Comment by utopcell

2 days ago

In the meanwhile, oled monitors can go to 480hz.

If you pay extra for that. Meanwhile _any_ CRT could trade off resolution for refresh rate across a fairly wide range. In fact the standard resolutions for monitors were all just individual points in a larger space of possibilities. They could change aspect ratio as well. This can be quite extreme. Consider the 8088 MPH demo from a few years back (<https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...>). See the part near the end with the pictures of 6 of the authors? That video mode only had 100 lines, but scrunched up to make a higher resolution.

  • Well, we are discussing a CRT TV that was $40k new a life time ago, so perhaps the fact that it costs $599 to get a 480Hz OLED today is not a consideration. To the point though: it is a fallacy to believe that CRTs could arbitrarily shape their resolution. While the input signal could cover a wide range of possible resolutions and refresh rates depending on the bandwidth supported, the existence of apperture grilles or shadow masks imposed a fixed digital reality that limited the maximum possible resolution to much lower values than the typical 4k panels that we have today. The "pixels" didn't become larger on lower resolutions: they just covered more dots on the mask. We can get much better results today with scaling than we ever could on CRTs, as awesome a technology as they were 40 years ago.

  • Any CRT given its driving circuits and deflection mechanisms can take it. But yeah, refresh rates of CRT aren't really tied to price.