CRT sets weighed about 40 pounds, blurry picture, and cost as much as a mid range PC. Modern TVs are 5 pounds, cheaper than most phones, and have nice crisp picture. Smart TVs suck but so did the past. Nostalgia is a lie. Things are always bad, they don’t get worse they just stay bad
And most of them would not last 50 years without repairs. Maybe the 2000s single-chip ones could but not enough time has elapsed. TV repair shops used to be extremely common for a reason.
While that very much sucks, CRT was a very mature technology that provided excellent products for what was needed at the time. It’s still unmatched when it comes to motion in my book (some may disagree because of phosphor trails).
The fact that my new fancy TV has to make the screen dark and flickery (and possibly add a little SOE) to look almost as clear as that clunker is pretty impressive.
And old video games. They were designed for CRT and look better than on a new TV. Plus CRT has basically no latency. New tvs cause input lag because they have to process the picture. It makes many old games unplayable or very hard to play unless you have a very expensive screen made for gaming.
If you’re measuring latency using the same methods as everything else, CRT has latency, and more of it than you might think.
The standard is to measure at the point where the picture is drawn halfway down the screen. On NTSC with ~30fps, this is about 17ms of latency ( ((1 / 30) / 2) * 100 ). If you hit the button slightly before the screen is drawn, and the game processes it immediately and draws the frame accounting for it, then it will take about 17ms before we stop the clock on the standard method of measurement for latency.
“But”, you might say, “the flatpanel can’t go any faster than it’s fed that NTSC signal, so its latency will be at least that much plus the upscaler plus its pixel response time”.
Fair. A good gaming panel has around 2ms pixel response time. Upscalers can never be zero lag, but good ones like the OSSC and RetroTink are pretty damn close these days.
This is already less than human ability to even notice the difference, but consider doing the same equation for PAL signals at 25fps. It comes out to about 20ms, which is 3ms slower than NTSC. The difference in latency between NTSC and PAL CRTs is about about the same as the difference between NTSC fed to CRTs or low latency flatpanels. It’s possible for flatpanels to be even less than PAL CRTs, and we’ll probably get there at some point.
A lot of it was covering up mistakes. Watching TNG on a modern display, you get to notice how they didn’t match the colors on the uniforms very well. It’s particularly noticeable with the extras uniforms compared to the main cast, though even the main cast uniforms aren’t all matched, either. Mostly happens with the remade uniforms from season 3 onward.
For one example, look at Geordi and Data. I don’t think this is just a matter of lighting.
It probably didn’t get noticed much on shitty broadcast quality TV back then, but once stuff got remastered for the digital age, it all popped out.
I’ve actually been working on similar patterns for the Strange New Worlds uniforms. It looked like it might be 3d printed directly on the fabric. I tried a transparent TPU, but it’s hard to get consistent results out of it. The transparent PLA I tried didn’t stick to the fabric.
They might have used a mask of some kind, or they tuned the hell out of a TPU printer setup and had an intern clean it up afterwords.
I saw a video about how they were made! Let me look through my browser history…
Ah, here we go. Here’s the bit where they talk about the deltas (on the Disco uniform, not the SNW one): https://youtu.be/xDthNAUMXYs?t=261
The person in the video describes it as a “rubberized print” (screen-printed rather than 3d-printed) and “foiled on top.” She also describes it as “the cosplayer’s nightmare,” LOL.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed so, so much more intentional stuff that you just couldn’t see that the old resolutions. It’s one of the reasons it’s a damn shame that Boy/DS9 haven’t gotten a remaster (though, I think in this case the way it was filmed basically means this will never happen.)
I have a few PVM, I just recapped my pvm2030 and even then the electron gun is slowly dying which will require a brand new tube at this point. This is without even considering the amount of custom cables and modchip required to use an RGB signal on those.monitors.
While I agree it’s great specifically for old content, it’s far from perfect and most people would get better enjoyment from something like an ossc plugged into a modern TV for the convenience alone.
CRT sets weighed about 40 pounds, blurry picture, and cost as much as a mid range PC. Modern TVs are 5 pounds, cheaper than most phones, and have nice crisp picture. Smart TVs suck but so did the past. Nostalgia is a lie. Things are always bad, they don’t get worse they just stay bad
And most of them would not last 50 years without repairs. Maybe the 2000s single-chip ones could but not enough time has elapsed. TV repair shops used to be extremely common for a reason.
And don’t forget the eyestrain!
My 34" Trinitron weights literally 200 pounds.
While that very much sucks, CRT was a very mature technology that provided excellent products for what was needed at the time. It’s still unmatched when it comes to motion in my book (some may disagree because of phosphor trails).
The fact that my new fancy TV has to make the screen dark and flickery (and possibly add a little SOE) to look almost as clear as that clunker is pretty impressive.
You clearly have never had a good CRT. It will cost you but its great for watching old movies and shows
And old video games. They were designed for CRT and look better than on a new TV. Plus CRT has basically no latency. New tvs cause input lag because they have to process the picture. It makes many old games unplayable or very hard to play unless you have a very expensive screen made for gaming.
If you’re measuring latency using the same methods as everything else, CRT has latency, and more of it than you might think.
The standard is to measure at the point where the picture is drawn halfway down the screen. On NTSC with ~30fps, this is about 17ms of latency ( ((1 / 30) / 2) * 100 ). If you hit the button slightly before the screen is drawn, and the game processes it immediately and draws the frame accounting for it, then it will take about 17ms before we stop the clock on the standard method of measurement for latency.
“But”, you might say, “the flatpanel can’t go any faster than it’s fed that NTSC signal, so its latency will be at least that much plus the upscaler plus its pixel response time”.
Fair. A good gaming panel has around 2ms pixel response time. Upscalers can never be zero lag, but good ones like the OSSC and RetroTink are pretty damn close these days.
This is already less than human ability to even notice the difference, but consider doing the same equation for PAL signals at 25fps. It comes out to about 20ms, which is 3ms slower than NTSC. The difference in latency between NTSC and PAL CRTs is about about the same as the difference between NTSC fed to CRTs or low latency flatpanels. It’s possible for flatpanels to be even less than PAL CRTs, and we’ll probably get there at some point.
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A lot of it was covering up mistakes. Watching TNG on a modern display, you get to notice how they didn’t match the colors on the uniforms very well. It’s particularly noticeable with the extras uniforms compared to the main cast, though even the main cast uniforms aren’t all matched, either. Mostly happens with the remade uniforms from season 3 onward.
For one example, look at Geordi and Data. I don’t think this is just a matter of lighting.
It probably didn’t get noticed much on shitty broadcast quality TV back then, but once stuff got remastered for the digital age, it all popped out.
It could be worse: at least that makes it easier for cosplayers, unlike this shit on the Discovery uniforms that seems almost designed to thwart them!
I’ve actually been working on similar patterns for the Strange New Worlds uniforms. It looked like it might be 3d printed directly on the fabric. I tried a transparent TPU, but it’s hard to get consistent results out of it. The transparent PLA I tried didn’t stick to the fabric.
They might have used a mask of some kind, or they tuned the hell out of a TPU printer setup and had an intern clean it up afterwords.
I saw a video about how they were made! Let me look through my browser history…
Ah, here we go. Here’s the bit where they talk about the deltas (on the Disco uniform, not the SNW one): https://youtu.be/xDthNAUMXYs?t=261
The person in the video describes it as a “rubberized print” (screen-printed rather than 3d-printed) and “foiled on top.” She also describes it as “the cosplayer’s nightmare,” LOL.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xDthNAUMXYs?t=261
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed so, so much more intentional stuff that you just couldn’t see that the old resolutions. It’s one of the reasons it’s a damn shame that Boy/DS9 haven’t gotten a remaster (though, I think in this case the way it was filmed basically means this will never happen.)
I have a few PVM, I just recapped my pvm2030 and even then the electron gun is slowly dying which will require a brand new tube at this point. This is without even considering the amount of custom cables and modchip required to use an RGB signal on those.monitors.
While I agree it’s great specifically for old content, it’s far from perfect and most people would get better enjoyment from something like an ossc plugged into a modern TV for the convenience alone.