Comment by PowerElectronix
5 hours ago
My advice to anyone even minimally interested in retro games or just clear motion in the image is to get a cheap crt monitor and play a bit with it. You'll surely will appreciate that even against today monitors they hold their ground very well (not in brightness, though) and easily surpass them in motion clarity.
We did lose quite a lot when we trasitioned to lcd screens.
I distinctly remember gaming on CRTs and then LCD screens and it was night and day difference, in favor of LCD. Monitors have only gotten better and I certainly don’t miss CRTs, least of all how hot they were.
Agreed a 100% CRTS were wobbly flickery mess. Especially in the 60Hz era. Everyhting below 90Hz on a crt gave me horrible migraines when working longer than 4 hours.
LCDs that were just constantly lit were so much easier on the eyes than a CRT where every bright pixel is flashing at 60Hz.
But one thing is true: a low res game designed to look good on a CRT looks much worse on a low res LCD. CRTs being a blurry mess gave you free 'antialiasing'.
I'm curious what the primary causes of that are. Like, I had a similiar experience growing up in the 90's. I think it was just the sheer increase in resolution. Text looked so much better, and you could fit more on a screen.
And then they got BIGGER.
Same here, I very distinctly remember the first time I got to use desktop-class LCD monitors (it was at a new job at the time) and four things stood out:
- The screen size. Going from a 17” or maybe 19” CRT at home to a 19” LCD but without the CRT bezel — the screen looked HUGE.
- The clarity and flatness. The lack of smudging on text, the consistent geometry, being able to see the screen edge right up to the bezel without any wasted space (which you often had on a CRT if you wanted an image without excessive pincushion / bulge).
- The relative lack of ghosting when compared to laptop LCD screens I’d used in the past.
- The colour gamut. Looking back I think those monitors I first saw were relatively wide gamut monitors being used with Windows XP and no colour profiles. The colour saturation was impressive (not accurate, but striking).
I never remember CRTs looking better than any desktop LCD from that point on overall, but I dare say I just didn’t have access to any high-end CRTs at the time.
I also never remember CRTs having true black levels close to OLED, which is another thing I hear people say sometimes. I mean you could get deep blacks, but you’d be sacrificing brightness and white/gray detail at the white end. Again though might have just been the CRTs I knew of at the time.
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I'm a _bit of a snob_ when it comes to that both due to my film & tv background as well as my game collection (jesus, that's a lot of games including full snes, n64 sets, mega drive, nes, etc). I have various broadcast monitors from PVMs to BVMs as well as some of the finest consumer ones including B&O etc. I can say that now with ultrafast OLEDs (240Hz) we're 95% there now, finally. With high quality shaders or hardware gadgets it's really nice. For that 5% more I think those things like ultra high DPI OLEDs and phosphor dot level emulation shaders with black frame insertions will get us there. Until then - good ol' Trinitron is still superb choice if you want 100%. Another thing, outside of actual display is that old console + CRT are almost zero lag input to screen experiences which I actually think plays significant role in the overall experience.
Very interesting. I grew up with CRTs and didn't even use an LCD screen until in my 20s. It felt magical. Then LED screens (especially the black of OLED) felt even more magical. I've never considered that CRTs might have been superior for some things.
I do remember playing some NES games on emulators on LED screens and thinking the weather effects and such looked pretty bad compared to the CRT experience I remembered, but hadn't gone much deeper than that. I'll have to try and find a CRT and do some tests
I started out gaming on CRTs in the late 90s. Moved to LCD in the mid-2000s and haven't looked back. I don't miss CRTs, not least the bulkiness of them lol.
For real haha. I remember helping my dad move his old big screen TV out of his house when he replaced it with a "flat screen" and holy hell, it beat the hell out of 4 of us and we only had to take it 100 feet. The bulk was something I'm the young will never be able to appreciate :-D