maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-12-20, 01:08:

A 21" trinitron with a fine grille pitch at 60Hz is peak CRT in all use cases and you cannot change my mind. (Unless you can find a larger one) 😀

At 60Hz RR? So that's a choice for real gourmets. No, thanks - even in pure DOS I use Unirefresh, UniVBE or VBEHz for higher refresh rate - flickering at 60 Hz I just see, I can't help it., excuse me.

Sensitivity to CRT flicker is subjective. I definitively see it at 60 Hz and cannot stand using it at that refresh rate for prolonged periods of time. VBEHz is a must for me when playing DOS SVGA games such as WarCraft 2 or Transport Tycoon. The downside is that you need a VBE 3.0 compatible graphics card to use VBEHz.

However, some older cards have their own proprietary utilities which provide identical functionality. My Hercules branded S3 Trio64V+ happily runs DOS SVGA games at 120 Hz.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-12-20, 01:08:

A 21" trinitron with a fine grille pitch at 60Hz is peak CRT in all use cases and you cannot change my mind. (Unless you can find a larger one) 😀

My Sony GDM-W900 was not impressed 😉

Peak CRT for me, but eventually swapped due to space constraints for a 60GB 2.5" HDD (back when those were pretty new)

I vote for a 17", Trinitron Tube. I remember 17" is the size to GO past in the day. I have one Sony branded and one IBM Branded but both are Trinitron and with 17" you can see two horizontal wire on the image. in the early 2000s I also got a Sony 24 "trinitron CRT, I struggled to make it fit in my car to take it away and its weight was absolutely impossible for one person.

Ydee wrote on 2021-12-20, 08:28:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-12-20, 01:08:

A 21" trinitron with a fine grille pitch at 60Hz is peak CRT in all use cases and you cannot change my mind. (Unless you can find a larger one) 😀

At 60Hz RR? So that's a choice for real gourmets. No, thanks - even in pure DOS I use Unirefresh, UniVBE or VBEHz for higher refresh rate - flickering at 60 Hz I just see, I can't help it., excuse me.

My aggressive posting on the subjected is directed at all the guys who keep saying "60Hz is useless, makes your eyes bleed, etc." without qualifying that that is really a personal problem. Plenty of people are completely unbothered by it and trying to fill new users with fear about it is disingenuous

dionb wrote on 2021-12-20, 08:59:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-12-20, 01:08:

A 21" trinitron with a fine grille pitch at 60Hz is peak CRT in all use cases and you cannot change my mind. (Unless you can find a larger one) 😀

My Sony GDM-W900 was not impressed 😉

Peak CRT for me, but eventually swapped due to space constraints for a 60GB 2.5" HDD (back when those were pretty new)

yikes I bet you regret that trade at today's prices 🤣

I swapped a 21 incher for a 256MB stick of PC133 in the oughts. It wasn't my best 21 incher though.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-12-20, 15:06:

[...]

yikes I bet you regret that trade at today's prices 🤣

Would probably get a *bit* more for it now - but it wasn't in great shape (as with many Sony screens, the anti-glare coating was starting to disintegrate irregularly) and I really didn't have space for it where I lived then. Also, despite being epic in size and weight (45kg...), it actually wasn't that practical - little of the software that benefits from CRT looked good on widescreen, and 24" CRT is actually only about 22" viewable, so easily surpassed by TFT. Or better. I actually replaced it with a 1280x720 projector giving me about 60".

Would definitely not go above 19" CRT now for DOS (and prefer less), so even if I could get that w900 back in exchange for my current 17", I'd stick with it. Might just put the w900 back in the living room for bragging rights though 😉

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-12-20, 15:06:

Ydee wrote on 2021-12-20, 08:28:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-12-20, 01:08:

A 21" trinitron with a fine grille pitch at 60Hz is peak CRT in all use cases and you cannot change my mind. (Unless you can find a larger one) 😀

At 60Hz RR? So that's a choice for real gourmets. No, thanks - even in pure DOS I use Unirefresh, UniVBE or VBEHz for higher refresh rate - flickering at 60 Hz I just see, I can't help it., excuse me.

My aggressive posting on the subjected is directed at all the guys who keep saying "60Hz is useless, makes your eyes bleed, etc." without qualifying that that is really a personal problem. Plenty of people are completely unbothered by it and trying to fill new users with fear about it is disingenuous

I'm with max, no problems with 60hz here, I put the whiners in the same category as the kids in school who said black and white TV/Films made their eyes bleed.

However, what I think is worst case scenario for that is a high spec monitor, with short dwell phosphor, because it was designed to do very high refresh rates, paired with a low spec card that can only do the res at 60hz. Therefore sticking a super good workstation monitor on a DOS/3.x era machine is gonna be disappointing. I'd aim for good office class monitors to be more general purpose, rather than graphics workstation/CAD/designer class... (Which if you do not intimately know the models may burn you by saddling you with one that doesn't do regular DOS modes.)

Differences in the genes determining sensitivities, along with the way the individual's brain develops by reinforcing commonly used pathways, leads to a vast range of sensory perceptions among humans.

People who are aware of the slightest movement or vibration, vs People who "didn't feel a thing".

People who just hear a blur of noise passing by, vs People who spend their life turning fast music into sheet music and therefore hear a series of distinct individual notes instead.

People for whom the 'flicker' of 60hz is a very real annoyance, vs People whose individual traits mean they aren't even aware of it. This is not a special distinction. There is no right and wrong. Just the standard and quite reasonable differences within our species, all types equally valid in their own ways.

I have four.....

My #1 for the big monster 486 XT Desktop is a 17" Dell CRT from 1998-ish. IT's sharp, it's crisp, it's bright, and it's easy for my worn nearly 39 year old eyes to read. And I got it for free.

The VersaDock uses some other generic CRT of which the brand name escapes me, I think it has "Vision" in the name. 15", SVGA, also bright and crisp, also free.

My NEC Ready 9522 tower came with a Micron CRT from 2001 with digital controls, 14" SVGA, yellow as pee, also has some strange staining on top either from someone's red wine glass or some other beverage or tinted candle or somesuch. Not too surprising since it's the grandmother of the original owners. Right now that one might end up being the CRT for my PCChips 486 system.

And lastly is my most prized find for free, a NEC MultiSync II JC-1402HWA, a 14" 15KHz capable CRT monitor that I found for free at Computer Recycle in Redmond WA. It was sitting face down in the "recycle" pile and they just let me have it. Turns out the PCB was cracked (as usual) so I bodge wired it back together and now it usually sees use with my Tandy 1000A, probably the crispest thing for CGA because it also works as a TTL Mono, Hercules, EGA, VGA, and SVGA Monitor. I also managed to eek out 1024x768 from it once, and I've read it works with other systems as well with different adapters.

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-12-20, 20:39:

People for whom the 'flicker' of 60hz is a very real annoyance, vs People whose individual traits mean they aren't even aware of it. This is not a special distinction. There is no right and wrong. Just the standard and quite reasonable differences within our species, all types equally valid in their own ways.

I can see it if I want to, also 72hz, but 75-100 is just some faint corner of eye ripple if I really concentrate on seeing it, 100+ can't tell without assistance, like wiggling a pencil up and down fast to see if it blurs or you see multiple pencils. But I just look through it... I guess if I had a 5 monitor setup and #1 and #5 were 60hz it might start to bother me, but when I'm looking right at them, nope. You can be aware of something and not let it bother you, like the noise your breathing makes, the smell of snot, where every seam in your clothing is, whether your toes are touching each other or not.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-12-20, 22:26:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-12-20, 20:39:

People for whom the 'flicker' of 60hz is a very real annoyance, vs People whose individual traits mean they aren't even aware of it. This is not a special distinction. There is no right and wrong. Just the standard and quite reasonable differences within our species, all types equally valid in their own ways.

I can see it if I want to, also 72hz, but 75-100 is just some faint corner of eye ripple if I really concentrate on seeing it, 100+ can't tell without assistance, like wiggling a pencil up and down fast to see if it blurs or you see multiple pencils. But I just look through it... I guess if I had a 5 monitor setup and #1 and #5 were 60hz it might start to bother me, but when I'm looking right at them, nope. You can be aware of something and not let it bother you, like the noise your breathing makes, the smell of snot, where every seam in your clothing is, whether your toes are touching each other or not.

Yeah same. Like if I force myself to use peripheral vision I can see it but otherwise I'd never even think twice

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-12-20, 22:26:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-12-20, 20:39:

People for whom the 'flicker' of 60hz is a very real annoyance, vs People whose individual traits mean they aren't even aware of it. This is not a special distinction. There is no right and wrong. Just the standard and quite reasonable differences within our species, all types equally valid in their own ways.

I can see it if I want to, also 72hz, but 75-100 is just some faint corner of eye ripple if I really concentrate on seeing it, 100+ can't tell without assistance, like wiggling a pencil up and down fast to see if it blurs or you see multiple pencils. But I just look through it... I guess if I had a 5 monitor setup and #1 and #5 were 60hz it might start to bother me, but when I'm looking right at them, nope. You can be aware of something and not let it bother you, like the noise your breathing makes, the smell of snot, where every seam in your clothing is, whether your toes are touching each other or not.

I getcha. Baseline comparison, sort of thing.

I'm not much bothered by flicker per se, but smoothness of scrolling can often get my goat. Then I deliberately de-care myself on the issue, and just focus on the game/foreground, get on with playing, and suddenly the scrolling doesn't matter any more.

Even among people more sensitive to RR flicker, there will be some who can deliberately choose to ignore it, and others for whom it's such an in-their-face constant that deliberate ignoring is not an option.

I'm just glad to not be in that latter category, because this world is already plenty full of things I'm fussy about. 😀

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-12-20, 16:49:

... as the kids in school who said black and white TV/Films made their eyes bleed.

No, I didn't feel uncomfortable about CRT TV, although here in Europe we had a 50Hz system. I did not register a certain flicker until I bought 100Hz panasonic and in direct comparison with it.
But I'm sitting in front of the TV at a much greater distance, and my eyes aren't as strained as they are in front of the CRT monitor that's a few feet in front of me.
If someone doesn't mind this low RR frequency, I have no problem with him using it. Unfortunately, I am not one of those lucky people myself - I am aware of flickering and after a long time I am uncomfortable.

CRT's that were specifically designed for 50 or 60 Hz had slower decaying phosphor than PC displays. BIOS and DOS prompt modes default to 70 Hz; for Win9x 75-85 Hz was the norm, and there were options up to 120 Hz. You only saw 60 Hz desktops (past the mid-90's) due to misconfiguration, by my experience.

firage wrote on 2021-12-21, 09:30:

CRT's that were specifically designed for 50 or 60 Hz had slower decaying phosphor than PC displays. BIOS and DOS prompt modes default to 70 Hz; for Win9x 75-85 Hz was the norm, and there were options up to 120 Hz. You only saw 60 Hz desktops (past the mid-90's) due to misconfiguration, by my experience.

MIsconfiguration or simply low-end. Screen resolution was a selling argument, high refresh less so, so in the bottom-scraping consumer market systems were sold with monitors that could only reach advertised resolutions at 60Hz.

Even established brands did that - if you take say IBM or Philips, their 'P' lines were nice high-end screens with good electronics and tube, but IBM "G" and Philips "E" lines were low-refresh crap. Even into 21st century Philips shipped exquisitely designed 107E screens with perfectly flat panel - that still only did 1024x768@60Hz. The very last generation 107E5 could do 1280x1024@70MHz and 1024x768@88Hz, but that was deep in early TFT period.