This is my favorite format now; staff member brings something they're passionate about, explains and shows it to Linus and they rate it as they go. It's so cool
Be VERY careful buying HDCRTs if you watch this and think "That's for me." Some of them have half second lag times. I've tested some. They are NOT all the same.
I've also had experiences with regular CRTs where they sometimes don't work with the NES Zapper. Some make it miss 100%, and others would register a hit anywhere on the screen. Other lightguns work fine with them though.
@@nathanddrews Especially if you have those little plastic twiddler knobs for contrast brightness saturation and blue levels. Over time they get unresponsive so making a small adjustment is impossible unless you have a tiny pixie sized wife to deal with them ...... ahem tiny knobs :D
@@tim3172 Imagine being a smartass when someone is trying to help others from wasting $1000+ on what they think was a standardized technology. They didn't cover it in the video, nothing wrong with covering it in the comments section.
The fact that CRT still has advantages really shows how great it was. Im 22 so i haven't had much experience with CRTs. As ours was replaced in 2007 so i was only 6 so it feels like we've had flatscreens for a long time. Would love to see a modern CRT capable at 4k resolution and HDR but not sure if that is possible, would be great for retro and modern gaming, would probably have to be pretty small as we are use to our light flatscreens even though they can be pretty awkward to hold at 65inch and up. 27inch would be fine
I'm 32 and grew up with CRTs In the late 90s / early 2000s And still on a CRT from 1998 which I play my older systems on they definitely do still have some advantages one of the biggest ones being how they handle motion and having zero input lag
@HollowRick Alot of people were unaware of their advantages and many people couldn't wait to get rid of them. Most my family members chose samsung as their flat screen of choice. Great flatscreens they were as you could turn the tv from left to right with the swivel feature. I know what TV flatscreen we had but not sure how much it cost us but all I can say it looked really high end and was a massive 40 inches in size lol we did have it with a dvd player and that had surround speakers. I wanted the old 27inch wide-screen CRT for my bedroom and my mum said no lol funny thing is it was already put upstairs because we had no where else to put it because we were selling it. So it could've been mine but instead I stuck with the small CRT which had the DVD player built in.
I'm 21 and I love playing retrogames until Xbox og on my new crt trinitron, I was more excited about this than the new 4k oled TV recently arrived at my house lmao Rgb consoles with a good cable on that crts are the best (excluding pvms of course, n64 on RGB with deblur there is OUTSTANDING and consoles like megadrive its just gorgeous, you really need to watch it by yourself to understand what I say..), for the new ones I would recommend a good oled one with some marseille cable which go nuts, spending money on stuff as rescalators imo is throwing money to the bin just because you don't want a good crt or because of space to get some decent picture on a modern display If you love original hardware and retrogaming do it well and waste the money well done as rgb cables of quality, getting RGB modded consoles.. if not go to the emulation scene totally free not something between that spending a lot unnecessary, that's my view and recommendation :)
Gotta remember graphics designers always optimise for their current display technology, a lot of people who think old games look like crap probably just never saw them displayed on a CRT.
They did look like crap most of the time. It's just that the good graphic was just an addition to gameplay. These days some games are just technical demos without the game itself.
@@PixogenPixels Older games were much more about art direction than pure graphical output. Game developers had a big incentive to think outside the box and ensure their game stood out from the competition. These days, many developers are churning out new games for the simple sake of providing new content for their customers.
I generally think most things look better on modern OLEDs, but there are exceptions. CRTs have a bit of separation between scanlines at lower resolutions, so sprites tend to look brighter and sometimes washed out on OLEDs where that doesn't exist. Also, the blurriness of CRT TVs makes dithering look much smoother and less pixelated than it would on an OLED.
The most vivid memory of a crt i have is a table collapsing because of the sheer weight of the 32 inch crt and it exploded, then we did not have a television for 13 years lmao.
I had a slightly similar experience with my 46" Samsung LCD, except it wasnt the table that exploded it was the glass stand that the tv actually ships with. The weight was too much for it to handle and one evening late at night whilst my parents were sleeping I was getting in a quiet session of Just Cause 2 when the base exploded so loudly it was akin to a gun shot. I still have the tv to this day and it still has some leftover glass on the base from over a decade ago.
You have gone throught many options, but it should be known that with retro games especially just a few gens back they were inherently designed with CRTs quirks in mind. The literal best example for sprite quality and shading is Dracula's blood red eyes in his talk portrait in Castlevania SOTN. CRTs biggest strengths are in its dream like haze and ability to apply extra blur to great effect, like in the ff10 cutscenes or Zelda: Majora's Mask.
The overly warm/red image on the HD CRT is likely due to what the CRT community calls "Trinitron Red Push". This red push was implemented by Sony to make TV content such as skin tones "pop" on the showroom floor, at detriment to the overall accuracy of the image. Luckily this "feature" can be easily disabled to bring the display back to a balanced and accurate color profile usually by turning the AXNT setting in the service menu from 1 to 0.
My KD 34XBR970 has a toggle in advanced settings to adjust red from normal to monitor. This dials back the red a lot, but can hurt because I think it dials it back too much. Some games need the extra red
I have never seen a sony TV survive past 20 years. At least being in active use. Eventually that power supply button or something inside will crap out.
@@AC3handle i was born in 03 and my parents had their crt b4 I was alive, it has always seen active use cause it was all I had to game on till I was like 12 and since then I've used it regularly (once/twice a week with friends) and it's still kicking around and it has no issues, I might just be the luckiest dude ever to have used it for 10000s of hours and never had it shit out tho.
@@segasdreamer I don't have a lot of experience with later HD XBRs so I can't say if the setting you mentioned is the same as the older service menu setting but I have noticed this too when disabling the red push, particularly on older and heavier used sets. So, after disabling it I usually do a quick and easy color recalibration by adjusting the red color's bias (cutoff) and gain (drive) to bring the strength of the red properly in line with green and blue. Luckily, consumer Trinitrons allow you to perform this adjustment through the service menu. I think this occurs because the from-factory red push causes the red gun and phosphors to wear out more quickly than blue and green, so if it is disabled after years of operation, the red can look weak in comparison without further calibration.
Fun fact about the color issues of old games: old games were intentionally colored a certain way to work with CRT's and how they naturally mute out the intensity of yellows and browns, so games were programmed with odd neon orange and yellow colors because, when run through CRT's, the colors would be washed out through the tubes and would display the desired colors. With OLED, you're seeing the compensating colors without the CRT washout and wind up with jarringly oversaturated colors that don't look good. So what Linus and co. are seeing in the OLED screen with DreamCast sprite games is the raw coloring that you were never ment to see, which would be corrected by the CRT tubes. If you don't have these intense colors, the browns and yellows would be washed out completely.
@Josh Stevenson yes. Modern tv's use LED or LCD screens which contain more colors than just RGB and can display wider variety of colors, so game devs no longer needed to compensate.
the one thing I remember as to why older games that were made when CRT setups were the dominant format is that sprites and models were crafted specifically to use the screen lines to "complete" the sprite. Hence why the smooth aspect from LCD and OLED screens looks much more "wrong" on older games
Also colors. Like with crosscode the colors are just wrong on the CRT since they were designed for LCD. While with old games designed on crt they are too colorful and unrealistic on LCD and look correct on crts.
@@gigabooga it wasn't a matter of limitations it was a matter of design. At the time of the early consoles CRT televisions made up the vast majority of all TVs so the designers made their sprite art to work within the tools available. When working with a handheld with an LCD screen and when LCD TVs became the more popular medium the artwork was adjusted to work with the more common medium
I think the 8 bit era and earlier games look great in clean HD because of their much simpler sprites with only a few colors. Later sprite games from the 16 bit and 32 bit era look a lot better with some sort of CRT shader to smooth out their much busier and more colorful sprites.
I have a 1980's console crt in my living room dedicated for my vintage systems and an OLED in the bedroom for the more current ones. It's tough to justify, but visitors always comment on how great it is to play old games as they were.
Another interesting note about CRTs and retro gaming is that for some consoles, such as the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, you might actually be hamstringing yourself trying to go for the best picture quality. Practically all transparency and extra color tricks rely on the signal bleed from a composite signal, of which only really works with a CRT accepting that signal. There's also another transparency trick that renders the sprite/background every other frame, taking advantage of the slight phosphor afterimage of a CRT.
I'm not really convinced those techniques were done to exploit CRTs or composite displays because they are used on many pixel-perfect LCD/Handheld systems which do not have any such effect. That suggests to me it's just a general technique to workaround hardware limitations, not something designed specifically against the effects the output signal has on the message. For Example, Mario Tennis on the GBC uses a flickering sprite for shadows as well; but of course the GBC doesn't have phosphor afterglow. It doesn't make sense to me that a technique was used to exploit this or that detail of CRT or the signal effects on the image if those techniques were used in situations where those same effects and details were not present.
@@BCProgramming The flickering shadow transparency on GameBoy was because the screen was so bad it would blend each together for a pseudo transparency or more shades than the screen could produce. Even the GBA used flicker transparency. The screens had pretty bad response times by modern standards. nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2019/05/screen-persistence-and-gba-lcd-abuse.html
CRT phosphors *do* emit light when theyre "off" if they've recently been activated. its why your CRT tv glows in the dark when you turn it off, and you can draw on the screen with a torch in the dark. but the contrast is so great that when other parts of the screen are lit the dark parts are basically as good as true black
@@trash_miner That's probably due to age and wear and knob-twiddling though. A monochrome CRT can have very pure black if it's set up to do so, but as the CRT wears, people turn up the drive circuit to get more brightness so the device remains useful, even at the expense of black becoming gray.
the contrast of CRTs isn't actually very good, the glow of lit phosphors spreads pretty far under the glass and lights up areas that should be darkened. I'm not sure where this misinformation started but it's apparently not going anywhere...they still have good contrast, just not anywhere near OLED. there's still numerous other advantages to a CRT though. Also all of the shit this guy showcased, he's outputing a lot of stuff that should be 240p at 480i, he's really not doing any justice to the 15khz set...
I feel like there was a missed opportunity here. One of the consoles they should've tested is an SD console made in an HD era. That would be the Wii. I would've loved to see wii games on this thing.
I have a wii. Grew up playing the wii as a kid on a lcd tv but recently tested it on my crt and wow it looks so much better on the crt than a flat screen
These widescreen trinitrons are absolutely gorgeous blu ray monitors. I mean they rival any oled imo in terms of black levels and color clarity and resolution. I liked it so much I bought a second one of these exact tv's on craigslist. I got about 3 years of amazing gaming and movie watching out of my first one before the power supply died and the second is still in the closet. These Sony tv's use a special grid of phosphorus in order to maintain geometric clarity and color separation. They really were the best of the best of crt technology. Any Sony trinitron is worth grabbing.
CRTs have a blurring effect, which was taken advantage of by many game developers, specifically in the 16 and 32 bit era, where they would combine dithering and the crt’s blurring to make a transparency effect, like on the Sega genesis and Saturn, or to smooth colors, lines, and textures like on the original PlayStation. This greatly improved the image. Also, light guns and light pens require crts, since they depend on the zero processing delay, as they use this to figure out where on the screen the device is pointing.
light guns needed to beable to drive and flash some part of the screen for them to work is more to the point. Motion sensing on CRTs for a time was trivial, at least relative to LED and LCDs.
Beside from the blur effect, the poor quality from the composite signal actually helps that aswell. The infamous waterfall on Sonic 1 (a Genesis game), took advantage of that.
@@strictlynineties Most processors have been 64 bit capable for over a decade now. I'd definitely say we're NOT in the 32 bit era, even if many codes are made in 32 bits for the sake of backwards compatibility. And if we speak about memory bus, graphics cards 5 years ago were capable of handling 192 bits, that's the bus width for a GTX1060, one of the most popular graphics cards still nowadays.
I think dithering was from composite signal, not the CRT itself, you'd get those waterfall effects on a flatscreen with the real console, but not with a CRT and an emulator (but it wouldn't look pixellated on the CRT)
The issue with certain sprites on the OLED (like Wolverine) was because they were designed with the expectation that horizontal lines of color will get blended a bit due to how the electron beam works.
Also because he has a shitty filter over it. I don't know how linus calls it out as "like a filter" when it literally is a filter. I'm not saying the OLED would look better than crt, but those filters are horrible and I don't know why you would have it on for a test like this.
Nope, that's not the issue with the workings of electron beam, but yes, it is the issue with blending of adjascent "pixels" in a horizontal lines. Old games were designed not only for CRT, but for composite signal on a CRT. Composite had artifacts mostly with bleeding colors to adjascent pixels, especially so if the image was made of bars (for example, if you feed CRT an image, where every odd vertical line is black and every even vertical line is white, via a composite signal, you will get a gray screen). Developers used this artifacts to their advantage. Great example is waterfalls in the first level of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 - they look transparent when you play using composite signal. But composite signal wasn't the only way of outputting an image to CRT - there also were s-video, component (YPbPr) and the best of them all, RGB, which mostly was used on professional equipment in USA, but in Europe it was available on most consumer TVs and monitors. If you'll play old games on CRT via RGB the image will look much, MUCH sharper and there will be no color bleed, games will look much better, but all the effects that was intended for composite will look wrong. Returning to Sonic 2 example, the waterfalls will consist of bars, and will not look like transparent water as was intended. This is extremely noticeable on playstation (the first one), the console had a hardware effect called dithering, which developers could turn on and off in games. This effect covers whole screen (afaik) and make the image look somewhat foggy or blured, I don't really know how to describe it. This was achieved by covering every second pixel of the screen with a different shade of the color that was in the original picture, in a checkerboard pattern. This effect looks horrible when displayed via RGB. The best example will be Silent Hill, just look at comparisons between composite and RGB in this game, both displayed on a CRT - you'll immediately understand what I'm talking about. But if a game wasn't relying on artifacts of composite signal it will look so much better when outputted via RGB. So the issue is not only about a type of display, but also about the type of signal fed to it. P.S: there's a demoscene production called "8088 MPH" (by Hornet + CRTC +DESiRE) that was made for 1981 IBM PC with intel 8088 CPU and original CGA graphics adapter. This hardware, even when special hacks were used, could only display no more than 16 colors simultaneously on screen, but this guys, using a very clever abuse of composite signal artifacts, made it display 1024 colors at once. I highly recommend watching this demo, it's amazing.
They weren't. They were optimized to run on a system with a tiny fraction of the computing power we have today. If CRTs never existed and people used LCD screens, nothing would have been different in terms of the art. Consoles of the time had so many limitations in terms of memory, color space, and speed that you had no other choice but to make pixel sprites or eventually very jagged 3D models with limited textures as time went on.
@@Straviradius I think the limitation was what made games awesome during those times because it made devs be crafty and scrappy with their designing of games.. where today they have become lazy and you can tell especially when putting a game out that is cross platform .. it's an unfortunate double edge sword of modern game development.
@@Straviradius there are subtle differences in pixel and art design based upon the display. Look no further than say, the difference between Gameboy Advance games and the SNES. Graphically they are very similar at first glance, but the GBA games naturally have a slightly washed out colour look on original hardware due to no screen light. Put those same games on a TV and suddenly the colours are too saturated, due to them not being designed for that purpose.
My main love for a CRT. No native display resolution. It just looks good at any resolution. I can make a 320x240 render and pop it up on my CRT and it looks lovely. Unlike with modern flatpanel displays where it it gets digitally blocky and smoothed depending on the settings
As a fighting game player (3rd strike and marvel 2) it absolutely is about input delay with original hardware. I don't use CRT's outside of retro gaming and it's specifically old fighting games.
@@Ivao. ???? Third Strike is gorgeous dude, one of the prettiest games out there. I guess you could argue that the background in Remy's stage is a little but crusty but the character sprites look excellent, imo.
I HAD THIS TELEVISION! Yall should have uploaded this video in 60fps to show off the SPLENDOR! Back in the day you had to order component cables for the original Xbox, GameCube and PS2 but once you got em hooked up you could game in Hi Definition on those consoles. People used to come over to my house all the time to game and play Guilty Gear on the PS2 and would wonder why it looked so good on my 34inch Sony Wega but not their TV 's at home all you had to do was press X and Triangle at the same time before the game loaded and it would ask you "Would you like to play in Progressive scan?" Select yes and BOOM glorious HD on all your PS2 games. Fun times.
Same, I got this for movies vs. gaming, but it was a fun last hurrah for the technology. It wasn't cheap though and I remember why they didn't sell well. When I moved I chose not to take it with me though as it was a monster. Donated it to a neighbor who was TV repair guy back in the day and he still has it last we talked.
Yes, component alone looks a lot better but the PS2 DOES NOT support progressive scan on all games. Some games you can press this combo but most of them, especially games that were multiplatform, didnt support 480p on the PS2.
The GameCube, Dreamcast and Xbox were better in this regard, the only issue with GC was the expensive cable at the time, but the amount of games not compatible with progressive scan is very small compared to the PS2
The camera moiré effects seen on the CRTs (wavy rainbow lines for example 13:00 ) aren't visible in person but its really weird they didn't adjust their cameras to eliminate it, which is possible. also the overhead lighting in the room is a worst case scenario for CRT image quality.
It pains me Dx long time CRT user but I would not use CRT unless the room is pitch black, cannot stand the washed out look that happens. I feel like it takes away a lot from the video, for what a CRT looks like in pitch black and how close it gets to OLED contrast, have a look at r/CRTgaming. Important note that people miss when talking about CRTs though, they do not reach the same contrast as OLED: even for a pure black signal the raster is not 0v and you can set it to be that but it. crushes blacks, and even if it was possible CRTs suffer greatly from OLED type image retention, so the black areas won't get black for a while after that have been lit up. The worst problem by far though is light scatter: because of the amount of glass in a CRT, after electrons hit the phosphors light can bounce around a lot far across the screen, resulting in very bad low-local-dimming-zones type blooming and slight washing out. That all means that in some content, especially consistently bright content, even the best CRT will look far from OLED contrast. In some content though it's definitely close enough that the other benefits of CRTs make it the winner IMO. Would highly recommend people see a well set up CRT irl in pitch black, even if it doesn't convince you it's definitely an experience. (I stress well set up - they are very difficult to set up properly and I always tune mine to the content I am watching)
My last CRT was a great large screen tv. It looked great, worked perfectly but I threw it out for a LCD. No one wanted them back then so I took it to a dump, felt really bad like abandoning a dog that had always been faithful
@@Toxic2T Agreed, we still have ours in the basement. Why throw away a fully functional piece of technology like that? Ours is just a small CRT but I've also already secured a big one from a neighbour that I can take once I move into my own place and have the necessary space. :)
@@Pit1993x sometimes you can't keep everything you've owned, you gotta draw the line somewhere. Personally I'd have kept the CRT, but then again, I didn't keep any of mine?
When I heard 2003, I went, “wait, what? Nah, that can't be.” And then I tried to remember when my family got a flat screen TV, and I'm not sure if it was before or after Skyrim was released. Edit: I watched the ring on a crappy (and really small) CRT. Guess how friggin' scared I was when it went directly to white noise when the film stopped!
I picked up a CRT off the side of the road a few years back that had a HDMI port. I was astounded.. but yeah. They keep making stuff way after the people in the know have switched away
@@Warp2090 your reply sounds super sarcastic haha but I'm only 50% sure it was meant that way. The main part of my point was that it had HDMI. HDMI was sort of only a thing post 2006, and I sort of think of crts as bring 90s and earlier
I worked at Goodwill about 6 or 7 years ago and we charged $0.25 for each CRT, even the rare HD ones that came in. No one would buy them. We would just end up recycling tons of them since they would rot on the sales floor
that's how this stuff works. By the time people are like, wait, what ever happened to X? Then they are like, wait, X was actually way better for Y than Z! Now it's rare, pricey, etc. High quality tape players, Vinyl pressings, etc.
Would love to see how 4k oled w/ the proper shader or filters compares to CRT for retro gaming. They've come a long way but usually require at least 4k to look their best.
The CRT-Royale-NTSC preset in Retroarch is I think the best I've found. It can do the waterfalls in Sonic 2 and Dracula's eyeglow in PS1 castlevania nearly perfectly.
@@tsartomato I find myself not liking the way a lot of games look when upscaled. 3D games look so much more crude, 2D games look so much more rough, and any anti-aliasing in 2D looks like hot garbage. 2D graphics back in the day were designed with limitations of CRT in mind, and definitely look much better when displayed how the artists originally made them.
@@tsartomato it doesn't though. Although removing flickering is definitly a plus, some games when blasted of into a super high resolution just starts to show the other drawbacks, like muddy textures and low poly count, the low resolution helps mask it all making it look more artistic, like an image artisticly out of focus, rather than something with super sharp edges but muddy ass textures
scanlines also help sharpen out edges byt masking the slight blurs pixel to pixel its not *quite* the same but if you try turning scanlines on and off on a oled or LCD display in the emulator you notice the graphics look better under scanlines so much so they even sell hardware scanline generators to apply this effect back to retro consoles on LCD and oled
I managed to get my hands on a 24 inch JVC from the late 90s early 2ks this month and got rid of my Roku smart tv. Hooked Roku to this one and I couldn’t be happier watching old anime on this tv over my smart tv
I remember stores sabotaging CRTs over here to push LED screens back in the day. LED was more spece efficient and some stores had massive stores of the crappy early LED monitors. So naturally some stores messed with contrast and brightness values on the few remaining CRTs to make them look less appealing and the LEDs better by comparison. They'd actually ask you to leave the store if you'd try to unfornicate the settings.
@@Thomasmemoryscentral Yes they were, but they didn't overtake CRT sales till 2008-2009. And it was in large part because getting a good CRT was already getting hard as less and less stores even stocked them in reasonable numbers due to logistics and shelf space.
Recently I found 2005 80cm LCD Fujitsu-Siemens Myrica V32 it weights 20kg but has terribly slow display. My 80cm pixel+ crt thomson(60kg) was much beter... now i collect 50cm sony trinitrons optimal size for retro gaming i can move it by my self andd it does not ocupy that much space.
I mean in fairness, first of all, lol who the fuck can afford to just drop that kind of money on a massive OLED. On the other, CRTs are soon going to be more expensive than OLED thanks to rarity vs industry of scale. But then on the other hand, let's be honest here, we're talking about 1990s technology that died out in the 2000s, so you're still getting stuck with 1990s visual tech for when Half Life was a riveting visual experience--in other words, back when us kids would say excitedly how much better muh grafix, because the graphics genuinely sucked so much ass back then that even I as a child could understand that Westwood's games looked freaking terrible. Like do you all remember Command and Conquer Red Alert? The little moving clump of 12 pixels that we called "soldiers"? Oh yeah fuck that, ain't no way I'm going back. I could even tell back then it looked so bad on all games, I mean we're talking about in 2022 terms what was basically a bunch of pixelart .gifs running at each other. That's what we had to play with back in my day. Pixelart .gifs So while I rescind some earlier things I said dunking on CRT because yes, you had those smudged pixels and I do think Starcraft Broodwar looked better on CRT, I mean...it looked bad overall for a reason. Everything looked bad. The tech just wasn't there. Like, I consistently say how much I don't care about FSR and DLSS because of the smudging, so why would I want to look at something even lower res and lower pixel count and still smudged? It only looks bad compared to really blocky LEDs back in the day. Or even 1366x768, hell tbh 1080p actually looks bad enough to me now I just can't. So. I'd rather have OLED if it's okay in price. The one thing I'll concede is yeah, you really do need period correct hardware for some of the real oldies, and I'd rather play Starcraft Broodwars on a CRT. Anyone up for a quick 7v1 cpu? It's not me I swear it's xXarchangel_69Xx he's the bs'er!
I have a Sony Trinitron wega I got back in 2006, display item. I got it for 476$ or so. It was a great deal. It was $1000 brand new at the time, has amazing speakers also. But in 2011 it started acting up. Now if you turn it off you can't turn it back on for at least a week or two and need to unplug it. If you don't do this it'll just keep shutting itself off everytime. All TV's have there pros and cons depending on what your playing on them. And yeah in 2006 the crts we're on their way out, only a.few models like Toshiba Sony Samsung RCA were available while flat TV's like the Westinghouse for $800 was very tempting but it was 32" so smaller and worse contrast. I will say I remember the color popping pretty good on the Westinghouse on the curious George movie they were showing on them, but my tv I got also displayed color great like in Madagascar. And when they let me hook up my 360 to the tv and try out a game a played quake 4 and was sold on it.
Before he passed my father had that HD trinitron. We used it for many many years and it always was one of the best and sharpest displays we’d ever seen, even into the mid 2010s. Wish I could have understood how great it really was and kept it after he passed but that thing weighs as much as an elephant
@@fattomandeibu You need 2 people to position it lol not for the faint of heart. I had a 60" trinitron clone from Blaupunkt, and it was like a train carriage 🤣 I knew a guy who had an even worse TV, it was a plasma projection TV which in it's stand was 5ft high, then at the base about 2-3 foot wide. You couldn't even move it!
I was using an Electrohome ECP4500 CRT projector. 1080i/720p. Awesome for gaming but its a lot of work to setup and very heavy. Its like having traffic lights laid sideways. Was 58th in the world in Killzone 2 mp.
@@ecp4500 "Its like having traffic lights laid sideways" 🤣 OMG that sounds pretty bloody awful! I am guessing then that the actual panels are amazing! 58th in the world? I am no FPS player these days, but I can appreciate that 58th out of a few million says you put a lot of time and effort into that. Which I commend! People might say its only video games, but it really doesn't matter what the task is. Being in the top 100 is a fairly high level, you are almost in the top 50 as well :)
Found a CRT on the side of the road. Hooked my PS2 into it with component cables and it is rapidly becoming my most played system. Anything HDMI will look better on a modern display but older stuff will always look better on a CRT.
I could barely play my xbox games on my flatscreen whatever it is and I got a free sanyo bottom shelf rf component cable only input crt and it was an incredible improvement
I pulled out my old ColecoVision console and games (kept in original boxes) from the attic for a vintage game night that we had various consoles connected to a Vivitek 56" DLP TV that has DVI/HDCP inputs and it looked wonderful! When I mentioned my wife previously wanted to get rid of it when we purchased our 70" flat screen it started a bidding war among the true vintage gamers. I'm glad I kept it but I miss her from time to time!
The biggest monitor I ever owned was a View Sonic 19in monster. It produced so much heat I kept the heat registers in the room closed during the winter. During the summer I kept a 9in fan running behind it to cool it, and kept the window AC running full blast. But the real dagger in the heart of CRT is power consumption, they simply can't compete with modern monitors, they are just power hogs and heat generators!
Sorry, but I have a couple of Sony 21" CRT monitors running in my tiny little gaming cave (well shed), and it's the summer, they put out a little warmth yes if you put your hand right over the vents, but my 32" LED monitor gets equally hot, and my PC puts out several times more heat than them all put together, if you want a display that puts out a ton of heat, then its OLED, the newer models actually have huge heatsinks to cool them down to reduce artefacts and improve brightness.
@@Wobble2007 Plasma TVs especially the Panasonic Viera series are right up there with OLED sporting massive heatsinks and active cooling fans, I like my 50" Viera because it's got CRT like contrast and with such a deep chassis it's got excellent sound, I have a MASSIVE old Sharp CRT that came with my house that still works flawlessly, it may very well end up being a shop TV because it's picture quality is right up there with even my "newer" plasma TV and the Panasonic, main reason I went with the Viera for my daily driver is there's no motion blur like LCD and select LED screens and it's too heavy to steal, took 4 guys to get it up the stairs and 4 guys ain't gonna get it down the stairs and out the door before police and armed and intoxicated neighbors show up
@@vacexpert2020 I owned FW900 i numerous 22" 19" CRTs there was no heat. On the other hand Panasonic plasma in front of your face you will feel that heat so much that you cant actually have it in that way near you.
not that much further, the issues of crt persist. them being the fact that a mechanical part has to move, this results in two very well known issues size and quality. you cannot go much higher quality because then the delay between refreshes would become obvious due to the fact that the "line" needs time to move. you could cercomvent this by adding extra lamps and mirrors and what not but then you run into issue number two size, they are already massive. all in all if you're actually interested in a modern take look at a lazer projector, basically the same principle only your screen is further away
@@billmilosz CRT's have circuit boards inside them, and the parts do degrade, and need replacing. You don't want a shtty old capacitor to start leaking all over the board, that's the death of the monitor, lol. And even if they don't leak, you still need to replace them, because otherwise the image processing gets messed up, and the image distorts and twists as you use the monitor. xD CRT's don't have moving parts, but they do have a lot of components, so yeah, they need maintenance.
@@GreySectoid I still have two 27" Sony Trinitrons but wouldn't use them for anything besides old game consoles, and even that is hard to justify. LCDs are just so more convenient and don't have all the picture, size, weight, power, etc. issues.
10 years ago CRTs were e-waste. People couldn't get rid of them, I remember my local charity shop (thrift store) had a MOUNTAIN of them at the back of the shop and they were practically giving them away. I bought one when I was a teenager for £5, a widescreen standard definition Daewoo, I still use it now. The facts are is that CTRs are crap, the one showed in the video was a very high end model that was out just before Plasma and LCDs took over. The vast majority of of them only have Ariel and Scart (at least here in the UK) and have aged like milk, require constant maintenance and repair and you need to know electronics repair to use them right. Plus the HD crt in the video is hooked up to a load of different devices, in normal use it won't look that good. The hype train for CRT TVs is totally ridiculous, even tiny 11 inch crts with standard Scart and mono audio are being sold for £75 and it's a huge scam. It's all just Hipster shite, steer clear. Take that from someone who's been into Retro Gaming for over a decade and has been using CRTs since childhood, don't fall for the hype.
Personal preference perhaps? I too don't see myself getting a CRT for retro gaming. However there is a difference between and I would argue a lot is nostalgia related. Just the same reason vinyl is back and even some tapes. I found some of my tapes when cleaning basement and couldn't resist to play them, surprisingly I rather enjoyed the sound. But the whole rewinding was awful and IMHO I didn't feel it was worth the effort to get a deck. I still want a vinyl player though. If I had the space I would definitely build a retro hifi, as I totally dig the mechanical look. For me that alone would do it. I don't have the same fond feelings about CRT. I used to think CRT was good until I had a good IPS LCD side by side and difference was night and day (not in favor of CRT). So anyway, I don't think it's fair to call these scam purchases, it's not uncommon retro stuff makes a comeback. If folks want them and willing to pay, why the heck not?
Actually they are still e-waste, I've found my two crt tvs on the roadside :D Just this year I've found at least 4-5 crts (and left them, I don't have that space at home)
12 years ago I had a 29" HD CRT tv, and I couldn't even give it to the Goodwill because nobody wanted them so I ended up having it recycled. Too bad I didn't keep it.
@@FreedomForAll2013 I honestly think CRTs are overrated for newer stuff and just movies in general but for like actual PS2 games and older, they often looked better on them. Also a flat screen just doesn't look right in a retro gaming room. That said, I wouldn't want to use one as a daily driver TV.
I still play old games to this day on CRT TVs, like the SNES system, and I have my original PS2 that I still use to this day and we just got another that we saw at a thrift store as backup. We saw an original NES system at a thrift store too but were second guessing getting it but then when we decided we wanted it and went back, it was gone. Sad. 😞 There's also an original PS1 and Xbox 360 there too, both of which I never owned but I did play on someone's 360 when I visited. I'm only 20 now, but I feel like an old-timer at heart. I missed out on the explosive growth of computers and games.
There is one thing that none of these crt comparison videos never tell you. The sound they make. Every crt makes a high pitch noise. Depending on how sensitive your hearing is, it can be painful unless you block your ears
legit, i got a regular crt from some relatives and i had to go looking for another newer high refresh rate one (good thing i have the space to keep both lol) because the whine combined with the flickering basically ensures i will get a headache if i try to use it for more than a few minutes without headphones on frame interpolation (if that's even what it is) was unfortunately not great in '97 though so pick your poison i guess
Sony High-Scan Chassis... Double the horizontal frequency! You will never worry about that 15.7 screaming again! It is just not there... I don't know anyone that can hear the 31.4Khz...
I might not have a 16:9 1080i CRT TV, but I do have a super old JVC box CRT TV and a couple way smaller ones that I use a lot, and a CRT monitor that my family had before I was even conscious I was alive and it still works to this day. There's something about CRT displays that just look so good.
As someone who regularly switches between using an oled, a Sony pvm. While also using real hardware, software emulation and fpga, I think people get so caught up in believing the only way to experience retro games is what they prefer, and everyone else is a heathen for thinking otherwise. The truth is, there’s no perfect way to experience retro games today. Every method has its pros and cons. And when it comes to crt’s, people can argue artistic intent all they like, but I’m pretty sure the main intent on the developers part was for people to play these games. I swear people spend more time on forums arguing over which is better rather than just playing great games.
Yup, the moment I found emulators, the moment I forgot about the actual hardware, let me enjoy these games on the go on a flashcart or laptop any day. I don't need perfection, I just want good enough so I can enjoy the content.
@@Rikorage yep. For the most part, I just stick to using emulation on my pc these days out of convenience. It’s good enough where I don’t even notice the difference. Even when compared to fpga.
Yes.. but no. Tv's look warm, cold, light and dark and can be adjusted, etc. You just hope that the monitor/monitors your testing on gives you a good middle ground.
@@FrosteMelon Yes you are right, after all manufacturers used to set this properties based on many factors, including product line, brand recognition and quality of parts based on market of a specific product. But people will always oversimplify things to validate their own beliefs.
For the longest time, up until maybe 4 years ago, my parents had one of those huge Sony HD CRTs in their living room (moved up from the basement when it got replaced there by a plasma). It was a monster, and so ridiculously heavy.
A few years ago I caught the crt bug and found local a 40 inch Trinitron, damn thing was virtually a piece of furniture. It weighs somewhere around 300 pounds
My mom and dad were using a massive 36 or 38 inch Sharp 4:3 CRT until like 2016 because as my dad said "it works better than my eyes do" so he refused to replace it so I bought them a 40 inch flat screen and replaced it while they were on vacation. It took me and 2 friends to move it.
My father had a 400lbs CRT big TV. It was heavy and it was difficult to move it around. Eventually got rid of it because it was so difficult of moving it around.
We use them for Smash Melee tournaments in our venue. Maybe once a month, sometimes more. We do way more other things I can't talk about necessarily but it's dope to see CRTs now that I started this job. Bringing back memories
for me crts are just about compatibility, no need to mess with converters or upscalers. just run any old game at any res or refresh rate you're good to go. no faffing about with converters or menu diving to fix wrong ratios or colour spaces. high refresh rates can look insane as well.
Also this. My wife bought me a copy of my favorite PS1 game for my birthday one year, and I hadn't used my PS1 since I made a Retropie. So I hooked up the A/V cables, and to my surprise, got nothing but a black and white output with a ton of issues refresh rate issues. No issue with the component/composite on my PS2/Dreamcast. Hooked it up to the old trinitron in our guest room? Bam. Perfect picture.
Very good point, my main issue with CRT, and maybe you can help, is finding how to send an HDMI or DP to RCA or Cable plug for my CRT. I have tons of old games on my computer that would be so much more fun on the TV, but I cannot find a converter anywhere for this purpose, only for going from old to new, not new to old. Also, you cannot buy a new TV now that is not "Smart," and those all slow down with time being they have computers inside you cannot maintain as end user. 2 year old Smart Samsung and LG mid-tiers both run as slow as my 5 year old Roku, even with fresh factory resets and updates...
@@joshuaadams4945 sorry didn't see this until now. Depends on your TVs inputs, you can get a HDMI to RCA composite box for cheap the image wont be great though. so for a clearer image it depends on what the other inputs your CRT TV has. svideo? scart? sending a digital signal from your pc out and converting to an analog signal will require some conversion inbetween.
There's no mention of how lightguns only work on standard definition CRTs, or how retro games use transparency effects with CRTs like the waterfall in Sonic 2 or the fog in Streets of Rage 2.
I used to have an old sony CRT like the big one in this video, the trintitron I believe. That thing damn near lasted 15 years and was still working perfectly when I got rid of it. They were very reliable.
I recently got into CRTs and I'd definitely say that they are the definitive way to consume 240p and 480i content. I disagree with David's opinion on moving a modern game to a CRT (like Cross Roads). I think games should be played with whatever display they were designed for
CRT dude here, I have to say that the RT5X can be used on that 4K OLED to get results almost indistinguishable from CRT-- and Mike Chi's upcoming RT4K will improve upon that even more.
Depends on what it is though, some are worth a decent bit of wonga, some only a few £$, A nice Sony 14"/21"/25" in good condition with a healthy tube is worth a fair few £$ for instance, or a JVC D-Series, Toshiba A Series, sets like those can go for a good price if they are in good condition, PC CRTs are the most expensive, a decent 19"/21" high resolution/refresh rate CRT monitor will fetch hundreds if it's got a healthy tube. And PVM/BVM sets can be a small fortune.
this is one of my favorite videos of this channel. Really, this sets you apart from ANY youtube channel. Not only the level of tinkering of something really interesting (for a 30 yo gamer that grew up with sega, nintendo, ps3 and xbox, this is actually interesting), but also for the production quality. No one in youtube is even close.
After trying several scalers I can easily say scalers do changes the color interpretation specially if they are converting form composite or component to hdmi, and thats just from the color intepretation from the information, the only way the scaler wont change color is if their using rgb scart
Do CRTs look better for basically anything Pre-PS3 era? Yes. Is it worth spending what CRTs are going for nowadays+the work of actually carrying a CRT home if you're not a hardcore retro gamer? Not so sure
I still think a CRT monitor like the FW900 from the previous video is more versatile than these CRT TVs, part of the weight is the sound system besides the cathode Ray tube itself, FW900 is just pure screen.
@@IAm-zo1bo nah i have a magnavox that i got from goodwill for 12 bucks and its not nearly as good as the ones shown in the video.still keep it on my desk for retro gaming though.
The magic of a CRT is that it is a strobing display. This means you get no motion blur as your eyes track objects. Sharp scrolling backgrounds, sharp moving characters at the same time. Only strobing displays give you this. Black frame insertion tries to do this, but is less effective because you lose light.
I respect CRT's. I grew up gaming with them including on PC, but you're not just buying a CRT in this example / case, with all the extra's that you're needing. Dilutes the experience, over complicates it, rats nest of cables and bulky space. If you own a CRT is your retro corner I totally get it I do that myself, but all this seems extra to accomplish something you don't notice until you put it side by side with one of the best modern TV's you can buy. Also, the guy with glasses says that "Bears don't look sharp in real life, they look blurry" had me rolling.
theyre doing all the extra stuff because they are outputting to three different displays simultaneously... obviously this isn't a regular use case. the only thing you would actually need is the upscaler if you use an hd-crt, to reduce input lag.
Really good software and really nice modern screens will always look better than old CRT's, I think this only really becomes relevant if you have a substandard flatscreen, and then you could conceive to improve it using a CRT. But 99% of the time I would say, nah the flat screen with good quality firmware always wins.
What David was talking about was that the clarity of the image exposed the layering of textures that make up the hair. In the real world, hair isn't made of 5 layers of textures but hundreds of thousands of individual strands.
I hopped on to the crt band wagon when digital foundary made their fw900 vids back in like 2019, and tbh crt only looks better if its an old game, or of course if you have an fw900.
@@DailyCorvid Of course mate and I really hope you don't feel I was shitting on your opinion. I do honestly get the argument and what you are putting forward in the video. It reminds me of talking to my friends about 120Hz monitors when they were niche and expensive (Though understandably comparing oranges and lemons, newer tech is adopted over time so can't be fully compared to judging CRT today.) But I really respect the passion behind the video and the point in this comment is very valid. I personally have an LG G1 for my main gaming and an old Sony Trinitron that I've had since I was born playing Sonic 2 games since I could hold a controller, nothing really competes to playing classic games on it if you can put the time into the set-up.
i just got a 32 inch samsung hd crt and it looks amazing with games like elden ring, It makes them feel retro. and one thing that i always love crt's for is the depth, they just look 3d games and movies just pop off the screen in this way that no flat display had ever been able to emulate for me.
I'd love to see a new technology that uses something like Lasers against a filtered screen to perform the same kind of scanning effect as a CRT, but in a smaller, more power-efficient manner. Imagine a lightweight display with nigh instantaneous response time, support for many arbitrary resolutions and refresh rates 1:1, and great contrast ratio.
@@nicomarino96 oled has a native resolution unlike crt and non native resolutions look blurry. They still have input lag although it's way lower than lcd
I thought about building a scanning-laser apparatus like that. The issue with any scanning-beam display is image persistence; you'd need to replicate that property of CRT/plasma phosphor coatings to make that happen.
@@RandomUser-tj3mg One nitpick - color CRTs aren't perfect on the native resolution front either. While no scaling is involved, the shadowmask/aperture grille's dot pitch does create a sort of native resolution in and of itself.
The picture might be more crisp with good geometry but when it comes to my 14" & 20" PVM and my JVC D-series and trinitrons, I go for the D-series every time. The colors don't pop out like they do on consumer sets and I get bored looking at the PVM's.
I remember an explanation before on why ps2 games at least looked better on CRT is because of the way it was displayed, the CRT would add a kind of anti-aliasing to the image.
In 2012 I sold one of our old 21" CAD CRT ( Sony GDM-F520 ) to a pro CS player. It was absolutely top tier when purchased around 2002 and capable of doing 1600x1200 @120Hz
The HD CRT's out there for sale , at this point, could be nearing their end. Especially if they have been in use since they were bought back in the early to mid 2000s. Certain boards (D BOARD) will eventually fail causing the image to pull down when a static white color screen or red is displayed. Also the color guns might lack some red or certain colors giving the image quality a magenta tint, and that affects the contrast creating more black crush. Finding replacement parts is almost impossible at this point lol probably easier to find the same tv on ebay or craiglist. Please don't spend more than 30 bucks buying something that will become a 200 pound paper weight.
I love seeing this, I'm disappointed that you didn't do light scanlines on OLED though. You still may not have liked it but games with sprites were created with scanlines in mind and used the scanlines to hide imperfections. This is why emulators have shader plugins and also a a way to add scanlines. Going in with nothing is like staring at the sun until your eyes can no longer see. It's blinding :)
Shaders are SO important in emulation really. And it's not just scanlines, but they can do things like detecting dithering patterns and smoothing values from it, creating a high quality image without the overall softness of a CRT input. I'm wondering if there's something like a SweetFX shader injection that can add scanlines or perform the smoothing to create a much closer to CRT visual experience. The CRT effect is pretty much just post-processing, so it should be possible to mimic pretty much everything related to static visual clarity with a good shader.
Honestly though most people have their OLED set way too bright. My parents set their OLED down to 38 brightness because it was hurting their eyes in the evening, while still being clear and bright during the day.
This problem is due to the pixel density of the display. If you were to use a computer for example and emulate while upscaling you won't experience this issue. They are playing relatively native hardware with hardware upscale conversion. OLED will win if you're doing this from a computer.
Friend came over one day to play TF2 on my big Iiyama CRT... broke his long standing scout record almost instantly. It was a 4:3 screen so I eventually had to let it go. But there's nothing like playing fast shooters on a CRT. It's like you can actually see what's going on in the game.
For me, the crt is good for 8 and 16bit systems. Partially for the large pixel size of a 240i image making the pixels too visible on a display with discreet pixels and partially because sometimes composite video and crt artifacting was used to create more colors. To me it just makes more sense to use a small crt to play these games natively instead upscaling hardware or experimenting with emulator filters. When you get into the hd era it might be a tossup but i wouldn't invest in an hd crt id just get a quality crt with composite and skip the rf modulation we used for lack of knowing better at the time. I wouldn't get caught up in component and hdmi mods, if you have systems with native component out and you feel they look better on crt then get what you need to play those systems but if you're running native hdmi you probably don't need a crt unless you want to turn off antialiasing and get better frame rates or something.
It's 240p, not i. The "resolution" is made by sending the same field of lines over and over again instead of sending 240 odd lines and then 240 even lines, so there's no interlacing or combing or, just 240 lines that are twice as bright.
I bought a 13" Trinitron with just composite and I will say it looks amazing, it's exactly how I remember gaming as a kid and teenager and wouldn't have it any other way.
But that's not the point entirely. Vintage systems output progressively and crt draw progressively. You can hook a console to a crt without extra hardware and enjoy it the way it always looked. Or you can go through painstaking measure optimizing your emulator setup to fake dithering, bloom, composite video artifacting, scan lines if you're into that, etc and so forth and you still get an image thats drawn after the whole frame has been communicated to the display not drawn progressively. All that effort to make super mario world look the way you remember it seems wasted to me when you can get a mediocre crt. I know its technically possible to get lower latency with modern hardware and its technically possible to look better doing it. But the old console and the old display do work well together. Its not unpractical to just have an old display around for such a purpose without having to think about all those emulator options.
@@danieldimitri6133 it has nothing to do with emulation or anything of sorts. It's just that the tv signal is designed to first send 240 odd lines, then 240 even lines thus drawing 480 lines in a comb like fashion. But it's the device generating the television signal that have the task to tag the 240 lines as being odd lines or even lines. So a 480i television station etc will tag odd/even/odd/even etc.. But old game consoles don't do that, they always use the same field, so it's not an interlaced signal, but a progressive one, as every frame is "complete". And you don't see the black unused lines on smaller tv sets because the lines being drawn are being drawn twice as fast, and end up twice as bright as well.
My grandparents had the 4:3 version of that TV. I remember my mind being blown when I realized it had hdmi on the back of the crt. It start going a little green and they got rid of it. Wish I could have kept it but I was in a small apartment at the time and didn't have space
Pretty much the main "plus" for CRT is that it smears vaseline over the lens so you can't see how crappy the textures are, which is not a good argument at all.
I picked up an HD CRT and fell in love with it. The softening of pixel art and bad PS3-era aliasing is second to none, and I love the glowy feeling of the image. I actually ended up using it way more for streaming movies and TV shows on it with a Fire Stick. Old video content just looks so much cooler and more believable on them than my OLED
I can't stand the high pitched whine of crt tv's. It was so tortuous to me as a kid playing Dreamcast and original Xbox while hearing that buzzing whine all the time. You kind of got used to it but would notice it again every time you turn it back on. No thank you lol glad crt is dead
@@CadgerChristmasLightShow CRT monitors have such a high resolution that the noise is inaudible. After watching Linus's Sony GDM FW900, i don't like the CRT TVs as much. I can hear the 15-16KHz tone of the CRT TVs on this video.
The 34XBR960 I have definitely has better contrast and color accuracy, much brighter colors and a certain glow that my LCDs have never been able to beat. For instance I watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation on it in 1080 and the christmas lights just glow and look so much more realistic.
16:26 It's called phong shading and it was developed to smooth out hard edges between polys by gradually adjust the angle of how light would bounce. It was a necessary advancement due to the limited amount of polys that could be displayed. It's just in the shader. No actual "texture" and certainly not vector based.
Close! In the PS1 generation, Phong lighting wasn't practical due to the amount of processing power required. Games actually used Gouraud shading, which would assign vertices colors based on their angles to the light source, and then interpolate between those colors. However, it doesn't look like her hair even uses that, instead, it's just vertex colors assigned once to her models verts that don't change when she moves.
@@blulynx2619 oh right! That actually makes more sense. I forgot that vertex colors were even a thing. Nowadays I only ever use vertex maps only if absolutely necessary. I guess that puts square in the world of having been confidently incorrect!
phong shading didn't come around till much later. it was called gouraud shading it's hard to emulate. It was a technique that benefited from hardware at the time. Both the screens and consoles.
I remember Amiga and PC demos in 1990's had Phong Shading. A lot of these terms became famous in the scene in 1980's and 90's. Same for Ray Tracing in 1980's.
Playing old games on old CRT's sound just as logical watching old movies and series on a CRT-tv. It is the complete experience for the right era. Actually I bought a CRT for the same reason that I wanted an DOS / Windows 95 environment with the right vibe.
@Clarissa 1986 I wish international copyright law could be rewritten so that it only last for as long as you continue to sell the piece of media in a reasonable way, like you could hold copyright ad-infinitum if you never stop selling a videogame but if you stop the production of that videogame for 2 years consecutive or 5 years cumulative, then you lose the copyright. This would be for the best as copyright would protect you and your profits as long as you are proffiting from it(aka selling it), once you no longer wish to sell it and as so you are no longer proffiting from it, there is no need to protect that profit anymore. I think this is the best of both worlds, if a company really is making a profit for a long time from a piece of media, they can hold the copyright for as long as they wish and continue proffiting from it, but once they themselves consider it is no longer profitable they just stop offering that piece of media and in 2 years it becomes public, and to avoid some nasty freaks just doing a limited release 1 time once 2 years so it does not expire, once they hit a maximum of 5 non continuous years, they lose it as well. This time gives companies that have had troubles with distribution due to something to still have time to recuperate and continue offering it without lossing the copyright due to some eventuality. I think my proposal is the fairest for both author and public, as it technically has no expiration date as long as they keep offering the media, but once they no longer care for the piece of media, demostrated by their own unwilligness to sell it and make profit, they lose the legal protection for their profits as they are no longer proffiting.
@Clarissa 1986 Copyright used to have expirations that were reasonable. Then Disney lobbied the hell out of the US government to change copyright so that it lasts way longer. All to protect Mickey Mouse from what happened to Oswald Rabbit.
@Clarissa 1986 That is the reason i said: " I wish international copyright law could be rewritten so that it only last for as long as you continue to sell the piece of media in a REASONABLE WAY", that is the wiggle room i left intentionally, they would have to actually sell it in a reasonable way, pricing it at unreasonable prices would not be a reasonable way of selling it and would be meant to defraud the law.
In 1999, I took part in a school fundraiser where we outfitted our computer lab with brand new Proline Windows 98 beige boxes and CRT monitors. I'll never forget the smell of all the static from those new monitors when walking in, combined with the smell of the new carpet. Magic. What got me into computing. I won't go back to those heavy energy in efficient hogs that gave me the worst migraines at low refresh rates, but man, did they make the presence of the computer known? Did they have an aura of mystique? Hell, yes.
One of my most favorite TV I ever had was a 36" Sony HD (with HDMI) CRT, It was a beast but Color and Blacks were unbeatable and It's internal Speakers were amazing. I miss that TV even now.
Internal speakers have taken an awful turn for the worst. Old good stereo sound CRTs had some of the best internal speakers. Of course since the case is so big you get decent bass response from them. Now the "Base model" tvs with the mono speaker, those were garbage and I dont miss that lol
This is an excellent format, I want to see more videos like this where the writer is one of the hosts. I'm a bit surprised that we haven't seen a major manufacturer try to make a modern CRT. Maybe it just takes a lot more work since they've been out of commission for so long.
The manufacture of CRTs where only cost effective on a large scale. A modern manufacture CRT would not be able to sell enough to bring the cost down to a reasonable price. They also use quite a bit hazardous materials in their construction that probably would not be tolerated by the market today.
Even before the sponsor, I can tell you right now that the input lag thing is legit. Years of testing just from the fighting game community alone confirms that. For so long it was better to play on a CRT than a laggy flatscreen, because the gap was so huge back then. Current flatscreen tech, just as they are designed, will never match CRT's speed in that department, but they've closed the gap so much that the difference is now negligible, as long as you aren't buying garbage tech above 5ms response time.
15:52 - This effect was because of the PS1 cutting out a lot of FPU (floating point hardware) for rendering. So pixels / coordinates in games were INTEGERS and NOT decimals, and hence it would "jitter" between 2 pixels when it was supposed to be a value in between. The N64 for a lot of games / capability, looked better in this particular manner than the PS1. Obviously this was done to cut costs (Sony's first entry in game consoles), albeit I feel it would have been WAYYYYYY better if they added it and ate the cost for the visual clarity that comes with an FPU. But I'm not in that business, so It's not really fair in hindsight to say that.
Considering that the PS1 was released in 1994 and the N64 in 1996 while graphic hardware made huge leaps during that time, it's excusable that the PS1 is worse at calculating coordinates.
@@Sk8erBoiALX Yeah, that's true. I excuse it too, but a lot of people consider the ps1 more powerful/capable than the n64 -- especially as most cartridges for n64 were a max of 32-64mb for game roms.
Back in the day, I got a 34XBR960 for free from a guy who was "upgrading to a flat panel". That 960 has the most glorious picture I've ever seen. Great sound with the built in sub too. It also weighed 200lbs. I ended up paying it forward after using it for a few years.
Yeah it always confused me why people will put perfectly working items on the side of the road when they can bring it to a thrift store. Same with recycling one of them, just give it to someone who will use it if it still works. I found a super high end gaming keyboard at goodwill. Brand new. Some people just are clueless not gonna lie!
I still have one of the last HD-CRT flat tubes from Sony that was around 2005, and I keep it because classic games do look better on them. My Dreamcast and PS 2 just go with it better than my 55 inch OLED tv.
True. Though they aren't for european use because of the high electricity price. My neighbour has a plasma TV (old woman, never bothered to get a newer TV etc) Now, with an electricity price of 0.30€ per kwh, she was shocked when I hooked it up to a kill-a-watt and told her that the TV she uses 'as background noise during chores and all' for 5 hours a day burns through 500w when turned on, essentially costing her almost 1€ each day. I then sold her my old 720p LED TV for 40€, which I maybe used ten times over the last 5 years. She gets to save money cause it uses only 35w, I got rid of unnecessary electronics and the plasma TV will probably either go to someone who uses it more moderately, or get recycled at the local electronics disassembly facility.
That's what I thought was missing from Linus's intro. Plasma was (and is) far superior to LCD for motion and contrast. I was blown away when I hooked up a Wii to a 42" Panasonic VIERA about 10 years ago for a friend's nephew. Mario Kart's motion was pure perfection. No blurring, no artifacts. Objects as sharp and stable while moving as while sitting still. Even now with a 240Hz G-Sync LCD and frame rates to match, I can't quite reach that motion quality (and the contrast is shit compared to the plasma too).
I love how crt filters look for 2d sprites, on my LG C2, the crt filters for ps1 games make them look so much better. I'm guessing it's not all the way there as a real crt, but it's a definitive improvement, while maintaining all of the other perks of OLED.
I was actually wondering if you weren't going to put a CRT like that in the company's game center room. so that the employees can experience CRT's for the first time in their lives.
The motion clarity of CRT's really stands out when playing sidescrollers. Much better than LCD/OLED flat panels in that one category. Scrolling backgrounds look smeared without black frame insertion.
As someone who grew up on CRTs, the jittery animations and aliasing in all forms have been the consistent bane of my every gaming experience since switching to an LCD. As soon as I noticed it the first time, I've been doomed. Weirdly enough, however, when I go back to games older than around 2012-2013, all of it seems less prominent. I don't know what happened along the way, but I hate it.
It really does come down to what tech the devs were working with, imo. Even something like the bilinear filtering that looks absolutely horrid on modern displays no matter what kind of panel it is can look passable or even good on a CRT because that filtering effect was applied with CRTs in mind.
dont worry Linus, i'm too poor to afford anything you recommend
Same
This hit too close to home for me. ;_;
Fuck I wanted to say this too lol
Same
Same
This is my favorite format now; staff member brings something they're passionate about, explains and shows it to Linus and they rate it as they go. It's so cool
Soo... who is next up for their Show & Tell? :-)
100% agree
Ditto.
Three Monitor CRT Gaming Battel Station..
@@shadowr2d2
it too
Be VERY careful buying HDCRTs if you watch this and think "That's for me." Some of them have half second lag times. I've tested some. They are NOT all the same.
I've also had experiences with regular CRTs where they sometimes don't work with the NES Zapper. Some make it miss 100%, and others would register a hit anywhere on the screen. Other lightguns work fine with them though.
@@tim3172 Watch out!!!! Your new TV will have a different remote¬!! I am pissed off I can't just keep using this old one. THATS BAD DESIGN ;)
@@nathanddrews Especially if you have those little plastic twiddler knobs for contrast brightness saturation and blue levels. Over time they get unresponsive so making a small adjustment is impossible unless you have a tiny pixie sized wife to deal with them ...... ahem tiny knobs :D
@@tim3172 Imagine being a smartass when someone is trying to help others from wasting $1000+ on what they think was a standardized technology. They didn't cover it in the video, nothing wrong with covering it in the comments section.
Those models came with an included “hard mode” as a feature.
The fact that CRT still has advantages really shows how great it was. Im 22 so i haven't had much experience with CRTs. As ours was replaced in 2007 so i was only 6 so it feels like we've had flatscreens for a long time. Would love to see a modern CRT capable at 4k resolution and HDR but not sure if that is possible, would be great for retro and modern gaming, would probably have to be pretty small as we are use to our light flatscreens even though they can be pretty awkward to hold at 65inch and up. 27inch would be fine
I'm 32 and grew up with CRTs In the late 90s / early 2000s And still on a CRT from 1998 which I play my older systems on they definitely do still have some advantages one of the biggest ones being how they handle motion and having zero input lag
@HollowRick Alot of people were unaware of their advantages and many people couldn't wait to get rid of them. Most my family members chose samsung as their flat screen of choice. Great flatscreens they were as you could turn the tv from left to right with the swivel feature. I know what TV flatscreen we had but not sure how much it cost us but all I can say it looked really high end and was a massive 40 inches in size lol we did have it with a dvd player and that had surround speakers. I wanted the old 27inch wide-screen CRT for my bedroom and my mum said no lol funny thing is it was already put upstairs because we had no where else to put it because we were selling it. So it could've been mine but instead I stuck with the small CRT which had the DVD player built in.
I'm 21 and I love playing retrogames until Xbox og on my new crt trinitron, I was more excited about this than the new 4k oled TV recently arrived at my house lmao
Rgb consoles with a good cable on that crts are the best (excluding pvms of course, n64 on RGB with deblur there is OUTSTANDING and consoles like megadrive its just gorgeous, you really need to watch it by yourself to understand what I say..), for the new ones I would recommend a good oled one with some marseille cable which go nuts, spending money on stuff as rescalators imo is throwing money to the bin just because you don't want a good crt or because of space to get some decent picture on a modern display
If you love original hardware and retrogaming do it well and waste the money well done as rgb cables of quality, getting RGB modded consoles.. if not go to the emulation scene totally free not something between that spending a lot unnecessary, that's my view and recommendation :)
@@codehunter77 Awesome 👌
@@brandonlee7382 Np ;)
For some reason I cant see my message again lol yt trolling me
(I wanted to type upscalers not that btw🤣)
Gotta remember graphics designers always optimise for their current display technology, a lot of people who think old games look like crap probably just never saw them displayed on a CRT.
Tell that to the AAA games that release constantly with broken HDR and all types of issues. haha
They did look like crap most of the time. It's just that the good graphic was just an addition to gameplay. These days some games are just technical demos without the game itself.
@@PixogenPixels Older games were much more about art direction than pure graphical output. Game developers had a big incentive to think outside the box and ensure their game stood out from the competition. These days, many developers are churning out new games for the simple sake of providing new content for their customers.
I generally think most things look better on modern OLEDs, but there are exceptions. CRTs have a bit of separation between scanlines at lower resolutions, so sprites tend to look brighter and sometimes washed out on OLEDs where that doesn't exist. Also, the blurriness of CRT TVs makes dithering look much smoother and less pixelated than it would on an OLED.
@@camthesaxman3387 dithering is done by nvidia driver be default. As for separation... crt has 2.4 gamma so it was darker.
The most vivid memory of a crt i have is a table collapsing because of the sheer weight of the 32 inch crt and it exploded, then we did not have a television for 13 years lmao.
_13 YEARS?_ Dang, that's honestly impressive. RIP to your table and CRT
it probably took down the house with it
@@Ra-Hul-K Hahaha
I had a slightly similar experience with my 46" Samsung LCD, except it wasnt the table that exploded it was the glass stand that the tv actually ships with. The weight was too much for it to handle and one evening late at night whilst my parents were sleeping I was getting in a quiet session of Just Cause 2 when the base exploded so loudly it was akin to a gun shot. I still have the tv to this day and it still has some leftover glass on the base from over a decade ago.
@@masterzela Hahaha good thing its still working, hauling out a dead 46 inch crt sounds like a nightmare.
If we bought everything you recommended, Linus, we'd be broke.
We are all broke already
If I bought ANYTHING Linus recommended, I'd be broke.
Wrong. You have a perfectly good kidney you can sell on the black market ;)
@@wordsmith451 Kidney isn't worth as much as you think. China flooded the market with organs from Falun Gong followers and Uighurs, prices crashed.
As a person who's bought everything Linus recommended, I am currently sitting at a grand total of 1 cent.
You have gone throught many options, but it should be known that with retro games especially just a few gens back they were inherently designed with CRTs quirks in mind. The literal best example for sprite quality and shading is Dracula's blood red eyes in his talk portrait in Castlevania SOTN.
CRTs biggest strengths are in its dream like haze and ability to apply extra blur to great effect, like in the ff10 cutscenes or Zelda: Majora's Mask.
The overly warm/red image on the HD CRT is likely due to what the CRT community calls "Trinitron Red Push". This red push was implemented by Sony to make TV content such as skin tones "pop" on the showroom floor, at detriment to the overall accuracy of the image. Luckily this "feature" can be easily disabled to bring the display back to a balanced and accurate color profile usually by turning the AXNT setting in the service menu from 1 to 0.
My KD 34XBR970 has a toggle in advanced settings to adjust red from normal to monitor. This dials back the red a lot, but can hurt because I think it dials it back too much. Some games need the extra red
@@segasdreamer Some games were probably "mastered" in that kind of mode, so they did not realise their colours were bias a little.
I have never seen a sony TV survive past 20 years. At least being in active use. Eventually that power supply button or something inside will crap out.
@@AC3handle i was born in 03 and my parents had their crt b4 I was alive, it has always seen active use cause it was all I had to game on till I was like 12 and since then I've used it regularly (once/twice a week with friends) and it's still kicking around and it has no issues, I might just be the luckiest dude ever to have used it for 10000s of hours and never had it shit out tho.
@@segasdreamer I don't have a lot of experience with later HD XBRs so I can't say if the setting you mentioned is the same as the older service menu setting but I have noticed this too when disabling the red push, particularly on older and heavier used sets. So, after disabling it I usually do a quick and easy color recalibration by adjusting the red color's bias (cutoff) and gain (drive) to bring the strength of the red properly in line with green and blue. Luckily, consumer Trinitrons allow you to perform this adjustment through the service menu.
I think this occurs because the from-factory red push causes the red gun and phosphors to wear out more quickly than blue and green, so if it is disabled after years of operation, the red can look weak in comparison without further calibration.
Fun fact about the color issues of old games: old games were intentionally colored a certain way to work with CRT's and how they naturally mute out the intensity of yellows and browns, so games were programmed with odd neon orange and yellow colors because, when run through CRT's, the colors would be washed out through the tubes and would display the desired colors. With OLED, you're seeing the compensating colors without the CRT washout and wind up with jarringly oversaturated colors that don't look good. So what Linus and co. are seeing in the OLED screen with DreamCast sprite games is the raw coloring that you were never ment to see, which would be corrected by the CRT tubes. If you don't have these intense colors, the browns and yellows would be washed out completely.
Now my only question is why do CRTs mute the intensity of yellows and browns?
i Hope that someone invents a "crt filter" for Oled displays that allows you to play old games with the same artifacts you can find on a CRT
aren't catodic rays dangerous for the human eye?
@@chamostrato cathode rays are dangerous in general. That's why they're stuck inside a vacuum tube.
@Josh Stevenson yes. Modern tv's use LED or LCD screens which contain more colors than just RGB and can display wider variety of colors, so game devs no longer needed to compensate.
the one thing I remember as to why older games that were made when CRT setups were the dominant format is that sprites and models were crafted specifically to use the screen lines to "complete" the sprite. Hence why the smooth aspect from LCD and OLED screens looks much more "wrong" on older games
Also colors. Like with crosscode the colors are just wrong on the CRT since they were designed for LCD. While with old games designed on crt they are too colorful and unrealistic on LCD and look correct on crts.
But then gameboy become a thing and suddenly sprites worked perfectly on lcd.
@@gigabooga it wasn't a matter of limitations it was a matter of design. At the time of the early consoles CRT televisions made up the vast majority of all TVs so the designers made their sprite art to work within the tools available. When working with a handheld with an LCD screen and when LCD TVs became the more popular medium the artwork was adjusted to work with the more common medium
@@gigabooga were you not old enough to actually play a game boy cuz I promise you sprites did not look good lol
I think the 8 bit era and earlier games look great in clean HD because of their much simpler sprites with only a few colors. Later sprite games from the 16 bit and 32 bit era look a lot better with some sort of CRT shader to smooth out their much busier and more colorful sprites.
I have a 1980's console crt in my living room dedicated for my vintage systems and an OLED in the bedroom for the more current ones. It's tough to justify, but visitors always comment on how great it is to play old games as they were.
@@Wearywastrel i thought you said bathroom. Lol, but that would be pretty cool tho.
Does the Oled handle 30fps? I’ve heard horror stories
People never mention this, but without a CRT, you lose a LOT of the fog effects from the original Silent Hill games
Don’t worry not hard to justify at all in fact it’s hard to justify throwing it away
Another interesting note about CRTs and retro gaming is that for some consoles, such as the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, you might actually be hamstringing yourself trying to go for the best picture quality. Practically all transparency and extra color tricks rely on the signal bleed from a composite signal, of which only really works with a CRT accepting that signal. There's also another transparency trick that renders the sprite/background every other frame, taking advantage of the slight phosphor afterimage of a CRT.
Yep, some digital conversions make it quite bad.
I'm not really convinced those techniques were done to exploit CRTs or composite displays because they are used on many pixel-perfect LCD/Handheld systems which do not have any such effect. That suggests to me it's just a general technique to workaround hardware limitations, not something designed specifically against the effects the output signal has on the message. For Example, Mario Tennis on the GBC uses a flickering sprite for shadows as well; but of course the GBC doesn't have phosphor afterglow. It doesn't make sense to me that a technique was used to exploit this or that detail of CRT or the signal effects on the image if those techniques were used in situations where those same effects and details were not present.
can you imagine optimizing your hardware to that level today? Turning bugs into features.
@@BCProgramming The flickering shadow transparency on GameBoy was because the screen was so bad it would blend each together for a pseudo transparency or more shades than the screen could produce. Even the GBA used flicker transparency. The screens had pretty bad response times by modern standards. nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2019/05/screen-persistence-and-gba-lcd-abuse.html
That's easily fixed in a proper emulator (not the crap "backwards compatibility" consoles nowadays shove out the door).
CRT phosphors *do* emit light when theyre "off" if they've recently been activated. its why your CRT tv glows in the dark when you turn it off, and you can draw on the screen with a torch in the dark. but the contrast is so great that when other parts of the screen are lit the dark parts are basically as good as true black
It's especially noticable on black and white sets, the blacks are more greys.
@@trash_miner That's probably due to age and wear and knob-twiddling though. A monochrome CRT can have very pure black if it's set up to do so, but as the CRT wears, people turn up the drive circuit to get more brightness so the device remains useful, even at the expense of black becoming gray.
That's why you get the glow. Afterglow. It's phosphorus.
I remember touching the static as a kid after turning off the tv
the contrast of CRTs isn't actually very good, the glow of lit phosphors spreads pretty far under the glass and lights up areas that should be darkened. I'm not sure where this misinformation started but it's apparently not going anywhere...they still have good contrast, just not anywhere near OLED. there's still numerous other advantages to a CRT though. Also all of the shit this guy showcased, he's outputing a lot of stuff that should be 240p at 480i, he's really not doing any justice to the 15khz set...
I feel like there was a missed opportunity here. One of the consoles they should've tested is an SD console made in an HD era. That would be the Wii. I would've loved to see wii games on this thing.
Very rough because the Wii outputs 480i and 480p. I prefer Dolphin emulator. I own a Triniton 4:3 CRT TV.
It actually looks pretty good as long as you run a component cable for it. Standard video isn't gonna cut it anymore.
I have a wii. Grew up playing the wii as a kid on a lcd tv but recently tested it on my crt and wow it looks so much better on the crt than a flat screen
@@saricubra2867 not true at all, it looks great
@@LJ7000 But blurry vs HD.
These widescreen trinitrons are absolutely gorgeous blu ray monitors. I mean they rival any oled imo in terms of black levels and color clarity and resolution. I liked it so much I bought a second one of these exact tv's on craigslist. I got about 3 years of amazing gaming and movie watching out of my first one before the power supply died and the second is still in the closet. These Sony tv's use a special grid of phosphorus in order to maintain geometric clarity and color separation. They really were the best of the best of crt technology. Any Sony trinitron is worth grabbing.
CRTs have a blurring effect, which was taken advantage of by many game developers, specifically in the 16 and 32 bit era, where they would combine dithering and the crt’s blurring to make a transparency effect, like on the Sega genesis and Saturn, or to smooth colors, lines, and textures like on the original PlayStation. This greatly improved the image. Also, light guns and light pens require crts, since they depend on the zero processing delay, as they use this to figure out where on the screen the device is pointing.
light guns needed to beable to drive and flash some part of the screen for them to work is more to the point. Motion sensing on CRTs for a time was trivial, at least relative to LED and LCDs.
Beside from the blur effect, the poor quality from the composite signal actually helps that aswell. The infamous waterfall on Sonic 1 (a Genesis game), took advantage of that.
were still in the 32 bit era just saying
@@strictlynineties Most processors have been 64 bit capable for over a decade now. I'd definitely say we're NOT in the 32 bit era, even if many codes are made in 32 bits for the sake of backwards compatibility.
And if we speak about memory bus, graphics cards 5 years ago were capable of handling 192 bits, that's the bus width for a GTX1060, one of the most popular graphics cards still nowadays.
I think dithering was from composite signal, not the CRT itself, you'd get those waterfall effects on a flatscreen with the real console, but not with a CRT and an emulator (but it wouldn't look pixellated on the CRT)
The issue with certain sprites on the OLED (like Wolverine) was because they were designed with the expectation that horizontal lines of color will get blended a bit due to how the electron beam works.
i did an s-video mod on my genesis and have seen similar effects, like metal not getting the intended gradient, even on a crt
The games were made for CRT, thats the difference. I totally agree.
Also because he has a shitty filter over it. I don't know how linus calls it out as "like a filter" when it literally is a filter. I'm not saying the OLED would look better than crt, but those filters are horrible and I don't know why you would have it on for a test like this.
there you go. the only reason why CRT had points. games were designed for it.
Nope, that's not the issue with the workings of electron beam, but yes, it is the issue with blending of adjascent "pixels" in a horizontal lines. Old games were designed not only for CRT, but for composite signal on a CRT. Composite had artifacts mostly with bleeding colors to adjascent pixels, especially so if the image was made of bars (for example, if you feed CRT an image, where every odd vertical line is black and every even vertical line is white, via a composite signal, you will get a gray screen). Developers used this artifacts to their advantage. Great example is waterfalls in the first level of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 - they look transparent when you play using composite signal. But composite signal wasn't the only way of outputting an image to CRT - there also were s-video, component (YPbPr) and the best of them all, RGB, which mostly was used on professional equipment in USA, but in Europe it was available on most consumer TVs and monitors. If you'll play old games on CRT via RGB the image will look much, MUCH sharper and there will be no color bleed, games will look much better, but all the effects that was intended for composite will look wrong. Returning to Sonic 2 example, the waterfalls will consist of bars, and will not look like transparent water as was intended. This is extremely noticeable on playstation (the first one), the console had a hardware effect called dithering, which developers could turn on and off in games. This effect covers whole screen (afaik) and make the image look somewhat foggy or blured, I don't really know how to describe it. This was achieved by covering every second pixel of the screen with a different shade of the color that was in the original picture, in a checkerboard pattern. This effect looks horrible when displayed via RGB. The best example will be Silent Hill, just look at comparisons between composite and RGB in this game, both displayed on a CRT - you'll immediately understand what I'm talking about. But if a game wasn't relying on artifacts of composite signal it will look so much better when outputted via RGB. So the issue is not only about a type of display, but also about the type of signal fed to it.
P.S: there's a demoscene production called "8088 MPH" (by Hornet + CRTC +DESiRE) that was made for 1981 IBM PC with intel 8088 CPU and original CGA graphics adapter. This hardware, even when special hacks were used, could only display no more than 16 colors simultaneously on screen, but this guys, using a very clever abuse of composite signal artifacts, made it display 1024 colors at once. I highly recommend watching this demo, it's amazing.
It almost looks like games at the time were optimized to look good on CRTs!
They weren't. They were optimized to run on a system with a tiny fraction of the computing power we have today. If CRTs never existed and people used LCD screens, nothing would have been different in terms of the art. Consoles of the time had so many limitations in terms of memory, color space, and speed that you had no other choice but to make pixel sprites or eventually very jagged 3D models with limited textures as time went on.
@@Straviradius I think the limitation was what made games awesome during those times because it made devs be crafty and scrappy with their designing of games.. where today they have become lazy and you can tell especially when putting a game out that is cross platform .. it's an unfortunate double edge sword of modern game development.
@@Straviradius there are subtle differences in pixel and art design based upon the display. Look no further than say, the difference between Gameboy Advance games and the SNES. Graphically they are very similar at first glance, but the GBA games naturally have a slightly washed out colour look on original hardware due to no screen light. Put those same games on a TV and suddenly the colours are too saturated, due to them not being designed for that purpose.
@@Straviradius You basically just said that they weren't... except for the fact that they were.
Arcade monitors were the best
My main love for a CRT. No native display resolution. It just looks good at any resolution. I can make a 320x240 render and pop it up on my CRT and it looks lovely. Unlike with modern flatpanel displays where it it gets digitally blocky and smoothed depending on the settings
I wondered if I was an idiot as I carried a free 27" tube tv into my garage yesterday
Still unsure
If it makes you happy and it doesn't harm any one it can't be that stupid :)
If it makes you feel any better, I have 5 of them lmao
Honestly I'm keeping an eye out for a little CRT monitor in my area just for fun, don't even need something fancy
I have a Dell CRT sitting on my desk just for doing repairs or because I do not want to dump it. Decided to just keep it until it dies or I do.
Hug it like your new best friend.
As a fighting game player (3rd strike and marvel 2) it absolutely is about input delay with original hardware. I don't use CRT's outside of retro gaming and it's specifically old fighting games.
Try them on horror games. A vga crt monitor thats high resolution looks amazing.
3rd Strike also looks LEAGUES LEAGUES LEAGUES better with scanlines. That game is so pretty but looks GROSS with actual pixels.
The only possibly acceptable excuse for relying on CRTs. Until we find a better solution.
@@Ivao. ???? Third Strike is gorgeous dude, one of the prettiest games out there. I guess you could argue that the background in Remy's stage is a little but crusty but the character sprites look excellent, imo.
Who's got winner?
I HAD THIS TELEVISION! Yall should have uploaded this video in 60fps to show off the SPLENDOR! Back in the day you had to order component cables for the original Xbox, GameCube and PS2 but once you got em hooked up you could game in Hi Definition on those consoles. People used to come over to my house all the time to game and play Guilty Gear on the PS2 and would wonder why it looked so good on my 34inch Sony Wega but not their TV 's at home all you had to do was press X and Triangle at the same time before the game loaded and it would ask you "Would you like to play in Progressive scan?" Select yes and BOOM glorious HD on all your PS2 games. Fun times.
Same, I got this for movies vs. gaming, but it was a fun last hurrah for the technology. It wasn't cheap though and I remember why they didn't sell well. When I moved I chose not to take it with me though as it was a monster. Donated it to a neighbor who was TV repair guy back in the day and he still has it last we talked.
Yes, component alone looks a lot better but the PS2 DOES NOT support progressive scan on all games. Some games you can press this combo but most of them, especially games that were multiplatform, didnt support 480p on the PS2.
The GameCube, Dreamcast and Xbox were better in this regard, the only issue with GC was the expensive cable at the time, but the amount of games not compatible with progressive scan is very small compared to the PS2
GameCube only had up to 480p also known as Enhanced Definition. High Definition is 720p minimum.
They supported ED not HD. The Xbox and PS2 had a couple (like 3/4) that would actually support HD.
might be the total lack of motion blur on CRT that makes it pop.
The camera moiré effects seen on the CRTs (wavy rainbow lines for example 13:00 ) aren't visible in person but its really weird they didn't adjust their cameras to eliminate it, which is possible. also the overhead lighting in the room is a worst case scenario for CRT image quality.
Despite all of that, the CRT won for every test.
How to eliminate it on camera? Do you know? (Just asking lol)
@@FakYuhGoogel Not on text and color (i can't stop looking at Linus's GDM FW900 monitor, beautiful on my Motorola OLED phone)
It pains me Dx long time CRT user but I would not use CRT unless the room is pitch black, cannot stand the washed out look that happens. I feel like it takes away a lot from the video, for what a CRT looks like in pitch black and how close it gets to OLED contrast, have a look at r/CRTgaming. Important note that people miss when talking about CRTs though, they do not reach the same contrast as OLED: even for a pure black signal the raster is not 0v and you can set it to be that but it. crushes blacks, and even if it was possible CRTs suffer greatly from OLED type image retention, so the black areas won't get black for a while after that have been lit up. The worst problem by far though is light scatter: because of the amount of glass in a CRT, after electrons hit the phosphors light can bounce around a lot far across the screen, resulting in very bad low-local-dimming-zones type blooming and slight washing out. That all means that in some content, especially consistently bright content, even the best CRT will look far from OLED contrast. In some content though it's definitely close enough that the other benefits of CRTs make it the winner IMO. Would highly recommend people see a well set up CRT irl in pitch black, even if it doesn't convince you it's definitely an experience. (I stress well set up - they are very difficult to set up properly and I always tune mine to the content I am watching)
The rainbow effect was practically impossible for me to ignore. It alone could kill the HD CRT for me as an option.
My last CRT was a great large screen tv. It looked great, worked perfectly but I threw it out for a LCD. No one wanted them back then so I took it to a dump, felt really bad like abandoning a dog that had always been faithful
Why would you threw that out lmfao. Consumerism at it's finest.
@@Toxic2T yeah crazy but that’s the way it goes
@@Toxic2T Agreed, we still have ours in the basement. Why throw away a fully functional piece of technology like that? Ours is just a small CRT but I've also already secured a big one from a neighbour that I can take once I move into my own place and have the necessary space. :)
@@Pit1993x Hell yeah! They will be extremely useful someday :))
@@Pit1993x sometimes you can't keep everything you've owned, you gotta draw the line somewhere. Personally I'd have kept the CRT, but then again, I didn't keep any of mine?
When I heard 2003, I went, “wait, what? Nah, that can't be.” And then I tried to remember when my family got a flat screen TV, and I'm not sure if it was before or after Skyrim was released.
Edit: I watched the ring on a crappy (and really small) CRT. Guess how friggin' scared I was when it went directly to white noise when the film stopped!
Flat screens only really took off in like 2006-7
That's the unique thing that the Ring (Ringu) will never be able to recreate with today's streaming & widescreen OLEDs.
I picked up a CRT off the side of the road a few years back that had a HDMI port. I was astounded.. but yeah. They keep making stuff way after the people in the know have switched away
@@jacksonblack9408 Wow another person who found a TV on the side of the road, why do people do that to perfectly working CRT's!
@@Warp2090 your reply sounds super sarcastic haha but I'm only 50% sure it was meant that way.
The main part of my point was that it had HDMI. HDMI was sort of only a thing post 2006, and I sort of think of crts as bring 90s and earlier
Mgs 1 is a perfect example of CRT looking way different the colors (specially the codet calls) pop and look more vivid
I worked at Goodwill about 6 or 7 years ago and we charged $0.25 for each CRT, even the rare HD ones that came in. No one would buy them. We would just end up recycling tons of them since they would rot on the sales floor
that's how this stuff works. By the time people are like, wait, what ever happened to X? Then they are like, wait, X was actually way better for Y than Z! Now it's rare, pricey, etc. High quality tape players, Vinyl pressings, etc.
CRTs don't "rot" - there is nothing wrong with them. They just weren't advertised properly.
@@dieselbaby sure thing buddy
im the guy who bought the decent ones in 2011 and stored them,thanks for making them more rare for me hahahaha
You make me cry hearing about that, i salvage CRTs especially models from the 2000s when they were at there peak.
Would love to see how 4k oled w/ the proper shader or filters compares to CRT for retro gaming. They've come a long way but usually require at least 4k to look their best.
Would have really liked to see that
currently playing Elden Ring on my FW900 and i have a OLED TV i much prefer my CRT on it. something about it just just pure perfection.
The CRT-Royale-NTSC preset in Retroarch is I think the best I've found. It can do the waterfalls in Sonic 2 and Dracula's eyeglow in PS1 castlevania nearly perfectly.
@@tsartomato I find myself not liking the way a lot of games look when upscaled. 3D games look so much more crude, 2D games look so much more rough, and any anti-aliasing in 2D looks like hot garbage. 2D graphics back in the day were designed with limitations of CRT in mind, and definitely look much better when displayed how the artists originally made them.
@@tsartomato it doesn't though. Although removing flickering is definitly a plus, some games when blasted of into a super high resolution just starts to show the other drawbacks, like muddy textures and low poly count, the low resolution helps mask it all making it look more artistic, like an image artisticly out of focus, rather than something with super sharp edges but muddy ass textures
I think the slight screen door effect on CRT's is helping hide some of the poor textures in older games and help everything blend together.
It's a natural antialiasing since the "pixels" aren't squares. Watch the video about Linus's GDM FW900 CRT monitor.
Some oleds can make mask filter effects to replicate that feel
Absolutely. It's the same reason people apply filters to Photoshop composites right at the end; it helps unify the image.
scanlines also help sharpen out edges byt masking the slight blurs pixel to pixel its not *quite* the same but if you try turning scanlines on and off on a oled or LCD display in the emulator you notice the graphics look better under scanlines
so much so they even sell hardware scanline generators to apply this effect back to retro consoles on LCD and oled
I managed to get my hands on a 24 inch JVC from the late 90s early 2ks this month and got rid of my Roku smart tv. Hooked Roku to this one and I couldn’t be happier watching old anime on this tv over my smart tv
I remember stores sabotaging CRTs over here to push LED screens back in the day.
LED was more spece efficient and some stores had massive stores of the crappy early LED monitors.
So naturally some stores messed with contrast and brightness values on the few remaining CRTs to make them look less appealing and the LEDs better by comparison.
They'd actually ask you to leave the store if you'd try to unfornicate the settings.
Geez that is some petty behaviour. LCD screens were catching on in the mid 2000s?
@@Thomasmemoryscentral Yes they were, but they didn't overtake CRT sales till 2008-2009.
And it was in large part because getting a good CRT was already getting hard as less and less stores even stocked them in reasonable numbers due to logistics and shelf space.
Recently I found 2005 80cm LCD Fujitsu-Siemens Myrica V32 it weights 20kg but has terribly slow display. My 80cm pixel+ crt thomson(60kg) was much beter... now i collect 50cm sony trinitrons optimal size for retro gaming i can move it by my self andd it does not ocupy that much space.
I mean in fairness, first of all, lol who the fuck can afford to just drop that kind of money on a massive OLED. On the other, CRTs are soon going to be more expensive than OLED thanks to rarity vs industry of scale.
But then on the other hand, let's be honest here, we're talking about 1990s technology that died out in the 2000s, so you're still getting stuck with 1990s visual tech for when Half Life was a riveting visual experience--in other words, back when us kids would say excitedly how much better muh grafix, because the graphics genuinely sucked so much ass back then that even I as a child could understand that Westwood's games looked freaking terrible. Like do you all remember Command and Conquer Red Alert? The little moving clump of 12 pixels that we called "soldiers"? Oh yeah fuck that, ain't no way I'm going back. I could even tell back then it looked so bad on all games, I mean we're talking about in 2022 terms what was basically a bunch of pixelart .gifs running at each other. That's what we had to play with back in my day. Pixelart .gifs
So while I rescind some earlier things I said dunking on CRT because yes, you had those smudged pixels and I do think Starcraft Broodwar looked better on CRT, I mean...it looked bad overall for a reason. Everything looked bad. The tech just wasn't there. Like, I consistently say how much I don't care about FSR and DLSS because of the smudging, so why would I want to look at something even lower res and lower pixel count and still smudged? It only looks bad compared to really blocky LEDs back in the day. Or even 1366x768, hell tbh 1080p actually looks bad enough to me now I just can't. So. I'd rather have OLED if it's okay in price. The one thing I'll concede is yeah, you really do need period correct hardware for some of the real oldies, and I'd rather play Starcraft Broodwars on a CRT.
Anyone up for a quick 7v1 cpu? It's not me I swear it's xXarchangel_69Xx he's the bs'er!
I have a Sony Trinitron wega I got back in 2006, display item. I got it for 476$ or so. It was a great deal. It was $1000 brand new at the time, has amazing speakers also. But in 2011 it started acting up. Now if you turn it off you can't turn it back on for at least a week or two and need to unplug it. If you don't do this it'll just keep shutting itself off everytime. All TV's have there pros and cons depending on what your playing on them. And yeah in 2006 the crts we're on their way out, only a.few models like Toshiba Sony Samsung RCA were available while flat TV's like the Westinghouse for $800 was very tempting but it was 32" so smaller and worse contrast. I will say I remember the color popping pretty good on the Westinghouse on the curious George movie they were showing on them, but my tv I got also displayed color great like in Madagascar. And when they let me hook up my 360 to the tv and try out a game a played quake 4 and was sold on it.
Before he passed my father had that HD trinitron. We used it for many many years and it always was one of the best and sharpest displays we’d ever seen, even into the mid 2010s. Wish I could have understood how great it really was and kept it after he passed but that thing weighs as much as an elephant
Yeah, my old 32" 576i CRT from the late '90s weighed in excess of 15 stone, I could only imagine the weight of an HD monstrosity.
@@fattomandeibu You need 2 people to position it lol not for the faint of heart.
I had a 60" trinitron clone from Blaupunkt, and it was like a train carriage 🤣
I knew a guy who had an even worse TV, it was a plasma projection TV which in it's stand was 5ft high, then at the base about 2-3 foot wide. You couldn't even move it!
@@DailyCorvid Yep. My friend had a Trinitron and it took a lot of work moving that thing.
I was using an Electrohome ECP4500 CRT projector. 1080i/720p. Awesome for gaming but its a lot of work to setup and very heavy. Its like having traffic lights laid sideways.
Was 58th in the world in Killzone 2 mp.
@@ecp4500 "Its like having traffic lights laid sideways" 🤣 OMG that sounds pretty bloody awful!
I am guessing then that the actual panels are amazing! 58th in the world?
I am no FPS player these days, but I can appreciate that 58th out of a few million says you put a lot of time and effort into that.
Which I commend! People might say its only video games, but it really doesn't matter what the task is. Being in the top 100 is a fairly high level, you are almost in the top 50 as well :)
Found a CRT on the side of the road. Hooked my PS2 into it with component cables and it is rapidly becoming my most played system. Anything HDMI will look better on a modern display but older stuff will always look better on a CRT.
I could barely play my xbox games on my flatscreen whatever it is and I got a free sanyo bottom shelf rf component cable only input crt and it was an incredible improvement
you mean composite
@@idkrossplay The PS2 had options for both composite (two audio, one video) and component (three video, two audio) cables.
You are mostly right. Few edge cases like ar tonelico I prefer non crt. Games with 3d models tho definitely look better on crt.
@@idkrossplay no component is way better. Tho some games where component doesn't work so good to have composite as backup
I pulled out my old ColecoVision console and games (kept in original boxes) from the attic for a vintage game night that we had various consoles connected to a Vivitek 56" DLP TV that has DVI/HDCP inputs and it looked wonderful! When I mentioned my wife previously wanted to get rid of it when we purchased our 70" flat screen it started a bidding war among the true vintage gamers. I'm glad I kept it but I miss her from time to time!
The biggest monitor I ever owned was a View Sonic 19in monster. It produced so much heat I kept the heat registers in the room closed during the winter. During the summer I kept a 9in fan running behind it to cool it, and kept the window AC running full blast. But the real dagger in the heart of CRT is power consumption, they simply can't compete with modern monitors, they are just power hogs and heat generators!
Remember, energy consumption = heat, and there's no way around that.
Sorry, but I have a couple of Sony 21" CRT monitors running in my tiny little gaming cave (well shed), and it's the summer, they put out a little warmth yes if you put your hand right over the vents, but my 32" LED monitor gets equally hot, and my PC puts out several times more heat than them all put together, if you want a display that puts out a ton of heat, then its OLED, the newer models actually have huge heatsinks to cool them down to reduce artefacts and improve brightness.
@@Wobble2007 Plasma TVs especially the Panasonic Viera series are right up there with OLED sporting massive heatsinks and active cooling fans, I like my 50" Viera because it's got CRT like contrast and with such a deep chassis it's got excellent sound, I have a MASSIVE old Sharp CRT that came with my house that still works flawlessly, it may very well end up being a shop TV because it's picture quality is right up there with even my "newer" plasma TV and the Panasonic, main reason I went with the Viera for my daily driver is there's no motion blur like LCD and select LED screens and it's too heavy to steal, took 4 guys to get it up the stairs and 4 guys ain't gonna get it down the stairs and out the door before police and armed and intoxicated neighbors show up
@@cokeacolasucks he didn't say anything against that?
@@vacexpert2020 I owned FW900 i numerous 22" 19" CRTs there was no heat. On the other hand Panasonic plasma in front of your face
you will feel that heat so much that you cant actually have it in that way near you.
It'd be interesting to know where CRTs would be today, if they were still being developed and innovated.
not that much further, the issues of crt persist. them being the fact that a mechanical part has to move, this results in two very well known issues size and quality. you cannot go much higher quality because then the delay between refreshes would become obvious due to the fact that the "line" needs time to move. you could cercomvent this by adding extra lamps and mirrors and what not but then you run into issue number two size, they are already massive.
all in all if you're actually interested in a modern take look at a lazer projector, basically the same principle only your screen is further away
@@lugaidster well said
@@ThaGr1m There are no moving parts in a CRT. I believe you are thinking about DLP technology. There is nothing mechanical whatsoever in any CRT.
@@billmilosz CRT's have circuit boards inside them, and the parts do degrade, and need replacing.
You don't want a shtty old capacitor to start leaking all over the board, that's the death of the monitor, lol. And even if they don't leak, you still need to replace them, because otherwise the image processing gets messed up, and the image distorts and twists as you use the monitor. xD
CRT's don't have moving parts, but they do have a lot of components, so yeah, they need maintenance.
@@GreySectoid I still have two 27" Sony Trinitrons but wouldn't use them for anything besides old game consoles, and even that is hard to justify. LCDs are just so more convenient and don't have all the picture, size, weight, power, etc. issues.
10 years ago CRTs were e-waste. People couldn't get rid of them, I remember my local charity shop (thrift store) had a MOUNTAIN of them at the back of the shop and they were practically giving them away. I bought one when I was a teenager for £5, a widescreen standard definition Daewoo, I still use it now. The facts are is that CTRs are crap, the one showed in the video was a very high end model that was out just before Plasma and LCDs took over. The vast majority of of them only have Ariel and Scart (at least here in the UK) and have aged like milk, require constant maintenance and repair and you need to know electronics repair to use them right. Plus the HD crt in the video is hooked up to a load of different devices, in normal use it won't look that good.
The hype train for CRT TVs is totally ridiculous, even tiny 11 inch crts with standard Scart and mono audio are being sold for £75 and it's a huge scam. It's all just Hipster shite, steer clear. Take that from someone who's been into Retro Gaming for over a decade and has been using CRTs since childhood, don't fall for the hype.
Personal preference perhaps? I too don't see myself getting a CRT for retro gaming. However there is a difference between and I would argue a lot is nostalgia related. Just the same reason vinyl is back and even some tapes. I found some of my tapes when cleaning basement and couldn't resist to play them, surprisingly I rather enjoyed the sound. But the whole rewinding was awful and IMHO I didn't feel it was worth the effort to get a deck. I still want a vinyl player though. If I had the space I would definitely build a retro hifi, as I totally dig the mechanical look. For me that alone would do it. I don't have the same fond feelings about CRT. I used to think CRT was good until I had a good IPS LCD side by side and difference was night and day (not in favor of CRT). So anyway, I don't think it's fair to call these scam purchases, it's not uncommon retro stuff makes a comeback. If folks want them and willing to pay, why the heck not?
Actually they are still e-waste, I've found my two crt tvs on the roadside :D Just this year I've found at least 4-5 crts (and left them, I don't have that space at home)
Nothing better than people talking about things they love and enthusiastically sharing them with others
12 years ago I had a 29" HD CRT tv, and I couldn't even give it to the Goodwill because nobody wanted them so I ended up having it recycled. Too bad I didn't keep it.
Why? Because someone else said it's good now? This is all bs hype honestly
It's worth what someone else is willing to pay. I agree with you, and that it's very silly, but eh.
@@FreedomForAll2013 No because there's a market for it now and instead of chucking it coulda been worth some decent coin lol
@@FreedomForAll2013 I honestly think CRTs are overrated for newer stuff and just movies in general but for like actual PS2 games and older, they often looked better on them. Also a flat screen just doesn't look right in a retro gaming room. That said, I wouldn't want to use one as a daily driver TV.
@@FreedomForAll2013 - No, it's because I could have sold it for some good money in this market.
I've gave to my kids vintage CRT and Nintendo and they just love it. For me is like travel to time and those old games are so much fun.
@Pointless Rat Race nah kids are nice
@@evennoiz kids are the best thing you can have, even though sometimes you might doubt that. And mainly family.
Got me boys an Amlogic game box and a CRT television, they're loving it so much it's not even funny
I still play old games to this day on CRT TVs, like the SNES system, and I have my original PS2 that I still use to this day and we just got another that we saw at a thrift store as backup.
We saw an original NES system at a thrift store too but were second guessing getting it but then when we decided we wanted it and went back, it was gone. Sad. 😞
There's also an original PS1 and Xbox 360 there too, both of which I never owned but I did play on someone's 360 when I visited.
I'm only 20 now, but I feel like an old-timer at heart. I missed out on the explosive growth of computers and games.
The CRT is very bad for their eyes, just know that.
There is one thing that none of these crt comparison videos never tell you. The sound they make. Every crt makes a high pitch noise. Depending on how sensitive your hearing is, it can be painful unless you block your ears
legit, i got a regular crt from some relatives and i had to go looking for another newer high refresh rate one (good thing i have the space to keep both lol) because the whine combined with the flickering basically ensures i will get a headache if i try to use it for more than a few minutes without headphones on
frame interpolation (if that's even what it is) was unfortunately not great in '97 though so pick your poison i guess
Get a high refresh rate CRT monitor.
Sony High-Scan Chassis... Double the horizontal frequency!
You will never worry about that 15.7 screaming again! It is just not there... I don't know anyone that
can hear the 31.4Khz...
True, I hated being around CRTs as a kid because it hurt my ears. Once I got into retro games in high school I just learned to live with it.
Every lcd i owned before i got my 144hz whined like crazy. This is not a crt specific issue.
I might not have a 16:9 1080i CRT TV, but I do have a super old JVC box CRT TV and a couple way smaller ones that I use a lot, and a CRT monitor that my family had before I was even conscious I was alive and it still works to this day. There's something about CRT displays that just look so good.
As someone who regularly switches between using an oled, a Sony pvm. While also using real hardware, software emulation and fpga, I think people get so caught up in believing the only way to experience retro games is what they prefer, and everyone else is a heathen for thinking otherwise.
The truth is, there’s no perfect way to experience retro games today. Every method has its pros and cons.
And when it comes to crt’s, people can argue artistic intent all they like, but I’m pretty sure the main intent on the developers part was for people to play these games.
I swear people spend more time on forums arguing over which is better rather than just playing great games.
Yup, the moment I found emulators, the moment I forgot about the actual hardware, let me enjoy these games on the go on a flashcart or laptop any day. I don't need perfection, I just want good enough so I can enjoy the content.
@@Rikorage yep. For the most part, I just stick to using emulation on my pc these days out of convenience.
It’s good enough where I don’t even notice the difference. Even when compared to fpga.
Interesting. The colors on old games were mastered on CRTs, so it's going to look truer to way the artists intended. Cool!
Yes.. but no. Tv's look warm, cold, light and dark and can be adjusted, etc. You just hope that the monitor/monitors your testing on gives you a good middle ground.
@@FrosteMelon Yes you are right, after all manufacturers used to set this properties based on many factors, including product line, brand recognition and quality of parts based on market of a specific product. But people will always oversimplify things to validate their own beliefs.
For the longest time, up until maybe 4 years ago, my parents had one of those huge Sony HD CRTs in their living room (moved up from the basement when it got replaced there by a plasma). It was a monster, and so ridiculously heavy.
If I remember, they could weight almost 150lb depending on size and model. The 34" Panasonic HD crt I had weighed around 130lb if I recall correctly.
@@AaronHendu my trinitron hd display is 220lbs iirc
A few years ago I caught the crt bug and found local a 40 inch Trinitron, damn thing was virtually a piece of furniture. It weighs somewhere around 300 pounds
My mom and dad were using a massive 36 or 38 inch Sharp 4:3 CRT until like 2016 because as my dad said "it works better than my eyes do" so he refused to replace it so I bought them a 40 inch flat screen and replaced it while they were on vacation. It took me and 2 friends to move it.
My father had a 400lbs CRT big TV. It was heavy and it was difficult to move it around. Eventually got rid of it because it was so difficult of moving it around.
We use them for Smash Melee tournaments in our venue. Maybe once a month, sometimes more. We do way more other things I can't talk about necessarily but it's dope to see CRTs now that I started this job. Bringing back memories
What kind of things can you do with a TV you "can't talk about." You guys snorting phosphor tubes or somethin?
for me crts are just about compatibility, no need to mess with converters or upscalers. just run any old game at any res or refresh rate you're good to go. no faffing about with converters or menu diving to fix wrong ratios or colour spaces. high refresh rates can look insane as well.
Also this. My wife bought me a copy of my favorite PS1 game for my birthday one year, and I hadn't used my PS1 since I made a Retropie. So I hooked up the A/V cables, and to my surprise, got nothing but a black and white output with a ton of issues refresh rate issues. No issue with the component/composite on my PS2/Dreamcast. Hooked it up to the old trinitron in our guest room? Bam. Perfect picture.
Very good point, my main issue with CRT, and maybe you can help, is finding how to send an HDMI or DP to RCA or Cable plug for my CRT. I have tons of old games on my computer that would be so much more fun on the TV, but I cannot find a converter anywhere for this purpose, only for going from old to new, not new to old. Also, you cannot buy a new TV now that is not "Smart," and those all slow down with time being they have computers inside you cannot maintain as end user. 2 year old Smart Samsung and LG mid-tiers both run as slow as my 5 year old Roku, even with fresh factory resets and updates...
@@joshuaadams4945 sorry didn't see this until now. Depends on your TVs inputs, you can get a HDMI to RCA composite box for cheap the image wont be great though. so for a clearer image it depends on what the other inputs your CRT TV has. svideo? scart? sending a digital signal from your pc out and converting to an analog signal will require some conversion inbetween.
There's no mention of how lightguns only work on standard definition CRTs, or how retro games use transparency effects with CRTs like the waterfall in Sonic 2 or the fog in Streets of Rage 2.
That transparency effect doesn't work unless you are using a really shoddy video signal like RF on older CRTs so that point us moot
This is a really nice “talk” through the display technology and retro games. Loved it
what old titles you still need now ???
I used to have an old sony CRT like the big one in this video, the trintitron I believe. That thing damn near lasted 15 years and was still working perfectly when I got rid of it. They were very reliable.
I recently got into CRTs and I'd definitely say that they are the definitive way to consume 240p and 480i content.
I disagree with David's opinion on moving a modern game to a CRT (like Cross Roads). I think games should be played with whatever display they were designed for
Exactly. You can't tell me modern games looks better on a CRT. That's just ridiculous.
That's my opinion as well
I wish they showed Shovel Knight on the HD CRT, would be curious to see a NES inspired game on a wide-screen CRT
CRT dude here, I have to say that the RT5X can be used on that 4K OLED to get results almost indistinguishable from CRT-- and Mike Chi's upcoming RT4K will improve upon that even more.
Silly me getting rid of all my CRTs around 2010. They'd be worth a fortune today.
I've still got mine in the garage. Might be time to list it for sale lol
Depends on what it is though, some are worth a decent bit of wonga, some only a few £$, A nice Sony 14"/21"/25" in good condition with a healthy tube is worth a fair few £$ for instance, or a JVC D-Series, Toshiba A Series, sets like those can go for a good price if they are in good condition, PC CRTs are the most expensive, a decent 19"/21" high resolution/refresh rate CRT monitor will fetch hundreds if it's got a healthy tube. And PVM/BVM sets can be a small fortune.
@@B1G_UN1T Why list it for sale when you can use it?
@@Warp2090 8 like the size of my 55" OLED more
this is one of my favorite videos of this channel.
Really, this sets you apart from ANY youtube channel. Not only the level of tinkering of something really interesting (for a 30 yo gamer that grew up with sega, nintendo, ps3 and xbox, this is actually interesting), but also for the production quality.
No one in youtube is even close.
After trying several scalers I can easily say scalers do changes the color interpretation specially if they are converting form composite or component to hdmi, and thats just from the color intepretation from the information, the only way the scaler wont change color is if their using rgb scart
Do CRTs look better for basically anything Pre-PS3 era? Yes.
Is it worth spending what CRTs are going for nowadays+the work of actually carrying a CRT home if you're not a hardcore retro gamer? Not so sure
believe it or not most people can still find cheap crt's
@@IAm-zo1bo Yeah cause this is just a fad
I still think a CRT monitor like the FW900 from the previous video is more versatile than these CRT TVs, part of the weight is the sound system besides the cathode Ray tube itself, FW900 is just pure screen.
@Toroidal Zeus but they can't do 1440p and high Hz, right?
@@IAm-zo1bo nah i have a magnavox that i got from goodwill for 12 bucks and its not nearly as good as the ones shown in the video.still keep it on my desk for retro gaming though.
The 1080i Sony WEGA is the coolest damn TV that's ever almost killed me
I lift 32” crt:s from containers to warehouse pallets in 1999 and it suck. 32” Sony crt weight 75 kg.
@@teemum3313 sony hdm 3830 is a 38" that weighs 180kg
Oh look, a bird.
The magic of a CRT is that it is a strobing display. This means you get no motion blur as your eyes track objects. Sharp scrolling backgrounds, sharp moving characters at the same time. Only strobing displays give you this. Black frame insertion tries to do this, but is less effective because you lose light.
I instantly regretted getting rid of my top of the line 36" trinitron HD.
The second I realized I could not use my NeS light gun
Light guns don’t work on hd crt’s anyway I thought
@@pistachiodisguisey911 it was a 720i. Not even p. No humidity, just a monitor and a dvi input, along with s video and rgb. It worked
@@pistachiodisguisey911 They do when you turn off the internal upscaling in the service menu.
@@hamoodhabibi8254 this is linus tech tips, 240i exist prolly…my niqa
@@pistachiodisguisey911 light guns work in any CRT, it's not related to the resolution, but the the way TVs work
Like others said, I LOVE this LTT format where someone (staff member) shares something they're passionate about for the video.
I respect CRT's. I grew up gaming with them including on PC, but you're not just buying a CRT in this example / case, with all the extra's that you're needing. Dilutes the experience, over complicates it, rats nest of cables and bulky space. If you own a CRT is your retro corner I totally get it I do that myself, but all this seems extra to accomplish something you don't notice until you put it side by side with one of the best modern TV's you can buy. Also, the guy with glasses says that "Bears don't look sharp in real life, they look blurry" had me rolling.
theyre doing all the extra stuff because they are outputting to three different displays simultaneously... obviously this isn't a regular use case. the only thing you would actually need is the upscaler if you use an hd-crt, to reduce input lag.
Really good software and really nice modern screens will always look better than old CRT's, I think this only really becomes relevant if you have a substandard flatscreen, and then you could conceive to improve it using a CRT. But 99% of the time I would say, nah the flat screen with good quality firmware always wins.
What David was talking about was that the clarity of the image exposed the layering of textures that make up the hair. In the real world, hair isn't made of 5 layers of textures but hundreds of thousands of individual strands.
I hopped on to the crt band wagon when digital foundary made their fw900 vids back in like 2019, and tbh crt only looks better if its an old game, or of course if you have an fw900.
@@DailyCorvid Of course mate and I really hope you don't feel I was shitting on your opinion. I do honestly get the argument and what you are putting forward in the video. It reminds me of talking to my friends about 120Hz monitors when they were niche and expensive (Though understandably comparing oranges and lemons, newer tech is adopted over time so can't be fully compared to judging CRT today.) But I really respect the passion behind the video and the point in this comment is very valid. I personally have an LG G1 for my main gaming and an old Sony Trinitron that I've had since I was born playing Sonic 2 games since I could hold a controller, nothing really competes to playing classic games on it if you can put the time into the set-up.
A classic CRT will always beat a LCD of the same time period. It wasn't till OLEDs and gaming LCDs that the tech surpassed it
i just got a 32 inch samsung hd crt and it looks amazing with games like elden ring, It makes them feel retro. and one thing that i always love crt's for is the depth, they just look 3d games and movies just pop off the screen in this way that no flat display had ever been able to emulate for me.
I'd love to see a new technology that uses something like Lasers against a filtered screen to perform the same kind of scanning effect as a CRT, but in a smaller, more power-efficient manner. Imagine a lightweight display with nigh instantaneous response time, support for many arbitrary resolutions and refresh rates 1:1, and great contrast ratio.
Woooooow! That´s interesting
@@nicomarino96 oled ain't lasers broski
@@nicomarino96 oled has a native resolution unlike crt and non native resolutions look blurry. They still have input lag although it's way lower than lcd
I thought about building a scanning-laser apparatus like that. The issue with any scanning-beam display is image persistence; you'd need to replicate that property of CRT/plasma phosphor coatings to make that happen.
@@RandomUser-tj3mg One nitpick - color CRTs aren't perfect on the native resolution front either. While no scaling is involved, the shadowmask/aperture grille's dot pitch does create a sort of native resolution in and of itself.
Kind of wish you would have tested those games with Sony PVMs instead of regular CRT TVs. There is a massive difference in picture quality.
Okay now we have another tier: original hardware andys, CRT andys, SONY PVMs andys.
Videophiles lol
The picture might be more crisp with good geometry but when it comes to my 14" & 20" PVM and my JVC D-series and trinitrons, I go for the D-series every time. The colors don't pop out like they do on consumer sets and I get bored looking at the PVM's.
I remember an explanation before on why ps2 games at least looked better on CRT is because of the way it was displayed, the CRT would add a kind of anti-aliasing to the image.
In 2012 I sold one of our old 21" CAD CRT ( Sony GDM-F520 ) to a pro CS player.
It was absolutely top tier when purchased around 2002 and capable of doing 1600x1200 @120Hz
I miss my old 19" beast, it had a bit higher res specs and 1080P felt like a step backwards.
@@GamingDad Same, I had a high-end Viewsonic that did 2048x1536, but IIRC only 60hz.
And nowadays pro CSGO players buy LCD "gaming" crap monitors.
The HD CRT's out there for sale , at this point, could be nearing their end. Especially if they have been in use since they were bought back in the early to mid 2000s. Certain boards (D BOARD) will eventually fail causing the image to pull down when a static white color screen or red is displayed. Also the color guns might lack some red or certain colors giving the image quality a magenta tint, and that affects the contrast creating more black crush. Finding replacement parts is almost impossible at this point lol probably easier to find the same tv on ebay or craiglist. Please don't spend more than 30 bucks buying something that will become a 200 pound paper weight.
Nah. None of those parts are hard nor impossible to find. Capacitors on CRT TV's can be replaced once the die.
I love seeing this, I'm disappointed that you didn't do light scanlines on OLED though. You still may not have liked it but games with sprites were created with scanlines in mind and used the scanlines to hide imperfections. This is why emulators have shader plugins and also a a way to add scanlines. Going in with nothing is like staring at the sun until your eyes can no longer see. It's blinding :)
Shaders are SO important in emulation really. And it's not just scanlines, but they can do things like detecting dithering patterns and smoothing values from it, creating a high quality image without the overall softness of a CRT input.
I'm wondering if there's something like a SweetFX shader injection that can add scanlines or perform the smoothing to create a much closer to CRT visual experience. The CRT effect is pretty much just post-processing, so it should be possible to mimic pretty much everything related to static visual clarity with a good shader.
Nothing is quite the same as a real electron beam and shadow mask.
Honestly though most people have their OLED set way too bright. My parents set their OLED down to 38 brightness because it was hurting their eyes in the evening, while still being clear and bright during the day.
This problem is due to the pixel density of the display. If you were to use a computer for example and emulate while upscaling you won't experience this issue. They are playing relatively native hardware with hardware upscale conversion. OLED will win if you're doing this from a computer.
@@jhoughjr1 you can get the exact same effect with a high end GPU
Friend came over one day to play TF2 on my big Iiyama CRT... broke his long standing scout record almost instantly. It was a 4:3 screen so I eventually had to let it go. But there's nothing like playing fast shooters on a CRT. It's like you can actually see what's going on in the game.
For me, the crt is good for 8 and 16bit systems. Partially for the large pixel size of a 240i image making the pixels too visible on a display with discreet pixels and partially because sometimes composite video and crt artifacting was used to create more colors. To me it just makes more sense to use a small crt to play these games natively instead upscaling hardware or experimenting with emulator filters. When you get into the hd era it might be a tossup but i wouldn't invest in an hd crt id just get a quality crt with composite and skip the rf modulation we used for lack of knowing better at the time. I wouldn't get caught up in component and hdmi mods, if you have systems with native component out and you feel they look better on crt then get what you need to play those systems but if you're running native hdmi you probably don't need a crt unless you want to turn off antialiasing and get better frame rates or something.
Or just get a oled tv
It's 240p, not i. The "resolution" is made by sending the same field of lines over and over again instead of sending 240 odd lines and then 240 even lines, so there's no interlacing or combing or, just 240 lines that are twice as bright.
I bought a 13" Trinitron with just composite and I will say it looks amazing, it's exactly how I remember gaming as a kid and teenager and wouldn't have it any other way.
But that's not the point entirely. Vintage systems output progressively and crt draw progressively. You can hook a console to a crt without extra hardware and enjoy it the way it always looked. Or you can go through painstaking measure optimizing your emulator setup to fake dithering, bloom, composite video artifacting, scan lines if you're into that, etc and so forth and you still get an image thats drawn after the whole frame has been communicated to the display not drawn progressively. All that effort to make super mario world look the way you remember it seems wasted to me when you can get a mediocre crt. I know its technically possible to get lower latency with modern hardware and its technically possible to look better doing it. But the old console and the old display do work well together. Its not unpractical to just have an old display around for such a purpose without having to think about all those emulator options.
@@danieldimitri6133 it has nothing to do with emulation or anything of sorts. It's just that the tv signal is designed to first send 240 odd lines, then 240 even lines thus drawing 480 lines in a comb like fashion.
But it's the device generating the television signal that have the task to tag the 240 lines as being odd lines or even lines.
So a 480i television station etc will tag odd/even/odd/even etc..
But old game consoles don't do that, they always use the same field, so it's not an interlaced signal, but a progressive one, as every frame is "complete".
And you don't see the black unused lines on smaller tv sets because the lines being drawn are being drawn twice as fast, and end up twice as bright as well.
My grandparents had the 4:3 version of that TV. I remember my mind being blown when I realized it had hdmi on the back of the crt. It start going a little green and they got rid of it. Wish I could have kept it but I was in a small apartment at the time and didn't have space
The majority of old games look better on CRT displays because they were designed in a way that they fit better on CRTs.
Pretty much the main "plus" for CRT is that it smears vaseline over the lens so you can't see how crappy the textures are, which is not a good argument at all.
I picked up an HD CRT and fell in love with it. The softening of pixel art and bad PS3-era aliasing is second to none, and I love the glowy feeling of the image. I actually ended up using it way more for streaming movies and TV shows on it with a Fire Stick. Old video content just looks so much cooler and more believable on them than my OLED
save some money for aspirins too.
I can't stand the high pitched whine of crt tv's. It was so tortuous to me as a kid playing Dreamcast and original Xbox while hearing that buzzing whine all the time. You kind of got used to it but would notice it again every time you turn it back on. No thank you lol glad crt is dead
@@CadgerChristmasLightShow CRT monitors have such a high resolution that the noise is inaudible. After watching Linus's Sony GDM FW900, i don't like the CRT TVs as much.
I can hear the 15-16KHz tone of the CRT TVs on this video.
The 34XBR960 I have definitely has better contrast and color accuracy, much brighter colors and a certain glow that my LCDs have never been able to beat. For instance I watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation on it in 1080 and the christmas lights just glow and look so much more realistic.
16:26 It's called phong shading and it was developed to smooth out hard edges between polys by gradually adjust the angle of how light would bounce. It was a necessary advancement due to the limited amount of polys that could be displayed. It's just in the shader. No actual "texture" and certainly not vector based.
Close! In the PS1 generation, Phong lighting wasn't practical due to the amount of processing power required. Games actually used Gouraud shading, which would assign vertices colors based on their angles to the light source, and then interpolate between those colors. However, it doesn't look like her hair even uses that, instead, it's just vertex colors assigned once to her models verts that don't change when she moves.
@@blulynx2619 oh right! That actually makes more sense. I forgot that vertex colors were even a thing. Nowadays I only ever use vertex maps only if absolutely necessary. I guess that puts square in the world of having been confidently incorrect!
@@parttimehuman No worries, lol. I've certainly been there before myself.
phong shading didn't come around till much later. it was called gouraud shading it's hard to emulate. It was a technique that benefited from hardware at the time. Both the screens and consoles.
I remember Amiga and PC demos in 1990's had Phong Shading. A lot of these terms became famous in the scene in 1980's and 90's.
Same for Ray Tracing in 1980's.
Linus make a review of RGB-Pi...
Definitely this, it really makes the whole process easier and alot cheaper, get Anthony on it!
Por fa Linus, pruebate un rgb pi y flipa, deja de mierdas escaladas....
too good to be true
The better choice to enjoy retrogaming on CRT.
And please use proper old-school games plugged into good-old 15 khz sets, not into crappy hd flat screen 100 hz ones
Playing old games on old CRT's sound just as logical watching old movies and series on a CRT-tv. It is the complete experience for the right era. Actually I bought a CRT for the same reason that I wanted an DOS / Windows 95 environment with the right vibe.
Only for content that’s only on SD or found footage style horror movies.
I remember when emulating games was called theft or pirating. Now its the only thing keeping that era alive. Just amazing isnt it.
It's only legal to emulate a copy of the game you own. ROM sites only exist because it's impossible to enforce this law.
I guess the most reasonable distinction is whether the game is still being published.
@Clarissa 1986 I wish international copyright law could be rewritten so that it only last for as long as you continue to sell the piece of media in a reasonable way, like you could hold copyright ad-infinitum if you never stop selling a videogame but if you stop the production of that videogame for 2 years consecutive or 5 years cumulative, then you lose the copyright. This would be for the best as copyright would protect you and your profits as long as you are proffiting from it(aka selling it), once you no longer wish to sell it and as so you are no longer proffiting from it, there is no need to protect that profit anymore.
I think this is the best of both worlds, if a company really is making a profit for a long time from a piece of media, they can hold the copyright for as long as they wish and continue proffiting from it, but once they themselves consider it is no longer profitable they just stop offering that piece of media and in 2 years it becomes public, and to avoid some nasty freaks just doing a limited release 1 time once 2 years so it does not expire, once they hit a maximum of 5 non continuous years, they lose it as well. This time gives companies that have had troubles with distribution due to something to still have time to recuperate and continue offering it without lossing the copyright due to some eventuality.
I think my proposal is the fairest for both author and public, as it technically has no expiration date as long as they keep offering the media, but once they no longer care for the piece of media, demostrated by their own unwilligness to sell it and make profit, they lose the legal protection for their profits as they are no longer proffiting.
@Clarissa 1986 Copyright used to have expirations that were reasonable. Then Disney lobbied the hell out of the US government to change copyright so that it lasts way longer. All to protect Mickey Mouse from what happened to Oswald Rabbit.
@Clarissa 1986 That is the reason i said: " I wish international copyright law could be rewritten so that it only last for as long as you continue to sell the piece of media in a REASONABLE WAY", that is the wiggle room i left intentionally, they would have to actually sell it in a reasonable way, pricing it at unreasonable prices would not be a reasonable way of selling it and would be meant to defraud the law.
I miss my Sony Trinitron... I definitely remember having the advantage against my friends who had their slow plasma tv's with noticeable input lag.
Got mine
🤓
For me it's Vizio 32 inch 720p hdtv from 2009-2010. It displayed 480p perfectly w/o upscaling with direct vga input via LCD, not LED.
@@crashbandicoot5636 This ain't tiktok
Don't tell me 🤧 unfortunately mine broke after 20 years
In 1999, I took part in a school fundraiser where we outfitted our computer lab with brand new Proline Windows 98 beige boxes and CRT monitors. I'll never forget the smell of all the static from those new monitors when walking in, combined with the smell of the new carpet. Magic. What got me into computing.
I won't go back to those heavy energy in efficient hogs that gave me the worst migraines at low refresh rates, but man, did they make the presence of the computer known? Did they have an aura of mystique? Hell, yes.
Crazy news. Content created for specific display technology and taking advantage of said technology looks better on said technology. More at 11
One of my most favorite TV I ever had was a 36" Sony HD (with HDMI) CRT, It was a beast but Color and Blacks were unbeatable and It's internal Speakers were amazing. I miss that TV even now.
I had 2 of those I got from my brother. Those bastards were a bitch to move lol.
I had one it was the heaviest tv I ever owned.
Internal speakers have taken an awful turn for the worst. Old good stereo sound CRTs had some of the best internal speakers. Of course since the case is so big you get decent bass response from them. Now the "Base model" tvs with the mono speaker, those were garbage and I dont miss that lol
Where do you live? Might have one to sell you.
We all feel crazy dumb now for getting rid of them, swapping them for 15 years of awful LCD’s lol.
This is an excellent format, I want to see more videos like this where the writer is one of the hosts.
I'm a bit surprised that we haven't seen a major manufacturer try to make a modern CRT. Maybe it just takes a lot more work since they've been out of commission for so long.
lol the host is one of LMGs camera operators, david. the writer is plouffe
The manufacture of CRTs where only cost effective on a large scale. A modern manufacture CRT would not be able to sell enough to bring the cost down to a reasonable price. They also use quite a bit hazardous materials in their construction that probably would not be tolerated by the market today.
I would to see one if anyone attempts it.
The HDR video looks so good and definitely helps demonstrate the differences you’re discussing on the OLED vs CRT.
@@pandemicneetbux2110 - DLSS is not blurry...
@@pandemicneetbux2110 DLSS is not blurry
this is a trent im not falling for.
"The last final fantasy you liked"
Loved the little "office stare at camera" Linus made at 11:31, almost as if he could sense the screeching FF fans
Even before the sponsor, I can tell you right now that the input lag thing is legit. Years of testing just from the fighting game community alone confirms that. For so long it was better to play on a CRT than a laggy flatscreen, because the gap was so huge back then. Current flatscreen tech, just as they are designed, will never match CRT's speed in that department, but they've closed the gap so much that the difference is now negligible, as long as you aren't buying garbage tech above 5ms response time.
For me it is music rhythm games.
My first LCD I bought had a 16 ms response time ca 2002. It was a blurfest and had shitty angles.
15:52 - This effect was because of the PS1 cutting out a lot of FPU (floating point hardware) for rendering.
So pixels / coordinates in games were INTEGERS and NOT decimals, and hence it would "jitter" between 2 pixels when it was supposed to be a value in between. The N64 for a lot of games / capability, looked better in this particular manner than the PS1.
Obviously this was done to cut costs (Sony's first entry in game consoles), albeit I feel it would have been WAYYYYYY better if they added it and ate the cost for the visual clarity that comes with an FPU. But I'm not in that business, so It's not really fair in hindsight to say that.
Considering that the PS1 was released in 1994 and the N64 in 1996 while graphic hardware made huge leaps during that time, it's excusable that the PS1 is worse at calculating coordinates.
I know it looks objectively bad but it will always have some nostalgic charm to me
@@Sk8erBoiALX
Yeah, that's true. I excuse it too, but a lot of people consider the ps1 more powerful/capable than the n64 -- especially as most cartridges for n64 were a max of 32-64mb for game roms.
Back in the day, I got a 34XBR960 for free from a guy who was "upgrading to a flat panel". That 960 has the most glorious picture I've ever seen. Great sound with the built in sub too. It also weighed 200lbs. I ended up paying it forward after using it for a few years.
I have that Sony HD CRT. I got it for free off the side of the road. I also have a Sony OLED in the same room. Great to have options.
Yeah it always confused me why people will put perfectly working items on the side of the road when they can bring it to a thrift store. Same with recycling one of them, just give it to someone who will use it if it still works. I found a super high end gaming keyboard at goodwill. Brand new. Some people just are clueless not gonna lie!
@@Warp2090 because it weighs like 250 lbs. I hated carrying it from my car to my living room lol
@@ShrtRndKid No im saying that its silly when people put a good TV on the side of the road and if no one grabs it its a goner
@@Warp2090 I gotcha. I was just joking that they don't want to take it anywhere because loading and unloading it is such a pain haha
I also have both TVs a good Sony 4k tv and an old Sony tv. Great combination
I still have one of the last HD-CRT flat tubes from Sony that was around 2005, and I keep it because classic games do look better on them. My Dreamcast and PS 2 just go with it better than my 55 inch OLED tv.
why u dont plug a ps5 on it and have fun?
@@AugustoV8Cesar because ps5 is made for uhd tv and looks sht on a tv like that
@@theneedforspeeder9575 no, it looks sharpy but lazy users dont wanto settup it correctly.
Is it the wega KD 970? That's the one I have it's a beast but it looks so gorgeous for 7th gen games.
@@MatticusFinch1820 wait, do u use a crt for modern games? is it tv or monitor? what games do you play on it?
I'd like to see a similar comparison but with CRT vs Plasma, I loved my plasma for retro gaming...
True. Though they aren't for european use because of the high electricity price. My neighbour has a plasma TV (old woman, never bothered to get a newer TV etc)
Now, with an electricity price of 0.30€ per kwh, she was shocked when I hooked it up to a kill-a-watt and told her that the TV she uses 'as background noise during chores and all' for 5 hours a day burns through 500w when turned on, essentially costing her almost 1€ each day.
I then sold her my old 720p LED TV for 40€, which I maybe used ten times over the last 5 years. She gets to save money cause it uses only 35w, I got rid of unnecessary electronics and the plasma TV will probably either go to someone who uses it more moderately, or get recycled at the local electronics disassembly facility.
More likes to this comment! It sounds like a very interesting comparison!
@@Igor_servant_of_Philemon So you've downgraded her set to save up 30 eur/month?
That's what I thought was missing from Linus's intro. Plasma was (and is) far superior to LCD for motion and contrast. I was blown away when I hooked up a Wii to a 42" Panasonic VIERA about 10 years ago for a friend's nephew. Mario Kart's motion was pure perfection. No blurring, no artifacts. Objects as sharp and stable while moving as while sitting still. Even now with a 240Hz G-Sync LCD and frame rates to match, I can't quite reach that motion quality (and the contrast is shit compared to the plasma too).
@@joesterling4299 True and a plasma is kinda cheap to get compared to good CRTs nowadays.
I love how crt filters look for 2d sprites, on my LG C2, the crt filters for ps1 games make them look so much better. I'm guessing it's not all the way there as a real crt, but it's a definitive improvement, while maintaining all of the other perks of OLED.
I was actually wondering if you weren't going to put a CRT like that in the company's game center room. so that the employees can experience CRT's for the first time in their lives.
The motion clarity of CRT's really stands out when playing sidescrollers. Much better than LCD/OLED flat panels in that one category. Scrolling backgrounds look smeared without black frame insertion.
As someone who grew up on CRTs, the jittery animations and aliasing in all forms have been the consistent bane of my every gaming experience since switching to an LCD. As soon as I noticed it the first time, I've been doomed.
Weirdly enough, however, when I go back to games older than around 2012-2013, all of it seems less prominent. I don't know what happened along the way, but I hate it.
I think it looks smeared on LCD, not OLED. However OLED has a problem with image persistence, which is not a problem on a CRT
It really does come down to what tech the devs were working with, imo. Even something like the bilinear filtering that looks absolutely horrid on modern displays no matter what kind of panel it is can look passable or even good on a CRT because that filtering effect was applied with CRTs in mind.
Not a day goes by i dont miss my CRT. However, my back, wife, and storage space at home all thank me for giving it up.