Idk if it's just me but I have pretty good hearing, so I can hear the high pitch tone CRTs make and it drives me crazy.

You beat me to the punch.

We were absolutely considering output delay and hoarding our CRT monitors.

Some of us were also initially concerned about input delay from early USB until we were shown that while it is slower that it was unnoticeable.

beeing

🐝

I bought a Sun Microsystems 24" widescreen CRT for $400 on eBay back in 2003ish? iirc. It was 100lbs and delivered on a pallet lol. There's a reason why they didn't get very big and were mostly 4:3. 1920x1200 and like 30" deep! But, they did exist!

As someone who still uses a CRT for specific uses, I feel that you're misremembering the switch over from CRT to LCD. At the time, LCD were blurry and less vibrant than CRT. Technical advancements have solved this over time.

Late model CRTs were even flat to eliminate the distortion you're describing.

I miss the sound of the degaussing function.

The guy inside it drawing them is insanely fast at his job. That's also why they were so bulky, to fit the guy who does the drawing.

Because it is analog. There are no buffers or anything in between. Your PC sends the image data in analog throug VGA pixel by pixel. These pixels are projected instantly in the requested color on the screen.

They don't have zero latency. It's a misconception.

The industry standard way to measure screen lag is from the middle of the screen. Let's say you have a 60Hz display and hit the mouse button to shoot the very moment it's about to draw the next frame, and the game manages to process the data before the draw starts. The beam would start to draw, and when it gets to the middle of the screen, we take our measurement. That will take 1 / 60 / 2 = 8.3ms.

Some CRTs could do 90Hz, or even higher, but those were really expensive (edit: while keeping a high resolution, anyway). Modern LCDs can do better than any of them, but it took a long time to get there.

Not necessarily if you’re the one walking in with the DC++ server. Getting that thing up and running was suddenly priority #1 for the entire floor.

LCDs came in just in time for me to be attending LAN parties in uni. Got sick of lugging my CRT up the stairs once a week pretty quickly and was glad when I managed to get my hands on an LCD. I can't even remember if I noticed the downgrade, I was so thrilled with the portability.

If input lag is the only measure for you, ok. But LCDs have surpassed CRTs in pretty much every other metric at least a decade ago.

Most people didn't own a CRT capable of 1600x1200@85Hz, most were barely if any better in resolution department than your average "cube" LCDs (one which I'm currently using besides my main 32" QHD display). I have owned a gargantuan beast like that with a Trinitron tube, I could run it at 120Hz at 1024x768 and at higher resolutions without much flicker, but it had issues with the PCBs cracking, so it was replaced to a much more mediocre and smaller CRT with much lower refresh rates.

You know we had 1080p 120hz displays 10 years ago, right?

Just goes to show many gamers do not infact know what "input" lag is. I've seen the response time a monitor adds called input lag way to many times. And that mostly doesn't in fact include the delay a (wireless) input device might add, or the GPU (with multiple frames in flight) for that matter.

The heavy part truly cannot be overstated. I recently got a tiny CRT, not even a cubic foot in size. It's about the same weight as my friends massive OLED TV. Of course, OLED is particularly light, but still. It's insane!

Anyone else remember when “flatscreen” was the cool marketing hype for monitors/TVs?

We got to move these refrigerators, we got to move these colour TV's.