Are CRT monitors good?

karthi3219

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

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

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.

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

erwintol1999

miripump @miripump What do you think about the Dell Alienware AW2310? I have looked for CCFL monitors with 120Hz+ max 24 inches but couldn’t find much.

T1000

As a person who's been still using a CRT (Samsung SyncMaster 795mb) at home for the majority of tasks, I'd say it depends on the model of a CRT monitor, as well on its settings and especially on the refresh rate.

1. I don't know why, but I've always had quite bad experience with LG (Especially those of LG's called Studioworks, probably of their lower refresh rates), but who knows, may be it's just a pecularity of my perception.

2. In the beginning, I tried to set my monitor's brightness according to the instruction manual - to the level when the most dark shadows of the image just slightly appear, and it always caused a lot of eye strain. Then my dad gave me advice of setting contrast to 100% and brightness to 0 and it worked! (In spite of losing a big part of shadows, the image appeared very easy to my eyes, and I'm still using such settings, though they're not good for photo editing for example)

3. As for the refresh rate, I prefer working in 1024*768@ 100 Hz mode so flickering is almost unnoticeable.

Unfortunately all the CRT monitors are at least 15 years old at present time, so their condition varies. As for me, I had to repair my monitor myself - replaced HOT as well as a faulty diode in puncushion correction circuit.

JTL

T1000 1. I don't know why, but I've always had quite bad experience with LG (Especially those of LG's called Studioworks, probably of their lower refresh rates), but who knows, may be it's just a pecularity of my perception.

You wouldn't happen to have any model numbers of the "bad experience" models?

T1000

Those were Studioworks 563N and 773N. But anyway it's my personal opinion