Man, there's just something that feels so right about seeing that XP era desktop on a CRT... also seeing UT2004 running at 2048x1536 is just nuts, haha.
@@chanceForNotBeingRapper Fun fact: Those limitations were mostly imposed by digital signalling bandwidth over DVI. Technically dual-link DVI can support up to 3840 × 2400 resolution, but only at 30Hz. Maximum @60Hz for DVI is 2560 × 1600. Analogue VGA doesn't have those same bandwidth limitations.
I'm genuinely impressed at how good you were able to capture and film this CRT using a camera pointing at it. Crisp, vibrant, no reflections, perfect sync shutter speed. Just wow! It must have been a lot of BTS work. Kudos and respect.
Indeed -- and I love that he has a camera where you can adjust that with a dial. @Jérémie: Speaking of which, Clint goes into more detail on the process here, in "Recording CRT Computer Monitors" -- ua-cam.com/video/aJKV7fTJRIc/v-deo.html
It's a pain in the ass honestly. Back in the day, they usually lowered the refresh rate until it worked with cameras. I'm able to pull it off with my samsung s20 in pro mode changing the speed which my cellphone grabs the image. So you either have to muck with the refresh rate, or the camera refresh rate to get an image to come out.
Playing games on max resolution on a quality crt like this was awe inspiring. Things are so crisp, colors are so sharp and it just has a "realism" to it
Yes, you are absolutely right. The games and colors pop out of the screen, motion is clear, even moving text. Truly immersive. Only OLED is just catching up in terms of color, contrast and response time, but sample-and-hold is still a limitation of all newer technologies.
I have a 20 inch color control monitor. Gaming on that takes a pisser on most if not all modern screens. The color depth is out of this world and it's superior to anything i've seen so far. It's nearly 18 years old now. :))
The hospital I work at used to use these as their CT monitors. When they discarded them in 2006 I signed 3 of them out. I shared the haul with a couple of friends and kept one for myself. It was the best monitor I had owned up until that point and I used it daily for the next 5 years.
@@cosettapessa6417 shut your stupid self up you know nothing about what burn is. You have to have something on the same part of the screen for months if not years to have a noticeable burn in. Stop while your at it
Man, some of those end-of-life CRTs were just jaw-droppingly good. I've also been searching for a high-end vintage CRT for years, but have had no luck. Admittedly I haven't tried being a successful UA-camr with an enthusiastic fanbase.
Had one just like this one in 2005. They're nice. I like the birds logo on the side of the top of the monitor. It just that I had a crappy desktop. lol😆
damn, this is the kind of CRT that you got in the mid-2000's that pushed back adopting LCDs for a LONG time. Those late CRT models were so fucking sick, I wish options still existed, I would love to have a modern CRT integrated into my system
The price to make them these days means we'll never see them again, LCD panels for a manufacturer are basically dirt cheap to buy. It's sad that they're gone but the used market will always be there
How about a 32" widescreen CRT. It would require a forklift to move, and a desk made out of cinder blocks and 2x12s. I'm on a HP Pavilion 27xw that I bought in September of 2015 and I can't imagine going back to a 4:3 CRT after this spoiling of my visual sense. I'm sure some tech snobs will be along shortly to inform me about what a hunk of junk my monitor is, but I'm more than satisfied.
I was forced to abandon CRT a few years ago. My FW900 died in 2014 (I'm hoping I can fix it), and the 22" FP1350X I was using afterward starting smoking in 2018 (I don't allow smoking in the house). I'm hoping I can fix it, too. CRTs are still a necessity for vintage console gaming/emulation. At any rate, I was forced to get something ASAP, and the only display solution that would come close to serving as a reasonable replacement for CRT without costing tens of thousands of dollars was OLED, so I bought a 55" 4K OLED55B7A. And by the way: Over 10,000 hours as a Windows monitor with _ZERO_ image retention/burn-in._ It's all about proper operating procedures.
Back in the day when you had to put your computer through a major upgrade every 2 years if you wanted to run the latest games (not run at ultra max settings, but simply RUN period), there was a popular saying that despite how fast systems became obsolete, "A good monitor lasts forever."
I definitely have mixed feelings about that. On one hand it was crazy seeing 3d graphics evolve at a breakneck speed, but being a kid on the poorer side I constantly felt left out, by the time I finally could afford an upgrade it would be mere months before it started to lag behind. Nowadays things feel more relaxed, I just retired an 8 year old pc and put together a new one that I'm sure will last me around the same time. Even if I upgrade the gpu at some point, the rest of the system will probably still keep up.
That's why I get a good laugh at these people using something like a 1080ti in 2024 and crying they can't max a game at 1440p or get 60fps. Shit back in the day we had to upgrade just to play like you said. Things were changing so much and so fast then. Being able to play the latests games on several generation old hardware is a great thing for your wallet....kinda sucks for the advancement of games but they are so damn expensive to make these days I knew we would eventually get to a point of where advancement was slowed way down.
Just goes to show that despite the improvements of LCD technology and the specific ways that it is better than a CRT, there are key areas that we STILL are playing catch up to and may never actually get better than compared to where CRT technology was when it was being phased out.
I haven't seen one in person but I hear really good things about some of the Laser projectors saying they can rival CRT color reproduction as well as blacks and response times. Maybe we'll get all those benefits of CRT's back again if/when prices drop for people to start adopting the tech. I still have my Sony GDM-F520 to hold me over until then.
@@Slay1337pl Really just motion persistence. But OLED has BFI which realistically catches up to CRT for the most part. Theres also multiscan support but integer scaling works well these days or even technologies like DLSS. Speaking from someone who has a 48C1 OLED and a Sony FW900.
The golden era of CRTs. I miss my Dell FD Trinitrons I had - a pair of 19” displays my G4 Mac could drive at 2304x1792 with a modified GeForce 6200. As far as the blurry picture goes, you might want to check the caps on the power and analog boards.
Fun fact: POD (Planet of Death) had copyrighted the use of the word “Pod” in any form of interactive entertainment, which is why Star Wars couldn’t give their pod racer video game the obvious title of “Star Wars *Pod* Racer,” and had to just go with “Star Wars Racer.”
I have a PF 795 and it will do 1920x1440 at 100hz. It's not "perfect flat" and it's only 19 inches but it's glorious! I love hooking it up to a modern GPU and playing modernish FPS games with it. It is competitive and fun!
The thing that especially always drew me to CRT's was that really nice image quality and basically instant response time. Even nowadays, I could run a game at 800x600 or 640x480 and it'd still look better than 720p does on a 24 inch display. Also, nice to see you round here Timmy! Hope alls going well. 🙏
@@FinnLovesFP *"Even nowadays, I could run a game at 800x600 or 640x480 and it'd still look better than 720p does..."* And on top of that, at those resolutions you can display at 160 or 170 Hz on a good CRT.
When you started HL2 and mentioned the refresh rate being "smoother than smooth" you are so so right. I have a 200hz and a 360hz modern display on my main desktop, but when I swap to a 120hz retro crt it feels incredible, an actual tangible difference. It has to be the input lag that makes it just feel smoother or something, it's hard to explain just how it feels.
*"It has to be the input lag that makes it just feel smoother or something, it's hard to explain just how it feels."* It's probably not the zero input latency---it's almost certainly the fact that the CRT has literally _zero_ Eye Tracking Motion Blur at any framerate. On a Sample and Hold display, you have to waste CPU/GPU power pushing _double_ the framerate/refresh rate just to _halve_ the ETMB. So at 240 Hz/fps the ETMB is 25% of what it is at 60 Hz/fps, but it's _still_ far above the _zero_ ETMB of a CRT. I have a feeling that a lot of people think that the reason that higher refresh rates are better on LCD is because of increased temporal resolution, whereas what they _really_ like is the lower ETMB. In other words, I think a lot of people don't realize that refresh rate/framerate and ETMB are not _necessarily_ linked. On a CRT you have zero ETMB even at 24 Hz/fps ... so you can game at 60 fps, and instead of wasting processing power on a higher framerate trying to reduce ETMB, you can spend that power on things like resolution, settings, _true_ AA, FOV, etc. This of course goes for any display technology that pulses the image instead of using Sample and Hold, though to date the only techs that have a short enough pulse to deliver zero ETMB are CRT and Plasma.
Very cool to see a high-end 21" CRT still working well in 2022, filmed in such beautiful 4K 60. I bought a Sony GDM-F500 in late 1998, when it first came out, and really loved it, with its 0.22 mm grille pitch and 160 Hz max refresh rate. (This was a big jump for me, coming from a Sony CPD-1304.) I used EnTech PowerStrip to create lots of custom modes; my GPU's RAMDAC at the time couldn't reach the monitor's full capabilities, but eventually I had one that let me push it everywhere from 928×696 160Hz to 2560×1920 60Hz. I also bought a Sony GDM-FW900 in 2002, and pushed that everywhere from 1088×696 160Hz to 2736×1710 60Hz. I also found that I could adjust the monitor settings to get a perfect black level, although it was then difficult to get an accurate gamma curve (eventually I had a GPU that could apply a 10bit LUT to the analog DVI-I output, but by then, I was already using an LCD as my primary monitor anyway). What I hated is that both monitors would only remember my settings for up to 10 modes, and beyond that would start forgetting them. I always carefully adjusted every mode to perfectly fill the rectangular viewing area of the monitor (including pincushion, keystone, etc.), which took a significant amount of time, so this was very annoying. Why did both $2000 monitors have to cheap out so much on their amount of nonvolatile memory? I also found the FW900's OSC UI to be much worse than the earlier F500's. So I'd be really curious to know, how many modes' settings can other high-end 21"+ monitors, such as the ViewSonic G220fb, remember at once? Neither Sony monitor lasted for very long, developing quirky problems - such as gradually drifting way out of focus then snapping back into focus, only to start drifting again; or falling out of color alignment, such that I could carefully use my giant NdFeB magnet to fix the color purity, but the next time it degaussed it'd go back into the bad alignment; or, on my FW900, acting like its joystick was being phantom-pushed in a particular direction, dependent on the temperature of the monitor. I eventually e-wasted both, and bought a used FW900 (for far less than I'd bought my original). It eventually went bad too. The worst things about modern monitors are 1) Almost none of them have a bright stroboscopic refresh mode to mimic the ultra-low persistence of CRTs; 2) Almost all these days have an antiglare coating that introduces angle-dependent photographic noise into the image, whereas glossy monitors don't have this problem - but even glossy LCDs lack the anti-reflective coating that the Sony GDM-F500 and GDM-FW900 had (which darkened reflections immensely, with the remaining reflection being blue or violet tinted); 3) Only OLEDs can get the perfect black levels that were achievable on CRTs. It's a shame that CRTs stopped being developed; I think they had a potential to be even greater than they were at their peak. I did some experiments on my GDM-FW900 (when it still worked) that strongly suggested that with the right signal processing (pulsing a black signal between every pixel), it would have been possible to individually address its individual aperture grille stripes, making them act like nearly perfectly focused pixels in the horizontal direction. (This would of course require precise adjustment to compensate for the geometric distortion, but maybe this could even be done adaptively.) The monitor I'm using now is an Acer ET430K. I overclock it to 63 Hz, and go down to 24 Hz to watch movies/shows, or 60 Hz to watch footage from my Panasonic GH5. Eventually I'd really like to get something 120 Hz or higher, but I haven't been able to justify it yet, so I really miss having had that back when my CRTs worked.
There's LPD, which uses a laser to excite phosphors instead of an electron beam; I think that's an exciting option. Said to use 75% less energy for a 25" square tile than an equivalent LED display.
it is weird the completely phased them out and not at least keeping them as a speciality, high-end item for people like us. i hated switching over to lcd, it was such a downgrade!
Hey LGR - The Blurriness can be attributed to a weak tube (not really "weak" but just not being used for a while). The more the monitor is used, the stronger the tube sharpness will get naturally unless you want to mess with high voltage + use a degaussing coil.
@@jaapaap123 Not always, sometimes problems with focus can be attributed to a problem with the yoke or possibly the deflection IC going out. Hitachi's and mitsubishi rear projection tvs were infamous for this issue.
That's 30kg of absolute cathode ray bliss. I had that USB thing populated, I think it was mostly used for controlling the OSD settings via software. I guess it might've had a hub too, not sure. Anyway this was an absolute beast of a thing for FPS games. Quake 3, UT2k4, CS 1.6 all at 120hz or better, heck yeah. Speaking of which, more Q3 in your demos please!
I was on the hunt for a cheap CRT last year, went to a few GoodWill stores, but didnt find one. On my way home, there was a TV sitting out by someones driveway that said free. Turned around and grabbed it...barely...free 27" Sharp flatscreen CRT. Nearly got a hernia getting it into the truck, but totally worth it.
Yeah flat crt's are heavy. Used to have to move 21" Trinitron crt's at my work when people moved desks and we joked that they were 100lbs... Looked up the specs and they were like 78. Insane for such a small display. I also have a roughly 27" Trinitron tv and it's a hunk of lead too, probably weighs as much as the one you picked up.
I actually did get a hernia moving a Kyle 21 inch PC CRT down some very steep stairs, even though I had help from another person. Watch out folks, these things can hurt you!
I've never wanted a CRT monitor more - or thought one was legitimately stunning, aesthetically and spec/performance wise, until this glorious day! Thanks for the knowledge nugget, Clint - what a piece of kit. "More real than real. Smoother than smooth." - LGR, 2022
Look for the Sony Trinitron monitors too. I used to have a 21" dell p1110 and it was a wonderful monitor. They were all over my office, really wished I had saved one.
@@volvo09 I miss my old CRT monitors as well, especially the fact that I never had to mess with any settings, things just looked good. Wish I could say the same about my fancypants 4k monitor.
@@TNSign I don't think I'll love a monitor again until I get a real high end one. I have a 24" HP 4k monitor that I oddly found on the side of the road with some other junk 2 years ago! and almost drove by thinking it was yet another "office" 1080 monitor. But its nothing awesome color wise. If oled monitors were a common thing and were reliable then I can see myself falling in love with one of them. But I know the burn in would be insane. There is also a somewhat rare 24" widescreen Trinitron CRT monitor out there, I think it was Sony branded, id have to look up the model number. Id love to come across one of them!
I had an LG Flatron T910B 19 inch monitor I bought in 2004 - that was a gorgeous monitor that I used daily at 1280x1024 @ 85Hz until it died in 2014 or so - I still miss it! The Viewsonic looks like an amazing monitor - thanks to Mitch for providing it and Clint for reviewing it!
The "smoother thn smooth" "realism" is almost definitely the low-persistence of the CRT. Even OLEDs, with instant response times, still have significant persistence blur. The motion clarity of a CRT can only be matched on OLED/LCD with strobing backlight techniques (aka lightboost, blur reduction, black frame insertion) that are available on high-end gaming monitors, but even those have crosstalk issues, because the backlight flashes all at once, but the LCD pixels update in a rolling scan (much like the phosphor beam of a CRT).
@@shanroxalot5354 No, electrical crosstalk occurs because the power and signal to drive each pixel on LCD/OLED are conducted through thin wires of transparent metal, which isn't a very good conductor. As pixels are refreshed, electrical crosstalk can cause signal leakage to be stored in adjacent pixels, particularly along the same row and column. OLEDs are worse in that because they're emissive, each pixel draws a lot more power, which can cause sag on the power lines, and therefore a whole row/column to appear dimmer: I have a radar detector with a cheap OLED that's really bad at this.
@@straightpipediesel "Strobe crosstalk" is what they call the phenomenon of when a strobing backlight fails to perfectly capture a full refresh and you end up with information from more than one refresh in each strobe, which is different from electrical crosstalk. LCDs with high response times in some color transitions can also cause double-images. OLEDs tend to strobe very cleanly, not exhibiting either of these issues. The issue with OLEDs is that you lose a lot of brightness in the process.
OLEDs do not have instant response times, they are just very low response times and they are also sample and hold screens which is the primary cause of perceived motion blur.
OLEDs are superior to CRTs. Pixel response time is much higher, since it takes time for phosphor to stop glowing. Even 60 FPS feels a bit choppy, while 24 Hz movies display same way as on old analog movie projectors. The only advantage CRTs have is how they can display different resolutions while OLEDs have just one native one. Yet with 4K panels it's rarely an issue. I have 19" LG Flatron CRT that can do 2048x1536 60Hz and 1600x1200 at 85Hz. Yet it's mostly comparable to plasma TVs while OLED is clearly superior. Also good HDR LCDs will be better for modern content.
I had a 21" CRT something like this back in the XP days. One problem is you couldn't always use it at highest resolution in some games because UI and text scaling wasn't really common yet.
@@World_of_OSes It was only displayed at its maximum resolution. This means, it was not displayed proportionally if resolution was increased. Thus it was less functional.
@@Trikipum "NO SCALING" Yes, and we are talking about the UI here. As the resolution is increased in most older games, the UI shrinks to unreadability.
For perspective, this is the same resolution that normal-sized iPads had from 2012 (when they introduced the "Retina screen" with twice the resolution of the previous model) to 2019 (when they made the screen and the entire device ever so slightly bigger for some reason, maybe so they could sell everyone new cases). In those days there were very few options for UI upscaling; you could select a larger size for desktop icons and bigger fonts, as well as zoom your web browser in, but I think that was about it.
I had one of those higher end CRT monitors and when I decided to switch to a flat screen because people were so in love with those, I was sooo sad. The high framerate and high resolution were and still are a must. They should keep making those, I'm sure if people can go past the idea that old=worst they would sell quite a lot.
climate change pushers are the biggest reason why CRT died not size etc because if that were to be true everyones TV right now would be replaced by short throw projectors.
You could show LGR a calculator from the 90s and Clint could make an hour long video talking about it, in fact I think he did that already. Thats why I love watching LGR. This mans passion for tech is unparalleled.
@@Psythik I'm looking it on CRT trinitron flat, only 17'' , but anyway. Can confirm, black is black, and it looks so good. Would love to see some videos on youtube, how good it looks, would be suprised. Particulary gaming ones at 60fps.
I had a 21" Viewsonic CRT at work back in the early/mid 2000s. I don't know if this is the same one or not. But it was super impressive. I really wish I could have gamed on it.
I remember buying a very similar CRT in like 2000, I was proud of it because it was my first "major" purchase made with my own money, it was like $800 at the time. It weighed 80 lbs, luckily I was younger and in good shape, I would lug it to college and then back hope for spring winter and summer break. It looked so good though, I think I used it up until like 2008, there was just no reason to replace it. Worked perfectly, sharp clear and bright. Only issue was I needed to get good desks that could support the weight without bending. I used to laugh at the people with LCDs, "enjoy your 1024 by 768 dull screen"
I kept my 21" crt until 2011. I really loved it! Except the space it needed on my work bench. It was for a long time a better gaming option than any lcd of the time.
That really is the bane of keeping CRTs. I have a few and really should only keep like 2-3, and even that takes up so much space. I've like VGAs for that reason tho - small, light and high quality picture (thanks to GBS C I can use retro component/RGB consoles on them too)
What? Thats like saying "I really miss those wonderful HDD's. There's just something about spinning a disk at 5500 rpms! Man the good ole days!" "srew these SSD's" CRT's suck and they destroy your eyes. The only thing they are better at is playing old games. Its like an old game console, they look better on the old TV's, but that doesn't make an old crt better than led, lcd, etc. Plasmas are terrible too.
@@farandwide7176 Are you crazy? that's a completely different comparison. LCD is a 'does the job' technology. LCD looks like a crap, you can't even get an LCD that doesn't have some sort of backlight bleed and they still make panels with horrible pixel response times, for what reason I don't know. OLED is the closest replacement, but they do eventually end up with burn in, so we're stuck LCD garbage. If you can't see the issues with LCD panels you need your eyes checked, honestly
@@farandwide7176 switching from crt to lcd was like switching from ssd to hdd because its cheaper to make. LCD is crap, unusable for anytthing but office and light webbrowsing, im glad OLED is here finally
I used a giant CRT during college because in the early 2000s LCD screens seemed so washed out and blurry by comparison. I didn't have this exact monitor, I had a 21" Mitsubishi from the same time as this one. That thing looked so good! It was so heavy, though. Trying to drag that thing to LAN parties in college was so hard. Good memories, though.
I used to have a21" ViewSonic I found at a thrift store for $20. I think it was the previous model to this, since I got it around '03. Wasn't quite as high-res but it did have a ridiculous refresh rate. I loved it, it was the most accurate monitor for photo editing I've ever had. Degaussing it was fun, 15" monitors just make a tiny lil' "snap" sound, that thing sounded like hitting a bass guitar with a baseball bat.
I used a g90f+ until 2014... I ran it at 1920x1440, and the image quality was way better than any LCD or OLED on the market even today. Sad that all these years later, we only start to approximate the quality and crispness with hacks like "Black Frame insertion".
Love your enthusiasm. You really get it across so well. My inner 20 year old is insanely jealous. I had a Sony Trinity's (predictive text DOH!!!) But never had the hardware to back it up. Now I have a triple 28" screen sim racing setup with the hardware to back it up. Back then things were very expensive. How things have changed over the years.
I kinda wish I could do comparison today, as going from a 120Hz LCD to a 120Hz OLED makes a HUGE difference, and logically a CRT should appear even smoother. Though its perhaps best I can't, I have a floating display arm so nowhere to put a CRT.
Holy shit that monitor looks amazing, with specs to back it up too I have one of those LCDs you showed from just a little bit beyond that period, vx924 display and yeah just image quality wise doesn't compare to a crt like that, even a Sony e220 from 2000 can outdo it in image quality
Awesome video! I have a 19" ViewSonic and I loved playing games on that back in the day. I still have the monitor as well as my old Dell with a Pentium III 750mhz with a 3DFx VooDoo 5 graphics card. Windows XP too and I loved playing Midtown Madness, Quake games, etc. This video brings back the memories.
I remember seeing a very nice ViewSonic CRT monitor at Best Buy back in the 2000's, not only did it have a nice looking screen but has S-Video input which would have been nice for the game consoles I had at the time. View Sonic also had S-Video to VGA converters too. I would definitely would love to have a CRT monitor like that for my current PC for running old GOG games...
Some of these old viewsonics's had touch screen. Just a few years ago we had one in our shop and I found out about it's touch screen capabilities and set it up to work. It worked through the rs232 port!
I was able to pickup a super-low hour of this exact model about 2 months ago and i freaking love it. It replaced 1440p 165hz acer as my main monitor. I was also able to pickup at A91f+ for a second monitor. I’m in love
I can't believe how awesome the image on this monitor is. The high refresh rate feels completely different unlike nowadays with cheap VA panels or higher quality IPS ones.
Flawless review. I miss my CRTs. I had few 17 inch Sony trinitron, and (1) 19' KDS monitor that reach same resolution you showing here. Amazing monitor. Windows Xp was the best os for gaming ever. My fav games was unreal tournaments, quake 1,2, 3, half life 1,2, counter strike and more. Thanks for sharing 👍
I had a Mitsubishi Diamondtron 22" in the early 2000's, maxing out at 1600x1200 IIRC. I really regret not having it anymore. Although I still have a 17" Iiyama with BNC input (and that BNC cable). Cannot say I miss the geometry issues of the CRT era though
So envious of LGRs setup. Would love to have such a retro-gaming system with a good crt monitor. Looking at the games LGR had installed brought back so many memories, and longing for those games, and time when I used to play them.
Makes me long for my Viewsonic P810. It was a 21" monitor that I bought for $1700 in the late 1990s (97? 99?). It was fantastic, I really got to use all of my 3dfx Voodoo card. Sadly, I took it to an electronics recycler about 6 years ago when I moved. I wish I would've known about your channel back then!
I remember right around the time this monitor came out, the first commercial flat screen LCD with high brightness came out, and I can't remember the brand. I do remember Thresh's Firing squad did a review of it and I wanted one so bad. Funny how times change. I'd much prefer this CRT obviously
I remember "back in the day" I would happily exchange higher resolution size for higher refresh rate. Even after I switched to an LCD for my main monitor, I use to pick up (then) lower-cost CRTs to use as secondary displays and would get quite sick to my stomach having them in my peripheral vision if they were running at anything less than 85Hz (and higher was of course better.)
Yes! CRT Magic! Great video as always. Loving every second of this as I watch on my 17 inch AOC CRT. I'm experiencing the blurryness in certain areas of my monitor like you discussed here. Though it was just my eyes. Glad to know I'm not alone.
I had the 19 inch version of this IIRC. The contrast boost and high refresh put it way ahead of early LCDs, which back then were really more of a gimmick than anything else. 20 years on I shake my head when gamerz get hyped for high refresh rates when they've been around for decades.
I remember my first (and last) 21" flat screen monitor I got to play FFXI back in 2004. Weighed north of 100lbs, believe it was a Sony refurb. Such a champ.
8:46 That is excellent linearity. It might not seem that great compared to perfect linearity on LCD, but wow, it didn't drift more than that over all these years? That's almost hard to believe.
Fantastic looking display. I really appreciate the 4k footage of it in action, and shadow mask/aperture grille closeups too. The footage turned out great! I wish I had one of these for MiSTer since it already has a custom 2048x1536 video mode for that ridiculously low lag iPad display. Maybe give that a try with this monitor if you have a chance sometime!
I had a Compaq P1210 22" CRT and it too went up to 2048x1536. It wasn't light thought and it bent my desk over the years of owning it. I just found specs for it and it went to 160Hz on the vertical which was crazy at the time. Oh, and it had a USB hub in the stand too, at the back. Probably what the ViewSonic would have had as the option.
I remember it cost a fortune, it weighed a ton, and it looked better than any other monitor I had ever seen! And my Matrox G400 pushed it along very nicely, with a PS775 17" next-door. MMM. Dualhead! :)
Oh man, this video brings back my teenage years. I built my first PC in 2002 when I was 14 and I selected this as my display. (Actually, it was the beige, yes beige! G220f). I think it set me back $450 at the time. It was basically 1/3 of the entire budget I saved up for the build, but so, so worth the many extra lawns I had to mow and cars I had to wash to earn it. Gaming on this display in 2002 paired with an AMD Athlon XP 2000+, geforce Ti 4400, and 512 MB of DDR RAM was PC gaming heaven for the time. And to top it all off, Unreal Tournament was my game of choice back then! CRTs had their drawbacks as you mention in the video, but there really is something about the crisp, glassy smoothness they delivered that modern high refresh LCD panels with software tricks like backlight strobing attempt to, but ultimately fall short, of replicating even 20 years later. Thanks for the video. Truly a blast from the past for me.
LOL your build sounds just like mine. I ended up getting 1024 ram at some point though. In a Thermaltake big steel blue case. Actual neons in it. Ahh man remember neons lights in cases. Screw rgb. Still had my grey viewsonic monitor from back in 96 with my first comp when I was like 8 lol. The graphics card came with like 6 games. Some duke nukem platformer. Morrowind and some others. aww man the times. Mind when I got that case I had to carry it about 2 miles walking and on 2 different busses from the shop. Weighed a ton and I was like 13 at the time lol. Thing gave me many a cut. Mind how pathetic the graphics cards looked lol. lol bright green tiny little fan with some geforce sticker on it lol. I remember when phys x originally came out about that time it was a separate card for physx specifically Think Mafia was like one of the only games to support it lol. Saw a video of some bricks breaking in game blew my mind.
@@オールマイト-y1f Yes, but even PS2 had only rich kids and it was time when salary was like 1/2 or 1/3 of today salary. That computer (with screen included) had to cost like 2000 USD in 2002. PS2 was definitely not that expensive, if I remember, it was like 600 dollars or something like that, maybe even less.
@@Pidalin Like I said, That build which I also had was about 400. It wasn't the best of parts at the time. The monitor was probably the same cost as the computer at the time. Which with some extras would have been about 1000. And I lived in one of the most deprived areas there is. And there were plenty of kids with PS2's. So not really sound logic that. A rich kid would have been getting a 9 grand Alienware at the time. Not building there own system with those parts. They were only partly decent. His monitor was overkill for it. Plus you have no idea how he got the money to actually pay for it. Also even if he was a rich kid. Good for him. Glad his parents had their heads screwed on.
I'm 62 and very much enjoy your videos! I've had all the versions of xbox and PC platforms for game playing. Video games keep you your at hart. Thank you! By the way, I just purchased a pre-owned EVGA Geforce GTX 1080 TI SC2. Love it on my 43" 4K HDR screen!
This thing is amazing, man I forgot how HEAVY CRT's were! I had a 19' and even that felt great in the early 2000s but this? WOW! And I 100% agree on what you were saying about lower resolutions on larger more capable monitors. You don't always need to have the max available resolution ya know! Honestly, some of the older games actually look better that way. Take RTS games for example. The lower the resolution, the larger all of the units and the details of everything is. When you go 1920x1080 everything is so tiny and yeah it's nice strategically to not have to scroll around but, I never like to go that big very often for those games that scale like this.
@@deleted61-y9y Lol Idk what that means, it's not that long of a comment, look up and down here at the other comments... people have a lot to say to LGR!
I was lucky enough to have purchased the Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2060U. That 75lb beast was the best of the best same top resolution. Best monitor I've ever owned. I still have the thing set up for retro gaming.
I still have my Sony GDM-F520 from 2000 and it's still in great shape. It sat in storage in southern California for 10 years but I hauled everything out of storage a few years ago and moved it to the east coast. After using LCD's for 10 years seeing this thing running games was truly an eye opener of just how smooth and responsive CRT's are compared to LCD's. I have not found an LCD display that can compare. I have a 32" 1440P, 144Hz LCD display that still doesn't display games as fluid, or with the color clarity, response time, and brightness of the F520. The desk real estate to have one is certainly an issue but overall I wouldn't trade it for any LCD I've seen yet. I've heard Laser Projectors are the next best thing.
21:20 The Craziness of Resolution, Crisp Graphics, High Texture Details, Insane FPS enables Clint to headshot without using rifle scope... Dang... You must me crazy rich back then to have this kind of PC, congrats LGR for a great experience and thanks for sharing it! =D
I was so incredibly blessed back in 2000 when my dad had to reorganize an office space and threw out all 'old' crts (just 1 year old), all 21" trinitron screens. I was just 17 years old and had 10+ of those screens for free. I gave some away to friends and sold some, I remember the great experience of playing Quake2 at 1536p at 75Hz, or 800x600 at 200Hz around the year 2001. Used that monitor for over 10 years until it finally broke. Not many really have the experience of how extremely good those monitors were. I also was quite bummed out when I finally had to take the step to LCD in 2011 and was not impressed at all. Slow, 60Hz bad scaling and everything.. and that was a High end screen. I wish I still had a screen like Clint has now, prices are going through the roof though. I remember the days when all these 21" CRT's went for just about 50 Euro's 2nd hand, just a couple of years after I sold some for over 500+ Euro's a piece.
@@stefankoopmans2200 Here in Philippines, your consider a rich kid if you have LCD Monitor in the early to late 2000s, so CRT is the norm from '17-'19. Then early 2010s came, the turning point to LCD Display, which sucks up until now where to match the crisp display of a Basic CRT back then, you must spend even more today for a LED Display... Ah, good old simple days... =)
I was running a Hitachi SuperScan Elite 751 Clone: Hewlett Packard M900, 19" CRT and then upgraded to a Sony CPM-G500 OEM: Dell P1110, 21" CRT around this time. Finally satisfied with LCD's when my NEC LCD2490WUXi H-IPS LCD @ 1920x1200, calibrated via Eye-One Display LT/SpectraViewII came out. Prior 1280 and 1024 resolutions were the popular (and still popular) maxes of many LCDs. After a 4K laptop, I hate working on the typical 1080p laptops. I did try to order many GDM-FW900's 22.5" viewable 16:10 display with 2304x1440 max resolution @ 80Hz 2048x1280 max refresh @ 85Hz especially since there were many nearby in Orlando. Sadly shippers destroyed everyone I got and/or many were shipping fakes so I gave up on my 24" CRT search. It was like 110lbs not packaged. Still their job is to deliver things. I wish I had one. I actually built a 3" deep desk in my college apartment to accommodate it.
The GDM-FW900 could actually do far beyond 2304×1440. I ran mine at 2736×1710 60Hz to view DSLR photos. Sadly, it stopped working many years ago (both my original one bought in 2002, and the used one I bought to replace it).
I still have my old ViewSonic and won't give it up. The blacks are so good, old games look perfect and it has that comforting hum and satisfying click when in it goes into power savings. Mine isn't as cool as yours though, only 120Hz and office space beige. Make sure you have a solid desk and not some Ikea computer desk.
That's brutal! Man I thought my 21" IBM P275 was badass with its 1920 x 1440 / 75 Hz (or 1600 x 1200 / 85 Hz), I love your retrospective goodness videos, Clint!
I had the Samsung SyncMaster competitor to this (it had a flat screen and could do 2048x1536 too, gasp!) at the same time period. It perished in November 2021 in a flood, but was able to do the same resolutions etc with a modern-day computer - I used it to watch rescanned 4:3 TV shows in HD, it was awesome! I miss it so much. This reminded me of the good days of that monitor, because it was truly creesp and sharp and just, yeah. Thanks, Clint :)
I had this exact monitor back in the day. It was the reason I was relatively late in getting into the flat panel LCD displays. Was hard to give it up. Looking back, I should have kept it. It was just so big, and so heavy.
I actually think that CRTs are still pretty good. I mean, I have a game room and the TV I use for it is a Panasonic CRT that goes up to 1080p and it looks really good 👍. It has HDMI so I even use all of my normal consoles with it and it's awesome! 😎.
I wonder if the difference between the 180Hz and 170Hz is actual, or just a difference in something like counting the blanking interval or something in how it's displayed.
21" crt monitors are awesome. I picked up an SGI GDM-5021PT (charcoal coloured) a few years ago for free and it is the crown jewel of my crt collection. Always on the lookout for more of these things but I've yet to see another one come up in my area.
I used a CRT at my university. A friend asked if it was slow or caused lag when gaming. I told him it was faster than any modern TV monitor and that CRTs are constantly refreshing. His mind was blown.
My friend fixed color problems on his CRT tv once. He cycled storing it on its face then back, and even used magnets attached to a drill spinning in front of the screen to eventually clear it.
NEVER STORE A CRT ON ITS FACE! You will damage it, the glass sorta just sits on top of the frame of the tube on a loose seal and pushes against the apeture grille or shadow mask depending, and will warp it. That'll ruin your colours The drill trick is fine though, it's a flashy and unnecessary way to degauss but it is very very fun. I've def used it in the past. I reckon Clint's tube has been dropped on its corner hard at one point, I know for a fact he manually degausses using an external wand etc.
I was extremely surprised to see the max power consumption on this beauty is only 115w, I was expecting almost double that. EDIT: My old ass 2008 26 inch LG tv uses 130w, mental.
I recall a college lecturer saying that a CRT was one of the most efficient light sources. Thinking about it the phosphor used isn't much different from a CFL light bulb. Early LCDs used CCFLs but the LCD then absorbed most of the light.
I'm running a CRT as a secondary monitor and I use it exclusively for gaming and video, even with my cheap adapter I'm driving that Dell P992 with Trinitron tube 1280x1024@85Hz, though it can do happily with a proper analog output 1600x1200@86Hz. Text and static images are waayy better on a LCD, but with graphics and stuff that actually moves, the tube is unbeatable. Revisiting Start Wars Racer and man is that thing smooth on the CRT.
It's actually funny my brother had one of these he used for years, and then once they went out of style you couldn't pay someone to take them away. Once the LED monitors hit a few years later around 06-08, it was ancient technology.
I love how crisp and sharp the image is, despite running on lower resolutions. I wonder how modern games would look on this screen, with that 180Hz refresh rate...
180 Hz is kind of unnecessary on a CRT because it doesn't have the sample and hold problems of a flat panel. You can run it around 90-100 Hz and it's plenty smooth. In terms of modern games they look pretty great but there are some issues. Some games like Elden Ring will refuse to run at anything other than 16:9 aspect ratio unless you hack them, so you lose the use of a lot of the screen. The other big problem is the phosphor trails that you can see in areas where there is a high contrast between light and dark. Some people might think these look cool, but in terms of image accuracy it's a problem. Finally, there is a trade off between glare and brightness. If you have a CRT with an anti glare cover it will be fairly dim in a bright room compared to a modern display, and if you take it off it'll be bright but there will be tons of glare on the screen from any other light sources.
CRTs always produced a better picture with almost no response lag but I don’t miss their bulky sizes, power use and geometry issues. I would love to see some company build a modern CRT with the latest tech advances though.
SED TVs had promised to be just that. Sadly Canon abandoned it and I think due to the patents no one else has bothered to do R&D for it. One can only hope
I recently got myself a SyncMaster 700b, and it's not quite as extravagant as yours, but it just feels AWESOME to use. I currently have my Mac mini hooked up to it, running macOS Monterey, sitting on top of the monitor, on a 90's CRT shelf in matching beige with a set of old IBM PC speakers, a nice beige mechanical keyboard and the A500 mini optical mouse to complete the 90's esthetic (who needs scroll functionality anyway?). I'm a millennial, so having a boomer setup like this makes me feel like being back before the zombie apocalypse. Having a setup like this at home, while getting rid of the iPhone and switching to a feature phone honestly just makes me feel like I actually belong in my own world again. Like, I don't feel totally foreign to everything, which is a huge relief. Sometimes it's the little things that can make a big difference. You could say I'm just getting old, and that would be true, but I don't think that makes it any less valuable. Isn't it interesting that lots of young people who grew up with iPhones are now switching to feature phones? There is a real human need for simplicity and familiarity. Some call it boring, I call it tried and true. That definitely makes me sound old lol! Getting old is awesome actually, you should all try it sometime!
You think it may not come across, how good this monitor is, but seriously, I'm kinda blown away by it. It's absolutely amazing! Thanks for showing it off, now I know what I should have told my parents to buy when I was younger instead of the crappy stuff I used to have, hah.
![Radius Pivot: The Rotating CRT Monitor from 1991 [LGR Oddware]](/img/n.gif)
Man, there's just something that feels so right about seeing that XP era desktop on a CRT... also seeing UT2004 running at 2048x1536 is just nuts, haha.
The only thing it brings back is the pain of trying to adjust keystone and pincushion to get everything to look straight.
@@rubiconnn god i hated that. I always got my crt tech buddy to suffer for me with that.
I still play UT2004 on modern displays, and it looks shockingly good at high res nearly 20 years later. Still fun too!
I don't know pc at that time could run windows xp at such high res
i mean some gpu in 2013 only even supports standard 2k 16:9 2560x1440
@@chanceForNotBeingRapper Fun fact: Those limitations were mostly imposed by digital signalling bandwidth over DVI. Technically dual-link DVI can support up to 3840 × 2400 resolution, but only at 30Hz. Maximum @60Hz for DVI is 2560 × 1600. Analogue VGA doesn't have those same bandwidth limitations.
I'm genuinely impressed at how good you were able to capture and film this CRT using a camera pointing at it. Crisp, vibrant, no reflections, perfect sync shutter speed. Just wow! It must have been a lot of BTS work. Kudos and respect.
Thank you, it took some doing!
Indeed -- and I love that he has a camera where you can adjust that with a dial.
@Jérémie: Speaking of which, Clint goes into more detail on the process here, in "Recording CRT Computer Monitors" -- ua-cam.com/video/aJKV7fTJRIc/v-deo.html
It's a pain in the ass honestly. Back in the day, they usually lowered the refresh rate until it worked with cameras. I'm able to pull it off with my samsung s20 in pro mode changing the speed which my cellphone grabs the image. So you either have to muck with the refresh rate, or the camera refresh rate to get an image to come out.
@@LGR how did you do it it? That would be a good video in itself 👌
Already made such a video! ua-cam.com/video/aJKV7fTJRIc/v-deo.html
Playing games on max resolution on a quality crt like this was awe inspiring. Things are so crisp, colors are so sharp and it just has a "realism" to it
So true… and I only ever saw 1024x768. Playing Rayman 2 at that res was amazing
Yes, you are absolutely right. The games and colors pop out of the screen, motion is clear, even moving text. Truly immersive. Only OLED is just catching up in terms of color, contrast and response time, but sample-and-hold is still a limitation of all newer technologies.
I have a 20 inch color control monitor. Gaming on that takes a pisser on most if not all modern screens. The color depth is out of this world and it's superior to anything i've seen so far. It's nearly 18 years old now. :))
@@aserta I always wondered what it would be like to game on one of my bay monitors. Are you a colorist?
I wouldn't say 'realism' but rather call it a 'gaming feel'
The hospital I work at used to use these as their CT monitors. When they discarded them in 2006 I signed 3 of them out. I shared the haul with a couple of friends and kept one for myself. It was the best monitor I had owned up until that point and I used it daily for the next 5 years.
No burn in?
Awesome!
@@cosettapessa6417 no....
@@furriesinouterspaceUnited you can’t know. Just shut it 😂
@@cosettapessa6417 shut your stupid self up you know nothing about what burn is. You have to have something on the same part of the screen for months if not years to have a noticeable burn in. Stop while your at it
Man, some of those end-of-life CRTs were just jaw-droppingly good. I've also been searching for a high-end vintage CRT for years, but have had no luck. Admittedly I haven't tried being a successful UA-camr with an enthusiastic fanbase.
Oh man, those early 2000s viewsonic CRTs are definitely nostalgic for me, especially running on equivalent computers of the Era
Who doesn’t love the sound of a good degauss?
It's pronounced "gif"
Had one just like this one in 2005. They're nice. I like the birds logo on the side of the top of the monitor. It just that I had a crappy desktop. lol😆
They were in schools everywhere I swear, even when they switched to LCDs they still had Viewsonics.
@@cherrym6262 I swear, windows XP on a pentium 4 with a beige Viewsonic CRTs must be huge mid/late 2000s nostalgia for a lot of people
damn, this is the kind of CRT that you got in the mid-2000's that pushed back adopting LCDs for a LONG time. Those late CRT models were so fucking sick, I wish options still existed, I would love to have a modern CRT integrated into my system
The price to make them these days means we'll never see them again, LCD panels for a manufacturer are basically dirt cheap to buy. It's sad that they're gone but the used market will always be there
Yep. One of the reasons I still keep a (very heavy) 1080i CRT in my setup. So great for games from the late CRT, early LCD era
How about a 32" widescreen CRT. It would require a forklift to move, and a desk made out of cinder blocks and 2x12s. I'm on a HP Pavilion 27xw that I bought in September of 2015 and I can't imagine going back to a 4:3 CRT after this spoiling of my visual sense. I'm sure some tech snobs will be along shortly to inform me about what a hunk of junk my monitor is, but I'm more than satisfied.
I was forced to abandon CRT a few years ago. My FW900 died in 2014 (I'm hoping I can fix it), and the 22" FP1350X I was using afterward starting smoking in 2018 (I don't allow smoking in the house). I'm hoping I can fix it, too. CRTs are still a necessity for vintage console gaming/emulation.
At any rate, I was forced to get something ASAP, and the only display solution that would come close to serving as a reasonable replacement for CRT without costing tens of thousands of dollars was OLED, so I bought a 55" 4K OLED55B7A.
And by the way: Over 10,000 hours as a Windows monitor with _ZERO_ image retention/burn-in._ It's all about proper operating procedures.
@@bricaaron3978 That's quite the workstation monitor size!!!
Back in the day when you had to put your computer through a major upgrade every 2 years if you wanted to run the latest games (not run at ultra max settings, but simply RUN period), there was a popular saying that despite how fast systems became obsolete, "A good monitor lasts forever."
big thumb up!
I definitely have mixed feelings about that. On one hand it was crazy seeing 3d graphics evolve at a breakneck speed, but being a kid on the poorer side I constantly felt left out, by the time I finally could afford an upgrade it would be mere months before it started to lag behind. Nowadays things feel more relaxed, I just retired an 8 year old pc and put together a new one that I'm sure will last me around the same time. Even if I upgrade the gpu at some point, the rest of the system will probably still keep up.
@@NebachadnezzaR gtx 1650 and 1080 TI are still good gpu's
That's why I get a good laugh at these people using something like a 1080ti in 2024 and crying they can't max a game at 1440p or get 60fps. Shit back in the day we had to upgrade just to play like you said. Things were changing so much and so fast then. Being able to play the latests games on several generation old hardware is a great thing for your wallet....kinda sucks for the advancement of games but they are so damn expensive to make these days I knew we would eventually get to a point of where advancement was slowed way down.
Just goes to show that despite the improvements of LCD technology and the specific ways that it is better than a CRT, there are key areas that we STILL are playing catch up to and may never actually get better than compared to where CRT technology was when it was being phased out.
I haven't seen one in person but I hear really good things about some of the Laser projectors saying they can rival CRT color reproduction as well as blacks and response times. Maybe we'll get all those benefits of CRT's back again if/when prices drop for people to start adopting the tech. I still have my Sony GDM-F520 to hold me over until then.
oled is good for that
Can you name the key areas?
@@Slay1337pl Really just motion persistence. But OLED has BFI which realistically catches up to CRT for the most part. Theres also multiscan support but integer scaling works well these days or even technologies like DLSS. Speaking from someone who has a 48C1 OLED and a Sony FW900.
@@wormbagged I love my CRT. Held me over during the GPU price hike years at 1280x1024 😀
The golden era of CRTs. I miss my Dell FD Trinitrons I had - a pair of 19” displays my G4 Mac could drive at 2304x1792 with a modified GeForce 6200.
As far as the blurry picture goes, you might want to check the caps on the power and analog boards.
Fun fact: POD (Planet of Death) had copyrighted the use of the word “Pod” in any form of interactive entertainment, which is why Star Wars couldn’t give their pod racer video game the obvious title of “Star Wars *Pod* Racer,” and had to just go with “Star Wars Racer.”
Shows how ridiculous the patent system is when you can patent a normal word and forbid it's use.
@@dolanddrumpf6344 That's for sure.
I wonder if that patent is still valid
@@dolanddrumpf6344 meh that was definitely a mistake, someone probably got in big trouble for allowing that one through
I have a PF 795 and it will do 1920x1440 at 100hz. It's not "perfect flat" and it's only 19 inches but it's glorious! I love hooking it up to a modern GPU and playing modernish FPS games with it. It is competitive and fun!
The thing that especially always drew me to CRT's was that really nice image quality and basically instant response time. Even nowadays, I could run a game at 800x600 or 640x480 and it'd still look better than 720p does on a 24 inch display. Also, nice to see you round here Timmy! Hope alls going well. 🙏
@@FinnLovesFP *"Even nowadays, I could run a game at 800x600 or 640x480 and it'd still look better than 720p does..."*
And on top of that, at those resolutions you can display at 160 or 170 Hz on a good CRT.
I shouldn't be surprised you still have CRTs laying around, Timmy Joe haha.
When you started HL2 and mentioned the refresh rate being "smoother than smooth" you are so so right. I have a 200hz and a 360hz modern display on my main desktop, but when I swap to a 120hz retro crt it feels incredible, an actual tangible difference. It has to be the input lag that makes it just feel smoother or something, it's hard to explain just how it feels.
Input lag makes sense, at those kinds of refresh rates.
probably feels way smoother due to how much better crts handle motion
If your LCD doesn't strobe the backlight then a CRT will give smoother motion (less blur).
input lag - even if it should be very minimal with LCDs too at those refresh rates - and motion blur / ghosting, which do not happen with CRTs at all
*"It has to be the input lag that makes it just feel smoother or something, it's hard to explain just how it feels."*
It's probably not the zero input latency---it's almost certainly the fact that the CRT has literally _zero_ Eye Tracking Motion Blur at any framerate.
On a Sample and Hold display, you have to waste CPU/GPU power pushing _double_ the framerate/refresh rate just to _halve_ the ETMB. So at 240 Hz/fps the ETMB is 25% of what it is at 60 Hz/fps, but it's _still_ far above the _zero_ ETMB of a CRT.
I have a feeling that a lot of people think that the reason that higher refresh rates are better on LCD is because of increased temporal resolution, whereas what they _really_ like is the lower ETMB.
In other words, I think a lot of people don't realize that refresh rate/framerate and ETMB are not _necessarily_ linked. On a CRT you have zero ETMB even at 24 Hz/fps ... so you can game at 60 fps, and instead of wasting processing power on a higher framerate trying to reduce ETMB, you can spend that power on things like resolution, settings, _true_ AA, FOV, etc.
This of course goes for any display technology that pulses the image instead of using Sample and Hold, though to date the only techs that have a short enough pulse to deliver zero ETMB are CRT and Plasma.
Very cool to see a high-end 21" CRT still working well in 2022, filmed in such beautiful 4K 60. I bought a Sony GDM-F500 in late 1998, when it first came out, and really loved it, with its 0.22 mm grille pitch and 160 Hz max refresh rate. (This was a big jump for me, coming from a Sony CPD-1304.) I used EnTech PowerStrip to create lots of custom modes; my GPU's RAMDAC at the time couldn't reach the monitor's full capabilities, but eventually I had one that let me push it everywhere from 928×696 160Hz to 2560×1920 60Hz. I also bought a Sony GDM-FW900 in 2002, and pushed that everywhere from 1088×696 160Hz to 2736×1710 60Hz. I also found that I could adjust the monitor settings to get a perfect black level, although it was then difficult to get an accurate gamma curve (eventually I had a GPU that could apply a 10bit LUT to the analog DVI-I output, but by then, I was already using an LCD as my primary monitor anyway).
What I hated is that both monitors would only remember my settings for up to 10 modes, and beyond that would start forgetting them. I always carefully adjusted every mode to perfectly fill the rectangular viewing area of the monitor (including pincushion, keystone, etc.), which took a significant amount of time, so this was very annoying. Why did both $2000 monitors have to cheap out so much on their amount of nonvolatile memory? I also found the FW900's OSC UI to be much worse than the earlier F500's.
So I'd be really curious to know, how many modes' settings can other high-end 21"+ monitors, such as the ViewSonic G220fb, remember at once?
Neither Sony monitor lasted for very long, developing quirky problems - such as gradually drifting way out of focus then snapping back into focus, only to start drifting again; or falling out of color alignment, such that I could carefully use my giant NdFeB magnet to fix the color purity, but the next time it degaussed it'd go back into the bad alignment; or, on my FW900, acting like its joystick was being phantom-pushed in a particular direction, dependent on the temperature of the monitor. I eventually e-wasted both, and bought a used FW900 (for far less than I'd bought my original). It eventually went bad too.
The worst things about modern monitors are 1) Almost none of them have a bright stroboscopic refresh mode to mimic the ultra-low persistence of CRTs; 2) Almost all these days have an antiglare coating that introduces angle-dependent photographic noise into the image, whereas glossy monitors don't have this problem - but even glossy LCDs lack the anti-reflective coating that the Sony GDM-F500 and GDM-FW900 had (which darkened reflections immensely, with the remaining reflection being blue or violet tinted); 3) Only OLEDs can get the perfect black levels that were achievable on CRTs.
It's a shame that CRTs stopped being developed; I think they had a potential to be even greater than they were at their peak. I did some experiments on my GDM-FW900 (when it still worked) that strongly suggested that with the right signal processing (pulsing a black signal between every pixel), it would have been possible to individually address its individual aperture grille stripes, making them act like nearly perfectly focused pixels in the horizontal direction. (This would of course require precise adjustment to compensate for the geometric distortion, but maybe this could even be done adaptively.)
The monitor I'm using now is an Acer ET430K. I overclock it to 63 Hz, and go down to 24 Hz to watch movies/shows, or 60 Hz to watch footage from my Panasonic GH5. Eventually I'd really like to get something 120 Hz or higher, but I haven't been able to justify it yet, so I really miss having had that back when my CRTs worked.
There's LPD, which uses a laser to excite phosphors instead of an electron beam; I think that's an exciting option. Said to use 75% less energy for a 25" square tile than an equivalent LED display.
it is weird the completely phased them out and not at least keeping them as a speciality, high-end item for people like us. i hated switching over to lcd, it was such a downgrade!
Hey LGR - The Blurriness can be attributed to a weak tube (not really "weak" but just not being used for a while). The more the monitor is used, the stronger the tube sharpness will get naturally unless you want to mess with high voltage + use a degaussing coil.
Isn't that standard with an electrostatic focusing tube?
@@jaapaap123 Not always, sometimes problems with focus can be attributed to a problem with the yoke or possibly the deflection IC going out. Hitachi's and mitsubishi rear projection tvs were infamous for this issue.
That's 30kg of absolute cathode ray bliss. I had that USB thing populated, I think it was mostly used for controlling the OSD settings via software. I guess it might've had a hub too, not sure.
Anyway this was an absolute beast of a thing for FPS games. Quake 3, UT2k4, CS 1.6 all at 120hz or better, heck yeah.
Speaking of which, more Q3 in your demos please!
As well as UT 99 and Oddworld
I was on the hunt for a cheap CRT last year, went to a few GoodWill stores, but didnt find one. On my way home, there was a TV sitting out by someones driveway that said free. Turned around and grabbed it...barely...free 27" Sharp flatscreen CRT. Nearly got a hernia getting it into the truck, but totally worth it.
Yeah flat crt's are heavy.
Used to have to move 21" Trinitron crt's at my work when people moved desks and we joked that they were 100lbs... Looked up the specs and they were like 78. Insane for such a small display.
I also have a roughly 27" Trinitron tv and it's a hunk of lead too, probably weighs as much as the one you picked up.
Many thrift stores won't accept CRT TVs or monitors of any type anymore, which is why you will rarely find one there now.
I actually did get a hernia moving a
Kyle 21 inch PC CRT down some very steep stairs, even though I had help from another person. Watch out folks, these things can hurt you!
I've never wanted a CRT monitor more - or thought one was legitimately stunning, aesthetically and spec/performance wise, until this glorious day! Thanks for the knowledge nugget, Clint - what a piece of kit. "More real than real. Smoother than smooth." - LGR, 2022
Look for the Sony Trinitron monitors too. I used to have a 21" dell p1110 and it was a wonderful monitor. They were all over my office, really wished I had saved one.
@@volvo09 I miss my old CRT monitors as well, especially the fact that I never had to mess with any settings, things just looked good. Wish I could say the same about my fancypants 4k monitor.
@@TNSign I don't think I'll love a monitor again until I get a real high end one.
I have a 24" HP 4k monitor that I oddly found on the side of the road with some other junk 2 years ago! and almost drove by thinking it was yet another "office" 1080 monitor. But its nothing awesome color wise.
If oled monitors were a common thing and were reliable then I can see myself falling in love with one of them. But I know the burn in would be insane.
There is also a somewhat rare 24" widescreen
Trinitron CRT monitor out there, I think it was Sony branded, id have to look up the model number. Id love to come across one of them!
@@volvo09 You're thinking of the legendary Sony GDM-FW900.
Is this more proof that with every scrambling advancement in technology we lost something?
I had an LG Flatron T910B 19 inch monitor I bought in 2004 - that was a gorgeous monitor that I used daily at 1280x1024 @ 85Hz until it died in 2014 or so - I still miss it! The Viewsonic looks like an amazing monitor - thanks to Mitch for providing it and Clint for reviewing it!
Even watching this on YT, on my phone, the picture quality on that monitor looks phenominal!
The "smoother thn smooth" "realism" is almost definitely the low-persistence of the CRT. Even OLEDs, with instant response times, still have significant persistence blur. The motion clarity of a CRT can only be matched on OLED/LCD with strobing backlight techniques (aka lightboost, blur reduction, black frame insertion) that are available on high-end gaming monitors, but even those have crosstalk issues, because the backlight flashes all at once, but the LCD pixels update in a rolling scan (much like the phosphor beam of a CRT).
but OLED can't have crosstalk issue since its self emissive, correct?
@@shanroxalot5354 No, electrical crosstalk occurs because the power and signal to drive each pixel on LCD/OLED are conducted through thin wires of transparent metal, which isn't a very good conductor. As pixels are refreshed, electrical crosstalk can cause signal leakage to be stored in adjacent pixels, particularly along the same row and column. OLEDs are worse in that because they're emissive, each pixel draws a lot more power, which can cause sag on the power lines, and therefore a whole row/column to appear dimmer: I have a radar detector with a cheap OLED that's really bad at this.
@@straightpipediesel "Strobe crosstalk" is what they call the phenomenon of when a strobing backlight fails to perfectly capture a full refresh and you end up with information from more than one refresh in each strobe, which is different from electrical crosstalk. LCDs with high response times in some color transitions can also cause double-images. OLEDs tend to strobe very cleanly, not exhibiting either of these issues. The issue with OLEDs is that you lose a lot of brightness in the process.
OLEDs do not have instant response times, they are just very low response times and they are also sample and hold screens which is the primary cause of perceived motion blur.
OLEDs are superior to CRTs. Pixel response time is much higher, since it takes time for phosphor to stop glowing.
Even 60 FPS feels a bit choppy, while 24 Hz movies display same way as on old analog movie projectors.
The only advantage CRTs have is how they can display different resolutions while OLEDs have just one native one.
Yet with 4K panels it's rarely an issue.
I have 19" LG Flatron CRT that can do 2048x1536 60Hz and 1600x1200 at 85Hz. Yet it's mostly comparable to plasma TVs while OLED is clearly superior. Also good HDR LCDs will be better for modern content.
I had a 21" CRT something like this back in the XP days. One problem is you couldn't always use it at highest resolution in some games because UI and text scaling wasn't really common yet.
What was the UI-sizing like at 2048x1536?
@@World_of_OSes It was only displayed at its maximum resolution. This means, it was not displayed proportionally if resolution was increased. Thus it was less functional.
That wasnt a problem, that was actually the stronger point of CRT, any resolution looked crisp.. no scaling...
@@Trikipum It actually was a problem if UI becomes tiny. We are not talking about scaling down something.
@@Trikipum "NO SCALING" Yes, and we are talking about the UI here. As the resolution is increased in most older games, the UI shrinks to unreadability.
For perspective, this is the same resolution that normal-sized iPads had from 2012 (when they introduced the "Retina screen" with twice the resolution of the previous model) to 2019 (when they made the screen and the entire device ever so slightly bigger for some reason, maybe so they could sell everyone new cases). In those days there were very few options for UI upscaling; you could select a larger size for desktop icons and bigger fonts, as well as zoom your web browser in, but I think that was about it.
Its a rainy autumn day right now and Im just cozy and watching LGR videos, lovely.
I had one of those higher end CRT monitors and when I decided to switch to a flat screen because people were so in love with those, I was sooo sad. The high framerate and high resolution were and still are a must. They should keep making those, I'm sure if people can go past the idea that old=worst they would sell quite a lot.
climate change pushers are the biggest reason why CRT died not size etc because if that were to be true everyones TV right now would be replaced by short throw projectors.
You could show LGR a calculator from the 90s and Clint could make an hour long video talking about it, in fact I think he did that already. Thats why I love watching LGR. This mans passion for tech is unparalleled.
What an epic monitor! I always dreamed of having something like this back in the day!
It looks so good watching it on my OLED! (blacks are *perfect* on this CRT, from what I can see). I can only imagine how much better it is in person!
@@Psythik I'm looking it on CRT trinitron flat, only 17'' , but anyway. Can confirm, black is black, and it looks so good. Would love to see some videos on youtube, how good it looks, would be suprised. Particulary gaming ones at 60fps.
I had a 21" Viewsonic CRT at work back in the early/mid 2000s. I don't know if this is the same one or not. But it was super impressive. I really wish I could have gamed on it.
It is so interesting that we hit resolutions like this so long ago, and have only relatively recently begun to exceed them.
I remember buying a very similar CRT in like 2000, I was proud of it because it was my first "major" purchase made with my own money, it was like $800 at the time. It weighed 80 lbs, luckily I was younger and in good shape, I would lug it to college and then back hope for spring winter and summer break. It looked so good though, I think I used it up until like 2008, there was just no reason to replace it. Worked perfectly, sharp clear and bright. Only issue was I needed to get good desks that could support the weight without bending. I used to laugh at the people with LCDs, "enjoy your 1024 by 768 dull screen"
I kept my 21" crt until 2011. I really loved it! Except the space it needed on my work bench. It was for a long time a better gaming option than any lcd of the time.
That really is the bane of keeping CRTs. I have a few and really should only keep like 2-3, and even that takes up so much space. I've like VGAs for that reason tho - small, light and high quality picture (thanks to GBS C I can use retro component/RGB consoles on them too)
I had a Sony G420 till 2011, I really didn't get the appeal of LCDs.
What? Thats like saying "I really miss those wonderful HDD's. There's just something about spinning a disk at 5500 rpms! Man the good ole days!" "srew these SSD's" CRT's suck and they destroy your eyes. The only thing they are better at is playing old games. Its like an old game console, they look better on the old TV's, but that doesn't make an old crt better than led, lcd, etc. Plasmas are terrible too.
@@farandwide7176 Are you crazy? that's a completely different comparison. LCD is a 'does the job' technology. LCD looks like a crap, you can't even get an LCD that doesn't have some sort of backlight bleed and they still make panels with horrible pixel response times, for what reason I don't know. OLED is the closest replacement, but they do eventually end up with burn in, so we're stuck LCD garbage. If you can't see the issues with LCD panels you need your eyes checked, honestly
@@farandwide7176 switching from crt to lcd was like switching from ssd to hdd because its cheaper to make.
LCD is crap, unusable for anytthing but office and light webbrowsing, im glad OLED is here finally
I used a giant CRT during college because in the early 2000s LCD screens seemed so washed out and blurry by comparison. I didn't have this exact monitor, I had a 21" Mitsubishi from the same time as this one. That thing looked so good! It was so heavy, though. Trying to drag that thing to LAN parties in college was so hard. Good memories, though.
I used to have a21" ViewSonic I found at a thrift store for $20. I think it was the previous model to this, since I got it around '03. Wasn't quite as high-res but it did have a ridiculous refresh rate. I loved it, it was the most accurate monitor for photo editing I've ever had. Degaussing it was fun, 15" monitors just make a tiny lil' "snap" sound, that thing sounded like hitting a bass guitar with a baseball bat.
I used a g90f+ until 2014... I ran it at 1920x1440, and the image quality was way better than any LCD or OLED on the market even today.
Sad that all these years later, we only start to approximate the quality and crispness with hacks like "Black Frame insertion".
Love your enthusiasm. You really get it across so well. My inner 20 year old is insanely jealous. I had a Sony Trinity's (predictive text DOH!!!) But never had the hardware to back it up. Now I have a triple 28" screen sim racing setup with the hardware to back it up. Back then things were very expensive. How things have changed over the years.
I almost forgot about the magic of high refresh rates on computer CRTs. Even dragging a window or moving the mouse cursor looked so smooth.
I kinda wish I could do comparison today, as going from a 120Hz LCD to a 120Hz OLED makes a HUGE difference, and logically a CRT should appear even smoother. Though its perhaps best I can't, I have a floating display arm so nowhere to put a CRT.
I have had many of these. Love the products ViewSonic produce. Recently, the 70" CDE7060T Touchscreen is lovely for art application and interaction.
Holy shit that monitor looks amazing, with specs to back it up too
I have one of those LCDs you showed from just a little bit beyond that period, vx924 display and yeah just image quality wise doesn't compare to a crt like that, even a Sony e220 from 2000 can outdo it in image quality
I have one of these myself and it has to be one of the best looking monitors I've ever seen.
Awesome video! I have a 19" ViewSonic and I loved playing games on that back in the day. I still have the monitor as well as my old Dell with a Pentium III 750mhz with a 3DFx VooDoo 5 graphics card. Windows XP too and I loved playing Midtown Madness, Quake games, etc. This video brings back the memories.
I remember seeing a very nice ViewSonic CRT monitor at Best Buy back in the 2000's, not only did it have a nice looking screen but has S-Video input which would have been nice for the game consoles I had at the time. View Sonic also had S-Video to VGA converters too.
I would definitely would love to have a CRT monitor like that for my current PC for running old GOG games...
Some of these old viewsonics's had touch screen. Just a few years ago we had one in our shop and I found out about it's touch screen capabilities and set it up to work. It worked through the rs232 port!
Excellent. Anything CRT-related is right up my alley. Always entertaining.
I was able to pickup a super-low hour of this exact model about 2 months ago and i freaking love it. It replaced 1440p 165hz acer as my main monitor. I was also able to pickup at A91f+ for a second monitor. I’m in love
I can't believe how awesome the image on this monitor is. The high refresh rate feels completely different unlike nowadays with cheap VA panels or higher quality IPS ones.
Dynamic focus is challenging on a flat CRT. The curved CRTs need much less correction.
Flawless review. I miss my CRTs. I had few 17 inch Sony trinitron, and (1) 19' KDS monitor that reach same resolution you showing here. Amazing monitor. Windows Xp was the best os for gaming ever. My fav games was unreal tournaments, quake 1,2, 3, half life 1,2, counter strike and more. Thanks for sharing 👍
I had a Mitsubishi Diamondtron 22" in the early 2000's, maxing out at 1600x1200 IIRC. I really regret not having it anymore. Although I still have a 17" Iiyama with BNC input (and that BNC cable). Cannot say I miss the geometry issues of the CRT era though
I just had two HP p1230 few days ago and "sold" them for 0 bucks each. I used them for CGI, and really loved.
So envious of LGRs setup. Would love to have such a retro-gaming system with a good crt monitor. Looking at the games LGR had installed brought back so many memories, and longing for those games, and time when I used to play them.
Makes me long for my Viewsonic P810. It was a 21" monitor that I bought for $1700 in the late 1990s (97? 99?). It was fantastic, I really got to use all of my 3dfx Voodoo card.
Sadly, I took it to an electronics recycler about 6 years ago when I moved. I wish I would've known about your channel back then!
I had two 21" IBM flat CRTs for years. From my PIII through P4 days. So heavy.
I unboxed a 21" IBM P275 if you're interested in reliving the experience!
I remember right around the time this monitor came out, the first commercial flat screen LCD with high brightness came out, and I can't remember the brand. I do remember Thresh's Firing squad did a review of it and I wanted one so bad. Funny how times change. I'd much prefer this CRT obviously
I remember "back in the day" I would happily exchange higher resolution size for higher refresh rate. Even after I switched to an LCD for my main monitor, I use to pick up (then) lower-cost CRTs to use as secondary displays and would get quite sick to my stomach having them in my peripheral vision if they were running at anything less than 85Hz (and higher was of course better.)
Back then when speed and color accuracy and crispness were granted.
Yes! CRT Magic! Great video as always. Loving every second of this as I watch on my 17 inch AOC CRT. I'm experiencing the blurryness in certain areas of my monitor like you discussed here. Though it was just my eyes. Glad to know I'm not alone.
I had the 19 inch version of this IIRC. The contrast boost and high refresh put it way ahead of early LCDs, which back then were really more of a gimmick than anything else. 20 years on I shake my head when gamerz get hyped for high refresh rates when they've been around for decades.
I remember my first (and last) 21" flat screen monitor I got to play FFXI back in 2004. Weighed north of 100lbs, believe it was a Sony refurb. Such a champ.
FFXI was my favorite game of all time... the amount of hours I played it where ridiculous.
There is NO QUESTION that a high refresh rate CRT feels and looks smoother than ANY LCD screen. They are flawless.
Big disagree, and i've used some of the best high refresh rate CRTs including the venerated GDM-FW900.
"flawless"
They're great, but not flawless. CRTs can have all kinds of alignment and aberration issues. Also they're crazy heavy.
8:46 That is excellent linearity. It might not seem that great compared to perfect linearity on LCD, but wow, it didn't drift more than that over all these years? That's almost hard to believe.
1:45 right one looks so good i'd have it even just for decoration
Fantastic looking display. I really appreciate the 4k footage of it in action, and shadow mask/aperture grille closeups too. The footage turned out great! I wish I had one of these for MiSTer since it already has a custom 2048x1536 video mode for that ridiculously low lag iPad display. Maybe give that a try with this monitor if you have a chance sometime!
I'd love to use my 12.9 iPad Pro as my MisterFPGA display, but how do you connect them?
@@AdamsOlympia cant connect it directly, there is a special display driver board made for the display itself when not connected to an ipad
I legit owned this back in the day! Imagine how i felt going to 1080p 75hz... i didnt even like it and went back to this thing haha
I had a Compaq P1210 22" CRT and it too went up to 2048x1536. It wasn't light thought and it bent my desk over the years of owning it. I just found specs for it and it went to 160Hz on the vertical which was crazy at the time. Oh, and it had a USB hub in the stand too, at the back. Probably what the ViewSonic would have had as the option.
I remember it cost a fortune, it weighed a ton, and it looked better than any other monitor I had ever seen!
And my Matrox G400 pushed it along very nicely, with a PS775 17" next-door. MMM. Dualhead! :)
This CRT looks amazing! Kinda giving me inspiration for a PC build.
Unreal Tournament 2004 never looked so damn good in 4:3. WOW Clint, awesome stuff.
Oh man, this video brings back my teenage years. I built my first PC in 2002 when I was 14 and I selected this as my display. (Actually, it was the beige, yes beige! G220f). I think it set me back $450 at the time. It was basically 1/3 of the entire budget I saved up for the build, but so, so worth the many extra lawns I had to mow and cars I had to wash to earn it. Gaming on this display in 2002 paired with an AMD Athlon XP 2000+, geforce Ti 4400, and 512 MB of DDR RAM was PC gaming heaven for the time. And to top it all off, Unreal Tournament was my game of choice back then! CRTs had their drawbacks as you mention in the video, but there really is something about the crisp, glassy smoothness they delivered that modern high refresh LCD panels with software tricks like backlight strobing attempt to, but ultimately fall short, of replicating even 20 years later. Thanks for the video. Truly a blast from the past for me.
LOL your build sounds just like mine. I ended up getting 1024 ram at some point though. In a Thermaltake big steel blue case. Actual neons in it. Ahh man remember neons lights in cases. Screw rgb. Still had my grey viewsonic monitor from back in 96 with my first comp when I was like 8 lol. The graphics card came with like 6 games. Some duke nukem platformer. Morrowind and some others. aww man the times. Mind when I got that case I had to carry it about 2 miles walking and on 2 different busses from the shop. Weighed a ton and I was like 13 at the time lol. Thing gave me many a cut. Mind how pathetic the graphics cards looked lol. lol bright green tiny little fan with some geforce sticker on it lol. I remember when phys x originally came out about that time it was a separate card for physx specifically Think Mafia was like one of the only games to support it lol. Saw a video of some bricks breaking in game blew my mind.
Your first computer in 2002 was this? You had to be a really rich kid. 😀
@@Pidalin How so? I had the same build and it was about 400 quid. a PS2 with some games was costing that much at the time.
@@オールマイト-y1f Yes, but even PS2 had only rich kids and it was time when salary was like 1/2 or 1/3 of today salary. That computer (with screen included) had to cost like 2000 USD in 2002. PS2 was definitely not that expensive, if I remember, it was like 600 dollars or something like that, maybe even less.
@@Pidalin Like I said, That build which I also had was about 400. It wasn't the best of parts at the time. The monitor was probably the same cost as the computer at the time. Which with some extras would have been about 1000. And I lived in one of the most deprived areas there is. And there were plenty of kids with PS2's. So not really sound logic that. A rich kid would have been getting a 9 grand Alienware at the time. Not building there own system with those parts. They were only partly decent. His monitor was overkill for it. Plus you have no idea how he got the money to actually pay for it. Also even if he was a rich kid. Good for him. Glad his parents had their heads screwed on.
I love that LGR doesn't feel the need to make his videos less than 10 minutes long. Just take as long as the video is supposed to take. We love it.
$ starts at 10:00 or am I wrong?
@@neindochoohh7955 no idea.
@@SolidNate99 people make their Videos longer than 10 mins to get more money
Why would it matter if it was over or under 10 minutes? There's no "limit" on videos.
@@blankname8553 your initial comment makes no sense.
I'm drooling throughout this video at the crisp beauty of this thing. I miss my old CRT monitors, family made me give them away.
I'm 62 and very much enjoy your videos! I've had all the versions of xbox and PC platforms for game playing. Video games keep you your at hart. Thank you! By the way, I just purchased a pre-owned EVGA Geforce GTX 1080 TI SC2. Love it on my 43" 4K HDR screen!
This thing is amazing, man I forgot how HEAVY CRT's were! I had a 19' and even that felt great in the early 2000s but this? WOW! And I 100% agree on what you were saying about lower resolutions on larger more capable monitors. You don't always need to have the max available resolution ya know! Honestly, some of the older games actually look better that way. Take RTS games for example. The lower the resolution, the larger all of the units and the details of everything is. When you go 1920x1080 everything is so tiny and yeah it's nice strategically to not have to scroll around but, I never like to go that big very often for those games that scale like this.
do you know where I can find one???
Can't believe i just wasted a minute reading this
@@deleted61-y9y Lol Idk what that means, it's not that long of a comment, look up and down here at the other comments... people have a lot to say to LGR!
Bring back new CRTs monitors damnit!
I have the 17" model that came with built in speakers! Its a great monitor!
I was lucky enough to have purchased the Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2060U. That 75lb beast was the best of the best same top resolution. Best monitor I've ever owned. I still have the thing set up for retro gaming.
I still have my Sony GDM-F520 from 2000 and it's still in great shape. It sat in storage in southern California for 10 years but I hauled everything out of storage a few years ago and moved it to the east coast. After using LCD's for 10 years seeing this thing running games was truly an eye opener of just how smooth and responsive CRT's are compared to LCD's. I have not found an LCD display that can compare. I have a 32" 1440P, 144Hz LCD display that still doesn't display games as fluid, or with the color clarity, response time, and brightness of the F520. The desk real estate to have one is certainly an issue but overall I wouldn't trade it for any LCD I've seen yet. I've heard Laser Projectors are the next best thing.
You should try OLEDs, my FW900's didnt hold a candle to OLED (except inherent lack of motion blur, which I can correct with BFI).
21:20 The Craziness of Resolution, Crisp Graphics, High Texture Details, Insane FPS enables Clint to headshot without using rifle scope... Dang... You must me crazy rich back then to have this kind of PC, congrats LGR for a great experience and thanks for sharing it! =D
I was so incredibly blessed back in 2000 when my dad had to reorganize an office space and threw out all 'old' crts (just 1 year old), all 21" trinitron screens. I was just 17 years old and had 10+ of those screens for free. I gave some away to friends and sold some, I remember the great experience of playing Quake2 at 1536p at 75Hz, or 800x600 at 200Hz around the year 2001. Used that monitor for over 10 years until it finally broke. Not many really have the experience of how extremely good those monitors were. I also was quite bummed out when I finally had to take the step to LCD in 2011 and was not impressed at all. Slow, 60Hz bad scaling and everything.. and that was a High end screen. I wish I still had a screen like Clint has now, prices are going through the roof though. I remember the days when all these 21" CRT's went for just about 50 Euro's 2nd hand, just a couple of years after I sold some for over 500+ Euro's a piece.
@@stefankoopmans2200 Here in Philippines, your consider a rich kid if you have LCD Monitor in the early to late 2000s, so CRT is the norm from '17-'19. Then early 2010s came, the turning point to LCD Display, which sucks up until now where to match the crisp display of a Basic CRT back then, you must spend even more today for a LED Display... Ah, good old simple days... =)
Back in 2015 i used to play Battlefield 3 1024x768 at 100Hz on my old CRT monitor
That James Webb wallpaper looks freaking amazing.
Maybe he has the only CRT in the world with that as a background, haha.
The way you documented this piece of tech history is amazing. I subbed
Glad you enjoyed it, thanks!
I was running a Hitachi SuperScan Elite 751 Clone: Hewlett Packard M900, 19" CRT and then upgraded to a Sony CPM-G500 OEM: Dell P1110, 21" CRT around this time. Finally satisfied with LCD's when my NEC LCD2490WUXi H-IPS LCD @ 1920x1200, calibrated via Eye-One Display LT/SpectraViewII came out. Prior 1280 and 1024 resolutions were the popular (and still popular) maxes of many LCDs. After a 4K laptop, I hate working on the typical 1080p laptops. I did try to order many GDM-FW900's 22.5" viewable 16:10 display with 2304x1440 max resolution @ 80Hz 2048x1280 max refresh @ 85Hz especially since there were many nearby in Orlando. Sadly shippers destroyed everyone I got and/or many were shipping fakes so I gave up on my 24" CRT search. It was like 110lbs not packaged. Still their job is to deliver things. I wish I had one. I actually built a 3" deep desk in my college apartment to accommodate it.
The GDM-FW900 could actually do far beyond 2304×1440. I ran mine at 2736×1710 60Hz to view DSLR photos. Sadly, it stopped working many years ago (both my original one bought in 2002, and the used one I bought to replace it).
I still have my old ViewSonic and won't give it up. The blacks are so good, old games look perfect and it has that comforting hum and satisfying click when in it goes into power savings. Mine isn't as cool as yours though, only 120Hz and office space beige. Make sure you have a solid desk and not some Ikea computer desk.
That's brutal! Man I thought my 21" IBM P275 was badass with its 1920 x 1440 / 75 Hz (or 1600 x 1200 / 85 Hz), I love your retrospective goodness videos, Clint!
I have a Mitsubishi Diamontron 21" from the same time. Buuuuuut, the max resolution isn't all that impressive.
Your P275 was badass! The tube was even more capable than this viewsonic's, though the viewsonic does have a slightly sharper pixel/phosphor? pitch.
i was rocking viewsonic at the time. loved those things. Had one till like 2010 or so
There are some really nice CRT monitors out there that even hold up well to this day. They're hard to find though.
I had the Samsung SyncMaster competitor to this (it had a flat screen and could do 2048x1536 too, gasp!) at the same time period. It perished in November 2021 in a flood, but was able to do the same resolutions etc with a modern-day computer - I used it to watch rescanned 4:3 TV shows in HD, it was awesome! I miss it so much. This reminded me of the good days of that monitor, because it was truly creesp and sharp and just, yeah. Thanks, Clint :)
I had this exact monitor back in the day. It was the reason I was relatively late in getting into the flat panel LCD displays. Was hard to give it up. Looking back, I should have kept it. It was just so big, and so heavy.
these late crts still have the best colors i have seen on any monitor!
I actually think that CRTs are still pretty good. I mean, I have a game room and the TV I use for it is a Panasonic CRT that goes up to 1080p and it looks really good 👍. It has HDMI so I even use all of my normal consoles with it and it's awesome! 😎.
I wonder if the difference between the 180Hz and 170Hz is actual, or just a difference in something like counting the blanking interval or something in how it's displayed.
21" crt monitors are awesome. I picked up an SGI GDM-5021PT (charcoal coloured) a few years ago for free and it is the crown jewel of my crt collection. Always on the lookout for more of these things but I've yet to see another one come up in my area.
I used a CRT at my university. A friend asked if it was slow or caused lag when gaming. I told him it was faster than any modern TV monitor and that CRTs are constantly refreshing. His mind was blown.
My friend fixed color problems on his CRT tv once. He cycled storing it on its face then back, and even used magnets attached to a drill spinning in front of the screen to eventually clear it.
NEVER STORE A CRT ON ITS FACE! You will damage it, the glass sorta just sits on top of the frame of the tube on a loose seal and pushes against the apeture grille or shadow mask depending, and will warp it. That'll ruin your colours
The drill trick is fine though, it's a flashy and unnecessary way to degauss but it is very very fun. I've def used it in the past. I reckon Clint's tube has been dropped on its corner hard at one point, I know for a fact he manually degausses using an external wand etc.
I was extremely surprised to see the max power consumption on this beauty is only 115w, I was expecting almost double that.
EDIT: My old ass 2008 26 inch LG tv uses 130w, mental.
Brightness is a huge factor.
I recall a college lecturer saying that a CRT was one of the most efficient light sources. Thinking about it the phosphor used isn't much different from a CFL light bulb. Early LCDs used CCFLs but the LCD then absorbed most of the light.
I had a ViewSonic back in the day, but not that monster! Impressive!
I'm running a CRT as a secondary monitor and I use it exclusively for gaming and video, even with my cheap adapter I'm driving that Dell P992 with Trinitron tube 1280x1024@85Hz, though it can do happily with a proper analog output 1600x1200@86Hz. Text and static images are waayy better on a LCD, but with graphics and stuff that actually moves, the tube is unbeatable. Revisiting Start Wars Racer and man is that thing smooth on the CRT.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is such a good memory, I remember really enjoying this game back in the days despite playing it offline.
I would love to have one of these hooked up to my 11th gen rig for some proper gaming.
It's actually funny my brother had one of these he used for years, and then once they went out of style you couldn't pay someone to take them away. Once the LED monitors hit a few years later around 06-08, it was ancient technology.
I love how crisp and sharp the image is, despite running on lower resolutions. I wonder how modern games would look on this screen, with that 180Hz refresh rate...
180 Hz is kind of unnecessary on a CRT because it doesn't have the sample and hold problems of a flat panel. You can run it around 90-100 Hz and it's plenty smooth. In terms of modern games they look pretty great but there are some issues. Some games like Elden Ring will refuse to run at anything other than 16:9 aspect ratio unless you hack them, so you lose the use of a lot of the screen. The other big problem is the phosphor trails that you can see in areas where there is a high contrast between light and dark. Some people might think these look cool, but in terms of image accuracy it's a problem. Finally, there is a trade off between glare and brightness. If you have a CRT with an anti glare cover it will be fairly dim in a bright room compared to a modern display, and if you take it off it'll be bright but there will be tons of glare on the screen from any other light sources.
CRTs always produced a better picture with almost no response lag but I don’t miss their bulky sizes, power use and geometry issues.
I would love to see some company build a modern CRT with the latest tech advances though.
SED TVs had promised to be just that. Sadly Canon abandoned it and I think due to the patents no one else has bothered to do R&D for it. One can only hope
just use OLED,
@@wormbagged not a CRT
I recently got myself a SyncMaster 700b, and it's not quite as extravagant as yours, but it just feels AWESOME to use.
I currently have my Mac mini hooked up to it, running macOS Monterey, sitting on top of the monitor, on a 90's CRT shelf in matching beige with a set of old IBM PC speakers, a nice beige mechanical keyboard and the A500 mini optical mouse to complete the 90's esthetic (who needs scroll functionality anyway?). I'm a millennial, so having a boomer setup like this makes me feel like being back before the zombie apocalypse.
Having a setup like this at home, while getting rid of the iPhone and switching to a feature phone honestly just makes me feel like I actually belong in my own world again. Like, I don't feel totally foreign to everything, which is a huge relief.
Sometimes it's the little things that can make a big difference. You could say I'm just getting old, and that would be true, but I don't think that makes it any less valuable.
Isn't it interesting that lots of young people who grew up with iPhones are now switching to feature phones?
There is a real human need for simplicity and familiarity. Some call it boring, I call it tried and true. That definitely makes me sound old lol! Getting old is awesome actually, you should all try it sometime!
You think it may not come across, how good this monitor is, but seriously, I'm kinda blown away by it. It's absolutely amazing! Thanks for showing it off, now I know what I should have told my parents to buy when I was younger instead of the crappy stuff I used to have, hah.