People were very much aware of the problems with ghosting that LCD TVs had but the form factor ultimately sold it over CRT. The idea that you could have a much bigger screen that didn't take up as much room and didn't weigh a ton was attractive to people.
That is basically it, my parents house last CRT was an amazing Samsung, I think the last movie I watched there was avatar and it looked gorgeous, but at 29 inch it was too heavy and needed a lot of space, you couldn’t mount it on the wall and you needed a big rack to put the TV, the room could never look minimalist. They changed that for a LG(that still works to this day) it’s way to big and heavy for today standards, but 42 inches was a dream back then and even being heavy by today standards, it was still very light compared to the way smaller Samsung CRT. I think for the average consumer it’s an easy choice, get a huge TV that is lighter, good enough quality to watch TV and and have a smaller form factor. I think my aunt had a Wall with a hole for the CRT Tv to make it look smaller.
For those doing spreadsheeting an email, the early LCD monitors were greatly appreciated. First in laptops, and then in desktops. As the technology progressed, more and more switched to the form factor. The transition was smooth.
That’s it. It’s flat, less than 50 pounds and can be hung on your wall. I still find old crt on the sidewalks in my town because they’re so big and difficult to store. Crazy how much space our TV and movies used to take. Now just hang a panel and stream. As a kid I hated laptop displays. I didn’t like the color change in viewing angles, motion blur or how fragile the screens were. Nowadays it’s hard for me to ignore the false blacks and stretched resolutions.
@@slarbiter Yup. While it's harder to find CRT's than it used to you can still find a lot of people looking to ditch them for free if you move it. I got a 24" Wega Trinitron TV last year at a yard sale for free because the guy just wanted the 70 pound square cube out of his basement.
This, however i waited quite a while and got my first LCD in the later 2000s i think. And i still enjoy my 32" 144hz 4k LCD a lot more than any CRT i owned.😬
I think one thing to keep in mind is that, at least in my experience in the USA, most people didn’t have high end CRTs and mostly used composite. If you were an enthusiast you could see the negatives of moving to a different display, but going from composite to hdmi was a huge upgrade in clarity
Oh, absolutely. We average consumers were still using our monitors from the 90s, plagued with burn-in and phosphor bleed, focus and aspect ratio never quite right, and we weren't about to go drop $4000 on a top-of-the-line model. My first LCD was a 24" WUXGA Samsung and could swivel to portrait mode. For $650 it was a steal.
That was the time when even cheap crts had decent tubes, so i don't think it was true for monitors. TVs was whole another story, of course cheap TV's was not good
Agreed. The CRT nostalgia sometimes feels as if everyone had a nice Eizo, NEC, or Sony Trinitron monitor. This absolutely wasn't the case. Most CRTs I've seen were rather awful. Black levels weren't really good, they weren't very bright, and thanks to analog VGA connections you always had to choose between flickering and blurriness. LCDs of course had their downsides, mainly that suddenly everything below native resolution looked like shit (particularly older DOS games), but apart from this the whole experience was just _so much better_.
It really is just as simple as that. When you're talking about televisions, we had thirtysomething-inch SD CRTs for decades, and then suddenly there were these 50"+ HD LCDs. "Better black levels" just isn't going to cut it in that comparison.
@@redvenomweb they could've easily had hd crts and in fact they did exist such as 1080i models but it ended up being that crts also were phased out for LCDs. in fact many early plasma and LCD televisions were 480p so its not like much changed until HDTV was standardized.
@@Web720 it was more like 480i for pretty much all of them (though 405 line tvs existed in the 1940s or whatever) but some models had more overscan than others and different dot pitches
I remember we had our fancy new 720p HDTV within viewing distance of our CRT and I was able to compare the two watching a baseball game. I was blown away that I could see the pinstripes on the baseball uniforms much more clearly on the HDTV. I think that was the general feel at the time
My primary desire was to get rid of my ugly and heavy CRTs. Moving from a 19" CRT that weighed like 30lbs to a 5lb or less flat screen was great even if the screens weren't that great yet.
@@vasili1207 When my parents were out of town I often carried the 32" TV to my room... Down stairs... At that point in time weight did matter, but I feel like my use case probably wasn't common. On the flipside, being a LAN party boi in the 90s, carrying my 21" CRT wasn't much better. It was ridiculously heavy. Secondly, the desk needed to be able to support like 60 kilos of screens cause I used two.. And they were each 28 kilos. Weight was a factor in some cases. Good luck hanging a 32" CRT on a wall.. Or finding a stand that isn't beefy and takes up a lot of space.
I remember hooking up that hd wire on the 360 (it wasn't hdmi at the time) onto our 720p plasma tv and being amazed at how clean and clear Splinter Cell Double Agent looked on it. I also remember hooking up my Wii to a Sony Trinitron after being on an lcd and going "whoa!" after seeing how much better Super Mario Galaxy looked on it compared to the lcd tv.
When I watched my HD-DVDs on our SD CRT TV the image quality really was great, better than DVD, even though most of the image didn't fit on the screen. I wish I owned a HD CRT back in the day, even though the digital processor added some lag for games.
the 360 was great on a crt with the hd plugs, where as I remember finally getting a ps3 and it looking like trash through the scart lead so had to buy a lcd tv for the hdmi input which did make the ps3 look a lot better
As someone who still definitely values CRTs in retro gaming, it’s awful to have to lug them around, and once prices were similar, it was worth the minor tradeoffs in picture quality to have a monitor that was that much lighter (especially as the visual fidelity of LCDs improved).
I had a rear projector tv that was way better then lcd and i went straight to 55 inch 1080i instead of 720p in 2002. Then got a lcd and it was a downgrade.
I mean to be fair it wasnt something for nothing. it was much sharper and sometimes brighter and after some time it got bigger. compared to my 10 inch crt tv connected with a composite to RF converter, almost any LCD looked amazing to me. I remember being able to read text in some video games without trying super hard
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593I was very impressed with my 19" viewsonic back in 2006. The space saving was great and I loved that all of the pixels were onscreen.
Absolutely people are fooling themselves now, looking back. It’s hilarious. I had a 32” widescreen Trinitron that was 480p 1080i and people who suggest weight isn’t a factor have no clue what they’re talking about. Outside of everything people don’t deal with tubes anymore, I still do at least some on my amps. It’s a pain and so, so expensive these days. Getting your hands on good vacuum tubes costs money and a gamer will need to replace tubes.
I remember going to a computer repair specialist, asking him if it's worth spending money on repairing my CRT monitor. At that point I was convinced by the internet that CRTs were almost like collector's items, valuable and highly sought after. The guy was very surprised, he told me that no, these things are everywhere, and they cost pennies, so unless mine was a professional-grade model (which it wasn't), then it's not worth spending money on. Since then I was wondering why do CRTs have this cult-like following, and now I know why: it's because the enthusiasts have monitors that cost thousands of dollars, and they don't realize that's not what the majority of people had.
Thousands of dollars for a professional-grade??? Even with inflation, good CRTs didn't cost that much. Ghosting, that gray-to-gray response time in milliseconds that LCDs are rated around, was a non-issue on CRT monitors. PC Monitors were higher resolution, and PC games were not capped at 30 Frames Per Second. Otherwise PC Monitors were smaller, uglier, and you would need 3.5mm input speakers with an external power supply. CRT Monitors were not an "obvious" choice, but for those in the know they were cheap, plentiful, and better than LCDs at the time. I got my hands on a used Apple Studio Display (M6496, iirc). $500 USD MSRP, which quickly dropped during the mid 00's with the advent of LCDs. A good Sony Trinitron was probably a dime a dozen at the time. There was no reason to hold onto a low resolution "standard definition" CRT once the switch to Widescreen HD programming was complete. Your garden variety $100 computer monitor on the other hand,... Those were worth keeping for the old 1024x768 4:3 video games, and First Person Shooters. That high refresh rate stuff that is the domain of e-Sports in the current day. Now, we're just struggling to replicate the old scanline look for retro gaming, and dealing with black bars on 16:9 sets. Classic games just look better on older sets.
@@marvinmallette6795Sony FW900 cost $3000. I wish I didn’t get brainwashed by BS ads and promotion on LCD monitor so I can buy Sony FW900 in affordable prices.
CRT EDTV’s are very rare. Zero lag, high resolutions, progressive scan mode, many inputs like RGB scart, component, s-video etc. Panasonic PD30 is one of the best CRT you can get for gaming 480p up to 1080i. Just not many ppl know about them.
I dunno man, I had CRT monitors I got at thrift shops and there's plenty they did better than LCDs, that's just inherent to the technology. That's the reason imo. When I got my first LCD monitor I was wondering why the hell everything was so blurry in games with motion. LCDs have improved a lot, but some things are still noticeable when comparing LCD panels to CRT or plasma
There was so much excitement surrounding HD LCD tech when the 360 launched. The sharpness and clarity jump from 480i tubes to flat 720p panels really cannot be overstated if you were never a PC person. I only played consoles using composite cables on mediocre consumer sets that had geometry issues, so I was certainly blown away. But then once I *did* get into PC gaming and had a CRT monitor, I bought the VGA cable for the Xbox 360 so fast. I still have it, lol. All the sharpness but none of the motion smearing, none of the shitty black levels, none of the gross looking colors. Unfortunately, the television manufacturers took it and ran.
The transition from xbx to 360 we got a LCD. Back then my mentality was how awesome and big the tv was while taking up little space and how easily you could pick it up. Also at this time i had no idea what black levels even meant or fps, brightness and ghosting. I was just a regular consumer. 😅 now i nerd out about tvs.
That’s a good point-I imagine it was more difficult to be a nerd about this kind of thing back then. Nowadays I can search for monitor reviews and instantly see detailed comparisons about black levels, viewing angles, response times etc. If this information was available in 2005 I certainly didn’t know where to find it.
The problem was never just black levels. CRT and (I think) Plasma are pulse-based, while OLED and LCD are based on sample-and-hold. Pulsed displays can exhibit flickering on static content, but they are much better at motion clarity. 60 FPS on an OLED/LCD looks much worse than 60 FPS on a CRT. On OLED/LCD successive frames blur together in a bad way, a kind of double vision. The Test UFO website can be used to compare this effect on different screens. (They also have a black frame insertion (BFI) test which tries to emulate the pulsed approach on sample-and-hold displays. This fixes motion clarity. Unfortunately it halfs the maximum FPS. It also decreases maximum screen brightness, and it could wear down OLEDs.) Amazingly, approximately nobody knows about this problem. Apparently not even TV test channels like HDTVTest know about it, as they don't test it in devices. Instead they only look at single frame metrics like black levels or color accuracy. It's actually crazy. We are basically wasting 50% of our compute budget (double the frame rate compared to CRT to make it look acceptable) just to fix a flaw in modern displays. By the way, theoretically this problem should be fixable on LCD without relying on software BFI and its drawbacks. They could just strobe the LCD backlight, i.e. illuminate each frame only for a fraction of its frame time. The LCD itself and the viewable FPS would not be affected. The maximum brightness would still go down, but it is higher on LCDs anyway than on OLED. I think that should be the default on LCD-TVs when viewing non-HDR content.
This is remarkable because I remember learning about this issue but have been effectively among the masses in recent years having forgotten all about it as far as day-to-day thinking goes
I definitely noticed. I bought an HDTV around 2007 and returned it the same day when I saw how my older consoles looked and saw the ghosting. Admittedly, it will have been a pretty cheap one, but I wasn't impressed when I eventually got an HDTV in 2013 in preparation for PS4. I kept my CRT as long as I could in a spare room for retro consoles. I now have an OLED 4K screen and wish I could compare it to my old CRT.
yeah back then I had a large CRT tv and a small CRT monitor as well, as well as a 1650x1080 720p LCD TN panel, so I basically had 3 different screens in my room around 2006-2010
My father bought the Philips 32PF9731 in 2006. Only 1368x768, but the image was still looking great in in 2019 when they finally replaced it. (It wasn't used for gaming, though.)
I was selling TV's when the flat panel craze/HD transition hit. Plasma was the closest to CRT in terms of black levels, and my god, did those LCDs have blur and backlight issues. Also, if you got the low-end plasmas, the they couldn't do black, just dark gray. I remember all the craziness surrounding plasmas too, the gassing up, the burn in, the whole deal... craziness. The problem was, when you went to large screen tvs, CRTs past 32-36" were so ungodly heavy that you had to get into projection tvs. OF which the CRT based ones did look better, but not until DLP and LCD projection tvs did the sizes and weights thin down. And that early period also did a disservice to customers IMO, with having SD, ED, and HD on the market, but the TV standard going to be HD. IMO, back during that time Sony and JVC (I'Art series) had the top CRT tube tvs. Philips, Toshiba, and Samsung were OK depending on the model. In projection, Hitachi (Ultravision and up lines), Mitsubishi, and arguably Pioneer had some of the best out. But, when the LCD/Plasmas hit, for Plasma it was Hitachi, Pioneer, Mitsubushi, and Samsung--for LCD Sharp and Samsung. Sony had solid models in both but weren't overly better. I remember having to steer customers off the low-end brands like Apex and others, because the picture quality just wasn't there. I really did enjoy my late 00's Samsung HD 32" LCD. I added a 50" Panasonic plasma about 3 years later. I think I still prefer plasma tech. I will say though, that motion blur was real on a lot of those flat panels. And that monster 40" CRT Sony made was so damn heavy, a place I worked that sold it would only deliver first floor and if it had to go up or down stairs the customer had to hire professional movers.
@@CheddarGetter Specifically, Pioneer Elite projection tv's were legit for that tech. Their plasmas were good/great, with the Elite branding or not. Panasonic models were solid top to bottom in plasma. Sony Bravia and XBR models weren't too bad, but Sony really did have the better CRT HD and their LCD projection sets were also top notch.
It was the weight that mattered most to me. I moved a lot back then, I still do, and with introduction of 16:9, the crts just became impossible to move around withour hired help. I still kinda miss my Sony Trinitron monitor, though.
oh yeah those sony trinitrons are still given away by older people because they are so much larger and heavier, most people want to buy one but who can lift them?
I was a kid at the time but I remember our computer room in school changing half of its computer's screens to LCDs. Most kids wanted to use them because they were new, but I remember noticing how the viewing angles sucked and how things just looked kinda wrong (I suppose it wasn't running at its native resolution). I also remember switching to a LCD TV and noticing how SD content looked awful. It took a while for most media to be updated to HD so I had to live with that for a while.
There definitely was controversy surrounding LCDs when they came. A lot of people got them just because they weighed less (and looked cool) but most of my friends (gamers and artists) refused to give up their CRTs. I threw out my last CRT 2009 but it was only because I was moving around a lot and by that time there were decent alternatives (still comprised quality thou).
Exactly, the fact that it was so thin (they actually weren't that thin compared to what we have nowadays) was cool as hell - such small amount of space taken plus the small weight. It looked like utter shit and were ridiculously expensive as well. My 1600x1200 flat screen 19" SyncMaster was not replaced for a loooong time.
@@mikeskellington5573 my was put inside a storage when I was moving because I didn't have a space for such a monster while living in a tiny apartment. Got a laptop instead. Eventually the shed started leaking and that was the end of it (tried to turn it on 5 years ago after moving again).
@@silenthill4 Yeah, sounds like complete nonsense. CRT's are way overrated. And while they did better than CRT's in some ways, fact of the matter is that they overal just had much better image quality. You could see a ton of details you couldn't see on CRT TV's and subtitles were very readable. I've been doing some retro gaming on a CRT recently and while it's nostalgic... the games definitely don't 'look' better than they do on modern TV's. They look better than them in some ways, far worse in others.
I think it comes down to how much people were willing to spend on displays. Back then, the cost of HD was high even for LCD, so the cheapest entry to HD in the LCD space was really bad looking. That's why I remember Best Buy had rows and rows of display models of all sizes. My first HDTV was a 19 inch Samsung for 900 dollars. At the time they were boasting pixel response as a selling point and this was the lowest I could go that still looked good. My 2012 Sony 3D TV still holds up, but that's because those TVs were really expensive. I bought an HDCRT in 2019 that was a 2006 Sony and if only they made them one more year so that it hit 1080p. 1080i doesn't look bad with 60 hz content, but anything below that you notice the interlacing hard.
yeah we have a large "flat screen" (not really flat but it is rectangular and 'flat' that is a 1080p LCD, it was expensive for its time but my mom gave it to me after they moved out of their house because it was a pain to carry around, not a light LCD TV like the ones today.. well it still looks amazing to this day.. except for the scuff marks on the screen from the dumb kids hitting it with their Quest 2 Touch controllers lol.
Is your CRT a Wega? I have a 32" Wega from around that time and you can get 1080i on them; I don't recall if you need to use SCART or composite for it though.
The widescreen and resolution boost on TV shows, sports, then-new-gen consoles and movies at home were so novel when they arrived, any negatives were just completely ignored
I immediately noticed the lag when I first had an LG LCD back in 2010 as a replacement to my Philips CRT (when my then 7 son inadvertently kicked the TV out of commission mimicking a Street Fighter move 😂). I was playing with a Hori joystick and I could no longer perform Sagat's combos like I used to in Street Fighter 4. 😬 I had to painstakingly adjust for the delay for some time, but of course eventually had gotten used to it.
I think my Philips LCD from 2008 already had a gaming mode. It will still have been a bit laggier than a CRT, but without it playing a game felt like crawling through heavy mud.
i still use my childhood 29 CRT TV from the 90s for retro consoles periodically, and the Plasma 720p Panasonic TV that i used for my xbox 360 back in the day
I remember an anecdote I read back in those early-mid 2000s where computer stores would deliberately use suboptimal image settings on showcased CRTs to make the LCDs appear disproportionately better, since they were under a lot of pressure to sell them at the time.
LCD's were controversal because it were legal to sell new screens with x number of dead pixels. In my country it were still possible to get a new screen on warranty even if there were only one dead pixel.
It's been a long time, I remember playing Modern Warfare on PS3 on a widescreen CRT. It was a nice TV but it was hard to notice opponents sometimes. The switch to a smaller monitor with 1080p was great, it was like putting on glasses. On the other hand, something like Motorstorm may have looked better on the CRT.
I remember my primary reason was for higher resolution material. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were out and a lot of games, and specifically Dead Rising, were tailoring their content to display correctly on those HDTVs. The text in Dead Rising was practically unreadable on a CRT, so having that higher res made all the difference. Come to find out years later my TV at the time had MASSIVE over scan you COULD NOT turn off or adjust for, and generally looked bad overall compared to newer technology we have now of course, but Mass Effect on that 720p TV looked incredible for the time. And Blu-ray looked amazing, and still does even on modern sets.
I hope the next step are short throw MEMS projectors and great ALR projection surfaces to save even more space and have better image quality (if it's bright enough).
weight isnt a issue then as we all had strong tv stands thats a marketing gimmick tvs are supposed to be static... hence why phones are great for viewing on the move.@@CDNChaoZ
@@vasili1207 Excuse me, have you ever taken a 21" trinitron to a LAN? You lift it up from the car, if you could fit it there in the first place, shout for everyone to clear the runway and evacuate the area. Everyone who didn't move were accepted as casualties.
Thing is a lot of people jumped multiple technologies around the time - so went from playing a PS2 game on a 24" standard def set, to playing 360 on a 37" widescreen HD TV (or some similar jump), so the downsides were covered up by the general upgrade of everything else. As far as work screens go, for most people motion wasn't an issue, and having a screen twice the size that took up a fraction of your desk space that was less straining on the eyes and easily mountable - was still an upgrade. With that said I imagine had I been more of a PC gamer at the time then I would have clung on to my CRT for longer.
Ah yes... The mid 2000's... When you went to a game tournament running LCD's with 20+ ms response times. I can VERY vividly remember this time because I was playing competitive Halo at the time going to tournaments every other weekend. To my dismay, many other players competing didn't even notice or care about the MASSIVE input delays. This was before LCD monitors with 1ms or 2ms grey to grey response times were common. They were more likely advertised as 20ms and that wasn't even the full delay chain, just the actual pixel response times so by the time you added picture processing and all that other crap it was probably above 50ms. Playing any first person shooter on these things was like ice skating. It opened my eyes to just how bad the average gamer is. Like you would press a button and then you waited what felt like an eternity for the action to happen and people on forums were telling me I should just "gid gud" basically and saying I was making up excuses for losing. I can confidently say 95% of gamers didn't notice and it was only the best players that realised how bad LCD's at the time were. As a WCG finalist I petitioned the Halo ref for the 2005 WCG finals to ensure that Halo 2 was played on CRT TV's instead of LCD's explaining all the input latency stuff and thankfully they listened. MLG did the same thing for their tournaments, so if you go back and watch Halo 2 tournaments you'll see they were playing on CRT TV's. The New Zealand WCG grand finals in 2005 were actually played on CRT monitors and that totally blew me away to just how smooth Halo could play on a progressive scan monitor. I immediately purchased a component to VGA converter so I could play Xbox on my CRT monitors. It wasn't until around 2007 when brands finally took gamers seriously and started releasing LCD's that had lower response times. I still have the very first LCD I bought, the BenQ M2200 to this day. By the late 2000's it was impossible to buy CRT's so at that stage you kinda just had to adapt. No tournament was going to be able to provide a full stage of CRT's even if they wanted to since no one was selling them so even if CRT's were still technically better displays it didn't make sense to practise on a CRT and then have to play on an LCD at a tournament. So yes, when LCD's first came out there was a small niche of people that knew they sucked and tried to explain to people why they sucked but the average normie was more impressed by aesthetics, less desk real estate, etc, so really it depends on who you were talking to at the time. As far as LCD's for desktop use... The early 4:3 ones were so bad I can't understand how they sold. They were all using VGA (analogue) and the text NEVER looked right, it always looked like characters had pixels shifted over too far and it made reading small text very difficult. The fact that computer labs were buying these things by the pallet never made sense to me since they really offered no advantages to CRT's at that point except for desk real estate (which didn't really matter when the room had been designed with CRT's in mind anyway).
A 720p or 1080i screen was such a step up from 480i that the negatives were easily overwhelmed. I imagine the first color TVs weren't nearly as crisp as the better black and white screens at the time and that exactly just as many people cared.
You can’t compare CRT TV technology at its peak after many years of the technology evolving, to when LCDs were in their infancy. Try comparing the first LCDs to the first CRTs. Technology always improves over time.
Oh this is a fun question. In terms of absolute top end picture, you would have wanted an HD CRT at 40". But those were also really expensive, really heavy, and a total albatross to make happen in your household. So then it went to other options available - plasma offered similar picture with high resolution and a smaller form factor. But it was still expensive. DLP was REALLY popular back then - good overall picture and motion clarity. Large screen size, fairly cheap. LCD also had a bright picture when LEDs became the back light, which was fairly early on. It was still very colorful compared to what we were used to at the time. And it was lightweight and portable (LAN PARTIES). People went to these new techs for reasons OTHER than black level and motion clarity. But largest reason of all? 16:9, higher resolution. The picture CLARITY was such a massive jump from what we were getting at 480i that it just didnt matter to us that our old games looked like shit on the panels. Combine that with the push to digital TV (now broadcasting in 16:9, at high resolution), widescreen movies, and other content that took advantage of the higher resolution all these displays had, no one was complaining that their LCD had ghosting and bad black levels (also because LCD wasnt the only tech out there). It wasn't until later on, when interest in old content started to come back, along with ease of access to formerly top, top end CRT tech that we started to appreciate the CRT in ways we never did before. But i can say i am not ever going out of my way to get my old memorex 25" CRT back into my home ever again.
True, nobody wanted to buy top end CRTs because they were stupidly expensive on launch, not to mention massively huge, stupidly heavy, used ton of electricity and got very hot. Different story when you can pick up something that costs thousands for rock bottom prices because people want to get rid of them.
@@cattysplat I love how people grab a Sony PVM that used to cost $10,000 or some amount back in the 90s for 50 bucks and are like "how did we ever get away from these????". Still, it's a fun topic. I remember being OBSESSED over resolution back then. 720p vs 1080i was a real thing, because it was all about clarity, and not getting screwed out on resolution because your TV displayed it in an odd manner (remember 720p TVs that would take a 1080i image, convert it to 540p, then do a shitty upscale??). It's why 1080p was so big back in the mid 00s. But some TVs looked AMAZING at 1080i when it would display it natively. Let alone the fact that 1080i was less resource extensive when displaying it on a computer. And if you had a PS2 with gran Turismo 4 that could display at native 1080i, put out to a TV that 1080i was specifically made for? (Like a CRT HDTV). It was incredible. There's so much that goes into this topic, and it's just not as simple as "hurr durr, CRTV black levels and motion clarity"
I wondered whether 40" CRTs even existed, but apparently they did. The largest CRT ever was the Sony PVM-4300 monitor with a 43" diagonal and weighing 200kg (=440lbs).
I remember when flat screens first came out as computer monitors, suddenly I was able to fit a screen on my desk nearly. The clarity was perfect, it didn't whine and pop and it stopped giving me headaches. CRTs were generally absolutely garbage horrible behemoth things I will never miss.
There was a lot of discussion about this when LCD's were new, I kept 2 Sony Trinitrons for a long time before finally moving to LCD's when I moved because I was doing a lot of photography then and color accuracy was much better on the Sony's compared to any LCD you could get at a similar price. I worked for a company that sold a lot of hardware at the time so I was lucky I could test a range of LCD's back then pretty easily and remember being pretty excited when Dell launched the original Ultrasharp monitors, they still sucked for gaming but were pretty decent for color accuracy at an affordable price.
yeah, that was the turning point for a lot of people, the 2405 was really colour accurate out the box. Went From a LaCie Blue to the slightly later 2408
People love CRT for the same reason they love plasma TV...phosper. A plasma is basically a CRT with a plasma medium instead of vacume. Both have great black levels and amazing color. There is a cure for LCD without going back to the technological dark ages...OLED
I was so excited to get my first "flat" screen TV. It was a 40" Westinghouse LCD. Got home, plugged in my PS2 and then had the worst gaming experience of my life. It was absolutely unplayable. Returned the LCD and bought the biggest CRT at BB which was a 32" Sharp and that is the 2nd best TV I've owned behind my current LG C1 OLED
I had a top end crt, a loewe aconda. Even so it had imperfect geometry, undefeatable overscan and the picture wobbled a bit when going from very bright to very dark fullscreen
I remember first seeing the picture a Loewe could make back in the day. Guaranteed I would have gotten one if I didn’t already have a Sony HD CRT at the time. What happened to yours?
@kenshirogenjuro873 it ended up going to the rubbish dump about 5 years ago as I had no room for it in the house and nobody wanted it. shame really. should have kept it
I remember going from CRT to a 1080p samsung screen around Uncharted 2, and definitely noticed I started doing worse in the online multiplayer, but I was sure it had to be me, I needed to get used to the new screen, at some point I just stopped thinking about it, then only some years ago I learned CRTs had lower input lag and realized why I felt that way.
lol game mode wasnt invented yet, i guess thats the reason they have it in all newer TVs to where weirdos still have CRTS because they dont know modern TVs have game mode and want less input lag but in results misses out in finer details and lower colors.
@@FreeAimDog Game mode just reduces digital processing to reduce lag generally to around 18-20ms, which is still very high lag, compared to CRTs 0ms, also game mode does nothing to increase motion clarity, which is where the major advantage in competitive play comes from, LCD's also have terrible greyscale, blacks, and colours compared to CRTs, which have super inky blacks, incredibly rich colours and can thanks to ultra fine dot-pitches that far outclass any LCD's fill-rate, have beautiful fine pitch detail in anything from 240p to 2560p, LCDs have gotten better at multi resolution handling and fine details thanks to subpixel rendering.
Never owned a lcd tv as I always knew they were horrible. I cried when my 27” crt monitor broke and had no choice to buy a over priced Viewsonic monitor with the worst ghosting while playing games such as original counter strike. Pioneer plasma for life!
Competitive gaming communities, like the fighting game community, were probably the first to take notice at LCDs problems. I remember that there was a lot of discussion and testing in various competitive fighting game forums in regards to finding LCDs that could compare to CRTs for tournament play.
Going from CRT monitor for LCD screen was definetly a jump, most of the motivation was getting better resolution and larger size with no headaches at lower refresh rates. CRT TVs kinda hit the size/affordability limit at around 32".
In the early 2000s i had a 40" Sony WEGA, which had an amazing picture (despite a slight geometry issue which was only noticeable in horizontal scrolling), and i had to get rid of it when i moved. My next two TVs were LCD and they were very disappointing, though i didn't really know why as i had the "newer must be better" mindset at the time. My latest TV, a Sony A8H that i got a couple of years ago, is _finally_ a superior picture to that 40" CRT i had 20 years ago.
People comparing a PVM crt to a modern low or mid market tv are silly. Those sony pvm displays were $100,000 when they released. It would be like comparing a flanders scientific display to any consumer tv.
At the time, I didn't watch much television so for me it was primarily computer monitors that I noticed. And there was definitely a feeling of trade offs. While tvs were pretty low res crt monitors could be up to 1024x768 or even higher! And at 80hz! Whereas the lcd monitors at the time had a limited viewing angles, limited colour and blackness replication, and lower refresh rates. But they were so much lighter and thinner and that seemed really cool. I think my feelings at the time was that this was the future of displays and they would catch up to crt's easily in time and they *mostly* have. They've certainly taken a lot longer than I thought and even now as I work and play on a 165hz refresh display it has terrible ghosting that I put up with because I chose a model which has better colour replication for colour matching when doing art. But back in the day it was like.. if you ever wrestled with a large crt taking them up stairs or getting it out of a cabinet to get at the inputs on the back.. the appeal of flatscreens was STRONG.
We used to have local halo lan parties. Everyone was clamoring over the hd TVs and I “reluctantly” ;) always volunteered to play on the old crt tv. I didn’t know what to call it at the time but I could feel the latency difference. I was a gaming god on the crt and played like dog poop on the high latency hd tv.
I remember the early oughts when people started getting first generation LCDs and wireless mice. In some cases that combination felt like absolute garbage. There was no real debate about it at the time, but it never felt right to me. I once hooked an X360 up to a CRT with a VGA adaper and was blown away by how good it looked compared to a contemporary HDTV.
well actually i got chewed out on messageboards when I brought up i was still using a CRT monitor back in the early 2000s and then i got bullied when I stated I played 360 on an SD Crt instead of a shitty HDready Lcd tv (circa 2005-2007)
@@signorpaldoni I played halo 3 and GTA IV for the longest time on a SD CRT TV because input lag and motion blur on HD TV's were so and is so bad. I just kept it to myself, because nobody cared or remembered how crisp games feel on CRT
I remember clearly when I swapped my CRT for a LCD while I was playing FFXII and the game went from "wow this looks amazing" to "wow this really looks like ass" I sort of noticed the image quality was crap, but I assumed it was due to my ps2 having "bad graphics" I never ended up finishing FFXII too, because I was like "man ps2 graphics sure are bad" Even bought "better cables" (component) to improve the image, because the thought that the actual image quality of the display might be inferior to CRT never crossed my mind.
Component cables definitely helped the picture on CRTs, but the colors of LCDs were typically so messed up no matter what, not to mention all the blurring and everything else. Low-noise cabling formats can’t preemptively fix inherently damaged picture reproduction.
As a PC gamer back then, desk real estate and ease of transport for LAN parties were the only thing I cared for. I went LCD as soon as I could and never looked back.
I got an LCD monitor first in like 2004 i think? Compared to the tired old CRT I had, it was actually an improvement. I could notice that there was some difference in colors and black level, but honestly even the response time wasn't _that_ different. Cheap CRTs had a surprising amount of motion blur (though it does have a nicer fall off). But the primary thing I noticed with the LCD was text was considerably easier to read. I think people have unreasonable ideas of what kinds of CRTs were the ones people were tending to be using back then. But yeah there definitely were beneficial things to them. Also i think a lot of people get a bit overly greedy with the like, crazy refresh rates and response times and acting like it makes all the difference to things when yeah going to 60 FPS can look kinda bad for all of like 5 minutes, until you just stop noticing it and you've gotten used to it again.
I remember at that period we had Dynaflat CRT monitors, and the picture quality was just out of this world. Most TVs at that time didn't support progressive inputs, so when I watched my Spiderman DVD on my friend's Dynaflat monitor I was just blown away. So even though people were buying LCDs, I always wanted those flat CRT monitors.
I had a large FLAT (flat glass anyway) Sony Trinitron CRT TV I think into the 2010s when it finally died. Sure, it had a huge box behind the flat screen, and it weighed like 200+ pounds, but that thing was beautiful even if it was only 480 resolution. I'd love to have something like that now. Why do companies not make CRT displays anymore? Is it too expensive to manufacture, or is the market too small and restricted to 'nerds' as John put it? I feel like there would be a small market for someone like Sony or Sharp to make a high resolution CRT, but maybe it's too niche.
There aren’t any factories that can produce Cathode-ray tubes anymore and unlikely to ever restart due to the insane costs to do so and lack of widespread demand outside of the niche retro gaming space.
I remember how long I hung on to my last CRT. It was a 21" behemoth that was nearly impossible to lift. When I finally upgraded 8 years later LCDs had come a long way by then.
If we're talking desktop monitors, the first LCD monitor I got was the Dell UltraSharp 16:10 model in mid-late 2000's and I used it until it died back in 2014. And funnily enough, I got work to replace it with another pair of Dell Ultrasharps which I'm still rocking to this day... well one of them, because one of them broke. I recall thinking the same thing as John that LCDs really sucked back then, but the Dell panels really stood out for some reason.
Most people just didn't care. 60 fps was considered a high framerate and the bulk of what people wanted to do on computer monitors favored bright screens and crisp pixels. A thing people also don't really remember is how dim CRT computer monitors were compared to televisions due to the finer dot pitches required by higher resolutions limiting the intensity of the electron beam. tbh it was all kind of a mess and adoption was driven by a series of tradeoffs rather than an absolute improvement in display technology
Some people were raging about the display latency but as soon as that was resolved, it was a no brainer. The clarity and crispness was very noticeable. That's why we were alright watching 480p DVDs on those screens. We were used to all that blur all the time, we grew up with it. I definitely am not remembering it fondly though with how flat panels can look better than real life today. And to be honest, they were massive. There was a reason we were stuck with small screens. It's kinda like the upscaling discussion right now, phosphor blur hid all that pixel ugliness and it why old games look horrible on pixel perfect panels now. Even 480p looked alright on a giant screen with how everything was smushed together.
I think around 2019-2020 is when LED FINALLY got black levels to a level that is really good (depending on brand.) but before that it was always just a dark grey.
I had the Sony GDM-FW900 monitor and I still miss it after it died. It was stupidly expensive for the time, but man it was stupidly good, especially when you had 1 or 2 GTX Ultras to power it. It was a shock to the system going to even a really well reviewed BenQ 1200p flat panel, but it did take up much less space on the desk.
The last CRT monitor I bought was a 19-inch while I was living in Chicago. The UPS driver refused to bring it up ny apartment stairs, so I had to drive all the way to pick it up and then try to squeeze the 50 lbs box into the back seat of my car because it wouldn't fit in the trunk. I loved that monitor, but yeah, moving to LCD was mostly just convenience for me.
This topic tickles my nostalgia in all the right ways, as I remember having black and white televisions still stationed around the house as a kid (80s kid here). Original LCDs, as John alludes to, were en vogue but TERRIBLE. I didn’t buy my first plasma television until the tech had matured enough to not feel like a step down from CRT strengths. I picked up one of the last Panasonic consumer plasmas and enjoy it in the man cave still today. It was a wild time to be alive!
I can tell you my experience because I remember it clearly. In 2008 I ditched my CRT monitor (1280x1024 and could go up to 85 Hz frequency) to a widescreen Samsung LCD monitor. I deliberately didn't say HD because the term HD was pretty ambiguous at the time. 😅 Back then 720p was considered HD 1080p was labeled as full HD. Later 720p was renamed 'HD Ready' (Ready for what?😅) and 1080p became 'True HD'. That was a good way to confuse the hell out of average people and make them buy 720p monitors and TV's. Well my monitor wasn't 720p nor 1080p, it's resolution was actually 1680x1050 with an aspect ratio of 16:10. Looking back it's actually surprising how many games actually supported this awkward resolution, like the Total War games, Call of Duty (all the original MW games) Far Cry 2, all the Crysis games (the first one doesn't support 1080p for some reason.😂 That's hilarious.). The last two games I've played which supported this weird resolution were CS: Go and LOTR Shadow of Mordor. But then again, some games did not support it, so I've ended up with a messy image. So my first negative experience was exactly this, running games lower than the actual desktop resolution on an LCD looked (and still kinda looks) awful, especially if compared to my old CRT where the difference switching from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 was miniscule. I could go low as 800x600 and the image quality was still serviceable. It was 640x480 where things got noticeably ugly. The other major problem was ghosting. There is this old RPG with superheroes, Freedom Force and it's follow up Freedom Force vs the Third Reich. I did play these games quite often back in the day. The game is cell shaded resembling 2D art and the main menus have this 2D art scrolling from left to right. When I first tried to boot this game on my brand new 2008 Samsung LCD with it's exceptional 1680x1050 resolution I was in shock. I just couldn't comprehend the level of ghosting. I seriously thought that something's wrong with the monitor but no, that's just the way old LCD monitors were. Overall and despite all the things I listed out I really liked my first LCD, high resolution was all the rage back then and picture clarity and the wide screen format made up for all the disadvantages (more so with TVs than monitors). Btw my old ass Samsung LCD with it's weird ass resolution still works, my mom uses it as her desktop monitor, while all my CRTs have bitten the dust (3 TV's and 2 monitors). When compared to other modern products (phones, printers or even washing machines) LCD monitors are stirdy as fu*k! None of my monitors has actually malfunctioned. My old LCD is 14 years old and still kicking, my 'new'/current monitor is 7 years old.
I personally loved the switch, not only did the flatscreens feel like crazy 21st century tech but I was finally able to see the screen for extended periods of time without feeling like shit! It's a very personal thing but there's something about my eyes where CRT screens would eventually start looking weird to me and I'd get nauseous and have awful headaches, this would get worse the older the screen was. Old CRT's have a nostalgic effect on me but never, not for a second, did I ever want to go back.
I think horror games becoming less dark had less to do with LCDs and more to do with the fact that older horror games used darkness in order to either draw less geometry (for things that are far away from the camera) and/or to hide how few details there were in the environment. Famously Silent Hill's fog was added to improve performance. I think it's also worth remembering that for non-gamers LCD monitors had multiple advantages. They were not only smaller thus freeing up desk space but they also were a lot more power efficient than CRT monitors. The lack of burn-in was also a major plus for any use case where the same GUI would be displayed 99% of the time.
I remember watching hockey in HD for the first time on an LCD and being amazed how well I could actually see and track the puck. That's when we made the switch.
Early LCD/Plasma TVs were total garbage and a big step down from CRT. All my family switched to them but I stuck with CRT. I was honestly disgusted at their lack of caring. The big 'selling point' back then was the switch from 4:3 to 16:9. My relatives spent years watching 4:3 images stretched/squashed to 16:9 and they didn't care, it was completely baffling and ridiculous.
I tell you that picking up a 35" SD TV requires a lot of strength... I even had a tube HDTV also before HDMI was a thing.... that was heavy also. I was happy LCD screens came about because they were bigger.... higher res too. 65" is slightly above average nowadays. I'd get 75" if it would fit in my car... 65" barely does.
honestly, when as a kid we "upgraded" from a CRT pc monitor to a slightly bigger LCD 4:3 for our win 98 i did not notice any real difference. just looked pretty similar exept that the LCD was a bit brighter. i think it was a pretty decent monitor for the time, an LG or something. mostly looked the same in games at 800:600 res despite it not being native. didnt notice any input lag either. standard definition CRT TVs were always shit picture quality outside of the input lag advantage, so i didnt notice any advantage there either. here in Pal territory CRT TVs also had the disadvantage that they made noticeable noise and flickered (exept for the 100 hz panels) so the LCDs had clear advantages in those regards too. that being said id still like to have a widescreen CRT pc monitor like Carmack!
Oh my gosh i remember this time.. i thought the same thing as John...why does everyone want a wosre picture??? I stayed with crt until i went plasma in 2008. My last crt was a 34" sony wega hd, it was 720p with hdmi. I still have that tv. Next i went with a Panasonic st60 which i still have .... currently i have a 77" c1. I also had a cool mitsubishi projector around 2010 until 2015..
I’m sorry but anyone that thing to CRT was better than LCD you need glasses. NO CRT was not if it was better they would still be making them. This Hass to be the dumbest take I’ve ever heard on this channel.
they do lol ... look it up mainly in china ... also more profit in lcd as crts are expensive to make hence cheap lcds we have now... smooth brain@@michaeldietz2648
@@michaeldietz2648There were tradeoffs in weight, cost of manufacture and shipping, and size. These were some of the same reasons that Plasma lost out to LCD. We’ll see if OLED can continue to compete with LCD but the inferior tech tends to win based on cost
*There was no fuss because most content was low quality* Console games were below SD resolutions (360p-480i) and videos were on DVDs (not HD and many had black bars not even taking the entire screen) and our analog cables were bringing noise along with it, it was a blurry mess. a crisp clean clear HD picture was not really a thing because even if you were a PC Gamer. textures/assets of games were low quality/pixelated
It was mostly good enough at the time. Flatter and lighter panels and higher resolutions after we started getting away from the TN panels a bit. Originally, I had a pretty good Samsung model after my CRT at the time went out. Unless you were comparing them side by side you would quickly get use the ignoring many of the shortcomings. Once you get the 1st IPS panels there were some advantages to them and CRTs which just were not being produced anymore. It is a lot now. The higher end VA panels with mini-LED backlighting that Samsung are producing now are fairly close in performance to an OLED. If you compare them side by side there is a huge difference but isolated from comparison and the VA panels are close enough.
Yes, anyone using good CRTs noticed. The main selling point of LCDs was that they saved space, and that mattered far more in offices, because it allowed companies to cram more people into the same space. In fact, I'd say it wasn't until the last 8 years or so that LCDs matched the colour quality / accuracy / refresh rate of my Eizo T966 monitors for a similar price. For a long time, the only "department" where LCDs had a clear visual advantage was image geometry.
As someone who worked in the games industry at the time I was extremely grateful for the transition to LCD screens. Back in the day, you'd have your monitor on your desk and a TV for your console devkit. The TV would often interfere with the monitor, causing its picture to wobble. Vomit inducing. Not long after the transition to LCD, we all got given multiple monitors, which is such a productivity booster. My first LCD TV (in 2006 or so) was pretty unplayable for some games though. Games like Halo 2 were a smeary mess.
I remember being at some fancy electronics shop in 2005 and they had this expensive Sharp LCD next to a plasma by Pioneer and I could just see there was something wrong with the LCD but I didn't know how to describe it
For monitors, the initial LCDs were worse in some regards like response time, but they also were so light that you could bring your rig to a LAN party so easy it was ridiculous.
I didn't even have or really see games on an LCD until 2013 when I got a small 32" Samsung. All I remember was going "wow, so this is what HD looks like" when I hooked up the PS3 and hopped into my go-to games.
I still have a CRT tv and main a plasma tv. If things worked on my vga crt id use that too but its in storage. OLED is close enough for me to upgrade the tv but its too expensive.
My first LCD TV was a definite visual downgrade, but on the other hand, the CRT it replaced was 300lbs with no handles. Not the most fun thing to move around.
For computer monitors, people were excited to see something thin. It was futuristic and looked expensive. The fact that they ghosted like crazy was an unnoticeable tradeoff for many. They also had matte finishes back then, which people preferred over highly glossy screens. Also, for TVs, sizes started to go up with LCDs. No one had a 42” CRT. It was too big and heavy. Once LCDs started to push sizes higher and higher it was endgame for CRT. Even a 32” CRT was too big and heavy, many people opted for small TVs since they could buy them and put them on a shelf easily. More tech interested people had bigger CRTs or crappy rear projection for size.
I remember vividly how sharp my first lcd monitor was compared to my viewsonic flat screen crt. But this was definitely not an early lcd, rocked the 21” crt for a good while
I remember picking up an old CRT form a friends place. It was so heavy we needed a shopping cart to move it. CRTs were never better. We knew back then the image quality was better, but the thing not weighing four times as much as a bowling ball meant it was better.
Definitely noticed the horrible black levels on the LCD but the screens were bigger at least and the strobing from the CRT wasn't there. Like a CRT at 60Hz had noticeable strobing from the low refresh rate, so I had to run at 100Hz+ by dropping the resolution on the display. Now finally I'm on OLED and loving the great black levels again with the bonus of HDR, VRR and can't notice strobing like with CRTs. Over 3000 hours as a monitor and no burn-in so far with an LG C1 TV. One downside is the subpixels are arranged left-to-right Red-White-Blue-Green while Windows generally accounts for RGB subpixels. No perfect solutions out there but Mactype seems to help text clarity with a little tweaking to it.
FOR SURE I did. When I still had my CRT screen, I remember going to Best Buy and seeing a new PC running Call of Duty on an LCD monitor and being turned off by the monitor's low response time motion blur (before knowing what that was) and how washed out it looked. Eventually I got an LCD because they were cheaper, easier to find and gave me more space on my desk.
I was definitely struggling with the transition from CRT to plasma or LCD. My first HD TV was a Samsung 1080i CRT. It was essentially defective but it was the last one our Best Buy had so I just dealt with intense warping and some poor color reproduction. When I finally jumped into plasmas I was super relieved how deep the black levels were and how nice the motion handling was. Still have 2 plasmas today.
I had a Samsung 34' CRT1080i TV and the picture on it was incredible in spite of it weighing a crap ton and it literally took 3 of us ,my Uncle ,me and my best friend to carry it down to my basement. Then when we finally got it all the way down the front side speaker panel was cracked and we had to return it in exchange for a better one and do the process all over again! Thank God for OLED ,my 55' literally weighs as much as the inches in diameter in screen size it came in.
@@dantasticmania8728 Yeah that thing weighed like 120 pounds. And almost completely front-heavy. The most awkward lift and an absolute nightmare to move with (especially out of an upstairs apartment). Once the warping got bad enough to warrant a replacement they didn't sell them anymore so Best Buy gave me a 42" Panasonic Plasma for it instead. Grateful I can get any of our plasmas or LCD's on and off the wall without any help.
People were very much aware of the problems with ghosting that LCD TVs had but the form factor ultimately sold it over CRT. The idea that you could have a much bigger screen that didn't take up as much room and didn't weigh a ton was attractive to people.
That is basically it, my parents house last CRT was an amazing Samsung, I think the last movie I watched there was avatar and it looked gorgeous, but at 29 inch it was too heavy and needed a lot of space, you couldn’t mount it on the wall and you needed a big rack to put the TV, the room could never look minimalist.
They changed that for a LG(that still works to this day) it’s way to big and heavy for today standards, but 42 inches was a dream back then and even being heavy by today standards, it was still very light compared to the way smaller Samsung CRT.
I think for the average consumer it’s an easy choice, get a huge TV that is lighter, good enough quality to watch TV and and have a smaller form factor.
I think my aunt had a Wall with a hole for the CRT Tv to make it look smaller.
For those doing spreadsheeting an email, the early LCD monitors were greatly appreciated. First in laptops, and then in desktops. As the technology progressed, more and more switched to the form factor. The transition was smooth.
That’s it. It’s flat, less than 50 pounds and can be hung on your wall. I still find old crt on the sidewalks in my town because they’re so big and difficult to store. Crazy how much space our TV and movies used to take. Now just hang a panel and stream.
As a kid I hated laptop displays. I didn’t like the color change in viewing angles, motion blur or how fragile the screens were. Nowadays it’s hard for me to ignore the false blacks and stretched resolutions.
@@slarbiter Yup. While it's harder to find CRT's than it used to you can still find a lot of people looking to ditch them for free if you move it. I got a 24" Wega Trinitron TV last year at a yard sale for free because the guy just wanted the 70 pound square cube out of his basement.
This, however i waited quite a while and got my first LCD in the later 2000s i think. And i still enjoy my 32" 144hz 4k LCD a lot more than any CRT i owned.😬
I think one thing to keep in mind is that, at least in my experience in the USA, most people didn’t have high end CRTs and mostly used composite. If you were an enthusiast you could see the negatives of moving to a different display, but going from composite to hdmi was a huge upgrade in clarity
Oh, absolutely. We average consumers were still using our monitors from the 90s, plagued with burn-in and phosphor bleed, focus and aspect ratio never quite right, and we weren't about to go drop $4000 on a top-of-the-line model. My first LCD was a 24" WUXGA Samsung and could swivel to portrait mode. For $650 it was a steal.
That was the time when even cheap crts had decent tubes, so i don't think it was true for monitors. TVs was whole another story, of course cheap TV's was not good
for most people the early lcd experiance would have been with svga on the crt and lcd and the difference was vast!
Agreed. The CRT nostalgia sometimes feels as if everyone had a nice Eizo, NEC, or Sony Trinitron monitor. This absolutely wasn't the case. Most CRTs I've seen were rather awful. Black levels weren't really good, they weren't very bright, and thanks to analog VGA connections you always had to choose between flickering and blurriness. LCDs of course had their downsides, mainly that suddenly everything below native resolution looked like shit (particularly older DOS games), but apart from this the whole experience was just _so much better_.
That's true. I only ever used S-video and component on my CRT tv's. Panasonic.
Resolution was the big deal. Going from 480p to a 1080p screen was a huge upgrade even if we lost alot of other things on the way.
It really is just as simple as that. When you're talking about televisions, we had thirtysomething-inch SD CRTs for decades, and then suddenly there were these 50"+ HD LCDs. "Better black levels" just isn't going to cut it in that comparison.
And that's even if it was 480p, 480i and less were pretty common.
@@redvenomweb they could've easily had hd crts and in fact they did exist such as 1080i models but it ended up being that crts also were phased out for LCDs. in fact many early plasma and LCD televisions were 480p so its not like much changed until HDTV was standardized.
@@Web720 it was more like 480i for pretty much all of them (though 405 line tvs existed in the 1940s or whatever) but some models had more overscan than others and different dot pitches
I remember we had our fancy new 720p HDTV within viewing distance of our CRT and I was able to compare the two watching a baseball game. I was blown away that I could see the pinstripes on the baseball uniforms much more clearly on the HDTV. I think that was the general feel at the time
It's also nice to not have a tv that weighs 3 tons.
do you carry your tv around crt or flat panel? old lcds were heavy too ... weight isnt a factor @@Maltbrew
My primary desire was to get rid of my ugly and heavy CRTs. Moving from a 19" CRT that weighed like 30lbs to a 5lb or less flat screen was great even if the screens weren't that great yet.
@@vasili1207 That's a stupid argument, of course it's a factor! Old LCDs weren't as heavy as CRTs.
@@vasili1207 When my parents were out of town I often carried the 32" TV to my room... Down stairs... At that point in time weight did matter, but I feel like my use case probably wasn't common.
On the flipside, being a LAN party boi in the 90s, carrying my 21" CRT wasn't much better. It was ridiculously heavy.
Secondly, the desk needed to be able to support like 60 kilos of screens cause I used two.. And they were each 28 kilos. Weight was a factor in some cases. Good luck hanging a 32" CRT on a wall.. Or finding a stand that isn't beefy and takes up a lot of space.
I remember hooking up that hd wire on the 360 (it wasn't hdmi at the time) onto our 720p plasma tv and being amazed at how clean and clear Splinter Cell Double Agent looked on it. I also remember hooking up my Wii to a Sony Trinitron after being on an lcd and going "whoa!" after seeing how much better Super Mario Galaxy looked on it compared to the lcd tv.
I believe the very first revision of the white xbox 360 didn't have hdmi and had component video as its best output.
When I watched my HD-DVDs on our SD CRT TV the image quality really was great, better than DVD, even though most of the image didn't fit on the screen. I wish I owned a HD CRT back in the day, even though the digital processor added some lag for games.
the 360 was great on a crt with the hd plugs, where as I remember finally getting a ps3 and it looking like trash through the scart lead so had to buy a lcd tv for the hdmi input which did make the ps3 look a lot better
For me it was GTA 4 720P on Plasma TV nothing has come close to it ever a 4K.
No. Its best output was VGA which gave 1080p. Component gave 1080i.@@km_6433
As someone who still definitely values CRTs in retro gaming, it’s awful to have to lug them around, and once prices were similar, it was worth the minor tradeoffs in picture quality to have a monitor that was that much lighter (especially as the visual fidelity of LCDs improved).
I remember being so enamored with the HD resolution, 480i to 720p, that I lost my critical eye. We were stupid back then.
No people are fooling themselves now looking back.
I had a rear projector tv that was way better then lcd and i went straight to 55 inch 1080i instead of 720p in 2002. Then got a lcd and it was a downgrade.
I mean to be fair it wasnt something for nothing. it was much sharper and sometimes brighter and after some time it got bigger. compared to my 10 inch crt tv connected with a composite to RF converter, almost any LCD looked amazing to me. I remember being able to read text in some video games without trying super hard
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593I was very impressed with my 19" viewsonic back in 2006. The space saving was great and I loved that all of the pixels were onscreen.
Absolutely people are fooling themselves now, looking back. It’s hilarious. I had a 32” widescreen Trinitron that was 480p 1080i and people who suggest weight isn’t a factor have no clue what they’re talking about.
Outside of everything people don’t deal with tubes anymore, I still do at least some on my amps. It’s a pain and so, so expensive these days. Getting your hands on good vacuum tubes costs money and a gamer will need to replace tubes.
I remember going to a computer repair specialist, asking him if it's worth spending money on repairing my CRT monitor. At that point I was convinced by the internet that CRTs were almost like collector's items, valuable and highly sought after. The guy was very surprised, he told me that no, these things are everywhere, and they cost pennies, so unless mine was a professional-grade model (which it wasn't), then it's not worth spending money on. Since then I was wondering why do CRTs have this cult-like following, and now I know why: it's because the enthusiasts have monitors that cost thousands of dollars, and they don't realize that's not what the majority of people had.
Thousands of dollars for a professional-grade??? Even with inflation, good CRTs didn't cost that much. Ghosting, that gray-to-gray response time in milliseconds that LCDs are rated around, was a non-issue on CRT monitors. PC Monitors were higher resolution, and PC games were not capped at 30 Frames Per Second. Otherwise PC Monitors were smaller, uglier, and you would need 3.5mm input speakers with an external power supply. CRT Monitors were not an "obvious" choice, but for those in the know they were cheap, plentiful, and better than LCDs at the time.
I got my hands on a used Apple Studio Display (M6496, iirc). $500 USD MSRP, which quickly dropped during the mid 00's with the advent of LCDs. A good Sony Trinitron was probably a dime a dozen at the time.
There was no reason to hold onto a low resolution "standard definition" CRT once the switch to Widescreen HD programming was complete. Your garden variety $100 computer monitor on the other hand,... Those were worth keeping for the old 1024x768 4:3 video games, and First Person Shooters. That high refresh rate stuff that is the domain of e-Sports in the current day.
Now, we're just struggling to replicate the old scanline look for retro gaming, and dealing with black bars on 16:9 sets. Classic games just look better on older sets.
@@marvinmallette6795Sony FW900 cost $3000. I wish I didn’t get brainwashed by BS ads and promotion on LCD monitor so I can buy Sony FW900 in affordable prices.
CRT EDTV’s are very rare. Zero lag, high resolutions, progressive scan mode, many inputs like RGB scart, component, s-video etc. Panasonic PD30 is one of the best CRT you can get for gaming 480p up to 1080i. Just not many ppl know about them.
I dunno man, I had CRT monitors I got at thrift shops and there's plenty they did better than LCDs, that's just inherent to the technology. That's the reason imo. When I got my first LCD monitor I was wondering why the hell everything was so blurry in games with motion. LCDs have improved a lot, but some things are still noticeable when comparing LCD panels to CRT or plasma
There was so much excitement surrounding HD LCD tech when the 360 launched. The sharpness and clarity jump from 480i tubes to flat 720p panels really cannot be overstated if you were never a PC person. I only played consoles using composite cables on mediocre consumer sets that had geometry issues, so I was certainly blown away. But then once I *did* get into PC gaming and had a CRT monitor, I bought the VGA cable for the Xbox 360 so fast. I still have it, lol. All the sharpness but none of the motion smearing, none of the shitty black levels, none of the gross looking colors. Unfortunately, the television manufacturers took it and ran.
480 to 720 "HD" was a pretty big jump, even bigger than 720p to 1080p imo.
The first time I saw a 360 I was amazed how clean it looked yes.
we're not talking about 480i
Actually I remember thinking PGR3 looked A LOT better on my SD crt than my friend's samsung LCD hdready tv in November 2005 when we bought our 360s
They ran and never look back 😁CRT is still king.
The transition from xbx to 360 we got a LCD. Back then my mentality was how awesome and big the tv was while taking up little space and how easily you could pick it up.
Also at this time i had no idea what black levels even meant or fps, brightness and ghosting. I was just a regular consumer. 😅 now i nerd out about tvs.
That’s a good point-I imagine it was more difficult to be a nerd about this kind of thing back then. Nowadays I can search for monitor reviews and instantly see detailed comparisons about black levels, viewing angles, response times etc. If this information was available in 2005 I certainly didn’t know where to find it.
The problem was never just black levels. CRT and (I think) Plasma are pulse-based, while OLED and LCD are based on sample-and-hold. Pulsed displays can exhibit flickering on static content, but they are much better at motion clarity. 60 FPS on an OLED/LCD looks much worse than 60 FPS on a CRT. On OLED/LCD successive frames blur together in a bad way, a kind of double vision.
The Test UFO website can be used to compare this effect on different screens. (They also have a black frame insertion (BFI) test which tries to emulate the pulsed approach on sample-and-hold displays. This fixes motion clarity. Unfortunately it halfs the maximum FPS. It also decreases maximum screen brightness, and it could wear down OLEDs.)
Amazingly, approximately nobody knows about this problem. Apparently not even TV test channels like HDTVTest know about it, as they don't test it in devices. Instead they only look at single frame metrics like black levels or color accuracy.
It's actually crazy. We are basically wasting 50% of our compute budget (double the frame rate compared to CRT to make it look acceptable) just to fix a flaw in modern displays.
By the way, theoretically this problem should be fixable on LCD without relying on software BFI and its drawbacks. They could just strobe the LCD backlight, i.e. illuminate each frame only for a fraction of its frame time. The LCD itself and the viewable FPS would not be affected. The maximum brightness would still go down, but it is higher on LCDs anyway than on OLED. I think that should be the default on LCD-TVs when viewing non-HDR content.
This is remarkable because I remember learning about this issue but have been effectively among the masses in recent years having forgotten all about it as far as day-to-day thinking goes
I did. When I first bought an LCD I couldnt believe how bad the picture quality was so I bought my CRT back
I definitely noticed. I bought an HDTV around 2007 and returned it the same day when I saw how my older consoles looked and saw the ghosting.
Admittedly, it will have been a pretty cheap one, but I wasn't impressed when I eventually got an HDTV in 2013 in preparation for PS4.
I kept my CRT as long as I could in a spare room for retro consoles. I now have an OLED 4K screen and wish I could compare it to my old CRT.
yeah back then I had a large CRT tv and a small CRT monitor as well, as well as a 1650x1080 720p LCD TN panel, so I basically had 3 different screens in my room around 2006-2010
My father bought the Philips 32PF9731 in 2006. Only 1368x768, but the image was still looking great in in 2019 when they finally replaced it. (It wasn't used for gaming, though.)
Oled 4k beats CRT in everything except depth of vision, unless if your CRT screen was flat.
I was selling TV's when the flat panel craze/HD transition hit. Plasma was the closest to CRT in terms of black levels, and my god, did those LCDs have blur and backlight issues. Also, if you got the low-end plasmas, the they couldn't do black, just dark gray. I remember all the craziness surrounding plasmas too, the gassing up, the burn in, the whole deal... craziness. The problem was, when you went to large screen tvs, CRTs past 32-36" were so ungodly heavy that you had to get into projection tvs. OF which the CRT based ones did look better, but not until DLP and LCD projection tvs did the sizes and weights thin down. And that early period also did a disservice to customers IMO, with having SD, ED, and HD on the market, but the TV standard going to be HD. IMO, back during that time Sony and JVC (I'Art series) had the top CRT tube tvs. Philips, Toshiba, and Samsung were OK depending on the model. In projection, Hitachi (Ultravision and up lines), Mitsubishi, and arguably Pioneer had some of the best out. But, when the LCD/Plasmas hit, for Plasma it was Hitachi, Pioneer, Mitsubushi, and Samsung--for LCD Sharp and Samsung. Sony had solid models in both but weren't overly better. I remember having to steer customers off the low-end brands like Apex and others, because the picture quality just wasn't there. I really did enjoy my late 00's Samsung HD 32" LCD. I added a 50" Panasonic plasma about 3 years later. I think I still prefer plasma tech. I will say though, that motion blur was real on a lot of those flat panels. And that monster 40" CRT Sony made was so damn heavy, a place I worked that sold it would only deliver first floor and if it had to go up or down stairs the customer had to hire professional movers.
Yup, the Panasonic, and by extension Pioneer Plasma was the thinkin man's TV in those days.
@@CheddarGetter Specifically, Pioneer Elite projection tv's were legit for that tech. Their plasmas were good/great, with the Elite branding or not. Panasonic models were solid top to bottom in plasma. Sony Bravia and XBR models weren't too bad, but Sony really did have the better CRT HD and their LCD projection sets were also top notch.
It was the weight that mattered most to me. I moved a lot back then, I still do, and with introduction of 16:9, the crts just became impossible to move around withour hired help. I still kinda miss my Sony Trinitron monitor, though.
And the heat. My 2 21" trinitrons took like 300 watts each.
oh yeah those sony trinitrons are still given away by older people because they are so much larger and heavier, most people want to buy one but who can lift them?
I was a kid at the time but I remember our computer room in school changing half of its computer's screens to LCDs. Most kids wanted to use them because they were new, but I remember noticing how the viewing angles sucked and how things just looked kinda wrong (I suppose it wasn't running at its native resolution).
I also remember switching to a LCD TV and noticing how SD content looked awful. It took a while for most media to be updated to HD so I had to live with that for a while.
There definitely was controversy surrounding LCDs when they came. A lot of people got them just because they weighed less (and looked cool) but most of my friends (gamers and artists) refused to give up their CRTs. I threw out my last CRT 2009 but it was only because I was moving around a lot and by that time there were decent alternatives (still comprised quality thou).
Exactly, the fact that it was so thin (they actually weren't that thin compared to what we have nowadays) was cool as hell - such small amount of space taken plus the small weight. It looked like utter shit and were ridiculously expensive as well. My 1600x1200 flat screen 19" SyncMaster was not replaced for a loooong time.
never happened
@@MrBl3ki Haha yes, it was a 19" flatscreen SyncMaster that I was forced to give up in 2009 :D
@@mikeskellington5573 my was put inside a storage when I was moving because I didn't have a space for such a monster while living in a tiny apartment. Got a laptop instead. Eventually the shed started leaking and that was the end of it (tried to turn it on 5 years ago after moving again).
@@silenthill4 Yeah, sounds like complete nonsense. CRT's are way overrated. And while they did better than CRT's in some ways, fact of the matter is that they overal just had much better image quality. You could see a ton of details you couldn't see on CRT TV's and subtitles were very readable.
I've been doing some retro gaming on a CRT recently and while it's nostalgic... the games definitely don't 'look' better than they do on modern TV's. They look better than them in some ways, far worse in others.
My first transition from CRT was a 50" Pioneer plasma in 2009, then the LG B6 OLED in 2016, then LG C9, and now the C2. I never bought an LCD TV.
I definitely noticed the input lag on snes games when I hooked it up to my first 720 lcd tv
Bizarre that HD wasn't brought up as a selling point or a plus.
I think it comes down to how much people were willing to spend on displays. Back then, the cost of HD was high even for LCD, so the cheapest entry to HD in the LCD space was really bad looking. That's why I remember Best Buy had rows and rows of display models of all sizes. My first HDTV was a 19 inch Samsung for 900 dollars. At the time they were boasting pixel response as a selling point and this was the lowest I could go that still looked good. My 2012 Sony 3D TV still holds up, but that's because those TVs were really expensive. I bought an HDCRT in 2019 that was a 2006 Sony and if only they made them one more year so that it hit 1080p. 1080i doesn't look bad with 60 hz content, but anything below that you notice the interlacing hard.
yeah we have a large "flat screen" (not really flat but it is rectangular and 'flat' that is a 1080p LCD, it was expensive for its time but my mom gave it to me after they moved out of their house because it was a pain to carry around, not a light LCD TV like the ones today.. well it still looks amazing to this day.. except for the scuff marks on the screen from the dumb kids hitting it with their Quest 2 Touch controllers lol.
Is your CRT a Wega? I have a 32" Wega from around that time and you can get 1080i on them; I don't recall if you need to use SCART or composite for it though.
Yep. It's a Sony KD- 34XBR970. It does 702p and 1080i through both component and HDMI. PS5 games look great on it.@@deanchur
The widescreen and resolution boost on TV shows, sports, then-new-gen consoles and movies at home were so novel when they arrived, any negatives were just completely ignored
I immediately noticed the lag when I first had an LG LCD back in 2010 as a replacement to my Philips CRT (when my then 7 son inadvertently kicked the TV out of commission mimicking a Street Fighter move 😂). I was playing with a Hori joystick and I could no longer perform Sagat's combos like I used to in Street Fighter 4. 😬 I had to painstakingly adjust for the delay for some time, but of course eventually had gotten used to it.
the lag on some lcds where so bad then, like 200-300ms. I remember looking up guids to find lcds that good response times
Shoutout to sf4 OG
I think my Philips LCD from 2008 already had a gaming mode. It will still have been a bit laggier than a CRT, but without it playing a game felt like crawling through heavy mud.
i still use my childhood 29 CRT TV from the 90s for retro consoles periodically, and the Plasma 720p Panasonic TV that i used for my xbox 360 back in the day
I remember an anecdote I read back in those early-mid 2000s where computer stores would deliberately use suboptimal image settings on showcased CRTs to make the LCDs appear disproportionately better, since they were under a lot of pressure to sell them at the time.
They still do this with cheap tv brands…
Until you get the jump to open or miniled a lot of the time they are super close to equivalent
LCD's were controversal because it were legal to sell new screens with x number of dead pixels.
In my country it were still possible to get a new screen on warranty even if there were only one dead pixel.
It's been a long time, I remember playing Modern Warfare on PS3 on a widescreen CRT. It was a nice TV but it was hard to notice opponents sometimes. The switch to a smaller monitor with 1080p was great, it was like putting on glasses. On the other hand, something like Motorstorm may have looked better on the CRT.
I remember my primary reason was for higher resolution material. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were out and a lot of games, and specifically Dead Rising, were tailoring their content to display correctly on those HDTVs. The text in Dead Rising was practically unreadable on a CRT, so having that higher res made all the difference. Come to find out years later my TV at the time had MASSIVE over scan you COULD NOT turn off or adjust for, and generally looked bad overall compared to newer technology we have now of course, but Mass Effect on that 720p TV looked incredible for the time. And Blu-ray looked amazing, and still does even on modern sets.
Most of us were just relieved not to need to lift CRTs and reclaim desk space. It took a while for me to switch, but widescreen was also a huge draw.
no weight was never a issue
I hope the next step are short throw MEMS projectors and great ALR projection surfaces to save even more space and have better image quality (if it's bright enough).
@@vasili1207 I worked in computer sales at this time and I assure you weight was most definitely an issue and was a huge selling point for LCDs.
weight isnt a issue then as we all had strong tv stands thats a marketing gimmick tvs are supposed to be static... hence why phones are great for viewing on the move.@@CDNChaoZ
@@vasili1207 Excuse me, have you ever taken a 21" trinitron to a LAN? You lift it up from the car, if you could fit it there in the first place, shout for everyone to clear the runway and evacuate the area. Everyone who didn't move were accepted as casualties.
Thing is a lot of people jumped multiple technologies around the time - so went from playing a PS2 game on a 24" standard def set, to playing 360 on a 37" widescreen HD TV (or some similar jump), so the downsides were covered up by the general upgrade of everything else. As far as work screens go, for most people motion wasn't an issue, and having a screen twice the size that took up a fraction of your desk space that was less straining on the eyes and easily mountable - was still an upgrade.
With that said I imagine had I been more of a PC gamer at the time then I would have clung on to my CRT for longer.
Ah yes... The mid 2000's... When you went to a game tournament running LCD's with 20+ ms response times.
I can VERY vividly remember this time because I was playing competitive Halo at the time going to tournaments every other weekend. To my dismay, many other players competing didn't even notice or care about the MASSIVE input delays. This was before LCD monitors with 1ms or 2ms grey to grey response times were common. They were more likely advertised as 20ms and that wasn't even the full delay chain, just the actual pixel response times so by the time you added picture processing and all that other crap it was probably above 50ms.
Playing any first person shooter on these things was like ice skating. It opened my eyes to just how bad the average gamer is. Like you would press a button and then you waited what felt like an eternity for the action to happen and people on forums were telling me I should just "gid gud" basically and saying I was making up excuses for losing. I can confidently say 95% of gamers didn't notice and it was only the best players that realised how bad LCD's at the time were.
As a WCG finalist I petitioned the Halo ref for the 2005 WCG finals to ensure that Halo 2 was played on CRT TV's instead of LCD's explaining all the input latency stuff and thankfully they listened. MLG did the same thing for their tournaments, so if you go back and watch Halo 2 tournaments you'll see they were playing on CRT TV's. The New Zealand WCG grand finals in 2005 were actually played on CRT monitors and that totally blew me away to just how smooth Halo could play on a progressive scan monitor. I immediately purchased a component to VGA converter so I could play Xbox on my CRT monitors.
It wasn't until around 2007 when brands finally took gamers seriously and started releasing LCD's that had lower response times. I still have the very first LCD I bought, the BenQ M2200 to this day. By the late 2000's it was impossible to buy CRT's so at that stage you kinda just had to adapt. No tournament was going to be able to provide a full stage of CRT's even if they wanted to since no one was selling them so even if CRT's were still technically better displays it didn't make sense to practise on a CRT and then have to play on an LCD at a tournament.
So yes, when LCD's first came out there was a small niche of people that knew they sucked and tried to explain to people why they sucked but the average normie was more impressed by aesthetics, less desk real estate, etc, so really it depends on who you were talking to at the time.
As far as LCD's for desktop use... The early 4:3 ones were so bad I can't understand how they sold. They were all using VGA (analogue) and the text NEVER looked right, it always looked like characters had pixels shifted over too far and it made reading small text very difficult. The fact that computer labs were buying these things by the pallet never made sense to me since they really offered no advantages to CRT's at that point except for desk real estate (which didn't really matter when the room had been designed with CRT's in mind anyway).
A 720p or 1080i screen was such a step up from 480i that the negatives were easily overwhelmed. I imagine the first color TVs weren't nearly as crisp as the better black and white screens at the time and that exactly just as many people cared.
Yup, took me a while before i went over to LCD, mainly due motion clarity, so i stuck to CRT for as long as possible.
You can’t compare CRT TV technology at its peak after many years of the technology evolving, to when LCDs were in their infancy. Try comparing the first LCDs to the first CRTs. Technology always improves over time.
Oh this is a fun question. In terms of absolute top end picture, you would have wanted an HD CRT at 40".
But those were also really expensive, really heavy, and a total albatross to make happen in your household.
So then it went to other options available - plasma offered similar picture with high resolution and a smaller form factor. But it was still expensive.
DLP was REALLY popular back then - good overall picture and motion clarity. Large screen size, fairly cheap.
LCD also had a bright picture when LEDs became the back light, which was fairly early on. It was still very colorful compared to what we were used to at the time.
And it was lightweight and portable (LAN PARTIES).
People went to these new techs for reasons OTHER than black level and motion clarity. But largest reason of all? 16:9, higher resolution.
The picture CLARITY was such a massive jump from what we were getting at 480i that it just didnt matter to us that our old games looked like shit on the panels.
Combine that with the push to digital TV (now broadcasting in 16:9, at high resolution), widescreen movies, and other content that took advantage of the higher resolution all these displays had, no one was complaining that their LCD had ghosting and bad black levels (also because LCD wasnt the only tech out there).
It wasn't until later on, when interest in old content started to come back, along with ease of access to formerly top, top end CRT tech that we started to appreciate the CRT in ways we never did before.
But i can say i am not ever going out of my way to get my old memorex 25" CRT back into my home ever again.
True, nobody wanted to buy top end CRTs because they were stupidly expensive on launch, not to mention massively huge, stupidly heavy, used ton of electricity and got very hot. Different story when you can pick up something that costs thousands for rock bottom prices because people want to get rid of them.
@@cattysplat I love how people grab a Sony PVM that used to cost $10,000 or some amount back in the 90s for 50 bucks and are like "how did we ever get away from these????".
Still, it's a fun topic. I remember being OBSESSED over resolution back then. 720p vs 1080i was a real thing, because it was all about clarity, and not getting screwed out on resolution because your TV displayed it in an odd manner (remember 720p TVs that would take a 1080i image, convert it to 540p, then do a shitty upscale??).
It's why 1080p was so big back in the mid 00s.
But some TVs looked AMAZING at 1080i when it would display it natively. Let alone the fact that 1080i was less resource extensive when displaying it on a computer.
And if you had a PS2 with gran Turismo 4 that could display at native 1080i, put out to a TV that 1080i was specifically made for? (Like a CRT HDTV).
It was incredible.
There's so much that goes into this topic, and it's just not as simple as "hurr durr, CRTV black levels and motion clarity"
I wondered whether 40" CRTs even existed, but apparently they did. The largest CRT ever was the Sony PVM-4300 monitor with a 43" diagonal and weighing 200kg (=440lbs).
I remember when flat screens first came out as computer monitors, suddenly I was able to fit a screen on my desk nearly. The clarity was perfect, it didn't whine and pop and it stopped giving me headaches. CRTs were generally absolutely garbage horrible behemoth things I will never miss.
There was a lot of discussion about this when LCD's were new, I kept 2 Sony Trinitrons for a long time before finally moving to LCD's when I moved because I was doing a lot of photography then and color accuracy was much better on the Sony's compared to any LCD you could get at a similar price. I worked for a company that sold a lot of hardware at the time so I was lucky I could test a range of LCD's back then pretty easily and remember being pretty excited when Dell launched the original Ultrasharp monitors, they still sucked for gaming but were pretty decent for color accuracy at an affordable price.
yeah, that was the turning point for a lot of people, the 2405 was really colour accurate out the box. Went From a LaCie Blue to the slightly later 2408
People love CRT for the same reason they love plasma TV...phosper.
A plasma is basically a CRT with a plasma medium instead of vacume. Both have great black levels and amazing color. There is a cure for LCD without going back to the technological dark ages...OLED
I was so excited to get my first "flat" screen TV. It was a 40" Westinghouse LCD. Got home, plugged in my PS2 and then had the worst gaming experience of my life. It was absolutely unplayable. Returned the LCD and bought the biggest CRT at BB which was a 32" Sharp and that is the 2nd best TV I've owned behind my current LG C1 OLED
Flat panel
PS2 looks great on my 65" plasma through component cables.
I had a top end crt, a loewe aconda. Even so it had imperfect geometry, undefeatable overscan and the picture wobbled a bit when going from very bright to very dark fullscreen
I remember first seeing the picture a Loewe could make back in the day. Guaranteed I would have gotten one if I didn’t already have a Sony HD CRT at the time. What happened to yours?
@kenshirogenjuro873 it ended up going to the rubbish dump about 5 years ago as I had no room for it in the house and nobody wanted it. shame really. should have kept it
@@mr.y.mysterious.video1 damn…I might have wanted it! Chances are not enough for the shipping though, wherever in the world you happen to be
I remember going from CRT to a 1080p samsung screen around Uncharted 2, and definitely noticed I started doing worse in the online multiplayer, but I was sure it had to be me, I needed to get used to the new screen, at some point I just stopped thinking about it, then only some years ago I learned CRTs had lower input lag and realized why I felt that way.
I had a Sharp LCD and it was better than CRT in any way. No input lag, it was hooked to an original Xbox
unlikely, it was probably a skill issue tho
lol sure....LCD with no input lag back then???@@E-087
lol game mode wasnt invented yet, i guess thats the reason they have it in all newer TVs to where weirdos still have CRTS because they dont know modern TVs have game mode and want less input lag but in results misses out in finer details and lower colors.
@@FreeAimDog Game mode just reduces digital processing to reduce lag generally to around 18-20ms, which is still very high lag, compared to CRTs 0ms, also game mode does nothing to increase motion clarity, which is where the major advantage in competitive play comes from, LCD's also have terrible greyscale, blacks, and colours compared to CRTs, which have super inky blacks, incredibly rich colours and can thanks to ultra fine dot-pitches that far outclass any LCD's fill-rate, have beautiful fine pitch detail in anything from 240p to 2560p, LCDs have gotten better at multi resolution handling and fine details thanks to subpixel rendering.
Never owned a lcd tv as I always knew they were horrible. I cried when my 27” crt monitor broke and had no choice to buy a over priced Viewsonic monitor with the worst ghosting while playing games such as original counter strike.
Pioneer plasma for life!
Competitive gaming communities, like the fighting game community, were probably the first to take notice at LCDs problems. I remember that there was a lot of discussion and testing in various competitive fighting game forums in regards to finding LCDs that could compare to CRTs for tournament play.
Going from CRT monitor for LCD screen was definetly a jump, most of the motivation was getting better resolution and larger size with no headaches at lower refresh rates.
CRT TVs kinda hit the size/affordability limit at around 32".
In the early 2000s i had a 40" Sony WEGA, which had an amazing picture (despite a slight geometry issue which was only noticeable in horizontal scrolling), and i had to get rid of it when i moved. My next two TVs were LCD and they were very disappointing, though i didn't really know why as i had the "newer must be better" mindset at the time. My latest TV, a Sony A8H that i got a couple of years ago, is _finally_ a superior picture to that 40" CRT i had 20 years ago.
People comparing a PVM crt to a modern low or mid market tv are silly.
Those sony pvm displays were $100,000 when they released.
It would be like comparing a flanders scientific display to any consumer tv.
At the time, I didn't watch much television so for me it was primarily computer monitors that I noticed. And there was definitely a feeling of trade offs. While tvs were pretty low res crt monitors could be up to 1024x768 or even higher! And at 80hz! Whereas the lcd monitors at the time had a limited viewing angles, limited colour and blackness replication, and lower refresh rates. But they were so much lighter and thinner and that seemed really cool. I think my feelings at the time was that this was the future of displays and they would catch up to crt's easily in time and they *mostly* have. They've certainly taken a lot longer than I thought and even now as I work and play on a 165hz refresh display it has terrible ghosting that I put up with because I chose a model which has better colour replication for colour matching when doing art. But back in the day it was like.. if you ever wrestled with a large crt taking them up stairs or getting it out of a cabinet to get at the inputs on the back.. the appeal of flatscreens was STRONG.
We used to have local halo lan parties. Everyone was clamoring over the hd TVs and I “reluctantly” ;) always volunteered to play on the old crt tv. I didn’t know what to call it at the time but I could feel the latency difference. I was a gaming god on the crt and played like dog poop on the high latency hd tv.
I remember the early oughts when people started getting first generation LCDs and wireless mice. In some cases that combination felt like absolute garbage. There was no real debate about it at the time, but it never felt right to me. I once hooked an X360 up to a CRT with a VGA adaper and was blown away by how good it looked compared to a contemporary HDTV.
well actually i got chewed out on messageboards when I brought up i was still using a CRT monitor back in the early 2000s and then i got bullied when I stated I played 360 on an SD Crt instead of a shitty HDready Lcd tv (circa 2005-2007)
@@signorpaldoni I played halo 3 and GTA IV for the longest time on a SD CRT TV because input lag and motion blur on HD TV's were so and is so bad. I just kept it to myself, because nobody cared or remembered how crisp games feel on CRT
I remember clearly when I swapped my CRT for a LCD while I was playing FFXII and the game went from "wow this looks amazing" to "wow this really looks like ass"
I sort of noticed the image quality was crap, but I assumed it was due to my ps2 having "bad graphics"
I never ended up finishing FFXII too, because I was like "man ps2 graphics sure are bad"
Even bought "better cables" (component) to improve the image, because the thought that the actual image quality of the display might be inferior to CRT never crossed my mind.
Component cables definitely helped the picture on CRTs, but the colors of LCDs were typically so messed up no matter what, not to mention all the blurring and everything else. Low-noise cabling formats can’t preemptively fix inherently damaged picture reproduction.
I went from a 23" CRT to a 40" plasma and it seemed a massive improvement to me.
Well duh, it’s plasma
I had a CRT until 2008 when I finally get a 24 inch DELL 1080p monitor. because any LCD below that was garbage compared to my CRT at the moment.
It was more about picture clarity at the time. I remember being amazing how crisp everything was.
As an IT person who the CRT to LCD transition, I can assure you no one cared about the picture quality. It was all about the weight saving.
I had to get one because the text for the radio calls in the first Dead Rising were just way to small to read.
As a PC gamer back then, desk real estate and ease of transport for LAN parties were the only thing I cared for. I went LCD as soon as I could and never looked back.
I got an LCD monitor first in like 2004 i think? Compared to the tired old CRT I had, it was actually an improvement. I could notice that there was some difference in colors and black level, but honestly even the response time wasn't _that_ different. Cheap CRTs had a surprising amount of motion blur (though it does have a nicer fall off). But the primary thing I noticed with the LCD was text was considerably easier to read. I think people have unreasonable ideas of what kinds of CRTs were the ones people were tending to be using back then. But yeah there definitely were beneficial things to them.
Also i think a lot of people get a bit overly greedy with the like, crazy refresh rates and response times and acting like it makes all the difference to things when yeah going to 60 FPS can look kinda bad for all of like 5 minutes, until you just stop noticing it and you've gotten used to it again.
6:00 16x10 (8x5) is literally the golden ratio, that's why it's so great and why more screens need to support it.
I remember at that period we had Dynaflat CRT monitors, and the picture quality was just out of this world. Most TVs at that time didn't support progressive inputs, so when I watched my Spiderman DVD on my friend's Dynaflat monitor I was just blown away. So even though people were buying LCDs, I always wanted those flat CRT monitors.
Did the dynaflat ones support 480p?
@@brkbtjunkie Don't remember actually, it was connected through VGA
Yes we did, but the quality of most videos and games was so bad anyway that it was ok to swap the better quality image for the cool factor.
I had a large FLAT (flat glass anyway) Sony Trinitron CRT TV I think into the 2010s when it finally died. Sure, it had a huge box behind the flat screen, and it weighed like 200+ pounds, but that thing was beautiful even if it was only 480 resolution. I'd love to have something like that now. Why do companies not make CRT displays anymore? Is it too expensive to manufacture, or is the market too small and restricted to 'nerds' as John put it? I feel like there would be a small market for someone like Sony or Sharp to make a high resolution CRT, but maybe it's too niche.
There aren’t any factories that can produce Cathode-ray tubes anymore and unlikely to ever restart due to the insane costs to do so and lack of widespread demand outside of the niche retro gaming space.
You never know if it could one day make a comeback…just look at record players
I remember how long I hung on to my last CRT. It was a 21" behemoth that was nearly impossible to lift. When I finally upgraded 8 years later LCDs had come a long way by then.
If we're talking desktop monitors, the first LCD monitor I got was the Dell UltraSharp 16:10 model in mid-late 2000's and I used it until it died back in 2014. And funnily enough, I got work to replace it with another pair of Dell Ultrasharps which I'm still rocking to this day... well one of them, because one of them broke. I recall thinking the same thing as John that LCDs really sucked back then, but the Dell panels really stood out for some reason.
Most people just didn't care. 60 fps was considered a high framerate and the bulk of what people wanted to do on computer monitors favored bright screens and crisp pixels. A thing people also don't really remember is how dim CRT computer monitors were compared to televisions due to the finer dot pitches required by higher resolutions limiting the intensity of the electron beam.
tbh it was all kind of a mess and adoption was driven by a series of tradeoffs rather than an absolute improvement in display technology
Some people were raging about the display latency but as soon as that was resolved, it was a no brainer. The clarity and crispness was very noticeable. That's why we were alright watching 480p DVDs on those screens. We were used to all that blur all the time, we grew up with it. I definitely am not remembering it fondly though with how flat panels can look better than real life today. And to be honest, they were massive. There was a reason we were stuck with small screens.
It's kinda like the upscaling discussion right now, phosphor blur hid all that pixel ugliness and it why old games look horrible on pixel perfect panels now. Even 480p looked alright on a giant screen with how everything was smushed together.
Latency was never resolved.
I think around 2019-2020 is when LED FINALLY got black levels to a level that is really good (depending on brand.) but before that it was always just a dark grey.
I had the Sony GDM-FW900 monitor and I still miss it after it died. It was stupidly expensive for the time, but man it was stupidly good, especially when you had 1 or 2 GTX Ultras to power it.
It was a shock to the system going to even a really well reviewed BenQ 1200p flat panel, but it did take up much less space on the desk.
The last CRT monitor I bought was a 19-inch while I was living in Chicago. The UPS driver refused to bring it up ny apartment stairs, so I had to drive all the way to pick it up and then try to squeeze the 50 lbs box into the back seat of my car because it wouldn't fit in the trunk. I loved that monitor, but yeah, moving to LCD was mostly just convenience for me.
This topic tickles my nostalgia in all the right ways, as I remember having black and white televisions still stationed around the house as a kid (80s kid here). Original LCDs, as John alludes to, were en vogue but TERRIBLE. I didn’t buy my first plasma television until the tech had matured enough to not feel like a step down from CRT strengths. I picked up one of the last Panasonic consumer plasmas and enjoy it in the man cave still today. It was a wild time to be alive!
Yes i notice, first time i saw TV News on LCD tv the image is pixelated and broke. Seriously
I can tell you my experience because I remember it clearly. In 2008 I ditched my CRT monitor (1280x1024 and could go up to 85 Hz frequency) to a widescreen Samsung LCD monitor. I deliberately didn't say HD because the term HD was pretty ambiguous at the time. 😅 Back then 720p was considered HD 1080p was labeled as full HD. Later 720p was renamed 'HD Ready' (Ready for what?😅) and 1080p became 'True HD'. That was a good way to confuse the hell out of average people and make them buy 720p monitors and TV's. Well my monitor wasn't 720p nor 1080p, it's resolution was actually 1680x1050 with an aspect ratio of 16:10. Looking back it's actually surprising how many games actually supported this awkward resolution, like the Total War games, Call of Duty (all the original MW games) Far Cry 2, all the Crysis games (the first one doesn't support 1080p for some reason.😂 That's hilarious.). The last two games I've played which supported this weird resolution were CS: Go and LOTR Shadow of Mordor. But then again, some games did not support it, so I've ended up with a messy image. So my first negative experience was exactly this, running games lower than the actual desktop resolution on an LCD looked (and still kinda looks) awful, especially if compared to my old CRT where the difference switching from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 was miniscule. I could go low as 800x600 and the image quality was still serviceable. It was 640x480 where things got noticeably ugly. The other major problem was ghosting. There is this old RPG with superheroes, Freedom Force and it's follow up Freedom Force vs the Third Reich. I did play these games quite often back in the day. The game is cell shaded resembling 2D art and the main menus have this 2D art scrolling from left to right. When I first tried to boot this game on my brand new 2008 Samsung LCD with it's exceptional 1680x1050 resolution I was in shock. I just couldn't comprehend the level of ghosting. I seriously thought that something's wrong with the monitor but no, that's just the way old LCD monitors were. Overall and despite all the things I listed out I really liked my first LCD, high resolution was all the rage back then and picture clarity and the wide screen format made up for all the disadvantages (more so with TVs than monitors). Btw my old ass Samsung LCD with it's weird ass resolution still works, my mom uses it as her desktop monitor, while all my CRTs have bitten the dust (3 TV's and 2 monitors). When compared to other modern products (phones, printers or even washing machines) LCD monitors are stirdy as fu*k! None of my monitors has actually malfunctioned. My old LCD is 14 years old and still kicking, my 'new'/current monitor is 7 years old.
used to say High Quality 720p and High Definition 1080p
@@n9ne It depends on the country. I live in Slovakia.
@@stanleysmith7551 720p is still called HD here where I live. At 1080p it's called Full HD, and also Ultra HD for 4K.
Not to mention a lot of the first LCDs had multiple dead pixels.
I personally loved the switch, not only did the flatscreens feel like crazy 21st century tech but I was finally able to see the screen for extended periods of time without feeling like shit! It's a very personal thing but there's something about my eyes where CRT screens would eventually start looking weird to me and I'd get nauseous and have awful headaches, this would get worse the older the screen was. Old CRT's have a nostalgic effect on me but never, not for a second, did I ever want to go back.
People love CRT brightness but it definitely causes eye strain, especially sitting close like a monitor.
Perhaps the flicker was causing your headaches? Especially if the crt was running at like 60hz
@@archetype6351You set your Hz higher to reduce eye strain, you get lower resolution, that's how CRT worked.
@@archetype6351 Yeah, that's what I think it was
I never owned an LCD TV. Went from CRT to Plasma to OLED.
The only LCDs I owned were on laptops.
You did it right
I think horror games becoming less dark had less to do with LCDs and more to do with the fact that older horror games used darkness in order to either draw less geometry (for things that are far away from the camera) and/or to hide how few details there were in the environment. Famously Silent Hill's fog was added to improve performance.
I think it's also worth remembering that for non-gamers LCD monitors had multiple advantages. They were not only smaller thus freeing up desk space but they also were a lot more power efficient than CRT monitors. The lack of burn-in was also a major plus for any use case where the same GUI would be displayed 99% of the time.
I remember watching hockey in HD for the first time on an LCD and being amazed how well I could actually see and track the puck. That's when we made the switch.
Early LCD/Plasma TVs were total garbage and a big step down from CRT. All my family switched to them but I stuck with CRT. I was honestly disgusted at their lack of caring. The big 'selling point' back then was the switch from 4:3 to 16:9. My relatives spent years watching 4:3 images stretched/squashed to 16:9 and they didn't care, it was completely baffling and ridiculous.
I tell you that picking up a 35" SD TV requires a lot of strength... I even had a tube HDTV also before HDMI was a thing.... that was heavy also. I was happy LCD screens came about because they were bigger.... higher res too. 65" is slightly above average nowadays. I'd get 75" if it would fit in my car... 65" barely does.
honestly, when as a kid we "upgraded" from a CRT pc monitor to a slightly bigger LCD 4:3 for our win 98 i did not notice any real difference. just looked pretty similar exept that the LCD was a bit brighter. i think it was a pretty decent monitor for the time, an LG or something. mostly looked the same in games at 800:600 res despite it not being native. didnt notice any input lag either.
standard definition CRT TVs were always shit picture quality outside of the input lag advantage, so i didnt notice any advantage there either. here in Pal territory CRT TVs also had the disadvantage that they made noticeable noise and flickered (exept for the 100 hz panels) so the LCDs had clear advantages in those regards too.
that being said id still like to have a widescreen CRT pc monitor like Carmack!
Oh my gosh i remember this time.. i thought the same thing as John...why does everyone want a wosre picture??? I stayed with crt until i went plasma in 2008. My last crt was a 34" sony wega hd, it was 720p with hdmi. I still have that tv. Next i went with a Panasonic st60 which i still have .... currently i have a 77" c1. I also had a cool mitsubishi projector around 2010 until 2015..
I’m sorry but anyone that thing to CRT was better than LCD you need glasses. NO CRT was not if it was better they would still be making them. This Hass to be the dumbest take I’ve ever heard on this channel.
this just tells me you didnt have rgb cables and used the yellow composite ... opinion is mute
@@vasili1207 I did, like I said if CRT was better they still be making it!!!
they do lol ... look it up mainly in china ... also more profit in lcd as crts are expensive to make hence cheap lcds we have now... smooth brain@@michaeldietz2648
Dont pay attention to vasili, hes just a troll. He has other replies negating any opinion he doesnt agree with under other posters as well
@@michaeldietz2648There were tradeoffs in weight, cost of manufacture and shipping, and size. These were some of the same reasons that Plasma lost out to LCD.
We’ll see if OLED can continue to compete with LCD but the inferior tech tends to win based on cost
Hell no. A flickery blurry screen VS a LCD with crisp pixels and no flicker
Oh yeah, I refused to buy an LCD tv all this time
*There was no fuss because most content was low quality* Console games were below SD resolutions
(360p-480i) and videos were on DVDs (not HD and many had black bars not even taking the entire screen) and our analog cables were bringing noise along with it, it was a blurry mess. a crisp clean clear HD picture was not really a thing because even if you were a PC Gamer. textures/assets of games were low quality/pixelated
It was mostly good enough at the time. Flatter and lighter panels and higher resolutions after we started getting away from the TN panels a bit. Originally, I had a pretty good Samsung model after my CRT at the time went out. Unless you were comparing them side by side you would quickly get use the ignoring many of the shortcomings. Once you get the 1st IPS panels there were some advantages to them and CRTs which just were not being produced anymore.
It is a lot now. The higher end VA panels with mini-LED backlighting that Samsung are producing now are fairly close in performance to an OLED. If you compare them side by side there is a huge difference but isolated from comparison and the VA panels are close enough.
Yes, anyone using good CRTs noticed. The main selling point of LCDs was that they saved space, and that mattered far more in offices, because it allowed companies to cram more people into the same space.
In fact, I'd say it wasn't until the last 8 years or so that LCDs matched the colour quality / accuracy / refresh rate of my Eizo T966 monitors for a similar price. For a long time, the only "department" where LCDs had a clear visual advantage was image geometry.
As someone who worked in the games industry at the time I was extremely grateful for the transition to LCD screens.
Back in the day, you'd have your monitor on your desk and a TV for your console devkit. The TV would often interfere with the monitor, causing its picture to wobble. Vomit inducing. Not long after the transition to LCD, we all got given multiple monitors, which is such a productivity booster.
My first LCD TV (in 2006 or so) was pretty unplayable for some games though. Games like Halo 2 were a smeary mess.
I remember being at some fancy electronics shop in 2005 and they had this expensive Sharp LCD next to a plasma by Pioneer and I could just see there was something wrong with the LCD but I didn't know how to describe it
For monitors, the initial LCDs were worse in some regards like response time, but they also were so light that you could bring your rig to a LAN party so easy it was ridiculous.
I didn't even have or really see games on an LCD until 2013 when I got a small 32" Samsung. All I remember was going "wow, so this is what HD looks like" when I hooked up the PS3 and hopped into my go-to games.
One thing that LCD enabled was sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Greater clarity of on-screen text was a major selling point.
Yes that was big
I still have a CRT tv and main a plasma tv. If things worked on my vga crt id use that too but its in storage. OLED is close enough for me to upgrade the tv but its too expensive.
My first LCD TV was a definite visual downgrade, but on the other hand, the CRT it replaced was 300lbs with no handles. Not the most fun thing to move around.
For computer monitors, people were excited to see something thin. It was futuristic and looked expensive. The fact that they ghosted like crazy was an unnoticeable tradeoff for many. They also had matte finishes back then, which people preferred over highly glossy screens.
Also, for TVs, sizes started to go up with LCDs. No one had a 42” CRT. It was too big and heavy. Once LCDs started to push sizes higher and higher it was endgame for CRT. Even a 32” CRT was too big and heavy, many people opted for small TVs since they could buy them and put them on a shelf easily. More tech interested people had bigger CRTs or crappy rear projection for size.
I don't think anyone ever bought a LCD for how the looked back then. You bought one to get a bigger screen that took up less space.
I remember vividly how sharp my first lcd monitor was compared to my viewsonic flat screen crt. But this was definitely not an early lcd, rocked the 21” crt for a good while
I remember picking up an old CRT form a friends place. It was so heavy we needed a shopping cart to move it. CRTs were never better. We knew back then the image quality was better, but the thing not weighing four times as much as a bowling ball meant it was better.
Definitely noticed the horrible black levels on the LCD but the screens were bigger at least and the strobing from the CRT wasn't there. Like a CRT at 60Hz had noticeable strobing from the low refresh rate, so I had to run at 100Hz+ by dropping the resolution on the display. Now finally I'm on OLED and loving the great black levels again with the bonus of HDR, VRR and can't notice strobing like with CRTs. Over 3000 hours as a monitor and no burn-in so far with an LG C1 TV. One downside is the subpixels are arranged left-to-right Red-White-Blue-Green while Windows generally accounts for RGB subpixels. No perfect solutions out there but Mactype seems to help text clarity with a little tweaking to it.
FOR SURE I did. When I still had my CRT screen, I remember going to Best Buy and seeing a new PC running Call of Duty on an LCD monitor and being turned off by the monitor's low response time motion blur (before knowing what that was) and how washed out it looked. Eventually I got an LCD because they were cheaper, easier to find and gave me more space on my desk.
I was definitely struggling with the transition from CRT to plasma or LCD. My first HD TV was a Samsung 1080i CRT. It was essentially defective but it was the last one our Best Buy had so I just dealt with intense warping and some poor color reproduction. When I finally jumped into plasmas I was super relieved how deep the black levels were and how nice the motion handling was. Still have 2 plasmas today.
I had a Samsung 34' CRT1080i TV and the picture on it was incredible in spite of it weighing a crap ton and it literally took 3 of us ,my Uncle ,me and my best friend to carry it down to my basement. Then when we finally got it all the way down the front side speaker panel was cracked and we had to return it in exchange for a better one and do the process all over again!
Thank God for OLED ,my 55' literally weighs as much as the inches in diameter in screen size it came in.
@@dantasticmania8728 Yeah that thing weighed like 120 pounds. And almost completely front-heavy. The most awkward lift and an absolute nightmare to move with (especially out of an upstairs apartment). Once the warping got bad enough to warrant a replacement they didn't sell them anymore so Best Buy gave me a 42" Panasonic Plasma for it instead. Grateful I can get any of our plasmas or LCD's on and off the wall without any help.
@@dantasticmania8728 660 of what weight unit?