Are CRT monitors good?

karthi3219

Have you anyone with led issues tried and still using CRT monitors? Is it any good?

MagnuM

karthi3219 I did some retro gaming of old original NES games on an old CRT tube TV about 2 months ago, and I remember not exactly liking the perceivable flicker I was able to see while playing it.

Crazy to think growing up that this was all there was to use, but I was a lot younger back then! =p

karthi3219

MagnuM do you experience issues with led screens ? If you compare between crt and led screen, how would you rate them? How long you can use the device comfortably?

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

As someone who can't use almost any modern screens, I actually can comfortably use a 1999 iMac G3 (the slot loading DVD drive revision) with CRT display! The only Mac I can truly use, lol

It's running Mac OS 9, most comfortable at the 120hz option (which limits the resolution to 640x480) A good middle ground is 800x600 at 72hz

Running at 60hz (1024x768), though, I can see the flicker and start to feel discomfort, so it seems like only higher refresh rates on CRT are comfy for me. Surprisingly though, even this less comfy 60hz option still feels leagues better for me than modern screens, i.e. I can still concentrate on reading text even in the CRT's 60hz mode

Note that Millions of Colors mode feels a bit strange -- might be using additional flicker to achieve this. So, I switched to Thousands of Colors mode in OS 9's Monitors control panel. Since then, it's felt great and the image feels extremely calm

Unlike Mac OS 10.0 and later, OS 9 from the 90s was completely software rendered with no GPU acceleration, so, it seems like OS 9 is sending a completely unprocessed signal is to the CRT. Looks very flat and stable to my eyes (excluding the physical curvature of the CRT)

Since the iMac is an all-in-one PC, the signal quality also seems noticeably better than most CRTs as the screen is directly connected internally, instead of through a more artifact-prone connection like VGA. There are no clock/phase/coarse/fine options at all, the signal seems to be as lossless as you can get with a CRT, without any tweaking. I don't see any color fringing!

BTW, I was able to install the VNCThing app on OS 9 to repurpose my 1999 iMac into a comfortable "monitor" and gain the ability to use modern apps through its display! It was easy to install -- modern USB flash drives still support OS 9. I transferred the VNC client and StuffIt Expander to the G3 via a flash drive -- figured it out in under 30 minutes

Connected via 100mbps Ethernet, this VNC client on this ancient iMac runs shockingly fast with low input latency, when directly wired to a Windows 10 PC running TightVNC Server (smooth scrolling in the Windows UI, YouTube videos in a smaller browser window, and even some low-resolution 2D games with simple graphics like Mario World on an emulator, through VNC, all display on the iMac at a strangely good framerate)

karthi3219

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs good to know this. In summary you are able to tolerate CRT monitor much better than recent LED screens. Let me find some old crt monitor and try for myself

karthi3219

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

have you ever tried connecting latest M1 - M4 MacBooks to CRT monitor directly? Any improvement in symptoms compared to led ?

MagnuM

karthi3219 Yes, quite severely. I actually just posted my story to Blur Busters yesterday:

https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=14703&sid=b1122fd0e0e506cab55b2ee44fb581c8

CRT is fine, CCFL is fine. LED is very much not fine. I have avoided that entire display technology cycle ever since it came out.

Until the last couple years, where I found an Asus VG27AQ and Samsung LS24DG30X that are almost as comfortable as my known good Dell U2410 CCFL LCD. This leaves me scratching my head as to why, as which has made me a bit more active here again.

karthi3219

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

karthi3219 Nope, but I have used a modern Mac over the VNC connection I mentioned to get it to display on the 1999 iMac CRT. In this case, being rendered through the 90s era Mac OS 9, it's very comfortable

I've never tried connecting a PC/Mac to a conventional CRT monitor via cable, as the only CRTs I own are this 1999 iMac in addition to a 1988 Macintosh Plus with monochrome display

(I bought the '99 iMac for $20 and the '88 Mac Plus for literally just 2 dollars, lol, although I obtained these ten years ago and I'm pretty sure prices are much higher now)

I feel like connecting via cable would be worse in terms of image quality than what I'm doing with 1999 iMac + OS 9 + VNC over Ethernet.

(Connecting a Mac directly to a monitor instead might still let some GPU image processing weirdness through and there's also the likelihood of additional flicker from the analog/lossy VGA signal)

JTL

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs I feel like connecting via cable would be worse in terms of image quality than what I'm doing with 1999 iMac + OS 9 + VNC over Ethernet.

I do know the quality of the analog interface/cable does play a factor, along with analog quality of the device output (may be implied by the former). That's the short version.

Sunspark

The last CRT monitor I used at home, 60 Hz was way too much flicker. Monitor phosphors have a different decay time than TV phosphors (in part due to the difference 15 KHz vs 31 KHz) which is part of why using a game console on a CRT TV is not the same as on a CRT monitor. 72 Hz was manageable. 85 Hz was acceptable. 100 Hz was good. That was the limit of that display at native resolution. I also used it with a 5-BNC cable. I also experimented with different BIOSes on the video card, and I did notice that some were better than others, eventually found one that worked well and left it. I still have the card in a box, though it'll likely never be used again because it's AGP and I have no motherboards. Maybe I will pick one up one of these days.

I think people forget that while CRTs had great colour and latency, they actually were fairly blurry and it would be hard for people to start using CRTs again as a desktop after all those years of sharp flat panels.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

Sunspark I think people forget that while CRTs had great colour and latency, they actually were fairly blurry and it would be hard for people to start using CRTs again as a desktop after all those years of sharp flat panels.

Not my 1999 iMac G3 -- individual pixels look noticeably more clear and distinct compared to other CRTs I've seen, especially in the 640x480 120hz mode. Because of the direct, seemingly "lossless" internal connection to the screen, there's no chroma subsampling blurriness or color fringing. Sure, it's not razor sharp, but it is significantly clearer than what first comes to mind when I think of a CRT

Sunspark

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs Colour CRT monitors use shadow masks or aperture grilles. The lower the resolution, the sharper text, etc. will be because it can overlap with more of the openings which is the case with 640x480. Black and white sets don't have a mask/grille at all. With those it is just the bandwidth of the connection. Green/amber monochrome displays are the same way.

The 17" monitor I mentioned I ran at 1024x768 which is why trying to make it sharper was a challenge because in addition to physical constraints, aperture grilles because of their rectangular shape don't lend themselves as much to text sharpness as the invar dot shadow masks do.

miripump

no cause it use focusing lens = accommodative lead