Everyone in the comments is forgetting about light gun games. They don’t work on LCD screens
No please. I want CRTs to stay in the past. The sound they make always gave me a headache, or just irritated me.
I wouldn’t use my Amiga, ST, ZX Spectrum or Mega drive on anything other than my CRT. They were designed for that pixel blur and playing on a modern TV is just not the same. I hadn’t realised the difference it made until i tried it and now I can never go back to using an LCD for any of my 80s/90s devices.
However, beyond that somewhat niche use, CRTs are otherwise entirely pointless and basically a worse display experience in every concievable way when your source is anything produced after the advent of HDMI/Display Port.
Look I miss CRTs too but no, don’t bring those things back.
I used to go LAN Parties at the local university and…man no. in the middle of winter? yeah very nice and toasty but in the humidity filled Canadian summers? eff off buddy.
It will not. The article is nostalgia and hopium-baiting.
Restarting a mass-manufacturing production line for something like once super-common CRT TVs would require a major investment that so far nobody is willing to front.
Meanwhile LCD and OLED technology have hit some serious technological dead-ends, while potential non-organic LED alternatives such as microLED have trouble scaling down to practical pixel densities and yields.
There’s a chance that Sony and others can open some drawers with old ‘thin CRT’ plans, dust off some prototypes and work through the remaining R&D issues with SED and FED for potentially a pittance of what alternative, brand-new technologies like MicroLED or quantum dot displays would cost.
Will it happen? Maybe not. It’s quite possible that we’ll still be trying to fix OLED and LCDs for the next decade and beyond, while waxing nostalgically about how much more beautiful the past was, and the future could have been, if only we hadn’t bothered with those goshdarn twisting liquid crystals.
It’s also utter garbage. We abandoned CRTs because they sucked. They’re heavy, waste tons of space, guzzle power, and have terrible resolution. Even the best CRT ever made is absolutely destroyed by the worst of modern LCDs. The only advantage you could possibly come up with is that in an emergency you could beat someone to death with a CRT. Well, that and the resolution was so garbage they had a natural form of antialiasing, but that’s a really optimistic way of saying they were blurry as shit.
besides input lag, and motion blur
There is literally 1 game I can think of that uses CRTs for competitions, and I guarantee nobody in this thread plays it at a level to require one.
Motion blur will always be subjective.
I remember when we were transitioning from CRTs to “flat screens.” Everyone and their grandma wanted a flatscreen.
Anyone yearning for a return of CRTs that doesn’t play that one game is most likely trying to be quirky rather than fulfill an actual need. It’ll be fun for 1 or 2 sessions because of the novelty, and then never get used again.
No chance I could lift a CRT enough times over and over to beat someone to death with it.
Some of them were heavy enough to do it in one shot. Looking at you Sony Trinitron
You should hit the gym more, just in case shit pops off.
Absolutely, in the beginning there were pros and cons, with the cheap TN-LCD having serious annoying display issues.
But with better LCD technologies like IPS arriving and improving fast together with lower prices, there is no doubt that today even a cheap IPS display is way better than any CRT can ever be. With better clarity, colors and black, and even less ghosting, because CRT definitely has ghosting too.
Back in the day my Sony 29" CRT TV weighed about 60 kg without speakers. (the speakers could be detached).
And the CRT weight increases exponentially with size, because with bigger screen the glass needs to be thicker to withstand the significant pressure of the vacuum in the tube.
So a 60" TV CRT would most likely weigh above 250 kg!! The tube alone would be more expensive to make than an entire modern TV of similar size!
But more than that, it would be very difficult to make a 60" CRT screen that doesn’t flicker, and the extreme speed needed for the ray to cross the entire screen, would require enormous power to light the phosphorous surface, within the nanosecond time it has for each pixel. Even just normal HD 1980x1024 at 60 frames per second and 3 RGB subpixels per pixel, is 364.953.600 sub pixels per second, so an analogue signal that needs to control the cathode ray at that speed would require enormous power.The result would be a 200kg+ TV with smeared/blurry images and very poor color quality, due to the inherent imprecision. and even with clever tricks to make the tubes slimmer, developed near the end of CRT popularity, it would require almost a meter distance from the wall, to make room for the huge cathode ray tube.
There is no way CRT is making a comeback, CRT is inferior in every way, for every size of display, and also in blackness, contrary to what he claims in the article.
Edit PS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_PVM-4300
The biggest CRT ever made was 43" and weighed 199.6 kg (440 lb).
So a 60" would weigh way above 250 kg.
Also notice that even this prestige project by Sony, does NOT have a black screen, so the idea of perfect blacks on CRT as the article claims are pure idiocy.
impending
As in “will never ever happen”
The only thing I miss about them is the degauss button.
And that constant tinnitus sound they emit.
Bwang!
Yeah an old with a good pseudo degauss would scratch an itch.
My Sony Trinitron served me well back in the day - But no, I don’t miss the CRT era. Just too huge and heavy. And honestly I don’t remember the generic non-Trinitron CRTs being anything special, they were kind of shitty.
Anyways I thought the CRT thing is just collectors/old school gamers looking to display older media on a proper CRT? Obviously people with a lot of space, garages, basements, etc… people in tiny rooms and apartments need not apply LOL.
This whole article seems a bit off.
Literally the only reason old school gamers play on CRTs is because old games were designed for the blurry low resolution displays they provided and so look kind of bad on modern crisp displays. You could just smear vasoline on a modern LCD and get roughly the same effect, but using a CRT is less messy.
Honestly surprised nobody has tried to sell some bolt on diffusing/screen mask for this reason
The look of CRT is important to retro gaming but do you know what the most important characteristic of CRTs for retro gaming is?
No input lag.
Play OG Super Mario Bros on a modern TV and let me know how long it is before you wanna smash the controller in frustration. The game just feels incredibly sloppy.
A modern TV is a really bad example. Most modern gaming computer monitors have grey-to-grey pixel response times measured in nanoseconds. I would not be surprised if that exceeds the fade-time of CRT phosphors.
Yeah super smash brothers melee is the peak for this. It looks fine on an lcd, and if you suck at it it’s fine, but there’s a skill level where your TV is hindering your ability to improve and you probably aren’t even winning local competition nights yet at that point.
I’d certainly think about a flat and slim CRT if they could manage 4k.
And should it be powered by nuclear wafers?
I prefer nuclear wessels.
But seriously, if you had read the article you would understand how it would potentially be done.
somewhere vox just shivered.
