The CRT, in its original sense, was a somewhat incredible crossroads in technological history. The combo of higher-vacuum and high-voltage allowed people to start fiddling around with glowy glass tubes in the late 1800s.
In 1895 Röntgen was messing with such a device trying to understand cathode rays when he discovered and published on x-rays (leading to medical diagnostics, x-ray diffraction, understanding of ionic bonds and modern chemistry, and the discovery that DNA had a double-helical structure).
This caused much excitement. Soonafter Becquerel was looking into x-rays in CRTs when he discovered natural radiation (leading directly to the field of nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants).
In 1897, J.J. Thompson discovered (using a CRT) that those very cathode rays were actually new particles known as electrons (leading to the photoelectric effect, general relativity, quantum physics, solar panels).
Right after that, people turned the CRT into the vacuum tube (leading to long-distance telephone networks, radio amplifiers, the electric guitar, the Beatles, Katy Perry).
And then of course if you stick some electromagnets around the CRT beam you can shake them around and draw out moving pictures, and you get the CRT we all know and love (and is written about in OP article).
The March 1931 issue of Television News[1] is a fantastic snapshot in time of the development of Television.
Amazing all those various silly spinning disk systems peppered throughout the magazine...and then buried on page 48 there's Philo T. Farnsworth[2] and his "scanning electric pencil"! Huzzah!
I think the vacuum tube has a bit of a different chain of history, with thermionic emission being discovered several times going back to the 1850s and the first real attempt at manipulating it by Edison in 1880 and patented it in 1883, but the first commercial diodes didn't appear until 1904 well after Johnson's experiments
And vacuum tubes are still in use, Geiger counters, Nixie tubes , microwave ovens (Klystrons), very high power RF amps, overpriced high end audio gear and so on.
CRTs are marvelous technology, but I don't miss them at all. Not a bit. Not the weight, the heat, the power consumption, the footprint on my desk, the depth, the whistle, the fuzzy pixels, the X-rays.
My dad told me around 1970 that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall like a picture and a typewriter that could fix mistakes.
I liked the fuzzy pixels (note, I had a quite sharp 1600x1200 @ 85Hz CRT) - the purpose of a screen is not to show pixels, but a pleasant image. The fuzziness was just right for text, and LCDs took a long time to mostly catch up with CRT color reproduction. I waited witch switching to LCD until IPS LCDs with low input lag became available. My next screen will hopefully be OLED...
Today, fuzzy pixels for text are available in E-ink displays. They produce good sharpness and no visible pixels at resolutions lower than you'd think.
I got an old Bang & Olufsen Beovision 1 CRT TV for free.
I use it at a cottage just because I assume no one will break a window to steal a CRT TV, especially one that weights 38 kg (84 pounds) not counting the motorised steel floor stand. I found a set-top box with digital reception and USB input that also had a SCART connector.
I knew the sound would be good.
But I was surprised how great the image is. It just look good from all angles and in all condition, when it gets a good input. And I do not notice the lower resolution much.
I am sure a modern B&O is better. But they cost from $6,675 (the B&O Harmony from $18,250)
A used Beovision 1 can be bought for $30.
I also had a 19" CRT that I ran at 1600x1200 most of the time. It was quite sharp, not as sharp as an LCD but not something I would consider blurry. As you say, just the right amount of fuzz for text.
The interesting thing is that I never enabled anti-aliasing in games with that screen. I just didn't feel the need for it.
Once I got an LCD (I was late to that party), I immediately gawked at how its sharp rectangular subpixels made jaggies pop out.
I sometimes feel like a weirdo because I just don't miss the cathode ray tube that much, either as a PC monitor or as the living room TV. I'm 34 so I think I'm on the tail end of the last generation that used them when they were still common.
I've never once pined for them. I really don't miss moving them. I don't miss 17" displays (and lets be honest most people weren't using high end ones). I don't miss 21 inches being the biggest you could get unless you had insane money. I don't miss 1024x768.
Yeah the blacks were good but I wouldn't go back to using a '90s CRT monitor as a daily driver even if you paid me a thousand dollars.
The only thing I do miss is the 4:3 aspect ratio. If someone could do a nice large high dpi 4:3 LCD monitor that would be "shut up and take my money!".
From a gaming perspective, one great thing about CRTs was that you could lower resolution without getting blurry pixels or black bands anywhere. So you could use 1024x768 for your desktop, but dial it down to 640x480 for games for better perf (if you even had a choice - at the time, it wasn't uncommon for games to be hardcoded to that).
There are some super high-res square monitors out there used for viewing mammograms and MRIs and such but they're like $25,000. This is the only one I can think of off the top of my head [1].
I was an early adopter of LCDs because I hated the flicker, glow and fuzz of CRTs and felt it was leading to eye strain. Spent the princely sum of £400 for a second hand 1024x768 14" display in 1998 and never looked back.
Currently enjoying working on my ridiculous 31" concave-curved gaming monitor.
I’m fascinated by the effects on images caused by different display technologies.
Retro games on CRTs are an obvious one (CRTPixels on Twitter[0] is great). It’s not just the displays themselves either, some games on the Mega Drive/Genesis used the specific qualities of a composite video signal to produce a transparency effect from a dither pattern.
Even today with all-digital displays there are differences. The very high response time of an OLED panel causes lower framerate content to look stuttery to some, whereas the slower response time of something like an IPS LCD causes a natural interpolation of sorts.
I miss my PVM, but the geometry was starting to drift and I have neither the time nor the inclination to adjust and/or recap it.
The principle of a decaying memory register requiring a refresh on a regular basis is actually not too far distant from how MOSFET DRAM memory works, to the extent I understand it (poorly).
Or, on a broader basis, education within a human population (we spend 15 years sinking information into the infosponges of children and hope that enough of that keeps over a lifetime to sink it into the next generation of infosponges).
Or of manuscript documents, rewritten by hand by scribes. Or palimpsests.
All data storage is ultimately a palimpsest, I'm increasingly convinced.
I've been told (many years ago) that CRTs for safety-critical applications like railway control used pretty much the same technique to read the image back and comparing it end-to-end to what the display is supposed to be. Never found a peep about that online though, and it seems to me like it'd be easier to just monitor deflection and beam current instead.
I don't mind CRTs. What does bother me somewhat is the narrative that they're somehow better than the displays we use today; your use case has to be so narrow and specific to benefit from a CRT is any meaningful way that most people may as well just ignore they existed. They're less color accurate, have horrible artifacting ("but it makes pixel art look better!"), force you to choose between refresh rate and resolution, are massive and heavy and consume more power than most people's computers in the first place.
If you're a retro fetishist or an analog gaming nut, then I could see how you might get something out of it. For everyone else, save your money and buy anything else. The price that good CRTs demand is simply absurd when compared to their cheaper, flatscreen alternatives.
Saying that modern monitors are more color accurate that CRTs really undersells the difference. Having been a professional photographer before a button presser, I feel I have a need to step in here. This narrative is so, so horribly wrong.
Nearly any given color CRT (in the 90's era) has a far flatter visual spectral response than modern ubiquitous displays. Each color has meaningful contrast; whereas the typical blue-LED is heavily weighted towards blue.
Even if a new display measures better, your brain interprets color from a tube better.
The only established displays today that approach that flatness (exceed them) are genuine three-color OLED displays, which are prohibitively expensive as packaged as a computer monitor.
I have some mild hope for new display technologies that I'm hearing about. I'm betting we are five years, at a minimum, before displays with that color quality are common.
Adding to com2kid's point (I had a CRT that I ran normally at 1600x1200, 80 or 85Hz), current displays still have problems with blacks. VA suffers black crush / gamma shift, IPS glows. Both suck in a way that CRTs did not. Don't even mention TN. OLED and microled monitors are not really here yet.
CRTs are relevant to gamecube players- in particular, super smash bros. latency.
For example, playing on 720p+ displays causes upscaling, which introduces variable latency into the game and renders it unplayable at a competitive level.
These days there are monitors that you can get instead, but the demand for CRTs is still high since they're cheap.
Pretty much all beyond-60-Hz LCDs up until ~3 years ago were pretty horrible trash (and there is a fairly decent argument to be made that they're still trash).
(The output lag in LCD displays is really significant. Switching between LCD and CRT feels remarkably different in games where reaction speed matters.)
Have to say that at least it was simpler to work with than digital displays as a user. I still have trouble with digital displays, EDID, getting __nothing__ when a signal is out of range, whereas you might get something you can decipher from a CRT. Displays that don't wake up, displays that blink off and on, and all sorts of other timing issues and such. It can certainly be a mess for drivers too, esp. in the hobby OS space.
It's annoyingly common to have these issues with modern display. I have an older Eizo which won't wake up after going to sleep if you use DisplayPort. Dad recently bought a new monitor (can't remember brand) and it has basically the opposite problem: the backlight glows all the time unless you manually power it off.
It is kind of crazy though. In 2001 I was running a CRT 120hz monitor but today in 2022 my 2560x1440 LCD monitor is 60hz. I know they make 120hz/144hz+ LCDs nowadays but it feels like it took forever for them to get decently main stream considering we had 120hz displays before 2000. I remember waiting until 2008 to finally switch to an LCD which was a Dell 2007FP 1600x1200, it still works. The last time I checked it was last year when I needed a temporary 2nd monitor in a pinch.
There are a lot of games which looked much better on CRT's ( MDK, Blood, Doom). The fact that early LCD's could not represent many colors (they claimed 24 bits but the image looked like 16 bits - especially visible in gradients)
Eventually they're gonna solve OLED lifespan for the high end and color e-ink cost and speed for everything else, and maybe even layer both of them for phones, so LCDs might not be around forever.
I used to manage a network of about 400 computers. People would turn off their computer but the monitor would stay on, and if there were any loose components in there, I could hear the noise. I would wander around the building, trying to find the beast.
It was relatively rare to have a monitor that was that loud when it was synced up and busy showing the computer display.
Mass-market televisions, though... every damn one.
Beware of corona leaks, if you can really hear it and smell ozone you might have bigger problems than just noise.
Other than that: you may be able to varnish the coil and get the whine to become inaudible, make sure you use the right kind (HV suitable). Capacitors can also make quite a bit of noise.
I have a big heavy 20 year old Trinitron monitor which I still drag out and use from time to time for the simple reason that it continues to outlast every modern screen I've bought to replace it.
It can do 1600x1200, though I run it at 1280x1024 as my eyes aren't what they were when I acquired it second-hand for $50 so many years ago - yet I can still hear the mosquito buzz when its not plugged into anything so maybe I'm not completely old yet?
Its days are numbered now, not because of the electrics but because the plastic casing is getting very brittle and cracked. I can see there will come a day it won't survive the short walk back to my storeroom.
That reminds me of working with my Dad as a kid who's senses were pretty much shot from years of working on heavy mechanical equipment. He asked me to do smell/listening tests when he fired up one of his repair projects.
Check out https://www.sindenlightgun.com/ it’s made to work with modern panels and can be made to work with emulators. The whole is incredibly impressive .
A lot of enthusiasts now prefer the Gun4IR [0] or Samco [1] routes over the Sinden. Both use the IR camera from an authentic WiiMote (the camera in clones won't work), or the commercially packaged version of the latter from DFRobot. The camera tracks around four infrared LEDs placed around the monitor. This gets you away from the white box the Sinden draws around the screen. The Gun4IR Discord is really active, with people modding everything from old PS/2 GunCons to airsoft guns to Nerfs. And no gun is complete without a solenoid and / or a rumble motor (that from a PS4 preferred) for feedback.
And it's crazy expensive for a peripheral that's not going to have any modern games for it. Which is fine for wealthy middle-aged folks chasing nostalgia, but generations of kids are growing up without that experience. At best, they might have experienced a (terrible) wiimote gun game.
well, if the kids just want to experience pointing and shooting there are plenty of modern VR games that provide that. And, BTW, my short description of "Pistol Whip" is "rhythm Time Crisis in VR"
Unless you mean something more specific than 'being able to play them with a gun', there are several solutions to this in the form of light guns that use infrared border leds or even image processing for aiming.
yes, loved these games! Point Blank especially Light guns are a lot harder these days, and even then you can't do the same thing with modern expensive guns, my 4 year old son would literally get up point blank to the TV screen and play point blank putting the gun on the glass.
There is an employee run arcade where I work that I am the de facto maintainer of, and the hardest part to keep up is the multiple 29" CRT displays. Specifically, their chassis (control boards in the pack) tend to need frequent repair.
Pulling the displays out of the cabs to work on them is also a huge pain. The size/weight has been mentioned here a few times; imagine having to pull a giant one out of an abdomen-height hole in a cab, and putting it back in without resting it on the plastic shell framing it.
It was quite a shock to look on the retro_gaming subreddit and see people bragging about this beauty of a 27" Sony Panavision they'd found. The very one I had to pay to get rid of.
Who knew? I guess the old game programmers knew how to take advantage of CRT weirdness.
I hunted ages to find a CRT a year or two ago, and it's not even very good :-/
If you find an old (studio, rather than consumer) CRT in good condition in the back of some old company's shed, you can pretty much demand whatever you want for it.
> [CRTs] respond colourfully to magnets (also magic) held to their screens by curious children [...].
Look at the reflection of an LCD (not LED) panel in a non-conductive surface and try tilting it! (A glass window at night, a glass bathroom door, or a piece of furniture with a shellac finish works.) Hint: Brewster’s law.
Doesn’t detract from the article, just ... LCDs have some of the good kind of magic in them, too! Feynman talked about “sun reflecting on bay”[1], but “tablet reflecting in bathroom door” is even better I think.
My kitchen TV is a 43-year-old Sharp brand 26" color cathode ray tube model from 1979 and I've no intention of changing it as it still works fine. When digital came out I added a STB/PVR and that's the only change since new.
The CRT still performs well and there is no sign of the picture blooming or losing focus (that's to say its vacuum and cathode emission are still OK).
As far as I'm concerned, CRTs are still alive and well.
CRTs are so terrible by themselves, but the history is amazing. The whole modern world, geek culture, gaming, people's childhoods... it all went through those heavy lead glass things.
The tech was much worse, but people seemed happier anyway. Maybe because what was actually on those screens was better("better" interpreted relative to the potential of the tech)
The tail end of the CRT would stick out the back of the TV set. One day, a picture on the wall came off and sliced that off of the TV. We did without a TV for a year or so as my dad thought good riddance. You can only watch so many Jack Lalane shows anyway.
> I started to warm to CRTs, maybe a fondness when I realised I hadn’t had to seriously use one for over a decade.
Same here, and now I'm looking for a CRT monitor because I don't remember anymore how it is to use one. Did the low resolution games look better on them? After more than 10 years I can't really recall the difference.
> Did the low resolution games look better on them?
Yes.
The standard way of seeing pixel art in modern indie games, the edges of everything are too harsh. CRT filters exist, but most kinda suck, though there's an occasional good one (Cyber Shadow does an excellent job).
There's also the issue of input lag. CRT's have virtually zero input lag beyond just their refresh rate, whereas for LCD/Plasma/OLED it's more substantial. In more recent years things have gotten better, with more and more TV's getting decent latencies (< 25ms) at least in game mode, but for a while there you were commonly looking at like 80-120ms lag times with no recourse for a given TV.
I have a 21 inch trinitron crt and hooked it up to the pc over vga to play some modern games on it and it’s hard to describe how different of an experience it is over lcds. It’s great even though the resolution is lower you don’t notice it as much because you don’t see scaling artifacts and response latency is super low.
I honestly didn't think I noticed the "ghosting" in LCDs until I started using a 144hz display. Now I can't unsee the mouse trails on most LCD displays.
In my first job out of college, our cubicles were outfitted with magnetic coat hooks that had very strong magnets. I would occasionally take mine off the cube wall and distort the display on my monitor with it. I did this a little too much once and ended up with a permanently distorted monitor.
Oh man, I just remembered somewhere I worked with monitors with a Degauss button. It was really cool the first time you pushed it but then it did very little until enough magnet stuff happened to give it something to do.
I don't care one bit about raster graphics CRT (can't stand flicker); good riddance I say. I do miss vector monitors though (their heyday was before my time, I used only the one in the Vectrex). Anyone to sell me a HP1300?
It has been so weird seeing all the headlines and rants about CRT as "Critical Race Theory" in schools, because every time I hear it I just think about good ole Cathode Ray Tubes.
FWIW I've run a mica window geiger cointer for hours in front of my tubes and been completely unable ti measure any radiation above ambient. At some point I will do it with a large scintillator, but already it's pretty clear that those X-rays are very soft indeed.
The glass where the image is displayed is quite thick, and leaded for just this reason. There is also a protection circuit that will shut down the whole set if the voltage were to increase enough to risk xrays that can't be contained.
In 1895 Röntgen was messing with such a device trying to understand cathode rays when he discovered and published on x-rays (leading to medical diagnostics, x-ray diffraction, understanding of ionic bonds and modern chemistry, and the discovery that DNA had a double-helical structure).
This caused much excitement. Soonafter Becquerel was looking into x-rays in CRTs when he discovered natural radiation (leading directly to the field of nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants).
In 1897, J.J. Thompson discovered (using a CRT) that those very cathode rays were actually new particles known as electrons (leading to the photoelectric effect, general relativity, quantum physics, solar panels).
Right after that, people turned the CRT into the vacuum tube (leading to long-distance telephone networks, radio amplifiers, the electric guitar, the Beatles, Katy Perry).
And then of course if you stick some electromagnets around the CRT beam you can shake them around and draw out moving pictures, and you get the CRT we all know and love (and is written about in OP article).
I blogged about it a bit here [1]
[1] https://partofthething.com/thoughts/the-modern-era-passed-th...