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People now pretending that these box tvs were great is hilarious.
What was wrong with them? They served their purpose just fine for many years
The weighed a ton, they were limited in size, their resolution was terrible, they sucked down electricity…
Their screen was curved the wrong way until they released flat screen TVs
4:3 resolution meant you lost some of the content from movies or you watched them with black bars
Except movies keep changing so now if you want imax at home you need 4:3.
Whatever isn’t available at home is what movies will change to to keep themselves unique.
Widescreen has been the movie industry standard for how many decades now? IMAX is its own beast but most movies aren’t filmed in real IMAX resolution and now there’s digital IMAX which is basically 19:10 which is the same as many TVs…
Movies used to be all 4:3 before tv. It’s called the academy ratio. Movies now do 1.85:1 and even 2.39:1. A few even do anamorphic 2.76:1. Anything but the dominant home format.
Major movie studios have mostly used widescreen since the 1950s and all the different ratios you mentioned except 4:3 are better watched on a widescreen TV than a 4:3 TV.
We had four channels and loved it!
And most people were lucky to have a TV. You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
Have you compared NES games on a CRT with the same games on a modern screen?
CRTs just look miles better.
EDIT: OK, it’s ackchually not technically “resolution” per se, I get it. :p
That’s because the graphics were tailored to CRT
resolution- which is to say, [things that just so happened to have] low/outright bad resolution.CRTs have advantages over more modern stuff but that’s mostly about latency.
It’s not as much about resolution as it was about exploiting the quirks of CRT. Artists usually “squished” sprites horizontally (because crt screens would stretch them) and used the now famous “half dot” technique to have more subtle shading than what was actually possible at the pixel level. So if you just display the original sprites with no stretch and no “bleed” between pixels, it doesn’t look as good as it should.
I had never heard of this. Fascinating!
That’s because the graphics were tailored to CRT resolution - which is to say, low/outright bad resolution.
No, it’s because the graphics were tailored to the analog characteristics of CRTs: things like having scanlines instead of pixels and bleed between phosphors. If they were only tailored to low resolution they’d look good on a low resolution LCD, but they don’t.
I admit I’m quibbling, but the whole thread is that, so…
As a pedant, that is impressive work. Fair enough.
Thanks, but @Sylvartas’ reply (which I didn’t read until after writing mine) did a much better job, TBH.
CRTs themselve don’t have concept of resolution.
Maybe one’s before the 80s didn’t, but they almost all do after that. Exactly how this worked varied between manufacturers and the display type, but they tended to have some kind of mask that pushes it to a preferred resolution.
http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2020/02/crt-shader-masks.html
CRTs don’t have pixels so the resolution of the signal isn’t that important. It’s about the inherent softness you get from the technology. It’s better than any anti-aliasing we have today.
Crts were jagged and blurry. A misconverged pixel isn’t good anti aliasing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command#/media/File%3AA5200_Missile_Command.png
That image is a digital rendering of the raw data, not a photo of how a CRT would render it.
CRTs were nothing if not the opposite of jagged.
CRTs do have pixels. If they didn’t, you could run an SVGA signal (800x600 at 60 Hz) directly into any CRT. If you tried this, it would likely damage the tube beyond repair.
The exact mechanism varied between manufacturers and types: http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2020/02/crt-shader-masks.html
I certainly saw aliasing problems on CRTs, though usually on computer monitors that had higher resolution and better connection standards. The image being inherently “soft” is related to limited resolution and shitty connections. SCART with RGB connections will bring out all the jagginess. The exact same display running on composite will soften it and make it go away, but at the cost of a lot of other things looking like shit.
CRTs do have pixels. If they didn’t, you could run an SVGA signal (800x600 at 60 Hz) directly into any CRT. If you tried this, it would likely damage the tube beyond repair.
Would it, though? I’m skeptical.
If it did, it wouldn’t be because they have “pixels,” though; it would be because overdriving the deflection yoke with higher-frequency signals would generate too much heat for the TV to handle.
Otherwise (if it didn’t overheat), it should “work.” The result might look weird if the modulation of the signal didn’t line up with the apertures in the shadow mask right, but I don’t see any reason why sweeping the beam across faster would damage the phosphors. (Also, I’m not convinced a black & white TV would have any problem at all.)
CRT filters exist now, and with HDR output (or just sending an HDR-enable signal to get tv’s to use the full brightness range) and 4k displays it honestly as good at this point. or better because the only good CRT’s you can get now are pretty small P/BVM and my tv is much bigger than those
There are plenty of upscalers with minimal latency that fix that.
There also isn’t just “CRT” in this space. Professional video monitors give a very different picture than a consumer TV with only the RF converter input.
If one more under 25 retro fan tells me that RF tuners are the “true experience”, I’m going to drink myself to death with Malort.
Edit: please don’t tell me you believe CRTs have zero latency. Because that’s wrong, too.
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Compare a PS5 on a modern day large screen 4k TV vs a CRT of your favorite brand from any year.
If your only use case is playing old consoles, there’s filters for current emulators that fill that need adequately.
They make a high pitched whine
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Use better power supply
Is there a better power supply than cable + wall socket?
Better than the one soldered into the main circuit board of the TV?
Yes! Hire an electrical engineer to improve it for you, you pleb! \s
If you got TV from crapufacturer, then yes.
Sony Trinitrons had whine to them, and those were basically the top consumer display back then. I think my JVC PVM has power supply whine.
They were great until you had to move them. They were clunkier than a sofa because they had no place to hold and weighted as much as a refrigerator
They did break, You know? My father fixed those things, it’s that they were actually fixable back then and it was cool. Or maybe it was just russian tech that broke, we lived in one of those ussr sattellite countries.
Moving those CRTs from one place to another is arduous.
Mine exploded.
Umm… How? There should be vacuum inside.
Okay, so technically CRTs implode, but the result of the implosion can be an explosion. What happens with a CRT implosion is that the the glass gets sucked into the back of the tube with so much force it’ll bounce off the back of the tube and come out the front. So they kinda implode and explode. Combine that with the glass being leaded and there’s a reason you really shouldn’t go out smashing CRTs.
The vaccum craved A I R
The fear of having to walk under a mounted crt every time I went in and out of my room was real… 😂
Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
Do I think crt’s are better? No. Do I miss them? Yes.
I will not break for 50 years
Yeah as a guy who used to repair these with his dad as a kid, hells no. The average crt TV had a lifespan of about 10 years without breaking
Yup. A lot of survivor bias going on with the remaining crop of CRTs out there. Granted, there were probably a lot of perfectly good tubes that got thrown out back in the 2000’s. But the ones we have left still need repair now and then.
And a lot of them don’t have the brightness they did back then. These aren’t going to last forever, which is why good upscaling solutions for modern TVs are important.
I am still rocking my old Apple color monitor and it has never needed a repair. It does need a slap on the top to get the picture right from time to time though.
That thing was my primary tv from the time I was 10 until I bought an hdtv in 2008 (so 13 years), and it was a monitor in a school for an Apple IIe before that. I had two badass old pc speakers I hooked into my ps2 for dvds and gaming back in the day. Now I have my classic consoles plugged into it. It hasn’t seen much use in the last 3 years, but it was constantly being used before that.
I know we threw some out from time to time when I was a kid, but we also had some in the family that lasted forever. We had this really pretty black and white floor model from the early 60s that we finally threw out in the early 2000s, but it worked just fine. No one wanted it any more I guess. I still have dreams about that tv for some reason.
This is your nostalgia talking. CRTs were absolutely awful. I think my family still had one of lying around in the mid aughts. It was heavy, ugly, big, with truly awful picture quality and sucks down on power. Even the cheap LCD TVs we upgraded to were so much better than that crap.
They’re might be awful to you, but those people at CRT gaming community would literally dive into a dumpster if they spot a Trinitron/Wega there.
I had to toss a Trinitron about a year ago. Was taking up too much space. I tried finding someone to pick it up with no takers, and had to junk it instead.
It’s not a large community.
Damn.
I’m happy with my old Apple color monitor for the IIe, but I would’ve happily taken it.
I had to give up an early 1080p CRT recently. It broke my heart, but I have toddlers.
They’re always messing with this 2lb giant flat thing. That would’ve crushed them if they had managed to knock it over. It needed a professional degaussing any way. Who the hell does that these days?
I had an old Radio Shack bulk tape eraser that I got good at using as a degausser. Cable TV installer came in and moved my speakers too close to the TV and it cast an off color to the side. Tried my hand with the big electro magnet and got rid of the discoloration.
Can confirm, I was just getting into it when someone was giving it away for free and arrived in time to see 2 people in a very heated argument that started to get physical… and I just got in my car and left.
I had a monster sized CRT that would creak due to thermal expansion and would buzz when in use
Oh man I’d forgotten about the weird hum some of them would make
They also made a high pitched whine from the flyback transformer. My parents couldn’t hear it but even as an adult I could.
I was very sensitive to that noise. Walking down the street in my neighborhood, I could always tell when someone had a tv on in their house. My friends were amazed by that.
My hearing isn’t what it used to be though.
I agree, but the ones with the degauss button were fun.
POINGngngngngng.
Are you sure it was a CRT and not a projection TV? CRTs were limited in size, and they have a reputation for being between lcds and OLED in terms of picture quality (ignoring resolution). Projection TVs, on the other hand, had a reputation for being garbage and the only reason you’d buy one is because you wanted something bigger than a CRT could handle.
There were big CRTs. They were just expensive. We had a Proton that was pretty big. Maybe 40"? There were bigger TVs, but we didn’t have the money for them.
There were 40+" CRT TVs (my father got one thrown in for free when he bought his place some years ago and kept usings it because “waste not”) and those things had a big back and were pretty heavy, which makes sense because the entire screen area has to be covered by a single electron gun at the back, so bigger screen means it has to be further back as the angle of the electrons can be made to turn when they exit the electron gun is limited, plus it all has to be happenning in vacuum (so that gas molecules don’t stop the electrons on their way to the screen) so you end up with the whole screen assembly being a big thick glass vacuum shell, so very heavy.
Even the smaller CRT TVs had quite the big back, partly because of the whole electron gun and max angle thing but also because firing electrons in a vacuum requires more than 1000v, which have to be generated from mains on the TV, and high voltages means big chunky components (plus back in the day the components were naturally bigger than they are now for the same capabilities), so even the smaller screen ones were still quite large in the depth axis because of the space needed for high voltage electronics.
Meanwhile the screens for LCD, OLED and so on are basically sandwiches of thin film forming a grid of cells that get activated/deactivated with reasonably small voltages (depends on the tech but if I’m not mistaken they’re all less than 20v) with only the detail that those techs which do not emit light by themselves (such as LCD) need a bit more space for backlighting, all of which can be made way thinner than “enough depth for the electrons from an electron gun to reach the corners of the screen”, much lighter than “requires a vacuum shell for all that space” and then again smaller and lighter because it doesn’t have any high-voltage electronics inside.
CRTs are great for retro gaming because they made low resolutions looking better than any other tech can (by low resolutions i mean 240-360p)
Also, some Counter Strike players really enjoy playing on CRTs.
Yeah they were all those things but they also made your hand tingly when you ran it over the screen and it smelled like a Tesla coil
One of the problems is survivorship bias.
The CRT’s that survive today are mostly the cream of the crop. Professional monitors that were used for decades at local TV studios. HD CRT’s from the 2000’s that were some of the last ones made, were prohibitively expensive at the time, and have been lovingly cared for by enthusiasts.
I think a lot of retro gaming enthusiasts who are in to CRT’s today are either too young to actually remember what the average CRT was like or are old enough that they were enthusiasts back even in the 90’s, only buying the absolute best of the best.
I would literally take my phone over the console TV I grew up with in my parent’s living room. I remember setting stuff down on it (it was pretty much a table), like an empty can, and the picture would go crazy. I think part of why we got rid of it was because my mom got new, wireless handsets for the landline phone that caused interference (and it was also around the time new technologies we’re replacing CRT’s).
At one point as a kid i got a 19" Zenith CRT in my bedroom. That thing was absolute garbage. Colors all over the place, the image noisy and warped. It was loud, deeper than it was wide or tall, and weighed probably 40lbs. The only two inputs were RF and RCA, but only mono because it only had one speaker.
I think most of the retro gaming community has just forgotten how bad the average CRT was.
However, I also wonder if this demand for CRT’s and that premium gaming experience is going to impact the market. Will there ever be enough demand for a Kickstarter to manufacture a few thousand high-end CRT’s? Probably not. Could there be new features or new technologies invented to try to sate this demand? Maybe. Projector glasses, retro gaming handhelds, TV’s and monitors with higher refresh rates, “gaming modes”. I wonder if some other new tech is going to come along to try to capture the benefits of good CRT’s in a modern package.
An automatic software update straight up corrupted my TV, I have to use it with no internet connection like God intended or it keeps trying to go back to the home menu for an error message. Factory reset and updates won’t fix it either. It wouldn’t even forget my wifi, I had to change the password to force it to disconnect.
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Update thru USB?
It updates, then it goes back immediately. Out of spite, I’m guessing.
Have you tried turning it off and on?
A friend of mine had an expensive LED TV set get bad RAM about 10 years ago after a firmware fix. You could watch TV for about 2 hours before it went blank. Only official fix via the manufacturer was to disconnect it from power, wait until the rechargeable battery went down, then it was fine again for another 2 hours. It seems like it’s overheating, but it’s not. Something to do with a memory leak and video buffering. It was a known issue among tech enthusiasts, there was a homemade wiki on how to replace the shitty low end RAM with a $30 stick of laptop DIMM and it worked! He still has it, I think.
The tech of CRTs seems almost futuristic to me. Bending electron beams with magnets to travel through a vacuum so they hit exotic materials at precisely the right locations seems much cooler than just miniaturizing LED arrays.
That’s nothing. Look into how vacuum tubes work to achieve logic gates, rectify AC-to-DC, and more. Compared to solid-state electronics, the fundamentals aren’t even the same sport, let alone the same game. People really were living in a different world 80 years ago.
I find this about a lot of old tech. Like precisely etching a piece of vinyl in such a way that it vibrates just right to get the music you want vs bouncing a laser off a reflective disc to read a bunch of 0s and 1s.
We went from the end-product achieving something through great complexity, to the end-product being made with great complexity so it could active something simply.
First of all, LEDs are bloody insane in how they work. And last, but not least, LCD panels bend THEMSELVES!
CRT sets weighed about 40 pounds, blurry picture, and cost as much as a mid range PC. Modern TVs are 5 pounds, cheaper than most phones, and have nice crisp picture. Smart TVs suck but so did the past. Nostalgia is a lie. Things are always bad, they don’t get worse they just stay bad
And most of them would not last 50 years without repairs. Maybe the 2000s single-chip ones could but not enough time has elapsed. TV repair shops used to be extremely common for a reason.
And don’t forget the eyestrain!
My 34" Trinitron weights literally 200 pounds.
While that very much sucks, CRT was a very mature technology that provided excellent products for what was needed at the time. It’s still unmatched when it comes to motion in my book (some may disagree because of phosphor trails).
The fact that my new fancy TV has to make the screen dark and flickery (and possibly add a little SOE) to look almost as clear as that clunker is pretty impressive.
You clearly have never had a good CRT. It will cost you but its great for watching old movies and shows
And old video games. They were designed for CRT and look better than on a new TV. Plus CRT has basically no latency. New tvs cause input lag because they have to process the picture. It makes many old games unplayable or very hard to play unless you have a very expensive screen made for gaming.
If you’re measuring latency using the same methods as everything else, CRT has latency, and more of it than you might think.
The standard is to measure at the point where the picture is drawn halfway down the screen. On NTSC with ~30fps, this is about 17ms of latency ( ((1 / 30) / 2) * 100 ). If you hit the button slightly before the screen is drawn, and the game processes it immediately and draws the frame accounting for it, then it will take about 17ms before we stop the clock on the standard method of measurement for latency.
“But”, you might say, “the flatpanel can’t go any faster than it’s fed that NTSC signal, so its latency will be at least that much plus the upscaler plus its pixel response time”.
Fair. A good gaming panel has around 2ms pixel response time. Upscalers can never be zero lag, but good ones like the OSSC and RetroTink are pretty damn close these days.
This is already less than human ability to even notice the difference, but consider doing the same equation for PAL signals at 25fps. It comes out to about 20ms, which is 3ms slower than NTSC. The difference in latency between NTSC and PAL CRTs is about about the same as the difference between NTSC fed to CRTs or low latency flatpanels. It’s possible for flatpanels to be even less than PAL CRTs, and we’ll probably get there at some point.
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If anyone here is interested, check out !crtgaming@lemmy.world
A lot of it was covering up mistakes. Watching TNG on a modern display, you get to notice how they didn’t match the colors on the uniforms very well. It’s particularly noticeable with the extras uniforms compared to the main cast, though even the main cast uniforms aren’t all matched, either. Mostly happens with the remade uniforms from season 3 onward.
For one example, look at Geordi and Data. I don’t think this is just a matter of lighting.
It probably didn’t get noticed much on shitty broadcast quality TV back then, but once stuff got remastered for the digital age, it all popped out.
Watching TNG on a modern display, you get to notice how they didn’t match the colors on the uniforms very well.
It could be worse: at least that makes it easier for cosplayers, unlike this shit on the Discovery uniforms that seems almost designed to thwart them!
I’ve actually been working on similar patterns for the Strange New Worlds uniforms. It looked like it might be 3d printed directly on the fabric. I tried a transparent TPU, but it’s hard to get consistent results out of it. The transparent PLA I tried didn’t stick to the fabric.
They might have used a mask of some kind, or they tuned the hell out of a TPU printer setup and had an intern clean it up afterwords.
I saw a video about how they were made! Let me look through my browser history…
Ah, here we go. Here’s the bit where they talk about the deltas (on the Disco uniform, not the SNW one): https://youtu.be/xDthNAUMXYs?t=261
The person in the video describes it as a “rubberized print” (screen-printed rather than 3d-printed) and “foiled on top.” She also describes it as “the cosplayer’s nightmare,” LOL.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xDthNAUMXYs?t=261
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed so, so much more intentional stuff that you just couldn’t see that the old resolutions. It’s one of the reasons it’s a damn shame that Boy/DS9 haven’t gotten a remaster (though, I think in this case the way it was filmed basically means this will never happen.)
I have a few PVM, I just recapped my pvm2030 and even then the electron gun is slowly dying which will require a brand new tube at this point. This is without even considering the amount of custom cables and modchip required to use an RGB signal on those.monitors.
While I agree it’s great specifically for old content, it’s far from perfect and most people would get better enjoyment from something like an ossc plugged into a modern TV for the convenience alone.
Pro tip: Never connect your TV to the internet, just use it as a screen. Its easier to buy a new cromecast or Kodi Box when you need support for the latest streaming.
Better yet, go to your local indie used game store and buy used movies.
My wife and I bought a DVD/blueray player a few weeks ago, because we have just found it easier to buy physical copies of movies/tv shows than try to figure out what service it’s on.
Make your own personal streaming service. Rip the DVDs / Blu-Rays and put them on your own Plex or Jellyfin server :)
If I wasn’t so lazy I’d do that.
So much easier to connect my Steam deck to the tv and pick one of the fmovies sites.
I had a friend call me crazy for ripping all of my old DVDs and Blu-ray Discs to a hard drive around 2009.
“Why not just stream from Netflix?”
Now he’s complaining about being subscribed to a half dozen services just so he can watch what he used to stream from Netflix. I kinda want to shake my Plex library with him for personal vindication, but I’m not sure he’d appreciate the irony in a way that would satisfy me.
I’ve been buying second hand dvds for awhile, and I also got a brand new Xbox finally. I threw a DVD in it, and it needed to download software to play it. I was a little irked, consoles used to be something that you could buy brand new and it just worked but everything needs a day one patch anymore. The smart TV is never going on the internet, but that doesn’t stop it from trying to talk to any smart phones that come into the house.
I don’t buy smart tvs. I have this ugly sceptre tv with a beautiful 4k picture.
I mean, I’m sure there’s something better, but I plug what I want into it and watch it. The volume goes up and down sometimes if my router isn’t facing away from it, oh and there’s a line going across it now, but for less than 200 bucks I feel like it was a win.
Eh, I have been running a pi-hole on my network for many years now. When I did it was purely because I find ads annoying, these days I’d consider it a basic necessity.
also, I have a hard time complaining about privacy and recommending anything google, especially at the price point they sell Chromecast’s for. If you’re buying a consumer set top box, Apple TV is basically the only one that’s anywhere near privacy conscious. Kodi box or self-built PC though if you really care, and even then I’d still want a pi-hole or similar even if you run it on Linux instead of Windows because the services themselves are doing all kinds of shady shit.
Also, hate how higher end features only come on screens over 55 or 60 inches. Have a small bedroom where 55 inches is just plain too big.
Buy monitor and computer
Opposite problem; now it’s too small. Around 40-45" is about right for this room.
There are currently 34 different computer monitors in the 40-45" range. Prices vary from $316 to $2000. B&H had 20 results. They even have short throw protectors for less than $200 if you want to go that route. Amazon had multiple if you are willing to wade through their cesspool of a search engine.
The world is your oyster, don’t let perceived problems stand in your way.
LG C1 or C2 has 42 and 48 options for being 4K OLED
Buying a TV and hooking up a computer is probably cheaper for larger screens.
You could look at the 40-45" LG OLED TVs.
I just never agreed to the terms of my smart TV because their privacy policy is horrid.
Been fine 3 or so years and counting.
Yeah just never connect these pieces of shit to the internet or even remove the wireless module if possible
“To purée your boiled potatoes, this blender needs a valid email address and cell phone verification number, please update your personal information in the Settings option and try again.”
(twenty minutes later, the bastards have your data and the boiled potatoes are still crammed inside the blender…)
“Error code prompt error general ### task failed successfully undefined command. FOR HOT SHINGLES IN [your street name] WAITING TO GET NAILED BY YOU [your name] CLICK ANYWHERE TO REGISTER NOW!”
I’m just imagining that juice maker, that just smashed to plates together to pour juice from a bag. And it took forever to actually pour. There was absolutely no reason for it to be smart. Except so that it could make sure you knky bought juice from them.
knky
I read this as “kinky” instead of “only” and it made just as much sense in context. I’m not normally one to kink-shame, but you’ve gotta be pretty fucking weird to want a Juicero.
I bet yhat juicero is the absolute number grip master
AvE also did a teardown of that. It has a huge CNC machined plate that’s completely unnecessary. Rolling the bag to squeeze it would have worked fine for a fraction of the price. As it was, they were probably paying over $1000 of manufacturing cost when it retailed for $400. This necessitated making up the difference on the juice packets–the razer blade and printer ink model–but that didn’t materialize.
That thing was a joke from so many different angles.
Yeah, I haven’t seen inside, I just know that even from someone who does like some smart products, that was a complete waste.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Video about it from critikal/penguinz0/Charlie.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Hey man, 50 years ago we went to the store and bought new vacuum tubes when our TVs went pop and hiss – you couldn’t fix CRTs like that.
CRTs were witchcraft.
Bro my TV straight up crashes sometimes And that is genuinely the most annoying concept ever
But could your old CRT you bought with your own money display advertisements in it’s menus? Hmm? HMMMM? Could it? See? Modern Television wins again!
I’ll have you know that if you uninstall updates from the launcher, I think, and something else, then turn off auto updates. You can get rid of the ads.
This is the way
How does it even knows it needs update?
A few times a day it rolls 3 dice (that’s the rattling sound you hear) and if they all come up six an update is needed.
Old TVs could literally kill you when you try to take them up the stairs.
