The Quest To Save the World's Largest CRT TV From Destruction (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0175742025
- News link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/12/23/2034248/the-quest-to-save-the-worlds-largest-crt-tv-from-destruction
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/retro-gamers-save-one-of-the-last-45-inch-crt-tvs-in-existence/
Gaming enthusiast Shank Mods, aided by local contacts and industrial shipping experts, secured the functioning 45-inch unit, which originally sold for $40,000 in the late 1980s. The TV, valued by retro gaming enthusiasts for its authentic, lag-free display capabilities, could potentially become a public exhibit pending future funding.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/retro-gamers-save-one-of-the-last-45-inch-crt-tvs-in-existence/
colors not experienced by this generation (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. The colors and intensities which were possible to display on CRTs are not possible with LCDs. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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Maybe not LCDs, but eventually there will be a feasible/affordable display with a color/intensity gamut that's close enough to a high-end 1990s consumer-grade TV that 99.999% of the human population won't be able to tell the difference when viewing something originally broadcast in the analog formats of the day (NTSC, PAL, etc.).
In many ways, today's digital displays with a modern digital TV broadcast are far superior in color gamut. The one thing a digital TV broadcast and, for that matter, a truly-digita
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Yeah, I remember those greenish flesh-tones from the 1970s. Can't say I miss some of those colors!
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Among about a dozen other picture adjustments, our first color TV had a helpful "Tint" knob. It allowed you to select any skin tone you preferred from the available choices of purple, green, or purplish-green.
It also featured "instant on" technology. It achieved this by keeping about 150W of vacuum tube heaters turned on 24x7.
Not sure why this was rated "funny" (Score:1)
It sounded more "informative" to me. Very high end CRTs could do a lot more than NTCS/PAL resolution. Some could do over 1000 horizontal lines. As far as color goes, some professional/Hollywood-studio-grade monitors had extremely good color reproduction, particularly when calibrated correctly.
Same goes for intensities.
That said, I don't think it's feasible to get deep black next to bright white at an arbitrary location on a CRT monitor.
Oh and as for "pure resolution" a vector CRT is the screen analog of
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It's a riff of the Tears in the Rain monologue from Blade Runner (Rutger Hauer...RIP). It's a thinker...but funny.
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What do you mean some?
The first gen of lcd monitors (those 5:4 ones) were lower resolution (1280x1024) than the previous generation of crts (1600x1200)
If modern displays were built for 480i (Score:2)
They would be lag-free too.
Re:If modern displays were built for 480i (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, no. LCDs inherently require some post processing to display the output, which means that there's no way for them to be "lag free" i.e. have nanosecond grade lag. They're pretty much stuck in a few millisecond range at best. OLEDs are better but still not a match for CRT.
Also CRT displays don't have fixed resolutions the way LCD and LED based displays do. They're analogue.
I used to overclock all my CRT displays back in the day for higher refresh rates for example, and most could push them very high. Though many would give off annoying coil whine when they were close to the limit, not to mention heating issues. Ability to display resolutions was also usually more than the spec, and since they didn't have a native resolution they would display all resolutions equally accurately.
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In some respects, such as the processing time of LCDs, you're right. But no, CRTs couldn't display "any" resolution because they were analog. The colors were analog, yes. But driving the screens at higher-than-supported resulted in blurry pictures. There certainly was a limit to their resolution, and that limit was pretty small compared to today's 8K monitors.
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Any resolution, no. But they could generally do "resolution x at n hz, resolution y at m hz, resolution z at o hz" where resolutions would go up and refresh rates go down. Essentially the problem was that speed of scanning was about the same, so you could choose to do less sweeps for lower resolution but more times per second, or more sweeps for higher resolution but less times per second.
This obviously had an upper limit, but that was usually pretty high. Especially for screens at the end of CRT cycle. Big
Heavy (Score:2)
Early 2000s, I had a 32" Aiwa widescreen CRT TV. Thing weighed as much as a big block Chevy engine block (220 lbs). It was a freakin' beast and I left it behind when we moved cross country.
I hope some retro gamer has lucked into it.
Lag-free? WTF? (Score:2)
Apparently, these people have no clue how a CRT works.
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yes, lag free
unless you are claiming that there is lag literally between scanlines, because the process was: video card reads a byte of memory, produces and pixel sends pixel out to a crt that is completely in sync with that sending, altering its electron guns based on the live signal and not any imaginary buffer of ignorance
Menu burn-in (Score:1)
Imagine the burn-in after displaying the restaurant menu on-screen for 40 years.
"Authentic, lag-free display capabilities" (Score:2)
"Authentic" display capability? What the heck does that even mean?
Marketers and salesmen really love to overuse that adjective.
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I'm assuming "authentic" means "as intended by the game designer."
Re: "Authentic, lag-free display capabilities" (Score:2)
or as in "authentic" scanlines and not generated by emulation
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I would think it means "historic" as in "in the past things were better" or such nonsense.
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In this case, of it's for retro games... CRT was the only tech in town.
But for real retro feel, you have to use an adapter to connect RCA cables to rabbit ears.
It's not about the retro feel (Score:2)
it's about input latency. LCDs by design do digital image processing on every frame which adds a delay between when you press a button or move a joystick and when you see the result on screen.
For casual gamers you won't notice but if you're doing speed runs, practicing intricate fighting game combos or trying to do 1cc score attacks in bullet hell shmups even an extra 1-2ms of lag can kill it.
Modern "run ahead" emulation can all but eliminate that lag with powerful enough CPUs but not every console
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Indeed, and the delay can be no better than 1.5 frames (average) of latency.
Demo/Intro coders would follow the rasterizer all the way down the screen, changing the palette every single scanline immediately before the next scanline was sent to the crt
Any tv that also does upscaling and whatever, you can add another frame of latency minimum but its going to be more like 4 frames more because thats how temporal ai upscaling bullshit works
..and dont get me started on sound canceling headphones and their w
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It means it doesn't use significant post processing on incoming video signal like LCD and LED based displays do before displaying the image.
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And that is just not true. CRTs do "post-processing", it is just all analog and crappy.
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Analog "post processing" is nothing like "post processing" being referred to. This is why lag on CRTs is measured in single digit nanoseconds. On LCD based screens, it's usually in tens of milliseconds. I.e. hundreds to thousands of times worse. They're not even in the same ballpark. Heck, not in the same game.
Re: "Authentic, lag-free display capabilities" (Score:2)
Lol not, lag on a CRT isn't "measured in nanoseconds." CRTs have an input rate of maybe (at the high end) 200hz. That means every pixel is updated every 5 ms at the very fastest, which is (roughly) the actual input lag of an ideal monitor (the exact minimum number depends on how you define "lag"). Modern LCD displays can get up to 500+ hz with less than 2 ms of lag, which is faster than CRTs. Of course if you're talking only about *processing* lag, sure, CRTs are faster, because they don't *do* any processi
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your user id and your blathering bullshit dont match
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I will say that up until about 2009 we still had a relatively large (not this large, obviously) CRT TV in our living room, and we played a lot of rock band on the Wii back then. When we got a new LCD TV and mounted it up on the wall, the lag really threw me off when playing. I re-calibrated it a few times, and it's supposed to compensate for the lag, but it was never as responsive, and I credit that with us playing a lot less rock band and eventually giving up on it.
Re: "Authentic, lag-free display capabilities" (Score:2)
What marketer or salesman is in the article?
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It is just bullshit. As many people are clueless and unable to fact-check, they get impressed by such nonsense.
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Must come with an NFT, certificate of authenticity.
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> "Authentic" display capability? What the heck does that even mean?
Blurry. Blurry with barrel distortion.