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Would a modern CRT make any sense?
- Thread starter wandplus
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the weight of a good 27inch CRT is a lot and (would make it a niche product almost certainly keeping the price really high) and every year, with the 480hz OLED and other type of tech (like those freesync, pulsar, BFI, etc...) is closing the gap that are still left and making it less and less sensical.
That said 16:9 is not better than 4:3 or other format, for many computer things specially at that size
That said 16:9 is not better than 4:3 or other format, for many computer things specially at that size
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No. Nobody is making CRTs anymore. (Maybe some small ones for military applications, allegedly, but it's more likely to just be a big stockpile) Restarting production would involve a lot of relearning of how to do things.
They're not going to be reasonably priced without mass production, but sales volume will be low. I would buy a few lowres 4:3 CRTs for my arcade machines, but once you go through one round of holdouts that's it.
Most people don't want to spend the floorspace on a CRT. Geometry adjustment isn't fun. The flicker bothers some people. Etc.
Better to fantasize about MicroLED or something. Get those small enough and bright enough and you can probably trace a beam across like a CRT. The brighter the pixel, the longer it stays on, etc.
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Eh. I'll be the contrarian here.
Yes it does. We have the tech to make good deflection yokes with perfect uniformity, convergence, linearity. Slap some wide-gamut color phosphors in there and we have DCI-P3. Projector phosphors used to burn insanely bright to project a large image onto the screen, so they could do "HDR 400". Perfect motion clarity. Yes there's the weight of the unit, but I don't think people who care about image quality care about that.
Most people who love image quality absolutely would buy a 27 inch 4K CRT monitor if it comes out tomorrow.
This is all hypothetical and fun though. No one's going to make CRT anymore.
Yes it does. We have the tech to make good deflection yokes with perfect uniformity, convergence, linearity. Slap some wide-gamut color phosphors in there and we have DCI-P3. Projector phosphors used to burn insanely bright to project a large image onto the screen, so they could do "HDR 400". Perfect motion clarity. Yes there's the weight of the unit, but I don't think people who care about image quality care about that.
Most people who love image quality absolutely would buy a 27 inch 4K CRT monitor if it comes out tomorrow.
CRT's do this naturally. This would require digital signal processing that would add input lag because of the processing.
This is all hypothetical and fun though. No one's going to make CRT anymore.
not sure there is much need/benefit for it to be 4k either, it would not be for text-work, there a bit of natural anti-aliasing inherent to the tech, 27 inch is small.
When people stopped buying them, the LCD-plasma of the time where no near those of today too, showing how valuable low power, not giant space at the back and low weight (many would need a new desk setup just for it and could buy a really nice high end qd-oled 88inch instead at the same price) is too people
When people stopped buying them, the LCD-plasma of the time where no near those of today too, showing how valuable low power, not giant space at the back and low weight (many would need a new desk setup just for it and could buy a really nice high end qd-oled 88inch instead at the same price) is too people
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Fair. 1440p is plenty. I will say this though, FW900 benefited from its 1440p mode, even if it couldn't fully resolve it. So it being able to do 4K but only fully resolve somewhere in between 1440 and 4k would be fine.
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Enhanced Interrogator
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The only thing ANYBODY should have said to the OP is "google this question".
This has been hashed and rehashed for 20 years now. There is nothing left to say about it
This has been hashed and rehashed for 20 years now. There is nothing left to say about it
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There's a market for it if fw-900's are selling for 3k+ and climbing. Just don't introduce input lag like every flat panel tech has.
I actually doubt it. While some people would, most of the people who like to crow about it would discover that they didn't want it when it came out. The biggest things that would keep people away would be the price, the weight, and the depth. They'd be excited until they discovered it was a $5000+ unit, and weighed like 200-300 pounds, and sticks out 3 feet from the wall. Suddenly it wouldn't be as interesting.
Also, I think you are kidding yourself with how easy you think it would be to solve geometry issues and so on. It would probably not have perfect geometry, if it supported 4k it would be blurry since the phosphors wouldn't be able to resolve it correctly, and not be nearly as bright as you would want, particularly since the short persistence phosphors (needed for high refresh rates) are harder to push as bright since they don't give off light as long.
This really is not an issue at least on computer monitors. OLEDs are extremely fast with their response, getting in the range of 0.1-0.5ms for it to hit the target light level, which I'd venture is faster than a CRT phosphor if you've ever seen them on a high speed camera. Processing latency is even less of an issue, ASUS's new PG32UCDM3 has an estimated signal processing lag of 0.001ms by TFTCentral.
You are going to have a lot of trouble convincing me that you can actually notice 0.5ms of lag, particularly given that it is dwarfed by other causes of lag in your system (even fast game engines usually have 10-20ms of lag). Likewise, you can get much less frame time lag these days. Fastest CRTs I ever encountered were in the realm of 100-160Hz for lower resolutions, not that GPUs could usually drive that much FPS, nor did you probalby run them in the low resolutions that could have them. Now you can 4k displays that'll do 240Hz no problem, and 1440 displays that'll do 500Hz.
The lag argument is just a non-starter these days. If you go with OLED, the only thing a CRT can claim as still better is motion clarity at low frame rates because of the scanning. Everything else, yes even latency, is better on the OLED.
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no there isnt, thats just retards with too much money and not enough sense.
XoR_
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Most of the things which add frames of lag can be done with very little lag.
The moment you do rolling scanning you don't need to buffer anything before sending pixels to the panel.
Gaming panels have very little latency in their normal gaming modes.
We still have lag in strobed modes and these modes are not implemented in the optimal way.
New CRT having market for it - just because someone got FW900 for 3K+ it doesn't mean there is market for it.
There would be market for cheap CRTs if they are even better than FW900 - which not technically impossible (there are not even any live patents left for them) but economically unfeasible.
It wouldn't be hard to make 4K 120Hz CRT. Maybe more expensive especially if you also wanted VGA compatibility and because in this case such monitor would likely also need to support 15KHz natively but technically possible.
And the biggest issue is that the very reason people wanted these displays being technically easy to resolve on modern panels like OLEDs.
Strobing can be done in smart way to have it lagless. There is possibility to make VRR work with such strobing - insta death to any CRT idea.
And for CRTs having nice look to the image - yeah but this can be faked using lagless low transistor count ASICs/FPGAs designs using polyphase filters.
Just look how MISTer FPGA can have extremely good CRT emulation alongside PSX or even N64 core on what is rather small FPGA.
Put such scaler to ASIC and you can have your flat panel do point scaling, bilinear scaling, lanczos, etc. and that amazing CRT simulation and each preset is quite small matrix of values so you could have dozens of them.
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See reading this just irritates me all the more. Assuming what you're saying is true then WTF are panel makers doing? Why isn't this out yet?
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Hahaha, alotta naysayers here but the facts are crt does no input lag and perfect motion clarity and flat panels including oled don't. You can say all you want there isn't a market for it but the fact is there is because the fw900 sell at 3k+, I follow the crt listings and sales on the different marketplaces and they sell, just because you aren't paying attention doesn't mean it's not happening. Argue all you want but those are hard facts and that's the circumstance at this moment. Now go back to your blurry mess of a headache inducing monitor and get pwned by someone on a crt because your character appeared on their crt before theirs appeared on your flat panel. Ez
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XoR_
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Unfortunately the more you know about given technology the more your conclusion is like what your reaction here is: what the flock were they thinking?
Strobing itself - you can draw lines at the same rate as you receive them on input (zero lag!) and then start blacking lines N lines after you have drawn them - get strobing -> excellent motion clarity.
Such strobing could allow you to get persistence as low as you want and you would avoid large window luminance limits.
In other words you would never at one time display more than N lines so you could just as well draw these lines at maximum luminance.
In fact "maximum luminance" is for displaying bunch of pixels (like at very small window size) continuously - which poses its own technical challenges, pixels heat up quickly. If you already only lit pixels for millisecond or two you could push more power because you would have plenty of time for pixels to cool off.
Why we don't have this yet?
They keep good obvious ideas for times they have literally nothing else to sell you.
For the time being they:
- prevented RGB pixels in computer monitors - because obviously it was artificial decision and didn't need any technological breakthrough.
- increase refresh rates
- increase brightness in small steps
- there are some advances in OLED emitters which are yet to be used in actual products
- investing tons of money in to how to be able to slap "AI" sticker on monitors
You know... slowing down advancement of technology as much as possible.
There's a market for $10,000 speaker cables that literally do nothing to improve your sound too. Just because there's a market doesn't mean there's a large market, or it is a good idea.
The funny thing is that you are hyper focused on ONE aspect of a display and just ignoring everything else. Yes, CRTs have better motion clarity for low frame rate content. Great. They are worse, or at best the same, at literally everything else. They have lower brightness, worse color, geometry issues, visible flickering, convergence issues, lower resolution, lower refresh rate, etc, etc. But somehow that all doesn't matter because their motion is a bit clearer!
The lag thing is also just not an issue. It is this red herring that people like to cling to. First as I noted already, lag is vanishingly small on modern OLEDs, the element response is sub millisecond and the processing lag is even less than that. You can't perceive that.
Second, CRTs have lag too. Yes, really, there's latency in the analog world too. They have display element lag, those phosphors don't reach full brightness the moment the beam hits them, they take a small amount of time, just like the OLEDs. It isn't much, sub millisecond I'd guess (I've never seen measurements just video) but just like any kind of light they are not instantaneous, they have to ramp up. What's more they have processing lag! Well, not them, but the DACs. DACs have latency, any live sound pro audio guy can tell you all about it. They have an internal buffer and delay, how much depends on how they process the signal. It is almost always sub millisecond, just like the OLED processing. Yet it is there, but it is something you ignore and don't care about (I've never seen anyone look up the DAC models and see what their datasheet says on processing).
Finally the biggest one: They have more frame time lag because they have lower framerate. This is where you actually start to get into measurable, meaningful amounts of lag. You can't get data any faster than your framerate, and when it is low it feels laggy, and that is also why framegen can't fix it. Ok, well take the FW900 that everyone lusts after: If you run it at 1920x1200 you are doing 85Hz standard, I think you can maybe push it to 95Hz though your image may get fuzzy. But we'll say 100Hz just for. That's a frame time of 10ms, which is, you guessed it, 10ms of lag. So even if we incorrectly assume no display element lag or DAC lag, you are at 10ms minimum. Now let's take a PG27AQWP-W, that's a 540Hz 2560x1440 OLED (which can also do 720Hz at 720p). That gives a frame time of just 1.85ms. We'll assume a worst-case element+processing lag of 0.5ms (in reality usually lower) and that's a total frame lag of 2.35ms. That is about 25% of our overly optimistic best case for the CRT.
So if lag really is the alpha and omega you make it out to be... OLED is measurably better. So if you ACTUALLY care about pwning someone because you saw them sooner... you'd have a high refresh rate OLED. It will get you measurably less lag. Of course I'm going to bet that it wouldn't make any difference, if you are hard stuck Silver 2 a better monitor isn't going to help you, it is a skill issue.
That aside I don't understand this attitude that everyone cares about competitive shooters. There's a whole lot of us who just flat out don't play them.
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Alotta made up numbers and bro science here, cope.
Sounds to me like the cope is coming from the guy who can't come up with any counter argument or numbers. Go look up the numbers for the OLEDs on TFTCentral, I already told you the source, they have them all right there. They even tell you how they do the measurements. Modern OLEDs have vanishingly small element latency and even smaller processing latency, combined with extremely high frame rates. Gives very low total latency, if that's your goal.
If you like your CRT that's fine, I'm not trying to take it away from you. But stop lying to yourself and others that it is lower latency. Also stop trying to pretend like that is the only thing, or even the primary thing, that should matter to most people.
Like me. I figured that out decades ago. Tried some in my 20s. Wasn't my thing. Now I'm 8 months short of 50. Think I'm going to get into them now?
I was a CRT holdout years ago, but that's largely because I had a GDM-FW900 I picked up slightly used in 2005. That was a great gaming monitor, and flat panels didn't catch up to it for years. I got that thing 20 years ago. OLEDs are fucking great for my gaming. Fast enough, inky blacks, better color, brightness and contrast than CRTs, and MUCH larger. What size forklift would you need to move a CRT as big as my 48" 4k OLED monitor? What would it take to get that thing into my office? 48" viewable CRT would be something like a 50" tube. That'd probably weigh a few tons, and I'd have to worry about the forklift breaking my floor joists plus it wouldn't fit through my doors, so I'd need to hire masons and carpenters just to get it into my house.
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I think we would need a sub-Millisecond CRT-Like scanning filter, something that can intercept a 'normal' signal and display it with a rolling scan at 1000Hz. I know motion clarity is significantly boosted by "primitive" versions of this kind of CRT beam emulation, but they're ''only" doing these at 120-240 Hz. Which gives you the effective motion clarity of... 120-240Hz.
Either we use FG to get up to 1000Hz motion clarity, or we take a 240Hz signal and split it into 4 separate CRT-Beam frames at 1000Hz
Either we use FG to get up to 1000Hz motion clarity, or we take a 240Hz signal and split it into 4 separate CRT-Beam frames at 1000Hz
Yep, not everyone has the dexterity to and even if you do, doesn't mean everyone likes them. I'm not shitting on people who do, the most important thing is to play the games you like, but I will shit on people who act like everything needs to be designed for ultra-competitive play and that's what everyone should care about. Nah man, right now it's me and my factory in Satisfactory and I couldn't give a fuck less about lag.
Lier my MiniLED vs OLED for HDR gaming. The MiniLED has more lag, it is something like 20ms because of the backlight calculation and also the slower element response where the OLED is less than 1ms. Can I notice it? Ya, a little, maybe. Does it bother me? Not in the slightest.
Makes sense, it took a while for LCDs to start getting enough features that were as good or better to the point they were a consideration vs a good CRT. Initially all they had going for them was brightness, geometry, and size. Not that those are nothing, but it took some time before other areas caught up and then exceeded CRT.
It would have to be a projection screen which came with their own, very large, set of issues. Building a tube that big was just a non-starter. Also the bigger the tube the more issues there were with getting the guns to target and converge accurately. Not such a problem for TVs which has shit resolution, and were interlaced to boot, but it was an issue with high precision computer screens and part of what pushed the cost up. Large was projector only and while those CRT projectors could have a beautiful image fuck me did they take a lot of calibration to get right, and there were tons of gotchas.
I also should add I'm not hating on people who like CRTs because they just like them for whatever reason. I see it the same as people who like records. It's fine if it is something you enjoy. My brother-in-law loves records, he doesn't have an expensive turntable or speakers, but he enjoys them. Fair. Where I'll shit on the record people, and the CRT people, is when they try to claim they are superior to modern alternatives when they objectively aren't.
XoR_
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Sycraft
Things like phosphors getting fully lit and DAC processing lag add pixels worth of lag - completely ignorable.
For illustrative purposes I guess this argument is ok.
Two things you forgot to mention are
1. lack of VRR on CRTs - argument against CRT. VRR greatly reduces lag and simplifies requirements. You don't need to worry about hitting constant frame rates or frame pacing in RTSS or see any tears
2. frame+ of lag on OLEDs when BFI is enabled - argument pro CRT. BFI adds a lot of lag, doesn't improve motion clarity that much and has all non-VRR issues one experience on CRT
Also discussion is about hypothetical new CRT with 480+Hz - because why not? It isn't like you would actually need to worry that much about VGA compatibility today so you could just design coils and their drivers for much higher rates.
Still we would be missing VRR and as things are sooner or later we will have Pulsar-like OLEDs - then even if motion clarity on CRTs is better it will be game over for modern games and any lag discussion.
This trick is being used because it is purely software driven, is cool and has smoother look.
Technically simple solution like I described which could be easily done on panel/driver level would give better motion clarity without reducing available refresh rates and is something which would help bringing Pulsar to OLEDs.
Heck, if driver could just address lines separately Pulsar could be done exactly they already do it on LCDs.
Even simpler solution for lagless strobing is GPU driven BFI. In this case giving zero lag right away. You would have all the headaches of fixed refresh panels like having to use RTSS scanline-sync but that you already have to do when dealing with any fixed rate display including CRT
Things like phosphors getting fully lit and DAC processing lag add pixels worth of lag - completely ignorable.
For illustrative purposes I guess this argument is ok.
Two things you forgot to mention are
1. lack of VRR on CRTs - argument against CRT. VRR greatly reduces lag and simplifies requirements. You don't need to worry about hitting constant frame rates or frame pacing in RTSS or see any tears
2. frame+ of lag on OLEDs when BFI is enabled - argument pro CRT. BFI adds a lot of lag, doesn't improve motion clarity that much and has all non-VRR issues one experience on CRT
Also discussion is about hypothetical new CRT with 480+Hz - because why not? It isn't like you would actually need to worry that much about VGA compatibility today so you could just design coils and their drivers for much higher rates.
Still we would be missing VRR and as things are sooner or later we will have Pulsar-like OLEDs - then even if motion clarity on CRTs is better it will be game over for modern games and any lag discussion.
You don't really need 1000Hz and blurbuster-like CRT simulation.
This trick is being used because it is purely software driven, is cool and has smoother look.
Technically simple solution like I described which could be easily done on panel/driver level would give better motion clarity without reducing available refresh rates and is something which would help bringing Pulsar to OLEDs.
Heck, if driver could just address lines separately Pulsar could be done exactly they already do it on LCDs.
Even simpler solution for lagless strobing is GPU driven BFI. In this case giving zero lag right away. You would have all the headaches of fixed refresh panels like having to use RTSS scanline-sync but that you already have to do when dealing with any fixed rate display including CRT
Same with the element and processing lag on an OLED, that's my point. Element lag, meaning the time it takes a display element (be it OLED subpixel, phosphor, whatever) to get to its target brightness it 0.5ms or less on modern OLEDs, usually less. Half a millisecond is kinda the upper bounds worst case. Processing lag varies a bit monitor to monitor, but TFTCentral generally measures it as 0.1ms or less.
My point is that these vanishingly small amounts of lag are the kind of thing you may well see with a CRT. I don't know what the lag is on phosphors, I know it isn't much, but if you watch a high-speed video of it, you can tell it isn't nothing as you can see them ramp up before hitting full brightness. It's silly for CRT fans to try and point to the latency in a modern OLED, most of which is actually the time it takes for the light to turn on not any actual digital processing, as some reason they are lower lag.
One of the largest if not the largest CRT that I know of was 43" Sony, very rare and yes, stupidly heavy. This dude found one in Japan and getting it out of the building was an interesting experience, let alone getting it overseas to home and set it up in his mancave.
View: https://youtu.be/JfZxOuc9Qwk?si=wkuVsS53fCqpqpUx
I would probably kill to own one, it is so cool. That said, by todays standards 43" is actually quite small as far as TV's go and yet, as you can see, it is inhumanly difficult to move around. I love the image of a good CRT but if we were to move back to that technology, we would all have to downsize our tastes. TVs would max out at ~30" and computer screens at ~20".
XoR_
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If we talk modern CRT I would imagine something like 27 and 32 inch monitors with very high resolution (higher than FW900 supports) being sweet spot and maximum at the same time.
I don't miss CRTs at all. The noise alone was giving me headaches. And let's not talk about the size. I can't go back from 48" gaming.
They were also not sharp (which is maybe pleasant for low res material, but meh nowadays) and they were not faster than the high refresh OLED stuff we have now, I don't know what a 500hz CRT would be like, but that was never a thing anyway. And it's hard to care much about motion clarity at 60-100hz when the flickering hurts me.
Bet you even the g-sync pulsar LCDs beat CRTs in latency and motion clarity, but I don't think we've seen measurements yet so maybe it's not quite that good? But it wouldn't surprise me. The LCDs in VR headsets like Q3/Q2/Index have perfect motion clarity too and those I have seen since I own one
They were also not sharp (which is maybe pleasant for low res material, but meh nowadays) and they were not faster than the high refresh OLED stuff we have now, I don't know what a 500hz CRT would be like, but that was never a thing anyway. And it's hard to care much about motion clarity at 60-100hz when the flickering hurts me.
Bet you even the g-sync pulsar LCDs beat CRTs in latency and motion clarity, but I don't think we've seen measurements yet so maybe it's not quite that good? But it wouldn't surprise me. The LCDs in VR headsets like Q3/Q2/Index have perfect motion clarity too and those I have seen since I own one
Is it possible that even with cheap LCDs that the blacks for example look better on recent LCDs compared to older LCDs? I know it sounds like I'm answering my own question because I tried to compare one day a movie with my old HP and new LG at the same time. The old HP seemed to produce artifacts during the dark scenes.
sharknice
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Depends how cheap and how old and expensive the older LCD is. You can still get new super cheap LCDs with absolute garbage image quality.
A super high end LCD from over a decade ago generally has better image quality than the lowest end new LCD most offices get for their employees.
XoR_
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Are you really trying to compare LCD to LCD in topic about making new CRT?
Of course new LCDs are better than old LCDs...
...but if you compare new cheap'o LCD with old top end LCD then it is not so clear cut.
IMHO HP DreamColor LP2480zx from 2010 will wipe the floor with all but already quite pricey panels.
Having that HP in the 2010's was like looking in to the future of LCD tech.
Of course top end gaming IPS today are better and some professional monitors are even better - at least in raw picture quality.
And QD-OLED wipes the floor with all of the above including any CRT.
CRTs are still relevant and I think will be more relevant in the future than that QD-OLED
I don't see CRTs being relevant for anyone except people heavily into retrogaming. That's where they still look the best. I've got a Sony reference monitor for that, it's great!
But I would never put a 4K CRT on my desk to use a computer or play modern games. It just doesn't make any sense functionally.
I doubt it, if there were they'd probably still be made. Until fairly recently, large vacuum tubes were made for radio stations. When you needed a REALLY big amplifier, particularly an RF amplifier, they were still the way to go thus they were made and used (they have since been replaced by thyristors).
So if there was an industrial use where CRTs were needed, they'd probably be made. In the consumer market, there can be a small demand that goes unmet, like a subset of people would like X, but X is too expensive or niche to produce so it doesn't happen. For industry that's not really the case. If something is needed for an industrial purpose, companies are willing to pay even if it is a lot to have a one-off thing made, so it gets made.
my guess would be that yes and that they are still made for those (military for example, fight jets cockpit design, radar scope like in movies still going on), analogue oscilloscopes are probably still a thing in the very high end, some medical imaging.
Those are not high resolution large flat screen like pc monitor became by the end and eveything that it involve in challenge for the tech, so they would have stayed way more competitive and their realtime analogue aspect much more natural than computer (for which image start all digital and needed to be turned into an analogue signal)
https://www.thomaselectronics.com/equipment-type/avionics/
fighter jets head up display seem to use crt projectors still:
https://www.thomaselectronics.com/avionics/head-up-display/
maybe not F-35 newer that must have went oled direct in the helmet, but the updated F-16/18 type are still high-class
Near as I've seen all scopes are digital these days. Now granted I haven't done an extensive search, but I work adjacent to engineers, including Biomedical engineers, and it is all digital all the time for scopes. It seems that they hit the tipping point of all the benefits outweighing the decreasing downsides some time ago. I haven't seen an analog scope in a lab in quite a long time.
sharknice
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There was a huge CRT price fixing cartel and when LCD started taking over there was almost no investment into CRT tech.
XoR_
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The thing is that there didn't need to be investment. You could have used the same manufacturing facilities for years to come with little investments.
CRTs were not needed for offices, they were not needed for many use cases so small capacity would be enough for small demand and it would allow to keep lights on.
Where CRTs still excelled was for for gamers, people who liked quality picture, etc. Especially since you could by then use two monitors you could have best of both worlds - sharp static desktop LCD and amazing for multi-media and games CRT.
And what pisses me off the most is that early 00's was when there were big improvements to CRT monitors. They seemingly improved up to the point they stopped being sold. It is easy to imagine what few more years on the market would yield.
So what happened?
Manufacturers chose to focus on LCDs because they had to make investments in to LCD manufacturing capacity anyways so they heavily advertised LCD and against CRT.
And of course most people... literally nothing to talk about.
What could possible improvements be? Higher resolutions? Larger displays? Higher refresh rates? Sharper picture with higher refresh rates? Greater contrast?
I've used a couple LaCie CRT's that have modes which seemed to push the contrast higher than other CRT's I've had do and to me the gameplay, especially in dark games, felt significantly more immersive.
I've used a couple LaCie CRT's that have modes which seemed to push the contrast higher than other CRT's I've had do and to me the gameplay, especially in dark games, felt significantly more immersive.
Plenty of gamers stopped buying them though. Heck, I was the last of my gaming friends to transition from CRT to LCD. Many gamers didn't care about the benefits CRTs had, they were more interested in the benefits LCDs had. To continue to produce CRTs, they would have had to raise prices a lot and they clearly figured that wasn't going to fly, so companies stopped.
Even now, gamers show themselves to be very price sensitive for screens. There's a market for high end screens, but it isn't huge, and even the "high end" in monitors doesn't tend to be as high end as TVs. Like look at the PG32UQX. People absolutely shat on the $2500 price when it came out as unreasonable, despite it being a real halo product. Yet $2500 is only kinda entry level for high end TVs, they go way up from there.
I'm not saying there wouldn't have been SOME market for expensive CRTs, but the question is would it have been enough to make them sustainable. Even those of you that claim you'd spend the money might well not if the time to actually spend came around. I've seen plenty of people come in with high demands on something and a "price is no object" attitude, clearly thinking that their demands can't be met and then when I or someone else shows them that sure, they can, and here's the thing that does the balk at the price. That happened with monitors right here on Hardforum, someone had a list of "Why won't people make this" demands and what they asked for was the PA32UCX, the professional version of the aforementioned PG32UQX. So I told them that, and it's price which at the time was like $3k. Suddenly the "price is no object" was a HUGE object and they were not willing to spend the money.
I think there would have been a whole lot of that with high end CRTs. When the market continued to shrink, the per unit price would have skyrocketed by necessity. I think the "But no I'd pay it for real bro!" people would mostly turn out to be all talk, and would in fact NOT be willing to pay, which means it shrinks more, meaning the price goes up even more, and so on.