I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean about "you just can't recreate that glow".
It's hard to describe but the image is completely ephemeral. All display technologies involve sleight-of-hand that exploits visual illusion and persistence of vision to some degree, but the CRT is maybe the most illusory of the major technologies. It's almost entirely due to persistence of vision. With colour TV and fast phosphors the majority of the light energy is released within a few milliseconds of the spot being hit by the beam. If you had eyes that worked at electronic speeds, you would see a single point drawing the raster pattern while varying in brightness.
A bit of TEMPEST trivia: The instantaneous luminosity of a CRT is all you need to reconstruct the image. Even if it's reflected off a wall or through a translucent curtain. You need high bandwidth, at least a few megahertz, but a photodiode is all that's necessary. The resulting signal even has the horizontal and vertical blanking periods right where they should be. Only minor processing (even by old school analog standards) is required to produce something that can be piped right into another CRT to recreate the image. I'd bet it could be done entirely in DSP these days.
Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took.
For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created by the spinning platter) came in and blew all other technology away.
And, likewise, we had liquid crystal technology since the 70s, and probably could have invented it sooner, but no need, because Cathode Ray Tube technology appeared (a mini particle accelerator in your home! Plus the advanced materials science to bore the precision electron beam holes in the screen grid, the phosphor coating, the unusual deflection coil winding topology, and leaded glass to reduce x-ray expose for the viewers) and made all other forms of display unattractive by comparison.
It's amazing how far CRT technology got, given its disconnect from other technologies. The sophistication of the factories that created late-model "flat-screen" CRTs is truly impressive.
The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").
Someday, maybe given advances in robotics and automation, I hope to start a retro CRT manufacturing company. The problems, such as the unavailability of the entire supply chain (can't even buy an electron gun, it would have to be made from scratch) and environmental restrictions (lead glass probably makes the EPA perk up and notice).
Absolutely. I love playing Atari 2600 games, and it seems sacrilegious to play on anything but an old-school CRT TV.
Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)
Blowing things up to that size is not representative.
Back when I first started playing things on emulators we were using 12" to 20" CRTs or LCDs with much higher resolution than a TV, so whether CRT or LCD the pixels were chunkier.
None of the nostalgia is how I remember it at all.
The average CRT TV had crap color and poor brightness and going from that and the flicker of 1-to-1 size NTSC on a 20-something TV to an emulated "chunkier pixel" rendition on a progressize-scan 72+hz 1024x768-or-higher CRT or an LCD looked way better.
Take the side by side pictures and zoom WAY out on a high-res screen or go stand several feet away from your monitor so that they're the size they were designed and expected to be seen at, and the vast majority of the perceived improvement from making the CRT subpixels visible goes away. And then put them into motion - especially vertical motion - and those lines in between, and losing half on each frame becomes more noticable and distracting.
The 4th image there of the yellow monster is a good example. Even zooming to 50% on my high-res display makes the "bad" version suddenly look way sharper and detailed as the size starts to show how frequently "rounded dots with gaps between it" just looks like fuzziness instead of "better".
And these comparisons tend to cherry-pick and not show examples of things that lose clarity as a result of the subpixels and scanlines instead of gain clarity.
The most important element of the CRT look is the fast phosphor decay. This is why CRTs have so little sample-and-hold blur. No other hardware can simulate it perfectly, but a 480Hz OLED display comes close:
Most modern displays are calibrated, to some reasonable level, and can easily accommodate the very limited gamut of an old CRT, especially anything supporting HDR10. I suspect this is more of "they need to be fudged so they're wrong" more than anything.
Most modern displays are calibrated, to some reasonable level, and can easily accommodate the very limited gamut of an old CRT. I suspect this is more of "they need to be corrected so they're wrong" more than anything.
I regret taking all my old tube monitors to Goodwill back in the mid-2000s. I saved a Commodore 1942, at least, but I sent all the rest away to die.
I appreciate the CRT modeling in emulators, but a hardware device that passes thru a display signal and provided sub-frame CRT artifacting and phosphor modeling (particularly if it supported 240P) would be bitchin'.
FPGA based devices that can do this, and quite well, do exist, they're just expensive. The RetroTINK-4k Pro is the top of the line as of this writing but it's a $750 converter.
i have a 55" panasonic LCD. no apps or wifi.From 2003. Still works.
We have roku, which at some point in the last 4 years, it went rogue and auto updated itself for who knows what telemetry . We almost never use it now.
I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.
My Sony Bravia XBR6 from 2008 is perfectly fine for my living room screen.
(I even programmed an old Sony remote to kludge sending theequivalent of the PS5 controller logo button, for the PS5 that the TV is plugged into, for streaming and gaming. And found the trick to get the TV to go to standby when the PS5's HDMI signal disappears, which isn't a standard feature, though waking is.)
I'll probably only upgrade if I relocate cross-country, and have Bay Area levels of money to spend on a much more expensive non-'smart' setup.
I’ve hunted down a couple old school big screen TVs, the fresnel lenses are awesome toys, you can melt just about anything using them as solar collectors.
I have a 32" Sony something or other. One of the very last ones - HDMI port and does 1080i or 720p. What a find! 30 dollars, and about killed myself getting it in the house.
The plan is to have all the light gun systems hooked up to it. Being able to get 1080i out of a PS2 while having the light gun work is a challenge I have not yet surmounted.
Unfortunately, you might have trouble with light gun games. Some of the HDMI CRTs do some video processing that adds video delay. :(
If you're US based, you would probably use component video (YPbPr) to connect to your 1080i display; you can hook a ps2 light gun to the Y cable (usually green) and it should work if everything else is cool.
I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean about "you just can't recreate that glow".
It's hard to describe but the image is completely ephemeral. All display technologies involve sleight-of-hand that exploits visual illusion and persistence of vision to some degree, but the CRT is maybe the most illusory of the major technologies. It's almost entirely due to persistence of vision. With colour TV and fast phosphors the majority of the light energy is released within a few milliseconds of the spot being hit by the beam. If you had eyes that worked at electronic speeds, you would see a single point drawing the raster pattern while varying in brightness.
A bit of TEMPEST trivia: The instantaneous luminosity of a CRT is all you need to reconstruct the image. Even if it's reflected off a wall or through a translucent curtain. You need high bandwidth, at least a few megahertz, but a photodiode is all that's necessary. The resulting signal even has the horizontal and vertical blanking periods right where they should be. Only minor processing (even by old school analog standards) is required to produce something that can be piped right into another CRT to recreate the image. I'd bet it could be done entirely in DSP these days.
Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took.
For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created by the spinning platter) came in and blew all other technology away.
And, likewise, we had liquid crystal technology since the 70s, and probably could have invented it sooner, but no need, because Cathode Ray Tube technology appeared (a mini particle accelerator in your home! Plus the advanced materials science to bore the precision electron beam holes in the screen grid, the phosphor coating, the unusual deflection coil winding topology, and leaded glass to reduce x-ray expose for the viewers) and made all other forms of display unattractive by comparison.
It's amazing how far CRT technology got, given its disconnect from other technologies. The sophistication of the factories that created late-model "flat-screen" CRTs is truly impressive.
The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").
Someday, maybe given advances in robotics and automation, I hope to start a retro CRT manufacturing company. The problems, such as the unavailability of the entire supply chain (can't even buy an electron gun, it would have to be made from scratch) and environmental restrictions (lead glass probably makes the EPA perk up and notice).
Some images to demonstrate how retro games look on CRT vs unfiltered on a modern display:
https://x.com/ruuupu1
https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why...
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e...
Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.
Absolutely. I love playing Atari 2600 games, and it seems sacrilegious to play on anything but an old-school CRT TV.
Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)
Blowing things up to that size is not representative.
Back when I first started playing things on emulators we were using 12" to 20" CRTs or LCDs with much higher resolution than a TV, so whether CRT or LCD the pixels were chunkier.
None of the nostalgia is how I remember it at all.
The average CRT TV had crap color and poor brightness and going from that and the flicker of 1-to-1 size NTSC on a 20-something TV to an emulated "chunkier pixel" rendition on a progressize-scan 72+hz 1024x768-or-higher CRT or an LCD looked way better.
Take the side by side pictures and zoom WAY out on a high-res screen or go stand several feet away from your monitor so that they're the size they were designed and expected to be seen at, and the vast majority of the perceived improvement from making the CRT subpixels visible goes away. And then put them into motion - especially vertical motion - and those lines in between, and losing half on each frame becomes more noticable and distracting.
The 4th image there of the yellow monster is a good example. Even zooming to 50% on my high-res display makes the "bad" version suddenly look way sharper and detailed as the size starts to show how frequently "rounded dots with gaps between it" just looks like fuzziness instead of "better".
And these comparisons tend to cherry-pick and not show examples of things that lose clarity as a result of the subpixels and scanlines instead of gain clarity.
I'm the same way. The scanlined, subpixeled versions just look terrible to me.
This helps validate my memories of SNES and PS1 games looking so much better when I was a kid than on an emulator today.
> But it's not quite the same as the real thing.
To be fair, with modern "retina" HDR displays, it should be very very close.
The most important element of the CRT look is the fast phosphor decay. This is why CRTs have so little sample-and-hold blur. No other hardware can simulate it perfectly, but a 480Hz OLED display comes close:
https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks...
> it should be very very close
It should. It isn't. For some obscure reason, VGA colours look different on every modern LCD.
Most modern displays are calibrated, to some reasonable level, and can easily accommodate the very limited gamut of an old CRT, especially anything supporting HDR10. I suspect this is more of "they need to be fudged so they're wrong" more than anything.
Most modern displays are calibrated, to some reasonable level, and can easily accommodate the very limited gamut of an old CRT. I suspect this is more of "they need to be corrected so they're wrong" more than anything.
I regret taking all my old tube monitors to Goodwill back in the mid-2000s. I saved a Commodore 1942, at least, but I sent all the rest away to die.
I appreciate the CRT modeling in emulators, but a hardware device that passes thru a display signal and provided sub-frame CRT artifacting and phosphor modeling (particularly if it supported 240P) would be bitchin'.
FPGA based devices that can do this, and quite well, do exist, they're just expensive. The RetroTINK-4k Pro is the top of the line as of this writing but it's a $750 converter.
i have a 55" panasonic LCD. no apps or wifi.From 2003. Still works.
We have roku, which at some point in the last 4 years, it went rogue and auto updated itself for who knows what telemetry . We almost never use it now.
I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there.
My Sony Bravia XBR6 from 2008 is perfectly fine for my living room screen.
(I even programmed an old Sony remote to kludge sending theequivalent of the PS5 controller logo button, for the PS5 that the TV is plugged into, for streaming and gaming. And found the trick to get the TV to go to standby when the PS5's HDMI signal disappears, which isn't a standard feature, though waking is.)
I'll probably only upgrade if I relocate cross-country, and have Bay Area levels of money to spend on a much more expensive non-'smart' setup.
I’ve hunted down a couple old school big screen TVs, the fresnel lenses are awesome toys, you can melt just about anything using them as solar collectors.
Guilty. I just love analog TVs.
I'm not really a CRT fan tbh but my neighbor was throwing away a working 24" Sony Trinitron and you don't just let one of those hit the dumpster lol
Hooked up my spare PS2 and got a light gun for it. Wish i had a way to play duck hunt though.
I have a 32" Sony something or other. One of the very last ones - HDMI port and does 1080i or 720p. What a find! 30 dollars, and about killed myself getting it in the house.
The plan is to have all the light gun systems hooked up to it. Being able to get 1080i out of a PS2 while having the light gun work is a challenge I have not yet surmounted.
Unfortunately, you might have trouble with light gun games. Some of the HDMI CRTs do some video processing that adds video delay. :(
If you're US based, you would probably use component video (YPbPr) to connect to your 1080i display; you can hook a ps2 light gun to the Y cable (usually green) and it should work if everything else is cool.
Wow, do I feel old right now.