I have a Sony PVM-1354Q, superb picture and full of inputs. I don't use it as much as I'd like to because the screen is a bit small for my taste (even though I grew up playing on a 14" screen) so I end up doing my console gaming on lower end but larger CRTs. If you're into retro home computers where you sit close to the screen such a CRT can't be beat, but for 'couch potato' retro gaming a 20" model or greater would be better.

One word of caution I'd give you is to thoroughly check the picture tube for wear before buying. These usually come from TV stations where they lived a very hard working life so reduced brightness and screen burn are common problems. I cherry picked mine in person aided by a selection of video test patterns.

14" is where it's at for me. 20" and higher gets very bulky and heavy. With smaller monitors you can just sit closer to them 🤣 but this is down to personal preference really...

What mainly got me interested in those monitors is that they offer real 240p output with scanlines. Perfect for PSX, for example. Regular SDTVs of course only display a flickering interlaced image. Also, what I'm concerned about are the inputs. I guess here it's down to either RGB via SCART->BNC or S-Video, with composite being out of the window?

And indeed, some of those things date back to the 80s. Seen some on the internet with geometry defects...

Your typical cheap consumer grade CRT SDTV does display real 240p video in all its sharp scanline-y glory if you feed it some. CRT TV is an analog device, if the video signal from the gaming console tells it not to interlace you get every field in the same place: progressive scan. What these broadcast CRTs have on them are higher resolution tubes, sharper raster scanning, better geometry and overall higher quality leading to a more faithful reproduction of the video source. Consumer grade TVs aren't really meant for computer graphics, regular television material hides a lot of their shortcomings.

My Sony PVM does composite, component and RGB through BNC jacks and S-Video through the standard 4-pin DIN connector. I've also seen them with TTL RGB input through DE-9 (IBM CGA compatible) and a DB-25 port labeled COMPUTER which can be wired for digital or analog RGB.

I use a Sony PVM-2950QM (29") and PVM-1442QM (14") for my consoles and home computers respectively.

Superb screens.

Some time in the late 90s, CRT TVs stopped being purely analogue devices. They started to have DSPs to correct convergence and distortion on shallow "low footprint" flat-screen tubes. Some of the cheaper ones would not display progressive 240p pictures, since the DSP was sloppily programmed and freaked out over never receiving an odd field (or even? don't remember).

Yeah I think the matter may be a bit more complicated than that. So far I've never managed to get a 240p image out of any flat or non-flat CRT TV via composite and I believe PSX and most earlier consoles do output that.

Did they ever make 4:3 EDTV-capable consumer CRT TVs? If I'm correct you could even go straight component through BNC with those professional ones and get 480p out of some PS2 games. By the way, what is the difference with the BVM series compared to PVM?

d1stortion wrote:

Yeah I think the matter may be a bit more complicated than that. So far I've never managed to get a 240p image out of any flat or non-flat CRT TV via composite and I believe PSX and most earlier consoles do output that.

Did they ever make 4:3 EDTV-capable consumer CRT TVs? If I'm correct you could even go straight component through BNC with those professional ones and get 480p out of some PS2 games. By the way, what is the difference with the BVM series compared to PVM?

They did. My grandparents used to own one, and that thing was MASSIVE. 😳 It had a really really really nice picture too, better than most of the "HD" TVs I've seen. 🤣

d1stortion wrote:

By the way, what is the difference with the BVM series compared to PVM?

The BVM monitors are meant to be a studio-monitor quality appliance. They have modularised frontends, built-in test patterns for calibration, buttloads of exposed calibration controls, picture settings save+recall, etc etc etc.

The PVM is a professional display (e.g. mine appears to have come from the AV trolley in a court room, the barcode sticker on the side says "Department of Justice"), still very good, but not quite as configurable or adjustment-rich as a BVM.

Some claim the picture quality on BVM sets is superior, but that could be because it's not quite as easy to calibrate a PVM. *shrugs*

I'm genuinely intrigued now. I've never managed to not get a solid 240p image out of plain vanilla NTSC curved/flat/ultra-slim CRT TVs from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, from generic Chinese crap to big name brands, unless it's something fancy like a 100Hz set or if I go through some video processing device like a DVD recorder.

The problems I've noticed with 'modern' CRT sets are that digital picture enhancement/noise correction features make sharp computer graphics look awful (but fortunately they can be turned off) and the active geometry/correction needed for flat/ultra-slim tubes messes up light pen type devices (such as some console light guns) since the beam scan is being modulated with a complex waveform, but I've never seen them messing up 240p on their own, they just simply don't mind the missing half-line and display a perfectly progressive 240 line picture with black lines in between.

Here's a closeup on the blue-ish sky of Super Mario Bros. on my 29" Samsung 29M16 from the mid-2000s: flat picture tube, full of digital picture enhancement settings (all turned off) and pretty bad geometry since it's a cheap consumer set, but the scanlines are stationary and clearly visible (click to zoom).

Beam focus on consumer TVs is not that great (especially on el cheapo Chinese ones) and that might play a role on making the scanlines less pronounced or not visible at all, but otherwise I haven't seen unwanted interlacing on 240p material. Do you happen to know any particular brands or models that do mess up 240p? I am CRT-crazy so I want to be on the lookout for them. 😵

Well, my old 14" Philips shadow mask from the early 2000's (now out of commission due to a loose SCART connection and no other inputs) did noticeably flicker with PSX. Gamecube and PS2 a bit less but still similar. When I once fired up that console after not having played it for several years it surprised me a bit, because as a kid I used to not notice such technical details. Generally I found the effect most noticeable on the PSX startup screen, where the static text just jitters a lot when you look really closely at the TV, so I believe that it's interlacing. Maybe 50 Hz operation has something to do with it as well. And I'm fairly sure PSX games lacked scanlines on there. But I have to check all of this out again to give a precise answer and pictures.

The Sony KV-14LT1E (FD Trinitron) that I'm now using for the most part seems to be not different in that respect. However, this TV has a more annoying issue, that being that moving white colors have a noticeable smear to them on black backgrounds. Somewhat similar to LCD ghosting actually. And interestingly, I noticed the exact same thing on a PC Trinitron monitor, while I never saw any shadow mask CRTs with any such degradation. Unless it's by design, which I doubt.

Also, you can watch this vid. He's talking about the same TV and at about ~4:47 he mentions how there are no scanlines.

The PSX startup screen is the full 640x480 iirc, no surprise that would flicker.

BTW most of those ps2 games (early ones especially) try to fake antialiasing by rendering the screen buffer with four way shifts since there was a jaggy stigma going on at the time. Tekken Tag Tournament Japan vs. US release compares this nicely.

Hmm, totally forgot about the alternating resolutions. But that piracy warning that comes up in a lot of games was like that too so it'd be 480i on that as well. The screen is just 320x240 though. Or I remember it incorrectly...

In the comments for the video I've posted they say that the TV is simply too small for scanlines to be visible. So I guess you just need a bigger one for them to be noticeable...

Do PAL consoles, which are normally 576i 50Hz, toggle to 60Hz to do 240p? That could have something to do with it.

The only set that did it for me was a no-name 24-ish inch flat-CRT. It couldn't do PAL60, wouldn't do progressive scan, you'd get a rolling picture, and of course there's no V-hold adjustment...

Ah so you're from PAL-land, that might have a little bit to do with it, at least for older consoles that displayed horizontal black bars on 50Hz. Such systems displayed the European 'standard' 288 active lines with the 240 lines of the Japanese game in the middle (hence the black bars), and due to the increased vertical resolution those 240 lines get squashed together, making the scanlines even smaller than on a 240 line display; kind of like playing a 320x200 PC game windowed on a high resolution monitor.

I think that the flicker caused by the lower frame rate may also play a part on how 'progressive' we perceive the picture to be. I grew up with 60Hz television and that looks rock solid, but 50Hz has a very annoying flicker to me, and even though I've mostly gotten used to it, large patches of solid color on 50Hz (like old video game backgrounds) tend to trick my brain into seeing flashes of other colors, like looking directly at a strobe light.

Yeah indeed. There is also that slower gameplay thing on a lot of pre-6th gen console games which makes speedruns and such not directly comparable between PAL and NTSC regions. And not all games have black borders, some actually utilize the full PAL resolution.

SquallStrife wrote:

Do PAL consoles, which are normally 576i 50Hz, toggle to 60Hz to do 240p? That could have something to do with it.

PAL wasn't meant to display 60 Hz before PAL60, wasn't it? Certain PAL60-only GC games had also special warnings on them. So I doubt that a PAL PSX game would ever display 60 Hz, because back then there still were enough TV sets around that were incapable of this.

Figured I'd throw this in here: S-Video vs. Composite. Just to prove that composite isn't always as horrible as it's made out to be on the internet. At least it eliminates dithering quite excellently. In fact, before this video I didn't even know that OoT had such a dithered output 🤣

I see that at least some of those Sony PVM/BVM monitors can do 9-pin D-sub digital RGB. Wonder if this could allow for TTL CGA and composite CGA on the same monitor? or does the digital RGB input know nothing of the Intensity signal?

I Believe PSX games are mostly 320x240 upscaled to 720x480(NTSC) or 720x576(PAL)

VileRancour wrote:

I see that at least some of those Sony PVM/BVM monitors can do 9-pin D-sub digital RGB. Wonder if this could allow for TTL CGA and composite CGA on the same monitor? or does the digital RGB input know nothing of the Intensity signal?

I had the opportunity to repair a PVM-1342 once so I tested the DE-9 digital RGB input, it does acknowledge the Intensity signal making it TTL CGA compatible.

My 1442QM has TTL RGB in, and indeed it works perfectly on my Tandy 1000.

It's a bit sharper than my 1084S as well, which is a bonus.

I picked up a BVM-1454D. It's dreamy. 😁 And has about the loudest degaussing stage I've ever heard on a monitor!

After some testing I can certainly say that some PSX games do output an interlaced image btw. Tekken 3 for example. So that's that...