Nostalgic but very inconvenient and overall not a part of the hobby I am invested in. The only CRT I am keeping is my C1084S and I don't see myself using even that now that I can get dual HDMI out of my A500..

Nothing in this world will make me use CRTs again)

IMO, having a CRT monitor provides the best way to experience DOS and Win9x games. The way lower resolutions like 320x200 and 640x480 look on a CRT is simply incredible. And with tools like VBEHz, you can even run SVGA DOS games at a 120 Hz refresh rate, which makes them look really crisp.

On the flip side, CRT monitors are bulky and heavy, making them cumbersome to move around. They are also very fragile which makes them difficult to ship, so it's best to pick them up in person, when possible. It's also getting more difficult to keep them in good working condition since very few repair shops know how to service them nowadays. Also, unless you're getting a new old stock monitor, second-hand ones sometimes have faded colors due to years of use.

"Must have" for me, period correct rig cannot be without it. Plus as Joseph say, lower resolutions DOS games looks on CRT waaaaaaaaaay better, than on LCD.

CRTs blur pixel edges due to how they work, so that's a free filter applied to the image - useful in the lower resolution modes. I know a lot of people love the blocky pixel art these days but it's not how it looked back then.

Also different colors, especially red tends to be a bit more "washed out" on the earlier CRTs (before 17" and 19" high-refresh rate SVGAs became the norm). The color difference is only partly due to aging, it has more to do with the CRT phosphor composition. Green and blue are affected too, but not as much - but it shows. I wish people who make scalers/filters for emulators had a period correct monitor to compare with because more often then not the filter is all about scanlines, which frankly were not really all that visible in most modes due to how some light was scattered in the glass.
I have a 14" SVGA that worked in office, it is tired but I was able to tweak the flyback and CRT neck controls to get it to full brightness with balanced white and good black levels (if only just). It's now cleaned (and by that I mean inside as well) and in storage. Something with less wear on the tube would be preferable but I got it free so can't complain. I'm not planning on getting any 17" or later stuff, I turned down a few such free offers, this is personal preference but anything SVGA can be done on modern LCDs and old monitors take up so much space - if someone owns a big house in which they can create a "man cave" then sure, go for it, but not everybody can do that.

I also like the old monochrome monitors, I have two: green and amber one, the first was cheap and the second was a trash rescue - both in decent condition. Strong CRTs. I am using those with Hercules and CGA in mono (the amber one also works at 60Hz), as well as personal projects like CP/M system.

I really like CRTs as well , my main two pc rigs have a Sony Trinitron G500 a 21" screen attached via kvm that can go up to 1600 x 1200 ,
so its useful for my socket 7 dos pc for lower res games like heretic or veil of darkness
but also useful if I want to run something like Expendable from 1999 on my slot 1 rig at the max res for a laugh.

It really does help with the immersion and transports me back to the 90s when they were the norm
not to mention they tend to be pretty flexible with the weird resolutions you can throw at them.
My amiga 500 has a cm8833 Mk2 , which again is really useful since it runs at 15khz and plays all the amiga games natively without needing some kind of converter box
or having to resort to a tv and I also have a Trinitron G420 as a backup for my G500.
I haven't got a huge collection of them but the three of them are pretty much all I need , I wish I could settle with 2 (500 and CM8833k2) but I'm paranoid the Sony might go at some point
so I'll have to keep the 420 backup just in case.

That said crts can be a pain in alot of ways , while the 14" cm8833 mk2 is pretty manhandable the G500 is a 30kg beast that nearly broke my back whenever I moved it around ,
also if they fail it can be hard to repair them if something like the flyback goes bad ,
luckily I have a spare for the phillips but you usually need to readjust the monitor after you replace it and I can't even find one for my sonys ,
so finding parts can be tricky , if something like the deflection yoke goes bad though , then you are pretty much boned , since even if you get one ,
well recalibrating a spare to the specific monitor can be a nightmare. So its getting harder to keep them going or finding replacements ,
and they can be a chore to haul around , overall I think I enjoy them enough to put up with any of the problems ,
but I cant see why some people don't want to bother and I don't blame them.

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-08-02, 11:42:

I really like CRTs as well

Sexy photos! There really ought to be some kind of current year CRT manufacturing. Sure they have some serious tradeoffs as mentioned in this thread, but after all that they offer some serious benefits as well. It's no wonder flat screens took over since they offer much more balanced feature set.

Anyone know how long the CRT tubes last (in hours? I think some projector lamps are in tens of thousands), there might be a future when all CRTs have dimmed to become unusable. Not sure how much more life mine has left in it.

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-08-02, 08:13:

So recently I acquired my first vintage CRT. Connected to the computer it came with, fired t up and I must say, I was wowed. The black levels were just so inky black, I could not believe how good Jazz Jackrabbit looked. It must have been something like 20 years or even more since I last time gazed at CRT. To this day I always thought "CRT craze" had been just a fad, because I remember I was first on the line to ditch them back in the day, buying the first TFT which was was advertised as being pretty much the best money can buy (it was 1024*768 Sony if I remember correctly, costed me something like 600 euros back then) and I was very happy with it and getting rid of those bulky tubes that seemed like from dinosaur-era back then.

But yeah, I do see the point now. I must admit I was almost shocked seeing the picture 😁 And bear in mind this was just some early 14" run-of-the-mill display from early 90s, nothing fancy. It's almost funny how I had totally forgot, gotten used to the shenanigans of the flat screens.

What do you think of CRTs?

It's the inky blacks that really sell CRTs for me too. I think it was most obvious when I played Doom 3 again. It leans so heavily on darkness and shadow, I feel like it only looks right on a CRT. I hear that recent QD-OLED panels are hitting the sorts of response times and black levels as CRTs can, but they are bonkers expensive and I doubt they'll ever make a 4:3 version of them.

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-08-02, 12:25:

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-08-02, 11:42:

I really like CRTs as well

Sexy photos! There really ought to be some kind of current year CRT manufacturing. Sure they have some serious tradeoffs as mentioned in this thread, but after all that they offer some serious benefits as well. It's no wonder flat screens took over since they offer much more balanced feature set.

Anyone know how long the CRT tubes last (in hours? I think some projector lamps are in tens of thousands), there might be a future when all CRTs have dimmed to become unusable. Not sure how much more life mine has left in it.

Thanks , Phillips and Sony made some really nice screens and I do really enjoy them.

However the problem with making crts is they really aren't great for the environment because they use phosphors leaded glass and other nasty things to make the magic happen , not to mention you have to deal with vacuums when making them , and they can implode , repairing them can be dangerous since the flyback tends to generate around 15kv or more , shipping them isn't super economical due to fragility and weight and they don't scale well since the larger the screen size the exponentially heaver they get. That said maybe some small production for niche enthusiasts might be alright , but I'm not sure if anyone would be able to justify the cost.

No thanks.

Like many of the other 'oldies', I lived through gaming on TV sets and Microvitec/Philips/Commodore 'monitors' through the early years of PC gaming 13" and 14" VGA screens, through to 17" and 19" screens being ubiquitous for the first 10-15 years of my working life (and I'm a programmer/unix admin, so it was all day, every day).

Even 'nice' screens, like those big 19 and 21" beasts on high end unix workstations from the likes of Sun and SGI (which tended to be mainly rebranded Sony units) you can keep.

Too big. Too heavy. Too horrible on the eyes. Work in front of one all day, every day, then swap to a modern LCD and tell me which one you prefer! 😁

The only positive thing I actually remember about CRTs is their juicy bright colors, especially in the dark.

... ah, and also it is the most loved place for cats on cold winter evenings. I think cats miss CRTs more than anyone. 😄

I love CRT's because of the deep blacks, the blurriness from the mask and how it looks in motion. I have my fare share of them.

But they are bulky, fragile and bound to fail at some point.

I am of the opinion that technology has evolved to the point that you can have 99.99% of the CRT experience with a good OLED panel with HDR, low lag, fast refresh rate and a filter to accurately emulate the shadow mask (blurriness and scanlines) - this will become even more evidence upon the release of the Retrotink 4K at the end of 2023.

If you have a CRT, enjoy it, otherwise I wouldn't get out of my way to get one.

You can get a very similar experience (if not better in some areas) with the current technology... you just need to know how to configure it.

Cheers,

I don't have any crts myself but I should, living in a tornado region I could just run cables from them to my roof rafters and never have to worry about my house blowing away.

NightShadowPT wrote on 2023-08-02, 14:18:

I am of the opinion that technology has evolved to the point that you can have 99.99% of the CRT experience with a good OLED panel with HDR

I've been looking them but I think the technology is not quite still there yet. I remember when the first TFTs came, they were laggy and such, but the benefits outweighed the downsides, the OLEDs are now in the same position with their burn-in problems and whatnot, but hopefully they will evolve as a proper replacement for CRTs, although I'm still after the perfect modern solution for 320 x 200 DOS gaming.

There's one place where kinescope still is better than the other things (except true laser projection) which seems to be motion performance, and it comes primarly from the way the light comes out of the kinescope. There's a ridiculously bright spot but it is in any given location very briefly. Our eyes don't see that brightness but they see the duration of it and it prevents what I have read being referred to as the sample & hold effect that will cause things to smear up as the eyes move (that includes tracking objects on the screen). OLEDs with black frame insertion can reduce the effect quite a bit but they don't seem to reach the point where there is total visual absence of motion blur yet. Contrast and colorwise they're just as good as the best kinescopes and even exceed them in some ways and when the prices come down I'll happily get some.

Image/panel itself aside, the digital side between video input and panel still seems to be the limiting factor with many of the joys of LCDs etc. such as need to scale to a native resolution and how it often entails some level of latency or image degradation etc. Now if the panel drivers offered some scaling methods that are relevant to our needs, things can be really good 🤣. 4k with full frame rate and non-chromasubsampled signals are a bit out of reach for hobbyist things like OSSC and the like so external solutions are gonna take a while to appear, even disregarding the can of worms that is HDMI licensing (and how DP is completely tainted by it, making it just as out of reach as HDMI is)...

There is not yet a truly *good* solution for connecting VGA to a modern LCD. You will always end up with a picture that is bad in some way, fails to switch resolutions without a 5 second wait, jitters, etc.

VGA was designed to be connected to a CRT, and a good, well designed CRT will always look very good with it.

The problem is that a CRT is an analog device, and VGA is designed around the analog nature of the CRT. The signals reflect the pattern that the electron beam traces on the screen. That signal was created by a DAC on the VGA card, so when you connect an LCD you have to convert that signal *back* to digital despite it having been digital in the first place. The results with any of the currently existing VGA->HDMI/DVI converters are tepid at best. The built-in VGA to digital converters in some monitors are okay in terms of stability, but still suffer from atrociously bad scaling (fuzzy pixels for no reason despite screen having plenty of resolution for example). A good CRT will get you nice sharp pixels in 320x200 that put an LCD to shame.

There are some projects that can get you fair results. OSSC for example. But it requires a lot of fiddling and doesn't work well with resolutions higher than 320x200. I use it for capture, but really want something better.

I expect a truly good VGA->HDMI converter will eventually be designed and released by somebody. The RGBtoHDMI gets admirably close to ideal for MDA/CGA/EGA signals, but still has some rough edges. We need that for VGA. Until then, CRTs are going to be the way to go if you want the best image.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2023-08-02, 16:44:

There is not yet a truly *good* solution for connecting VGA to a modern LCD. You will always end up with a picture that is bad i […]
Show full quote

There is not yet a truly *good* solution for connecting VGA to a modern LCD. You will always end up with a picture that is bad in some way, fails to switch resolutions without a 5 second wait, jitters, etc.

VGA was designed to be connected to a CRT, and a good, well designed CRT will always look very good with it.

The problem is that a CRT is an analog device, and VGA is designed around the analog nature of the CRT. The signals reflect the pattern that the electron beam traces on the screen. That signal was created by a DAC on the VGA card, so when you connect an LCD you have to convert that signal *back* to digital despite it having been digital in the first place. The results with any of the currently existing VGA->HDMI/DVI converters are tepid at best. The built-in VGA to digital converters in some monitors are okay in terms of stability, but still suffer from atrociously bad scaling (fuzzy pixels for no reason despite screen having plenty of resolution for example). A good CRT will get you nice sharp pixels in 320x200 that put an LCD to shame.

There are some projects that can get you fair results. OSSC for example. But it requires a lot of fiddling and doesn't work well with resolutions higher than 320x200. I use it for capture, but really want something better.

I expect a truly good VGA->HDMI converter will eventually be designed and released by somebody. The RGBtoHDMI gets admirably close to ideal for MDA/CGA/EGA signals, but still has some rough edges. We need that for VGA. Until then, CRTs are going to be the way to go if you want the best image.

Some modern(ish) LCDs have a 4:3 mode. Asus seems to have offered that on a lot of their monitors (e.g., https://www.asus.com/ca-en/commercial-monitors/vs229hp). Have you ever tried one out yourself for a more modern option without extra adapters?

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-08-02, 17:19:

Some modern(ish) LCDs have a 4:3 mode. Asus seems to have offered that on a lot of their monitors (e.g., https://www.asus.com/ca-en/commercial-monitors/vs229hp). Have you ever tried one out yourself for a more modern option without extra adapters?

The challenge is that certain modes (e.g. 320x200) won't necessary display in 4:3 on an LCD monitor.

I have an Asus ProArt display and it won't recognize these modes as 4:3. Which unfortunately makes it not useful for DOS.

I'm surprised that so many people here dislike CRTs considering that most of us are trying to recreate the original experiences using old hardware. IMO, having a CRT is the one thing that you can't fake on modern hardware. You can emulate a wide range of vintage computers and consoles, but you can't simulate the original monitors very well on an LCD, even with CRT shaders. I'd even bet that most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a good emulator and the original hardware if they were only given a keyboard and monitor and the rest was hidden from view.

That's not meant as a jab at anyone. I'm not a CRT elitist and believe that people should enjoy their hobby how they see fit. I personally like CRTs, but only for 2D games. I need a widescreen monitor for anything 3D. I get nauseous otherwise.