[HN Gopher] A Small Ode to the CRT
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A Small Ode to the CRT
Author : als0
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-02-15 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > [CRTs] respond colourfully to magnets (also magic) held to
| their screens by curious children [...].
|
| Look at the reflection of an LCD ( _not_ LED) panel in a non-
| conductive surface and try tilting it! (A glass window at night,
| a glass bathroom door, or a piece of furniture with a shellac
| finish works.) Hint: Brewster's law.
|
| Doesn't detract from the article, just ... LCDs have some of the
| good kind of magic in them, too! Feynman talked about "sun
| reflecting on bay"[1], but "tablet reflecting in bathroom door"
| is even better I think.
|
| [1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I miss light gun games. Point Blank. Time Crisis. No MAME arcade
| emulator will ever being them back from the dead without a CRT.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Unless you mean something more specific than 'being able to
| play them with a gun', there are several solutions to this in
| the form of light guns that use infrared border leds or even
| image processing for aiming.
| christkv wrote:
| Check out https://www.sindenlightgun.com/ it's made to work
| with modern panels and can be made to work with emulators. The
| whole is incredibly impressive .
| gattilorenz wrote:
| > I started to warm to CRTs, maybe a fondness when I realised I
| hadn't had to seriously use one for over a decade.
|
| Same here, and now I'm looking for a CRT monitor because I don't
| remember anymore how it is to use one. Did the low resolution
| games look better on them? After more than 10 years I can't
| really recall the difference.
| christkv wrote:
| I have a 21 inch trinitron crt and hooked it up to the pc over
| vga to play some modern games on it and it's hard to describe
| how different of an experience it is over lcds. It's great even
| though the resolution is lower you don't notice it as much
| because you don't see scaling artifacts and response latency is
| super low.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Did the low resolution games look better on them?
|
| Yes.
|
| The standard way of seeing pixel art in modern indie games, the
| edges of everything are too harsh. CRT filters exist, but most
| kinda suck, though there's an occasional good one (Cyber Shadow
| does an excellent job).
|
| There's also the issue of input lag. CRT's have virtually zero
| input lag beyond just their refresh rate, whereas for
| LCD/Plasma/OLED it's more substantial. In more recent years
| things have gotten better, with more and more TV's getting
| decent latencies (< 25ms) at least in game mode, but for a
| while there you were commonly looking at like 80-120ms lag
| times with no recourse for a given TV.
| Lammy wrote:
| Fun fact: a CRT was the first RAM!
|
| https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/williams-demon...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I've been told (many years ago) that CRTs for safety-critical
| applications like railway control used pretty much the same
| technique to read the image back and comparing it end-to-end to
| what the display is supposed to be. Never found a peep about
| that online though, and it seems to me like it'd be easier to
| just monitor deflection and beam current instead.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The principle of a decaying memory register requiring a refresh
| on a regular basis is actually not _too_ far distant from how
| MOSFET DRAM memory works, to the extent I understand it
| (poorly).
|
| Or, on a broader basis, education within a human population (we
| spend 15 years sinking information into the infosponges of
| children and hope that enough of that keeps over a lifetime to
| sink it into the next generation of infosponges).
|
| Or of manuscript documents, rewritten by hand by scribes. Or
| palimpsests.
|
| All data storage is ultimately a palimpsest, I'm increasingly
| convinced.
|
| See also, BTW, delay-line memory:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
| hihihihi1234 wrote:
| For a second I thought this was going to be about critical race
| theory.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I don't mind CRTs. What does bother me somewhat is the narrative
| that they're somehow better than the displays we use today; your
| use case has to be so narrow and specific to benefit from a CRT
| is any meaningful way that most people may as well just ignore
| they existed. They're less color accurate, have horrible
| artifacting ("but it makes pixel art look better!"), force you to
| choose between refresh rate and resolution, are massive and heavy
| _and_ consume more power than most people 's computers in the
| first place.
|
| If you're a retro fetishist or an analog gaming nut, then I could
| see how you might get something out of it. For everyone else,
| save your money and buy anything else. The price that good CRTs
| demand is simply absurd when compared to their cheaper,
| flatscreen alternatives.
| chowells wrote:
| What is analog gaming?
|
| (The output lag in LCD displays is really significant.
| Switching between LCD and CRT feels remarkably different in
| games where reaction speed matters.)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Similar things can be said about records and cassettes. But
| there's a retro nostalgic vintage contingent that will pay a
| premium for them.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I have a thing for old televisions for some reason. I have a
| small collection of nice ones, typically the smaller ones.
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