onethirdxcubed wrote on 2026-01-29, 23:58:Let's ignore passive matrix and dual-scan LCDs, they are patently unsuitable for 3d FPS games due to the severe motion blur and […]
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Let's ignore passive matrix and dual-scan LCDs, they are patently unsuitable for 3d FPS games due to the severe motion blur and if you'd ever tried to use one for that purpose you would know why. Here's a quick example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNlODEi4mTY
TFT LCDs had just began to come on the market in 1996, were astronomically expensive and limited to the highest end laptops until 1998, and equivalent sized CRTs were still cheaper until about 2004-2005.
If you look at photos or video of demoscene parties in the early 2000s, it's still almost all CRTs in 2000 and 2001 but then shifts quickly after that because who wants to take even a 40 lb CRT on the train? (to say nothing of the Trinitrons). Also venues were running into electrical power limitations at that point.
PC Magazine in the late 90s has many articles about cutting edge TFT LCD production ramping up. The size of panels that could be mass produced was also very limited at first so it took a while for desktop suitable sizes of at least 14" to be available.
I recently found a 486 Toshiba T1950CT with active TFT sold in 1993. I haven't got it working yet, but the spec sheet clearly states it has (or had) an active TFT. Other variants had passive LCDs that were cheaper and consumed less battery, so the laptop market was split into premium levels.
Another important clarification is that CRTs were also not equal: You could have a low quality CRT with uncoated domed glass and screen glare, which was harder to play on - at least during a sunny day if you didn't shutter the blinds! So when gamers actually argued for CRTs, they argued for the expensive professional CAD CRT screens that had flat glass and various coatings that mitigated glare. I added a flat panel to one of my CRTs - it was a coated glass pane with a wire and crocodile clip to discharge static to the desktop case.
And, CAD workstations is where the first big desktop TFTs emerged - that was the true battleground in the mid 90s.
Matrix
High cost: Active TFT vs Flat CRT (flat vs flat - debate shifts to graphics card)
Low cost: Passive LCD vs Domed CRT (temporal blur vs screen glare - nobody talked about either)
But in reality, magazines didn't talk of all those differences. They mostly talked about how LCDs were sneakily marketed using CRT diagonal measures, how CRTs prevented the full use of edges but LCD didn't, and how this meant confused consumers were getting a different picture than they expected. On there other hand, doing professional graphics work on consumer CRTs meant shrinking the image to avoid edge distortions.
The real "problem" with LCDs in the 1990s was that dead pixels were unavoidable at the machining level. Very expensive LCDs guaranteed no dead pixels, and that meant manufacturers had a lot of waste to dispose of. That disposal was partly fixed by selling some of the waste as cheap generic LCDs that typically came with three dead pixels. That is what I had - cheap, generic, three dead pixels, and it worked fine.
So what I actually had in the late 90s:
- Common 15" semi-flat coated CRTs pushed to higher resolutions and higher refresh rates (and that physically harmed my eyes)
- Older retro 14" domed CRT with aftermarket flat panel that discharged static (that I swapped for a graphics card)
- Early adoption of 14" cheap generic LCD with a few dead pixels (that I kept)
