much better on a good CRT, but it also ran much smoother, with the display blending between the images at the lower framerate much better than modern displays do, as well as without any input lag too. So, yeah, we've lost a lot in going all modern, at least when it comes to retro gaming.
My best friend had to use a CRT to play all his games up until like 2016, but I remember when we would play Brawl or GTA 5 on PS3, it looked really sharp and made those lower resolution games look a lot nicer over any HDTV
it had anti aliasing as well which is fucking nuts for 1996 :P
Actually I found the N64 to be the platform which benefits the most for being plugged into a CRT. Even using composite, compared to a LCD all the blur is gone, texture details are more pleasant and the game is smoother. A huge upgrade if you want to play N64 games on original hardware without any video mods.
CRTs just hid flaws really well because of their softer image than LCDs at native resolution. This means they hid aliasing well, and scaled perfectly with games running at low resolutions.
I think ignorance is bliss when it comes to CRTs. I won't notice how "bad" the motion on my LCD is, if I don't have a CRT for comparison 😅
was thinking the same thing, yet people are selling these for crazy prices on ebay meanwhile you can find them for $5 in local markets (consumer ones obviously)
if you're happy with what you have, you've already won
@@namesurname4666 You live in a cool place, I can't find them anywhere.
I feel like I need to say a prayer for all the CRT sets we've lost. Lmao
Can't help but feel the overall 90s vibe of this whole video. I just love it!
a lot of "ridge racer type 4 intro" vibes
Sorry, but a get headache and eyes popping out from CRT flickering. Will never go back. Never. F-that. All the "problems" of LCDs you talk about are software (interpolation - pixel reconstruction) issues. Not the panel itself.
This. I don't care about any advantages as long as flickering is here. And advantages are greatly exaggerated by CRT fanatics/enthusiasts.
Me, watching this on an LCD panel display:
Interesting.
Does it look good on your LCD or is the LCD incapable of showing it? 🤔
@@Mr_G_s_Route_66 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What kind of screens do phones use
@@colbyboucher6391 Yeah, We know it sounds like a weird religious cult but you REALLY have to see it to understand, all these small things add up and you get this much more true to life image.
@@colbyboucher6391 It's not your display that's the bottleneck. It's the way the video was recorded, the camera (its capabilities and settings), and the compression (and color compression) used that mainly limits how true-to-life a recording looks.
Your display only acts as a kind of filter to this that's significantly less impactful than ALL the latter. It's why standards such as SRGB was developed; to make everything look decent and consistent across all screens, regardless of hardware capability.
I love when DF covers CRTs! Thanks guys!
based retrotech
Retro Tech, master of pro CRT's.
I think most of this 'CRTs are awesome' stuff has got to be due to how amazing these particular high end monitors are. As someone who lived through the transition I can tell you that your average, or below average CRTs warped images (especially around the corners), had brightness issues when running in higher resolutions, and pretty much just were not as good for your average computing tasks as LCD. LCD was crisper at native resolutions, brighter and probably most important of all, didn't give you a headache due to refresh rate mismatches with the overhead lights in office buildings.
Refresh and response times, and ghosting were a big issue in the beginning for gaming but once we got past most of that it was such an upgrade I can't even begin to describe it.
That all said, if I had had a CRT that did 1080p I'd still own it. This thing looks incredible.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills watching these vids, because I have zero fond memories of CRTs. I just remember them looking washed out and gross. Maybe you are right in that these professional monitors are why. Because none of the CRTs I ever used had picture quality that I would consider good, let alone even remotely comparable to a modern day tv/monitor.
@@nerdstrangler4804 Yeah and this "can display any resolution" BS is so tiring. While you can't call it a "native" resolution, you can say that a CRT is BEST at a particular resolution. I had monitors that were "800x600" on the box but had unfixable geometry problems if you ran it above 640x480. Brightness was absolutely effected by resolution. I have an old first gen iMac and an old PPC quadra-something and the monitors on both stretch the picture on the edges like crazy. 16x9 monitors were incredibly rare and I bet this has a flatter screen then then 12 inch class balls us plebs had to use.
@@megan_alnico change your pfp... it’s disturbing.
@@frankie5821 Exactly what do you find disturbing about Megan's profile picture?
Did she change it already? Because currently her profile picture is a picture of what i assume is her human face.
And if human faces disgust you, then you really should consider getting some therapy for that, because that's not a very sociable response to have to seeing images of other human beings. Stop isolating yourself from the rest of the world to a point where you have alienated yourself from other human beings.
@@RobotronSage I think it's her run through one of those "Pixar me" filters. I don't consider it disturbing, but could see why someone would get some uncanny valley feelings from it. Just as bad is why he's peeping her profile in the first place.
Now Ratchet and Clank really looks like a Pixar Film. Especially the ones from the mid to late 2000s. The aliasing is virtually gone.
CRTs usually look more blurrier than jagged.
There is no aliasing lol
@@JonesBrothersProductionsiac Yeah, the sample shots of the 720p text looked worse on the CRT.
@@FutureNaught I thought that, not sure what he was talking about
Or as Alex would say, "Ayliyaysing."
Wasn't "SED" displays supposed to have the advantages of CRT's but in modern form?
Hi! Yes and no. It still had a fixed pixel grid but every subpixel is a CRT. The whole display is made up of millions of tiny CRTs. It would've been what plasma TVs wanted to be.
I want Laser Phosphor Display right now! They are CRT but it's laser.
I think your view is a bit tinted with these professional CRTs. I remember one CRT I sued to play the PS2 on. It had green horizontal lines + black was gray and the glass was so curved the image actually looked weird on the edges, more like a fishbowl than a window.
@Rory Yes. The consumer TVs were very poor in quality. PC monitors were way better, but also crazy expensive and small. This CRT he shows, truly is the 1% of the 1%.
@Rory Absolutely, but the high end CRTs were really really really good for their time.
If you ever wondered, why your old games looked a lot better back then than now, this video is the answer.
not really
@@wildechap yea really, try playing a ps1 game on a stock standard 720/1080 lcd tv and then a crt
the difference is night and day
@@wildechap It really is. CRTs are objectively better at some things (like displaying lower resolution images and motion clarity) than even the greatest OLED HDR TV/Monitor.
It's actually a lot more than that once you get specifically into retro gaming, like how 2D (And maybe some early 3D) games way back when were designed from the ground up to look best on a CRT, and look much worse on an LCD.
If you want examples of this, look up "CRT Pixels" on Twitter, they post images of what old games actually look like on a real CRT display and compare it side by side to the raw pixels that you'd see on an LCD.
@@TexelGuy don't worry i understand that, but i don't think that is the reason why games looked beautiful back then. They were nkt beautiful back then, it's just our frame of reference that changed. Im talking about those 3d games not 2d. And his sentence is also based off of some internet meme , like how GTA SA looked really beautiful back then.
@@wildechap Part of what you said is true but no games really did look better back then because of the displays we had back then vs now. There is a significant difference.
watching this on my old DELL 19" the one with Trinitron tubes, ten years ago i was about to give it for free but the guy didn't pick it up because it was so heavy, a year ago (when i saw the first video) i rushed to my parents house and i found it in the garage all dusty but still working, it has some cable issues though
We should just get new high end CRTs out in production. They could be made relatively slim as Samsung did with their flat-ish crts. Combining it and refining it further to even higher level than last of high end Sony CRTs could give us the best displays around.
I would liken it to how cars with internal combustion are still pushed to new and new highs in performance space. It doesnt matter than electric cars like Teslas are faster, they are inherently ruining or lacking the experience a well made internal combustion manual transmission sports cars offers. And electric car will never replace it.
For same reason we should have CRTs put back in production and pushed when they still can be made until knowledge needed for it gets lost forever.
It would genuinely be interesting to see what modern engineers could come up with to improve the CRT technology. Making it all slimmer without sacrificing any of the CRT's benefits would alone create a new market for such screens. I'd definitely want one, since getting a hold of a good CRT is now an increasingly difficult and expensive undertaking, while the massive weight and size are also a problem I can't easily overlook.
Hey, if steam locomotives like the PRR 5550 can be made in the 21st Century with efficiency improvements, then I see little reason that CRTs cannot be manufactured in the 21st Century!
1 look at that first scene with the cars and its awful blacks, and I knew I was sticking to my OLED.
Lol, right? I don't know what drain cleaner these people are injecting into their veins, but CRT is dead and dying. I watched TV on a CRT over Christmas (mind u, I grew up on them), and when I got back home, I wanted to hug my OLED. I'm a videophille through and through, and the color reproduction, and infinite contrast ratio, a CRT stands no chance.
I was born in 1985 so I got to use CRTs for quite a long time, whether it was gaming on a TV CRT or PC CRT. I'm 100% glad they are gone, power hungry, hurts your eyes after hours of use and weighed an absolute ton. Made the switch to PC LCDs back in 2004 and never looked back, sharpness on the LCD was night and day, I could use it all day and night without headaches or eyestrain, used sod all power and it was light as a feather in comparison to a CRT. You had to make sacrifices by using native resolution and motion blur especially in 2004 was worse than a CRT but that was definitely worth the trade off.
Same. All I got was eye strain and endless migraines. As soon as I got my first 15'' LCD display I threw my two monitors out of the window (not literally) and never looked back. Out of curiosity I played Jedi Outcast on a CRT at a friend's house last week and after an hour => headache.
Maybe things are different for high-end CRTs, but the cheap/consumer ones were very heavy and picture quality was mostly trash.
Lol on PC CRt Monitors I never had eye problems and I was born in 1998 and my country isn't that technologically fast and my first PC and of course TVs were all CRTs up to like 2010 or later.
Never had eyestrain issues at 75hz or more
i don't regret replacing my 1080p 16:9 flat pannel with my "new" CRT 4:3 monitor that can max up at 1920x1440 60hz (mostly using 1600x1200 at 75hz) for playing modern games on my PC
weight and space is a small price to pay for that superior quality and i love the 4:3 ratio for gaming (16:9 was too wide for my tastes)
And some us 32:9
I recently played the final duel of Ghost of Tsushima on a 34" Toshiba HD CRT and it really added to the atmosphere. Thanks for the video John, it was entirely my shit
😥😥buy me one plz
Crazy how much software engineering is required just to match crt tech from 20 yrs ago.
CRT are amazing, I still use mine till this days. Perfect for old nes games.
It's also crazy how we take LCDs for granted now and forgot about all the good reasons we switched to LCDs to begin with.
Sure, the first few generations of LCDs to replace CRTs were absolutely terrible panels, but these days, on a high-end IPS with local dimming HDR and high refresh, or HDR OLEDs, going back to CRTs would be insanity, fueled by nostalgia and nothing else.
Even if you want to play at lower-than-native resolutions on a bigger screen, there's now perfect pixel scaling settings in your GPU driver panel that bypasses blurring when blowing up smaller resolutions. And failing that, you could just use a projector instead.
@@GENKI_INU I don't think you understand that image clarity is not why people play old consoles on CRTs.
@@GENKI_INU High end IPS LCDs come with 750-1000:1 contrast ratio, which is a joke. Pixel response times are still around 3-10 ms even on top end "1ms" gaming panels. There is still no monitor in the market that does rolling shutter blur reduction. OLEDs are close to CRT quality, but it still have worse motion quality and you cant buy it in monitor sizes.
@@magyararon6918 Actual high-end IPS monitors with HDR 10 support have Full Array Backlight Dimming (available for everything, not just HDR enabled content). While not as precise as OLEDs, they are a match for CRT's near-infinite contrast ratios in a completely dark room, due to effect of CRT glow.
In typical scenarios with moderate or brighter ambient lighting however, CRT's actually have contrast ratios that are similar, or worse than IPS/TN LCDs, due to the glare from the thick CRT glass screen and gray coating on the inside. Typical antiglare coats on LCD's handle ambient lighting much better, and give off deeper blacks under ambient lighting conditions.
As for contrast ratios without Backlight Dimming Arrays or OLEDs, VA LCD panels have been around for ages in the TV and PC space, providing easy 3000:1- 5000:1 contrast ratios. These days, you can buy very affordable high-refresh VA LCD monitors with pixel response times that match faster IPS monitors at 144hz+.
Also, many mid to higher-end LCD monitors (especially ones with FreeSync) have a backlight strobing feature you can enable, simulating exactly what CRT's do by rapidly flickering the backlight between frames. They are extremely effective at getting rid of any sample-and-hold blurring mentioned in the video. My 4-year-old $200 1080p 144hz VA FreeSync monitor has this feature, and it works well.
If you're still comparing response times with CRT's, the bad news is if you wanted to use a CRT these days, you would need to use an active, powered HDMI to VGA converter, which inevitably adds a couple ms of latency, nullifying any real advantage you would've had to begin with on a CRT, compared to using a fast TN or IPS panel. And that's not even accounting for the much higher refresh rates on LCD's.
Great video I've been preaching the benefits of crt's for years. They just cannot be beat when it comes to games. You should have a look at the white balance on that Sony monitor though, the blue could be turned down a touch.
That CRT is so beautiful and I want it so bad... holy shit that price.
I guess I'll stick with LCD.
Find the best used Panasonic or Samsung plasma TV you can find. It'll blow away the image on the LCD, even a 4k, although it doesn't have the flexibility of all the resolutions and refresh rates of a CRT monitor. But no motion blur and great contrast. Great for consoles. And they're cheap.
Buy an oled. Its the best. They have all the advantages of plasma and crt. Without the huge size,weight and small screens.
@@ninetendopesaitama2107 But they last 2 years because of burn in 🤣🤣
@@jayeydoor97 bought my second oled and my first is older than 3 years. You sound kinda jelly. Enjoy your coin operated motel crt. :D
@@ninetendopesaitama2107 I don’t own a CRT and was highly considering an OLED until I saw how quickly they can develop burn in. Imo not acceptable on something that should be lasting 5 years minimum. I should need to change TVs every 5 years minimum not every 2 years like a phone. While OLED is very nice I’ll skip it because of longevity issues and wait until either mini LED or micro LED becomes much more affordable
On pc, integer resolution scaling is amazing. It basically makes up for the resolution advantage of a crt, assuming your using a multiple of the monitors resolution
Charlie Sheen is not a fan of IRS
lmfao ''integer resoluton scaling'' does not really stack up to CRT-capable resolutions.
Also i am wasting way too much time of my life arguing resolution semantics on the internet.
For the first time I can see a resurgence of the old (and heavy!) CRT's of the day.
Running anything high resolution through a Composite or RGB Display is not limited to physical pixels (Triplets) so its like having built in High Quality Antialiasing!
I made CRT's for Philips from 1986 up until 2000 and recall their demise under LCD/Flat
Oh man the old Phillips large size crt's with the built in speakers. Those things were barely unliftable for 1 person. I could lift it but forget about moving it more than 5 meters.
@@barryschalkwijk9388 we got this old 32 inch JVC CRT TV on the curb not too far down the road where I am, and it is so heavy. Built in speakers, and the fact that it's a *32 inch display*
We used to move it to the basement during the winter and garage during the summer but we realized we're just going to leave it outside to be our outside TV. It still works like a charm, even with the radical temp swings from single digit temps in winter to the 80 to 90 degree heat we get during summer.
I love using that thing though. I have another one that's more moderately sized but with a busted speaker, Zenith brand, and much older too with the only port being the RF coaxial port, but I do use an old VCR with it and "broadcast to channel 3" but with mere millimeters in range, and I tune an old radio to channel 3 to get audio for it. I love using that too. I have an old 10 inch CRT in my room with an antenna too. I feel like an 80s kid deep down, even though I was born in 2002.
@@barryschalkwijk9388 the trick is to keep the screen against your belly!
@@salmon_wine i know but still :-)
I bet the Series S and Switch would be great with a CRT!
Everything does. 😅
Love my Sony trinitron and bang and olufsen crt with high quality scart on the sega mega drive. Would also recommend not skipping on the audio as it's just as important. Tried many set ups and settled on a Sony hi fi system of all things. Pulling stereo from headfone jack on Megadrive to music center is a joy to be had.
I'm glad I still have my 2005 Sony Trinitron TV, CRT with a resolution up to 1080i and has HDMI. One day I hope to get something high-end, but for my everyday use it suffices. I can use everything from my VCR and Genesis to my Chromecast and PS4. That being said, it's a 200 pound beast (about 91 kilograms).
I love videos like this that explore pros and cons of different technology. That being said, I love my oled with hdr and would never give it up lol
Oled is nothing special a plasma with hdr would be the perfect TV since it would have amazing motion like crt
I'm just wondering have you tried a Sony Trinitron CRT?
I wish I could transition to OLED, but I pretty much know I'll get the screen burned in. Already got burn in on my phone's OLED display from playing too much Duel Links.
@@romxxii I bought my OLED CX with 5 years panel warranty, which covers Burn in and dead pixels. Can totally recommend!
I assume you've never seen a CRT equivalent (as in same screen size, resolution, and refresh rate).
I've ditched LCD monitors for CRTs about 5 years ago and I never wish to go back. Absolutely everything I throw at my 17" LG looks stunning, from low, *low* resolutions of 320x200 (DOOM, Quake, etc.) to 1080p content, either from modern games and videos to older, remastered media.
Very funny how everyone in the comments wants a modern crt…
Plasma Tv’s - “UMM AM I A JOKE TO YOU!?”
My 4K Oled made that one hair sticking out on your left ear extremely sharp! Take that, CRT's!
... shame 4k would probably make most retro games look like dirt nowadays lol
(not knocking OLED - it would be my personal choice for modern display tech)
@@TheKayliedGamerChannel-UA-cam I just switched from a 1440p ultrawide to an LG C1 48" for my productivity and gaming. For someone who's been around to see CRT monitors go from 2 colors to completely gone again, I can tell you, we're back on track display wise!
Lol I noticed that watching on my 1080p tv
Too bad OLED monitors (not TV's) literally don't exist.
@@GENKI_INU Meh. I'm using an LG C1 48" as a monitor since a couple of weeks and I won't be going back. 4k120, g-sync and primo HDR. This has been an all-round great upgrade from my IPS 34" ultrawide. I was a bit hesitant at first, but 48" is perfectly doable.
"Wow this monitor looks great, maybe I should buy one." Looks at prices online. "Nope."
Forget it, I see they ask 2500€ for a FW900. That is total bullocks.
not to mention how perfect this generation has been for the FW900, finally we're getting 1080p60 games with ray tracing!
I was playing Xbox 360 on a CRT for entire generation 😃
bet it looked good. Looked pretty bad on my 1080p TV
Yep. Games felt like 60fps compared to LCD.
The main advantage of CRT is dynamic clarity.
I haven't even started watching yet but this has to be done by John!
Why do DF keep touting the 'benefits' of CRTs without mentioning the disadvantages?
Those that actually worked through the CRT era, like me, most likely have to wear glasses now. Those damn things cause eye strain, affecting some more than others. I could not stare at a CRT at my job for more than a few hours at a time before I can FEEL my eyes start to ache.
The consistent 'flash' as the CRT is updated each frame do put a strain on your eyes that a video capture of a CRT does NOT show!
No, I DO NOT want to own a CRT nowadays, thank you.
You had what is referred to as the “shitbox special” since you mentioned the one at your job. Probably it’s max refresh was 75hz on whatever res you were using. If you run a CRT at 85hz you can greatly decrease the amount of eye strain you get from using them.
Forgot to add in my original comment but yes. I wish they would talk more about the disadvantages. There are a ton compared to what modern displays have to offer. Other than motion blur, input lag, and free choice of resolution and refresh there aren’t many advantages anymore.
@@josephboysuk686 Hah! Shitbox special, I'll refer to them as such from now on :)
When my brother joined the Marines, back in the late 90s, he got what they call the contraceptive glasses... GI issued glasses... Damn thing was so thick, you can see the spacetime warp around the side of the glasses when you looked at his face lol.
He later got Lasik and got 20/20 vision, I just get feather-light lenses, but still thicc AF as my vision are so bad. Couldn't go through that operation consciously.
All thanks to CRTs.
Next video: 4:3 is the BEST WAY to play 4K!
I remember getting rid of my old 32" CRT and needing two of us to painfully carry it. It was so massive and heavy. Back breaking work moving those things.
but at the end of the day it was all worth it though.
I still play on CRT to this day. Quality is incredible 🤙
Wii + Super Mario Galaxy is 🔥
I wouldn't mind being trapped in 2007 if i had to pick a year.
Mentions quality. Plays Nintendo graphics. Lmao
@@ASSASSYN Nintendo exclusive games look incredible still tell this day on all generations. Stop being like that its toxic.
@@ASSASSYN
You clearly dont know what quality is then.
@@ZackSNetwork
Calling people toxic? Must be a
S
I
S
S
Y
I remember when i upgraded from my 1 ton CRT to one of the first gen 720p panels. I was disappointed with the colors, the viewing angles limitations. Going into a store and seeing a screen never made me excited to buy a new one.
I expected incremental improvements to continue until high end 4k HDR displays. Seeing 4k HDR clips with perfectly tuned to the panel specs that seemed to come out of nowhere. It only took two decades to get to the point that I'm blown away.
Although most content isn't optimized for HDR and each display manufacturer seems to have a different HDR format that isn't fully compatible across displays from the same generation of tech.
You're right about that 🤣😂 I barely could pick up that 32 I gave away for $10 ; now I deeply regret 😭
Hoping for a review on the Doom Eternal PS5 update…
Thanks for the reminder. Forgot that came out today.
Well from my quick test on the Xbox I can tell you it’s awesome. Just can’t choose between 120fps or ray tracing lol. I know that the Xbox is higher resolution than the PS5 at 120fps as it says on the doom site and from what I’ve seen it’s locked 120 fps
Most likely better on Xbox I'm sure Phil Spencer said they'll make sure Bethesda games play and look best on thier platform.
Still using my P2 with its trusty old Diamondtron monitor. 😁
I still use a CRT to this day, in fact its set up right next to my 4k TV. Current and last gen games are played on the 4k display. For everything else its CRT all the way.
i still use crt on modern games, notably Doom Eternal, the game genuinely looks AMAZING on crt.
I always thought it was my imagination moving from CRT to LCD back in the day when it became all you could get. In the back of my head I been thinking why do these flat screens always look so shitty. I just assumed it was because I was younger when CRT's were around and my eyes were better. Now I'm glad you've confirmed it wasn't my imagination.
From what I hear crt tvs don't really have a max resolution so if u use an rca to hdmi converter for your standard (480/576) crt tv and run your ps3 ps4 or ps5 at 1080p what resolution will the tv display?
The big problem with CRTs is that they flicker, noticeably. Even at higher refresh rates, you may not notice the flicker but it increases eye strain, a lot. The colours can also shift badly as they age, and electromagnetic sources nearby can affect the image. It’s also hard, even on a “flat” CRT, to get the image squared up, and they also “overscan” the image. I think some people remember CRTs with rose tinted glasses.
shhhhhh… they don’t want to hear that. let them have their boomer displays. it makes them happy to live their childhoods again. let them be.
Eye strain and Headeches 😖
LCDs are flickering too from DC inversion, some of them are VERY fcking bad, you can get a strong migraine from it. Way worse than even a 60 Hz crt, but the thing is, if you had a little bit of brain, you were running your CRT at 75 or 80 Hz anyway, and it caused very little eyestrain at that refresh rate. The other issues are true, but its not like LCD is a perfect technology either, i would rather take a CRT if i had the chance.
@@magyararon6918 I'm not sure why people on youtube seem incapable of expressing an opinion without slipping an insult in. Does it make you feel somehow, superior?
CRTs still flicker at 75 or 80hz, and for some people could reduce eye strain, but for others not as much.
At any rate, at not point did I say that LCD's were a perfect or better technology, in fact, I said nothing about them at all.
@@deadmankino I think you need google "baby boomer", John would be the son of a boomer, he's far too young to be one himself.
U did motion blur test wrong. The camera need to be following the object on screen instead of static camera
With all due respect, but watching CRT footage on my OLED or LCDtv.. really defeats the purpose right? The whole thing is about CRT looking better in person, so I don’t think this translates well to UA-cam (when watching on anything other than CRT)?
Therin lies the problem.with this stupidity on display in this video. He dumbed down the 4K to play at max 720p. So all this proves is that at 720p the CRT is superior because the OLED is meant for 4k video consumption....this doesn't touch on how trash these things were on energy consumption, or how the tubes within were filled with gases that are extremely harmful once the TV was no longer able to work.
@@vidsurfer0725 CRT enthusiast here to say: I'm quite amused at how CRTs have become the vinyl of music. Objectively speaking they are an inferior tech for most use cases, hence why they are obsolete. Yet there are myths and defy common sense and science and people's own eyes and ears that tell them that the wobbly flickery mess is better than their 40+ inch 4k LCD with "HDR" (it just isn't) and that a medium that is so limited physically that the higher fidelity at the start of the medium meant tracks were actually shuffled around to get better sound... And of course, never mind that vinyl requires surprisingly extreme EQ to COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS audio. Just like with audio, it being analog actually has very little bearing on audio quality, aside from it being a destructive type. Analog audio can be heavily processed as can and is (at least on CRT TVs made from the late 90s and beyond). I love my CRTs, but I don't lie to people about their capabilities, and I honestly feel like this comes close to lying by omission. Myths like "it has perfect black levels" really get to me, since all you have to do to debunk them is turn on a CRT and turn off the lights but now I find it more funny, again, it's akin to how many people defy science and their own ears and actually think vinyl sounds better than high resolution digital formats (yes, I collect CDs too).
@@awesomeferret I appreciate the honest reply. Like don't get me wrong, I think CRTs are cool (I grew up watching them), and there is this retro nostalgia about them that is the pulse of 80s & 90s (early 2000s) entertainment, but they definitely have no place in the modern world. I think I get more anoyed they let this dude get on to discuss this type of thing....like who is going to run out and buy a horribly over priced piece of dinosaur tech, to hook up to either of the most powerful consoles ever made? I remember watching movies in the 80s thinking they were so cool, then got older and realized how cringy and corny they actually were...haha
@@vidsurfer0725 "who is going to run out and buy"... Idiots like me, that's who. Even though I criticize the absurdity of how mythological CRT tech has become, I get it. While it's very much the same as current TV tech (for example, for better or for worse, we are only now finally moving post 60hz in mainstream TVs) it's also very different and there's a certain appeal to it, similar to the "novelty" of OLED and how it can show a clock or something that just floats. CRTs, even the modern ones that deinterlace everything have video processing and thus lag, and have inherent flicker. I have a JVC D series (among others, that's my best one though) and it taught me a lot about CRT myths and the real world limitations of the tech (I grew up with CRTs but also with LCD, ironically we still have and use our first LCD TV which is 1080p IPS in 32 inches and has real front facing speakers that actually sound good (me also have newer TVs of course). Wii games really pop on this TV in a way that they don't on my D series (they pop in their own way on there, but it's not as sharp and you have a lot of geometry wobbling).
Not necessarily. The quality of a display affects how sharp it looks on camera, regardless of what you're watching back the footage on.
I love playing modern games on a CRT, just finished cyberpunk 2077 on a CRT
lol, like for real. you can't get more Cyberpunk than this
i played through cyberpunk on my crt also but it was mostly out of necessity, my pc did not like that game
I do the same for the most part. At least with my PS3 via S-Video. Some games don't look too great but for others it gives it a fantastic look.
@@HumanManufactured I also did it because I got better performance running on there. I could do lower resolutions like 1280x960 and the game still looked spectacular and ran leagues better. Plus I love how the game natively supports 4:3 resolutions with now added tweaking or modding
Any chance Sony or any other major company would make CRTs again?
I love CRTs. One day I will upgrade from my triniton to a PVM.
PVMs are overrated, and wildly overpriced nowadays. You can still get an amazing picture with consumer sets and component output - I say this as someone who formerly had a PVM 20M4U. Not everyone needs a Lamborghini just to get to work.
@@Garbagehead5 they aren’t overrated but they are over priced as fuck. Please show me a consumer CRT that looks as good as PVM. The 20m4 that you have would blow away if it’s not a POS any sort of 20” consumer set. I know because I have 20” consumer sets they just don’t have the same look as that 800 line tube.
PVMs are awesome. Keep watching OfferUp, Craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace. :D
Depending on your tastes (and I'll admit it's different for everyone), it might not even be a clear upgrade. Retro console games were designed for blurrier consumer CRT sets, and the limitations those sets came with were incorporated into the games' aesthetics. See, for instance, Dracula's red eyes in Symphony of the Night. The artists designed his eyes so they have exactly one bright red pixel in each eye. Over a composite signal, that red pixel expands across multiple adjacent lighter pixels, filling his eyes. Over a clean RGB signal, you for the most part just see his eyes as having strange red dots in them.
For the most part, your Triniton is in the sweet spot where it still has a great image quality for a consumer set while not eliminating many of the factors that the art designers of the 80s and 90s were banking on existing. The PVM is still great because it gives you a plethora of options, but I'd find it hard to justify the cost over a regular Triniton if you're just gonna do retro gaming on it.
I like gaming on my 32in jvc via component/svideo just as much or more than my 20m4u and 1354q. They definitely look awesome, but kicking back on the couch and playing on a big screen with the boys is where it’s at. High line count monitors also exaggerate 480i flicker. The 13” is really nice for bringing places though. Keep an eye out for a pvm or equivalent if you want one, but I wouldn’t obsess over it having used them now. A good consumer set with component input gets you almost all the way there, and I’d say it’s even better in some cases.
I really hope CRTs make a comeback I love them.
They're too expensive to produce, too large to store, and too big and heavy to ship.
It's much easier to profit from flat panels, hence why forces in the industry was so eager to go in that direction without ever looking back.
This was never a question about "what gives the customer the best quality"
@@Lasse3 cant they produce crt image on a flat screen?
@@lilpp4791 haha no 😂
@@Lasse3 why
@@lilpp4791 cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, the beams of which are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen.
This principle simply requires a gigantic heavy box. The tech is huge and weighty, it can't be downsized.
Your question is absurd, it's almost like if you asked, why a car couldn't be made as flat as a flat screen TV..
とても良いビデオですね
very nice!
I am so god damn jealous of your CRT's it burns...
I feel you. The folks from MyLifeInGaming and Retro Tech all have a freaking Sony PVM 20L5. It's a monitor that natively displays 240p, 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i all without lag and have like 800 TV lines of resolution. 😩
i still have my GDM f520 best buy ever made
Darn, I'm jealous. I want the GDM-F520!
A guy in Norway is selling a refurbished version of this monitor on Ebay for $6,000. LMAO.
I'm visually impaired (meaning bad vision regardless of glasses/contacts), but the transition from CRT to LCD in the early 2000s was a big deal for me and I thought it was absolutely crazy that no one saw how badly they looked. I have to sit pretty close to the screen and all the issues I had with LCDs which I was never able to explain to anyone are explained here! I thought I was taking crazy pills because of how badly LCDs looked when anything was moving on screen and it's so jarring to me I still can't believe that sighted people on average tell me they perceive no quality issues. I used a professional CRT into the late 2000s because of it. It's pretty awesome seeing it finally addressed, though 20 years later.
What I've seen of CRT's is that the blues are far brighter and deeper... My dad reckons that LCD's were a massive brightness increase. I told him about Daytona USA and how much more shit, low-resolution and dark it looked compared to the arcades watching someone play it on an emulator on UA-cam. He told me "it was a special kind of screen in the arcades, then"
The FW900 is undoubtedly one of the best gaming monitors ever made, however one of the biggest strikes against it is the fact that it costs like $4000+ used. In a world when you can literally buy a 48'' LG CX or C1 for around $1000 new, it doesn't make much sense to acquire one these days, unfortunately.
It's not cost effective for most people to search out and buy a rare FW900. It's like buying a LaFerrari. Benefits are obvious. Cost is significant. Buy the Prius or even a Tesla equivalent of screens b/c the availability, profile, energy and cost savings. It's more practical. The Fw900, like a LaFerrari is a unique experience.
Good ol' CRTs man, how I miss them; still remember when I got me my first LCD (think it was an LCD) screen; the CRT I owned had gone the way of the dodo, and after so much hype over the next generation of flat screens, and having people all around me drooling at them, I got me one; BIF FUCKING MISTAKE! ...was beyond disappointed at how crap the quality actually was in comparison to a regular CRT Monitor, and the one I got was suposed to be one of the good ones at the time; what a major step back... Did I mention I miss CRTs?
Somebody needs to start making new crts for enthusiasts ASAP
Right
A lot of the components that went into making CRT displays aren't available anymore. Any manufacturer would have to setup a whole lot of infrastructure.
Enthusiasts are using OLED my friend. Never going back to a small CRT monitor from my 77 inch 4K/UHD OLED LG G1 with 120 Hz native, VRR and BFR + HDR.