6 ms·

We had CRT displays that could easily do 100 to 120 Hz. Then we regessed to LCD panels that could do 60 Hz and it somehow became the performance target.

Avicebron 25d ago
I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.
- krige 25d ago
  To sellers, yes. The drop of visual quality when the top-down LCD push began was staggering.
  - deleted 25d ago
    [deleted]
  - LargoLasskhyfv 25d ago
    Depended very much on the CRTs used, there were very wide gaps in quality. Even a now obsolete HP ZR2240w (24" 1920x1200@60Hz) was a huge upgrade from a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm2112mu https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm... That thing was at least Trinitron equivalent, if not better, because it lacked the thin wires holding the mask from within. Now you are talking about the start of all that, OFC there were bad and cheap ones, but there was also very good stuff from the beginning by Eizo, Sharp, NEC, and many more. Just as with CRTs. I don't miss them.
  - rcxdude 24d ago
    To buyers as well. I don't recall the switch to LCDs being particularly pushed, though I was admittedly quite young at the time. Especially keep in mind that people today are generally comparing the absolute top-tier of CRTs which were not what the average person had. (Another thing to keep in mind is that the systems of the time generally could not drive the kinds of resolutions and framerates that make those CRTs shine in some of today's comparisons. At the time the difference in quality in practice was lower because of this)
    - aleph_minus_one 24d ago
      > (Another thing to keep in mind is that the systems of the time generally could not drive the kinds of resolutions and framerates that make those CRTs shine in some of today's comparisons. At the time the difference in quality in practice was lower because of this) For desktop applications, the systems could. For 3D games, keep in mind that CRTs (in opposite to flat screens) could also diplay every other supported resolution sharply. The reason why many people think that CRTs were worse in practice is that many graphics cards of the time simply had a low-quality VGA signal generators built-in.
    - anilakar 23d ago
      I owned a 17-inch Trinitron and very much preferred it over the early slow and small LCD panels. I did get a 15-inch Samsung VGA LCD panel for free later, but only kept it as a LAN party display as it folded completely flat for storage and transport.
  - tom_ 24d ago
    Was there a top-down push? In general, people on average never really actually liked CRT displays all that much. They are annoyingly deep; they are heavy; the screen is flickery, or not quite pin sharp, or both; they use up a lot of power; they fail in annoying ways, and they're expensive to fix - and they have magnets in them.
    - thfuran 24d ago
      And they make a constant shrieking sound.
      - mrob 24d ago
        Only SD CRTs make an audible shrieking sound. LCD computer monitors were replacing VGA or better CRTs with a horizontal refresh rate of >30kHZ. Maybe they could annoy your dog but no human could hear it.
        NathanielK 24d ago
        I still use a 130kHz CRT monitor sometimes. There's no 15kHz whine, but there's audible harmonics. It depends what you're looking at at and how hard you're pushing it.
  - BigTTYGothGF 24d ago
    I had multiple mediocre-to-crappy CRTs in the 90s and 00s and was glad to move away from them. I think the last one I owned was even one of the fabled trinitrons, and it was acceptable.
    - AnotherGoodName 24d ago
      Yeah i had a trinitron and i still had bloodshot eyes after a few hours that i never got with LCD screens. Everyone was aware that CRTs sucked terribly for eye strain. The tradeoffs moving to even the early LCDs was well worth it. I remember people spending effectively double on LCDs at the time over higher specced and larger CRTs and being delighted with the result. eg. early LCDs were just 14inch, low res, low refresh rates when you could get a 17inch CRT higher specced in every way. People were still opting for the early LCDs. Your eyes are important!
- TacticalCoder 25d ago
  > I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular. But going from, say, a Sony Trinitron CRT [1] to one the first LCD was a huge step backwards, which is what GP is saying. I did wait for the first LCD with DVI support before switching: for the difference in crispyness between an analog video cable and a DVI one was night and day (I also won many points when I helped friend set up a startup in southern california and we realized one person out of two had picked the VGA cable instead of the DVI one when setting up its desk / computer: so with the CTO late at night we went through every PC and changed all those with VGA cables to the DVI ones). We're not saying modern days flat monitors aren't better than old CRTs: we're saying the first flat screens were complete suckage. [1] even though on a Trinitron you could see two faint horizontal lines (Trinitron were still amazing)
  - LargoLasskhyfv 25d ago
    DVI or not didn't matter that much when your VGA had a good RAMDAC, and you had a good cable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMDAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMDAC Which of course you could only see in direct comparison. Which most ppl didn't have the opportunity to do, so you needed experience instead to judge that. Which most ppl also didn't have, because they've been exposed to cheap stuff only.
    - jaffa2 24d ago
      Matrox used to have the best back in the day. Ai were ok and Nvidia were the worst. Even a lay person could see that difference between the tnt out put vs a millenium. It was so great that i used to use an older matrox card think it was the g450 since it worked great under Linux and the pq was amazing.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 23d ago
        Yes. Matrox was very good. But so were later Voodoo3. I know, because I've driven a https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm2112mu https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm... with it. At 1600x1200@75Hz. Crystal clear and sharp. I also had something by ELSA with a S3 and a translucent blue RAMDAC by IBM. Same thing. But only 2MB VRAM, and PCI. So only useful for testing purposes. Regarding the usability under Linux, or rather support by XFree86, Matrox accelerated some graphics primitives in the DDX-layer, or whatever that was called then. So did the Voodoo3's! Independently of that Glide stuff for 3D. Really nice to have.
aitchnyu 25d ago
Had a Samtron 15" and the LCD that replaced it was very washed out. Commercial users in India kept them for 15+ years.
TiredOfLife 24d ago
After 15 minutes at crt my eyes were watering, not so for lcd
inigyou 24d ago
Now that you mention it, 60Hz was considered poor on a CRT. 85 was the target. But that was because of flicker. AFAIK, 60Hz video frame rate was considered acceptable, but on a CRT the video frame rate was also the flicker rate and 60Hz was too low for flicker.
- AnotherGoodName 24d ago
  A slow motion capture of CRT show's the issue https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/7w0v02/video_by_the_slowmo_guys_showing_how_tvs_work/ https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/7w0v02/video_by_... Almost laser pointer brightness at one point on the screen which you don't consciously see because the your eyes and the hold the image for a few milliseconds but do you really want to be looking at a extremely bright point of light all day. Higher refresh rates on CRTs lowered eye strain since that point could be effectively lower brightness, just refreshing twice as fast. I honestly don't get eye strain on LCDs nearly as bad under any circumstance. 60hz LCD was a massive improvement over the 120hz CRTs.
- mrob 24d ago
  CRT flicker is equally visible when frame rate is the same as refresh rate as when it differs. 60Hz CRTs were never good. 60Hz was only considered "acceptable" because people didn't know any better at the time. At least you didn't suffer with 50Hz CRTs using the same fast phosphors like the PAL regions did.

Avicebron 25d ago

I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.

krige 25d ago
To sellers, yes. The drop of visual quality when the top-down LCD push began was staggering.
- deleted 25d ago
  [deleted]
- LargoLasskhyfv 25d ago
  Depended very much on the CRTs used, there were very wide gaps in quality. Even a now obsolete HP ZR2240w (24" 1920x1200@60Hz) was a huge upgrade from a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm2112mu https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm... That thing was at least Trinitron equivalent, if not better, because it lacked the thin wires holding the mask from within. Now you are talking about the start of all that, OFC there were bad and cheap ones, but there was also very good stuff from the beginning by Eizo, Sharp, NEC, and many more. Just as with CRTs. I don't miss them.
- rcxdude 24d ago
  To buyers as well. I don't recall the switch to LCDs being particularly pushed, though I was admittedly quite young at the time. Especially keep in mind that people today are generally comparing the absolute top-tier of CRTs which were not what the average person had. (Another thing to keep in mind is that the systems of the time generally could not drive the kinds of resolutions and framerates that make those CRTs shine in some of today's comparisons. At the time the difference in quality in practice was lower because of this)
  - aleph_minus_one 24d ago
    > (Another thing to keep in mind is that the systems of the time generally could not drive the kinds of resolutions and framerates that make those CRTs shine in some of today's comparisons. At the time the difference in quality in practice was lower because of this) For desktop applications, the systems could. For 3D games, keep in mind that CRTs (in opposite to flat screens) could also diplay every other supported resolution sharply. The reason why many people think that CRTs were worse in practice is that many graphics cards of the time simply had a low-quality VGA signal generators built-in.
  - anilakar 23d ago
    I owned a 17-inch Trinitron and very much preferred it over the early slow and small LCD panels. I did get a 15-inch Samsung VGA LCD panel for free later, but only kept it as a LAN party display as it folded completely flat for storage and transport.
- tom_ 24d ago
  Was there a top-down push? In general, people on average never really actually liked CRT displays all that much. They are annoyingly deep; they are heavy; the screen is flickery, or not quite pin sharp, or both; they use up a lot of power; they fail in annoying ways, and they're expensive to fix - and they have magnets in them.
  - thfuran 24d ago
    And they make a constant shrieking sound.
    - mrob 24d ago
      Only SD CRTs make an audible shrieking sound. LCD computer monitors were replacing VGA or better CRTs with a horizontal refresh rate of >30kHZ. Maybe they could annoy your dog but no human could hear it.
      - NathanielK 24d ago
        I still use a 130kHz CRT monitor sometimes. There's no 15kHz whine, but there's audible harmonics. It depends what you're looking at at and how hard you're pushing it.
- BigTTYGothGF 24d ago
  I had multiple mediocre-to-crappy CRTs in the 90s and 00s and was glad to move away from them. I think the last one I owned was even one of the fabled trinitrons, and it was acceptable.
  - AnotherGoodName 24d ago
    Yeah i had a trinitron and i still had bloodshot eyes after a few hours that i never got with LCD screens. Everyone was aware that CRTs sucked terribly for eye strain. The tradeoffs moving to even the early LCDs was well worth it. I remember people spending effectively double on LCDs at the time over higher specced and larger CRTs and being delighted with the result. eg. early LCDs were just 14inch, low res, low refresh rates when you could get a 17inch CRT higher specced in every way. People were still opting for the early LCDs. Your eyes are important!
TacticalCoder 25d ago
> I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular. But going from, say, a Sony Trinitron CRT [1] to one the first LCD was a huge step backwards, which is what GP is saying. I did wait for the first LCD with DVI support before switching: for the difference in crispyness between an analog video cable and a DVI one was night and day (I also won many points when I helped friend set up a startup in southern california and we realized one person out of two had picked the VGA cable instead of the DVI one when setting up its desk / computer: so with the CTO late at night we went through every PC and changed all those with VGA cables to the DVI ones). We're not saying modern days flat monitors aren't better than old CRTs: we're saying the first flat screens were complete suckage. [1] even though on a Trinitron you could see two faint horizontal lines (Trinitron were still amazing)
- LargoLasskhyfv 25d ago
  DVI or not didn't matter that much when your VGA had a good RAMDAC, and you had a good cable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMDAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMDAC Which of course you could only see in direct comparison. Which most ppl didn't have the opportunity to do, so you needed experience instead to judge that. Which most ppl also didn't have, because they've been exposed to cheap stuff only.
  - jaffa2 24d ago
    Matrox used to have the best back in the day. Ai were ok and Nvidia were the worst. Even a lay person could see that difference between the tnt out put vs a millenium. It was so great that i used to use an older matrox card think it was the g450 since it worked great under Linux and the pq was amazing.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 23d ago
      Yes. Matrox was very good. But so were later Voodoo3. I know, because I've driven a https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm2112mu https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm... with it. At 1600x1200@75Hz. Crystal clear and sharp. I also had something by ELSA with a S3 and a translucent blue RAMDAC by IBM. Same thing. But only 2MB VRAM, and PCI. So only useful for testing purposes. Regarding the usability under Linux, or rather support by XFree86, Matrox accelerated some graphics primitives in the DDX-layer, or whatever that was called then. So did the Voodoo3's! Independently of that Glide stuff for 3D. Really nice to have.

aitchnyu 25d ago

Had a Samtron 15" and the LCD that replaced it was very washed out. Commercial users in India kept them for 15+ years.

TiredOfLife 24d ago

After 15 minutes at crt my eyes were watering, not so for lcd

inigyou 24d ago

Now that you mention it, 60Hz was considered poor on a CRT. 85 was the target. But that was because of flicker. AFAIK, 60Hz video frame rate was considered acceptable, but on a CRT the video frame rate was also the flicker rate and 60Hz was too low for flicker.

AnotherGoodName 24d ago
A slow motion capture of CRT show's the issue https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/7w0v02/video_by_the_slowmo_guys_showing_how_tvs_work/ https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/7w0v02/video_by_... Almost laser pointer brightness at one point on the screen which you don't consciously see because the your eyes and the hold the image for a few milliseconds but do you really want to be looking at a extremely bright point of light all day. Higher refresh rates on CRTs lowered eye strain since that point could be effectively lower brightness, just refreshing twice as fast. I honestly don't get eye strain on LCDs nearly as bad under any circumstance. 60hz LCD was a massive improvement over the 120hz CRTs.
mrob 24d ago
CRT flicker is equally visible when frame rate is the same as refresh rate as when it differs. 60Hz CRTs were never good. 60Hz was only considered "acceptable" because people didn't know any better at the time. At least you didn't suffer with 50Hz CRTs using the same fast phosphors like the PAL regions did.