I Treated myself to something EXTRAVAGANT - Sony GDM FW900 

Same

Hell I'm far from old and it makes me feel old.

Literally 90+% of the population requires an explanation on CRT technology. Likely you and everyone else who 'knew' what a CRT was just had seen/used one before and maybe knew the acronym.

i feel you

Well, you've got the name to fit that

Rock solid 24 fps gaming at a razor sharp 640x480

“NO LOWBALLS! I know what I have.”

2000hr tube for 200 dollar thinking they selling it as a deal

True but you already have an FW. I got burned hard by DF's video while I was searching for one :)

Not to mention that the average CRT monitor can't compare to a modern LCD for clarity/sharpness - if you're doing anything other than gaming on one, get ready for hard to read, shimmery text!

You could trigger them manually which was always satisfying to do. They had the added benefit of getting rid of static build up too which was also another problem with CRT's.

Now that's something I didn't know! Always wondered how it worked, all I knew was that the loud noise was to fix magnetized stuff. Thanks :)

I like the de gaussing whomp xD My old CRT screen hat the function as well but I just needed it once. I had a set of magnets (building speakers) to close to it and my whole desktop was wonky xD

Lol also the reason you gotta discharge for 3 days so you don't get shocked to death working on them. Super super dangerous stuff

Actually that's because they have a big old flyback transformer inside them that boosts the voltage to some many thousands of volts so that it can blast electrons at the screen - the capacitive effects on those things are super crazy. Not entirely true you need to discharge them for several days either - they typically have a rubber "anode cap" inside them, and if you poke under the skirt with a good quality screwdriver, a ground cable, and a very steady hand you can discharge it. I would strongly not advise anybody in general population to try though, just to make sure. That's aside the fact that relatively modern CRTs have a bleeder resistor in there and they discharge fairly quickly after turning them off, but it's best not to assume that is the case. The reason why the mask gets magnetised is because the electrons that are accelerated from said electron gun are moving really really fast, have charge, and don't always hit their intended target, thus leaving a charge on the mask and causing the colours to trip out. Not directly related to the whole thing where the CRT stores a lot of energy - the amount of charge stored on the mask is actually kinda tiny - that's just the transformer inside the thing being heavy and metallic and dealing with big voltages

Film quality depends on which level of physical quality filmtape the movie was transfered onto. There are HD-releases of old movies out there which looks absolutely clean and only part of that is the digital processing in remastering, but there are also HD-releases in which you can see the film grain meaning the original filmtape wasn't that fine quality. So it depends on the source material if rescanning it in 4K or 8K actually makes sense. Though overall I absolutely know what you meant in your comment and I'm also amazed how good very old movies can look once scanned in HD.

Old digital cameras with a CCD image sensor instead of a CMOS sensor can take better looking photos. Those old cameras were *expensive* and part of that expense was the big, glass lens. When you zoom in on a CCD image you see *pixels*. Zoom in on a CMOS image and you see *blurry fuzz*. CCD is "sharp all the way down". CMOS works around its built in fuzz by going to extreme resolutions. Like a Class D audio amp, the fuzz is buried in the signal.

YES! thank you someone gets it!

There are 3 kinds of camera, Digital, Analog and Film. The ones we used in the 90s to take photos were color film cameras, they were not analog. The only analog cameras that ever existed were old analog TV broadcast cameras that were based on the iconoscope an analog device which is basically the reverse-CRT in many ways kinda like how a microphone is a reverse-speaker the iconoscope is the reverse-crt. Iconoscope cameras were THE ONLY analog cameras and basically they were not available for ordinary people to buy. We had film cameras instead.

@@greggv8 Really depends... The major disadvantage of CMOS is rolling shutter and also the fact it's usually slower than CCDs. CCDs are way faster and if I'm not mistaken they are parallel meaning that they don't have the rolling shutter which is usually responsible for image distortions. I read somewhere that CMOS is basically cheaper so it's more widely used.

It's a factor. The bigger factor is still nostalgia, but CRT tech is definitely a part of that picture.

Yeah I grew up with SNES/N64/PS1 and in the 2000's when it became common to play those systems on emulators I hated the hideous flat pixelated look (PS1 games look like pixel vomit on an LCD). I stayed away from playing old games because of that. Then I saw a post of a gaming setup with a CRT monitor few years back and loved the aesthetic. So I bought one, pulled out all my old systems from my closet and they look absolutely stunning on a CRT. Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. It's how the games were built to be played. I went from RF modulator trash in the '90s to god tier RGB in the '20s.

@@awill891 I'm 41 years old and have been playing games since I was 6. I lived through the CRT era and still have a CRT at home that I sometimes use for retro gaming when I feel like it. Also fine with using LCDs, with various settings. I do mod hacking on old NES games. I play old N64, Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS1 stuff, etc. C64, Amiga, and Atari 2600 too when the whim occurs once every several years or so. I have a lot of younger gamer friends, and very few of them can stomach my favorite games from the NES era. Nostalgia has a ton to do with it. CRT is certainly how they were played and how they were built, but the concept of "how the games were meant to be played" is just fanboi nonsense. It's how you prefer it to look. And that's fine. Just don't pretend authorial intent is an objective metric.

@@blarghblargh "fanboi nonsense" god you're so embarrassing to get this upset and call names. I have an OLED and LCD for modern stuff and CRT for old analog stuff. Have no clue why you're so butthurt. It's a fact pre-HD games look better on a CRT. Unless all the devs in 1991 were developing 240p games for a 4K OLED screen and I didn't know about it.

@@blarghblargh I think CRTs looking much better than LCDs with lower resolution content like retro games isn't really a matter of preference, unless you somehow love excessive blur and artifacting. It's probably more a case of it just happened to work out this way, rather than any sort of "how it was meant to be played" but still.

It is. CRT, in a way, is inherently flawed technology but games of that day were made with CRT's for CRT's and especially with RF or composite cables (or at best S-video) which also added a blur of their own. Old SNES and Genesis/MD games that have dithered and blocky/banding color gradients when watched with LCD actually look smooth on CRT, almost like the console is outputting more colors than it is truly capable of. The same effect are even used to create transparency effects which look real on CRT but wrong LCD. Like the shield or waterfalls in Sonic 1, they look wrong dithered mess in LCD where as with CRT it is a smooth and transparent.

100% this is why. I broke out my PS2 the other day and plugged it into a Sony Vega CRT, and it looked fantastic. Just like I remembered it. Modern displays are just absolute garbage when it comes to displaying sub-HD resolutions.

@@TheJRSvideos Well they can do okay with non HD sources of film content. But with anything digital, it's going to look like crap on a modern display if it was designed for and on a CRT as those drawbacks in a CRT heavily influenced how these games were made. Take away the CRT and you remove a massive part of the equation that led to the look those games had.

@@TheJRSvideos key word: sub-HD I really loved this video, more than usual which I often watch Linus videos for fun and probably my favourite videos he ever does is talking about very old and very rare technology. Thing is he's kind of got a salesman vibe so while he is being very objective I think a lot of people are getting the wrong impression or misremembering. It might look "better" than a cheap display, but the games themselves looked bad, and the displays any middle class family would have looked bad. It had all kinds of different problems to them especially the brightness issue and some of the other stuff Linus talked about, so I feel like a high enough refresh monitor with the least motion blur would still look best if you could just get the scaling right. But then I also hated the graphics back then. Like Command and Conquer: Red Alert is just unplayable to me for so many reasons, and the visual quality is one of them. Adding blurring from CRT is like lipstick on a pig to graphical quality back then imo. Put it this way, The Division blows me away to this day how good it looks, and doesn't need blurring or quirks of CRT to do so.

Retro Games were designed around CRT use, it's why they look better. LCD panels didn't come out for a long time after so they where not even in the thought

Can't help but agree it would be cool, in the mean time I might get a cheaper old CRT just as a fun option for my modern system

Unfortunately it won't ever happen. CRTs are made out of very hazardous meterials.

they will

@@sologamerreborn6677 so are lightbulbs

@@lopiklop not quite the same. Crts are made with several pounds of lead and murcury. Plus most light bulbs are also LED now. Crts will never be manufactured again just based on the manufacturing process alone.

The 1080p/60 limitation was stated in the video.

@@daltonrandall4348 really? I didn't even watch it.

@@dhammalama Phenodreum ≠ Phatnightmares

@@daltonrandall4348 Right. I’m adding additional information that was not discussed in this video.

The real LPT is in the comments

you couldn't find it anyway, even before.

Tv's are your best bet I could get a stunning looking beovision 3 from bang & olufsen for free here in The Netherlands

same :/ kinda sad

What needs to happen is a colab on display lag with Bob RetroRGB.

Don't give up. The universe will reward you with this monitor one day, somehow.

did you mean to say 32 year old home owner?

You’re not a real adult until you have glow in the dark stars and a sweet, twin-xl, car bed. Source - self-proclaimed adult

@@zuki9537 Any first world nation excluding second rate places like america. You could trip over and be in debt your whole life and thank yourself lucky some scum shot you at a school or fast food place for no reason so you didn't have to work 5 jobs with no leave to pay for a wooden house that could burn down at any point 🤣.

@@lifeofentropy 31 here, and i just had to give up on owning a home because I can barely afford rent in my work area... maybe someday when i finally pay off all my debt, assuming that im not forced to pay for healthcare, new car, car repairs, traffic tickets, or any other surprises...

@@lifeofentropy nope. 22. i got the house as inheritance.

What are you on about?...(presses Win+shift+right arrow) You Tube jumps over to 2nd display. OMG, where has this been my whole life. As someone who plays games fullscreen and browses the web on the other display, this could be a game changer. Thank you, I didn't really get what was happening when Linus did it.

Actually the PS2 was capable of 1080 there even was a TV with one built into it where they hardwired it to 1080 res (like a built in Roku vs one you stick in the HDMI port)

As a teen I had a Dreamcast with vga box and a Mitsu 'trinitron' type display. It was SUCH an amazing experience. It made my PS2 look so crappy. But now almost all games work on emulators.

But not all Dreamcast games support the VGA adapter. :( It's not that they *couldn't*, the companies that made them mostly neglected to enable that when they were written. IIRC most of those games have been patched to enable 480p, but of course they'll only play on an emulator, cut down to be crammed onto a 700 meg CD-R (which won't play on the final Dreamcast revision), or a Dreamcast with a modded BIOS and a hard drive or SDCard or USB mod.

@@greggv8 A lot of the games that wont allow you to boot with the vga output will if you just launch the game first then plug the cable in after

@@animeloveer97 It doesn't seem to make much difference overall though. I have a modded PS2 with Component out, HD resolutions can be chosen(and from memory even forced for some games that didn't originally support it), and I was struggling to determine which output was best(on an LCD TV). From memory I think some things looked slightly better & others slightly worse.

I thought it was just a me thing and never realized it was the crt because I would never use it on a crt but like you said now it's basically mandatory and thought it was just a thing of the times. Wild.

Tbh there’s a lot of modern games that I think look worse with AA. Sometimes it makes faraway details impossible to make out

MSAA does not look worse on a CRT. Edit: you guys REALLY need to learn about different AA types

The type of AA matters a lot, FXAA often just smudges the image, SM and MS, etc, are far better about it, since they down sample and/or use 3d data. Still yeah CRT you don't need it.

Native resolution goes a long way to not needing AA, especially with 4k. But it also depends on the type of AA, some are better than others.

I wonder if the IT guy knew what it was.

@@computeraidedworld1148 probably

@@ChronicBongitis420 probably knew it was a crt but doubt they'd know this specific one.

I always wondered how many PVMs (professional video monitor) were thrown into dumpsters, when security systems or whatever were upgraded. I remember in movies you saw walls of these monitors. They're expensive for their size and considering their age. But i always wanted one just for retro gaming.

I don't think the IT guys did it on accedent.

Interestingly, as I hear Linus 'grew up on a farm' (so is a 'farmer' himself?) the CRT was invented by a farmer 2! A man of course (as they invent everything, pretty much =) & came up with the 'beam bending' thing 2 break up pictures into 'scan lines & bladee bla. The color version was a refinement by Zenith I think = just threw at the engineer guys saying 'make a color version of this' & figured it out by breaking it into 'color phosphor groups' & so on. Trinitron was a deal 2 reduce 'shadow mask brightness loss' by using wires instead of a solid sheet with a bunch of holes. Problems with Trinitron include the ALWAYS annoying horizontal 'stabilization wire(s) & if they R around a lot of bass they can also get 'rainbow wave' type artifacts, which U can also C sometimes if U bang on them, depending on size. The brightest CRT I've ever seen was a fairly small random computer monitor but I forget the name. It was like 12" or something = not big @ all just 'WoW that's really BRIGHT!' =) Interestingly the Pioneer 'Kuro' a bunch of 'fanbody' rave about being so 'movie like' becasue 'dark blacks' (for a plasma, which all suk 4 'black level but so what?) is just like many of their other plasmas but they put 'sunglasses' in front of it, like make the 'shaded layer' even DARKER (because 'have 2' have 'something' otherwise the GRAY background is even LESS dark than a CRT?) N E 1 who pretends 2 think that CRT has better 'black levels' than LCD or ANYTHING ELSE is #FullRetard tier insane = like Linus there in the $tudio looking directly at the different things & how 'light gray' the 'blacks' R on the CRTs & spewing the same 'mantra' nonsense 'CRTs have the best black levels' = WTF? =)) It's like all the fools at 'so-called colleges' pretending 2 think boys can B girls if they just chop their dix off HAHAHA

@@Deathrape2001 Aside from all the hateful drivel, "the CRT was invented by a farmer" is plainly misleading. He grew up on a farm, but that had nothing to do with his discoveries. Upon graduating high school he was in the military a few months before quitting to go to university. The professions of him & all the others that worked on it were physicists & associated fields.

​@@DoubleMonoLR HAHA not only was he a farmer, but his name was 'Farmsworth' = LOL =)) U R just trollin' =P

У меня сдох 22 дюймовый NEC MultiSync FE2111SB 😢😢😢😢 Твм сначала контакт пропадал, стукнеш и заработает, я все платы лупой просмотрел и кое где пропаял и бесполезно. А сегодня вообще перестал стартавать, мигает индикатор (светодиод)😢😢😢 А моник то топчик, один из последних по качеству, кинескоп Diamondtron, это крутой конкурент Тринитрона

Very true

This is strange, Linus making such an obvious error. It also talk about scanlines, so it might be this monitor supports 480i and this is a special mode. It should be also interesting to see how it was hooked up

@@LucaMolteni84 its an easy mistake to make, as in the retro world most things DID NOT support 480p only 480i, by the time progressive scan was mainstream crt was on its way out...

Thanks for pointing this out.

100%

Ship it to the new LTT Labs facility for use in retro console content.

@@mndlessdrwer I like that Idea, the more I get to see the FW900 the better tbh.

It is on my screen.

Looking for it as well

Virtually impossible to do so. You need to create a massive glass tube that's strong enough to contain a vacuum. The bigger the screen, the bigger the tube and also the thicker the glass needs to be.

@@paulbrookfield4133 Plasma TV's.

@@juanme555 more like LPD (Laser-powered Phosphor Display)

@@juanme555 I still use my Panasonic Plasma tv from 2010 as a daily driver.

FED/SED displays were a continuation of CRT technology using a matrix of tiny cathode ray tubes, they were slimmer, lighter, required less power and were ready to be launched on the market, but were abandoned after LCDs became dominant...

The natural blur thing and the vampire example Linus gave is not a feature of CRTs but of the old composite video signal (that yellow cable that's usually paired with the red and white audio cables). That signal crammed all the analog brightness and color and timing data into one wire, which results in a lot of distortions like that. You won't get it on a CRT with more 'modern' inputs like S-video, component or RGB/VGA (in ascending order of quality). The two are often equated because especially in the states, all old TVs only had composite input (nowadays people 'RGB mod' their CRT TVs to get higher quality RGB input into the display)

Good info! 🙂

If someone want to sell that widescreen CRT Sony GDM-FW900, I'm interested as long as it can be shipped to Montreal from British Columbia or Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba; I can drive to pick it up in Ontario, or Nova Scotia, in the bilingual Province of/du New/Nouveau Brunswick, Province du Québec, Territory of Labrador or Newfoundland.

That was only a thing if you used shitty composite video. RGB and S video removed that effect.

Me: Leaded glass

Apart from a microwave, servicing a crt is my worst nightmare. ( though hugely more rewarding )

@@benwu7980 obligatory CRTs contain 20,000+ volts inside when running and if A) not working properly or B) pre- 80s will store that voltage in the tube for days even after unplugged. I have experience repairing these, but please don't approach CRT repair if you don't know very well what you are doing and have training SPECIFICALLY for CRTs. But yes it is very rewarding if you can do it safely

"e-waste" but let us not mention how much less longer LCDs and the like last compared to many CRTs being able to last half a century with minimal loses if taken care of.

When CRTs were still being manufactured, the leaded glass from old sets was melted down and re-used in new sets. It didn't actually become an issue until we stopped manufacturing CRTs.

They were not ahead... Flat panels just are behind.

@@TheAdatto so they were ahead of there time compared to most other options of tech

They were a product of their time and a tech that was researched for something like over 80 years.

the downside of them is they are very hazardous to make and if they break they can actually kill you in multiple ways

У меня сдох 22 дюймовый NEC MultiSync FE2111SB 😢😢😢😢 Твм сначала контакт пропадал, стукнеш и заработает, я все платы лупой просмотрел и кое где пропаял и бесполезно. А сегодня вообще перестал стартавать, мигает индикатор (светодиод)😢😢😢 А моник то топчик, один из последних по качеству, кинескоп Diamondtron, это крутой конкурент Тринитрона

Pronus

kk. glad it wasnt just me

Noticed the same XD it's a bug tho since there is an invisible wall and you fall down to where he jumped.

Can't be much of a pro if he called the vga output on the Dreamcast 480i :p

Hey yorue the Sonic CD guy lol

if anyone were to manufacture tubes again they would be as expensive (if not significantly more, economy of scale) as they used to be and nobody would buy them. I got a new old stock 32" trinitron for 500 bucks (700 dollar tv in 06) and people in the crt gaming subreddit flipped out because im ruining the value of tubes

@@braydoncoate9583 if this video proves anything it is that if someone made it, certain people would happily pay through the nose for them as long as they are good quality. It'd be a license to print money for a company willing to bite that bullet of tooling up a factory to make them and then sell them at a 2000% markup coz where else are people gonna go to buy them?

@@tyrannicpuppy a bunch of teenagers claiming they would buy one is different from actual enthusiasts who have the cash to pony up 5-6k for a new crt

@@tyrannicpuppy 2000% markup would be a 10,000 dollar monitor. Tubes are so fucking stupidly complex and expensive to manufacturer

@@braydoncoate9583 yeah. I'm assuming while there's documentation lingering in company offices and warehouses, most of it is likely to be proprietary, and all the people who designed the methods for manufacturing these puppies are retired or passed away. Hell, all the plants that made these surely scrapped or reused any tools they would have used, so a new manufacture would likely have to setup a plant from scratch. So the only way for a crt to make a come back would be if some insane billionaire did it as a pet project...

Did yall throw it away? 🥲

BRO your dad is awesome :DDD

@@Roshan_420 I think so. It's kind of a shame, but you never really know what's going to become valuable later on, and it's not worth hoarding every single piece of tech. It was basically an old TV and my dad so no value in it anymore. Not to mention, that thing weighed a TON. So glad I'll never have to move CRTs ever again, personally.

@@testbenchdude personally i would have sold it locally or something to make someone else happy

@@Roshan_420 Alas, my dad is not you. Who knows though, maybe whoever picked it up made a good score.

I broke a desk with two smaller versions of this one. Straight up collapsed. The screens were fine, thanks for asking.

I had the 24" Dell version of this for which I paid about £60 in 2003/2004. I upgraded to an lcd telly in 2007 and I do not regret going to 720p because of the trade off in size of the screen. The dell was almost as deep as it was wide. Like John, I was proud the day I took it from my car, went up four flights of steps and placed it gently down while my shoulders and arms were on fire. I updated to a 1080p lcd screen within one or two years. $3000 is a joke for something that basically benefits only the retro feel.

@@goblinphreak2132 Goblin you do understand that most people struggle with 100lbs,let alone a 200lb crt! You must be popular when friends are moving home!

@@faisalkl The Sony FW900 and the Dell version you claim to have had went way higher than 720p or 1080p, it could happily do 2880x2560 or 2560x1600p @ 85Hz, 1920x1200 @ 120Hz, it is far beyond a retro monitor, sure thanks to CRTs being able to display low resolution so beautifuly it can happily show 640x480, a 720p LCD would have been a huge downgrade for an FW900 owner.

@@olivermood8003 @Oliver Mood yes it could do much higher than 1080p and my go to resolution was 1920x1200. However if I went higher than 1200p my eyes would hurt like crazy after a few minutes and I never found any sweet spot better than that. Funnily enough, I run at 4k on a 28" with basically a higher dpi and no ill effects on my eyes. I was well into running the Dell at high refresh rates so don't know what caused the discomfort but it is possible I was doing something wrong. The picture quality was sublime though!

The price would have be crazy high because the supply chain and manufacturing would need to be started from almost scratch, for an extremely niche market.

I wouldn't mind paying $5750 Canadian dollars (5,000 + 15% tax), that's 3500 $usd$ for a new 24" 16:9 CRT that would do 1080p at 120-150hz.

NEC 6FGe's for CAD. They were HEAVY. We gave two monitors per CAD user and Windows 95/98. They were hooge and needed re-enforced desks to cope with.

Mustve meen some pricey tubes! I have a 21 inch compaq qvision and i threw my back out bringing it up 3 flights

When my father worked for Sun they had a special trolley for moving the monitors around when they'd do installation and repair as they were not only very heavy, but also very fragile and expensive. Of course he also had to lug the servers around too...

i'm not allowed to pick up my 22": p1220

I did the same when I helped my highschool move their gear.

Sad for consumers.

The game developers created the games with CRT monitors with their computers.

Technically: I love how older games actually accounted for and took advantage of the limitations of NTSC color encoding, like how the red is wider on the Dracula image

@@doctordothraki4378 Game developers had to create their games for multiple markets back then. For markets that used the NTSC system, PAL and SECAM.

this isnt inherent to CRTs, but the video cables they used at the time! You wouldnt get the same effect with Linus' monitor since its RGB, but a console hooked to a TV over a composite cable mixes all the video signals into a signal wire, which blends color in a way that results in those kinds of distortions!

@@NicheAsQuiche Exactly! And because the signals are designed for humans, green is tied much more closely to the overall brightness. Red also tends to bleed horizontally.

Funny seeing you here, like your headphone reviews

Ooof. i wish I could get my hands on one.

@@largejoe2195 Why thank you Joe Rogan I like your hair products.

@@ZReviews Never change Z, never change.

I really enjoyed your video on these a few weeks back.

I regret throwing mine out in the 2000's when they blew a capacitors.

Like he said in the video, they had been in development fr 60 years, so they've more or less reached their peak when the last one came out, unless someone crazy decides to put millions into R&D hoping to get something better

@@shivansh7152 In essence, that is what the Trinitron is. Sony wanted to improve on the CRT design to allow cleaner, brighter images. They poured a lot of money into the aperture grill design. When the fw900 released in 2001 almost all monitors 19"-21" could only do 1600x1200 or 1920x1400. the FW900 could do 160hz at 1280x960 along with a few of the other 21-22" Trinitron monitors from other manufacturers. I had 4, including an IBM and a DiamondTron and all could hit 160-200hz refresh rate at lower resolutions. These were the best for competitive quake and cs play.

У меня сдох 22 дюймовый NEC MultiSync FE2111SB 😢😢😢😢 Твм сначала контакт пропадал, стукнеш и заработает, я все платы лупой просмотрел и кое где пропаял и бесполезно. А сегодня вообще перестал стартавать, мигает индикатор (светодиод)😢😢😢 А моник то топчик, один из последних по качеству, кинескоп Diamondtron, это крутой конкурент Тринитрона

@@goblinphreak2132 No it is not, unfortunately. I mean back to CRT eras, at first it was for the elite costing nearly $10 000 of today value, and these models were not profitable, they were an investment for a growth in demand and cost reduction. It became profitable and accessible when produced in millions, and the factories were used and slightly modified for several models over the years, the profitability was made over time. Those factories face maintenance too, which is very expansive as you can imagine. Not a profitable operation today, at all. If the industry stopped their production, it is because it was not profitable anymore, this is by far the biggest reason. The demand for these behemoth would not grow, at best stagnate, and their durability mean low demand overall.

@@goblinphreak2132 No it isn't. There used to be a CRT in every home and dozens to hundreds in every office. Even if 1 in 10 gamers wanted one, it still wouldn't be high enough volume for the manufacturing to be affordable.

My school still has 100 CRTs monitors in our computer lab, and 84 of them still work well

@@goblinphreak2132 Everything you said is wrong. The retro scene is not anywhere near as big as you think it is, the percentage of retro gamers who actually want CRTs is smaller than you think it is, the ease at which anybody (even the biggest corporations) could begin production of CRTs is not anything at all like you think it is. If anyone actually _did_ start making CRTs it would be at a massive loss. There is no profit in it. Not even in the fantasy land you live in.

@@goblinphreak2132 I just think they would be way more expensive than people want to pay for because the economies of scale will be really low. For example DJs love Technics turntables, I have a pair of SL1200-MKII that I own and they're great. Technics stopped production ages ago but finally decided to resume production and the new one is $5,000. I bought my two MK2's for $400 each brand new still in box in 2007. Everyone thinks if they make CRTs again it will be $200 - $300 for a good one like it was in the late 90s but they'd likely have to cost like 10x that minimum which few people would pay for.

Yes and not even OLED hasn't been able to fully "mimic" CRT behaviour. It's just a shame that we havent' really improved in image quality exept for resolution and HDR.

@@kingotime8977 and brightness, and black levels. So quite an improvement

@@kingotime8977 in some ways haven’t improved in image quality either, true resolution is measured as dpi or dots per inch not 1366x768 pixels they don’t even advertise dpi anymore at all, and resolution still gets conflated with image size and pixels by pixels all the time Yes big flatscreen displays may have 720p hd or better 1366x768 or better yada yada, but I find I need two monitors to run two programs, we’re on crt monitor running at 400x600 or 600x800 or whatever it was I could cascade or tile or arrange windows as I wanted running 3 or 4 programs comfortably at once sharing that small crt real estate and still see everything quite clearly. Flat screen just need two monitors, some of this is the trend from “programs” to “apps” and poor or no optimization anymore, but a lot of it is the display itself from what I can tell, and a lot of it is the programs and desktop icons change size or you end up needing to use larger desktop icons on bigger resolution instead of the standard ones, and many icons and programs don’t scale up well at all, it’s like blowing up or scaling up a photo without the negatives, it blurs and distorts Text based programs and iconography designed for older versions of windows don’t scale well now days. Sometimes it’s better to read on a phone or tablet because the desktop world is formatted for video content now not text, where phones still have optimizations behind the scenes for better text readability and tablets are closely linked to e ink and e readers and iPads are same size nowadays as a sheet of paper roughly and have reproducibility to be concerned with for reading text and artists drawing with Apple Pencil or something Computer displays now compared to crts or other methods of reading are like comparing a tv or monitor to an overhead projector or slide projector, yes you can read on one but why when the experience is so poor or bad or distorted.

@@tristanwegner Blacks on CRTs are much better, unlike OLED that just switches pixels of, CRTs can handle unlimited amounts of greyscale and retain detail in even the darkest scenes, trying to play horror games or watch dark movies/TV shows on OLED is not easy as you canny make anything out, CRTs can happily show so many different shades of black, from the darkest of dark to the most subtle shades of blacks.

This has also happened within LCD technology. Plasma displays are insane, they have outrageous 40k+:1 contrast ratios and produce very nice images with good internal response times, the move away from plasma to LED was another regression that we are just now digging our way out of with OLEDs

The Diamondtron was the Mitsubishi version. FWICR they were a Sony tube and the rest made by Mitsubishi

What does TFT stand for in this context?

@@Leamsi Thin Film Transistor. LCD basically

I also had an Iiyama back then and it was 120 W but 2048*1536 was great, diamondtron is Mitsubishi.

@@travelthetropics6190 and Mitsubishi were more willing to license the technology to manufacturers such as Iiyama.

Look down in new comments dum dum

Maybe make a retro gaming setup in the office so that all employees can enjoy it during break rather than a single person. But should a single person get to use it, my vote is Anthony.

Yeah, where do I sign the petition that Anthony gets this monitor?

Nah. Anthony being a true retro gamer, would dismiss it for not being 4:3.

Retro games are better on a large 480i TV. 4:3, high brightness, easy support for 240p, RGB hookups, etc; They might as well just sell it tbh, even a heavily used, worn-out FW-900 is worth a small fortune and wouldn't just end up sitting in a RU-vidr's warehouse of unused tech.

At the same time, maybe it will inspire those sitting on forgotten CRTs to list them up for sale.

but maybe that will make a company aware that there is a market for CRTs, it's pretty niche but hey it's a gap in the market

hmm..what if someone decided to make new production CRTs? there is certainly a market for high quality, AVAILABLE CRTs...

Yeeees 😍

@@GameCyborgCh For maybe a few thousand people within the entire world? Absolutely not. I see the appeal of CRTs for their niche use cases but that's all it is. An extremely niche group.

would look like the best gaming screen ever.

Rear projection. Three six inch CRTs for each color channel, thus eliminating the need for a dot mask or aperture grille, and allowing 4k+ resolutions. Probably only 2 pounds per diagonal inch, if not less. Because the tubes are smaller, the electron guns don't need to travel as far for the same refresh, making higher refreshes possible. Also, having the DAC (or better yet, three of them -- ideally 10-bit or higher) inside of the monitor so you can have a DisplayPort connection out the back of it.

If you could use totally black room, you can still go with CRT video projectors. Those are *really* finicky to tune (I had one about 20 years ago) but they have all the plus sides of CRT monitors and if you use matte screen instead of silver screen, the viewing angle is equally good to CRT monitors. I used to run PS2 with about 80" image around year 2000 and because CRT (being totally analog technology) has no native resolution, it was able to render everything the video signal had.

That's the thing about technology. As we stop using it, we lose the knowledge. CRTs made today use the simplest and cheapest 80's design. There's no improvement, and even "deprovement". New Vinyl and cassete players are garbage compared to even mid line ones from the 70's and 80's. It's not that it's not worth it... it's that it's not possible. To make a copy of that monitor, the amount of R&D needed, build up to create the components would be greater than what it was at the time. It's the same reason we can't build a Saturn V today. We don't have the technology anymore. It's effectively lost.

Though this one isn’t really a crt but here one of his videos on something that would be close to it ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Ngy9TIbREJE.html

i remember in the early 2000s i would play pretty much every game possible on a 400 euro 2003 family desktop, even the newest game like prince of persia, rayman, morrowind etc would run no problem because i would run them at 480p sometime even lower, i was so use to that, that the concept of graphic card and graphic performance was alien to me. so when i made the transition to lcd it was rough " hum oblivion sure is struggling, i will lower the resolution to 480p.....why does it look like shit" . but we didn't have a choice as media started to leave 4:3 to 16:9, i couldn't play my xbox360 anymore as most game would just be cut on all corner and most text was unreadable. fun fact : i played skyrim day one on a old crt television from 1999 and it did a great job at hidding the ugliness of the game.

its basically DLSS imo: you drop the rendered resolution, the image quality stays the same and FPS take a boost

@@champ6436 Screens that generate their light from the panel itself and not from a projected light have always and will always look better due to the way our eyes work and our brain processes the information. It's to help with things like pattern recognition which allows us to see things like tigers hiding in the forest undergrowth.

I remember running Crysis on my 8800 GTX and a 1920x1200 display and actually downgrading to the 16:10 equivalent of 720p just because it was still better looking than high resolution and low everything else. That stupid game was so demanding on hardware of the time. Though I also didn't have a very good CPU... my PC was a bit lopsided since I was 14 and had no idea how to make a PC properly.

And resolution

The black levels are also fantastic, and they're effectively kind of HDR. I think it's a lot of the reason why there was(relatively) so much use of lighting effects in older 3D games(eg: Heretic II), as it looked great.

@@DoubleMonoLR OG Doom looks godlike on that Sony FW900

@@DoubleMonoLR a couple of days ago i tried fatal frame 2 on a crt, pissed my pants

CRTs do technically have a native resolution, because the holes in the shadow mask/aperture grille are only so big. Any DPI that deviates from that isn't "native".

Correct!

Yep. I first played DKC on my Sony KV-27S25 and it looked great. Plugged it into my dad's OLED and it looked like total garbage.

As I already said up above, the problem with remasters isn't that the original looked better by older hardware, but that many remasters look bad because they're incompetently done. Bioshock and Starcraft are two that immediately spring to mind. Fable afaik got panned for its remaster too though I played neither. This is because artistry in gaming is partly making all things work together, even if say realtime pathtracing isn't a thing and so you need all kinds of tricks done in raster which can make it look better than badly done RT, and alleged "HD texture packs" tend to do this by clashing wildly with everything else that's put together to go well in the original game, that now does not. It's because remasters tend to also only modify some parts of it and not others, and then not use something which really looks right on its own compared to the original artistic vision which looked more cartoony or blocky but still just looked better while being of poorer technical visual quality, and then on top of it all often ends up clashing with the very message or theme of the original game itself. Like just imagine if you took some old grainy movie's musical score, removed the tinny old staticy, low-fi, poor quality sound, and then upgraded that by...adding modern rock music to a black and white crime noir. Or imagine if you removed the old original chipset sound of 90s console games, and "remastered" it by introducing...jazz music and Lady Gaga. In Resident Evil. It doesn't suck because it's just a technical problem, it sucks because it's badly done and it clashes with everything else. I grew up then. Linus' monitor is a multithousand dollar piece of equipment which costs far more than a midrange computer today, even at scalper pricing--for just the monitor. This is a basically 1440p display from VGA period. No game was ever made to look good on that particular monitor; they were made for my family's and friends' monitors and TVs. They may look better in a sense, but they still looked like ass, because it was late 90s. Everything looked like low fidelity minecraft. That's why retrogamers all use pixels stuff, because that is how it all looked even back then on period correct technology. Imagine somebody trying to cargo cult late 90s games, and then cargo culting all the absolute worst aspects that I'm glad are dead and gone, only to leave out the only good thing they often had which was SOUL. Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape, these had soul, Starcraft, Jedi Knight Academy, but they all looked awful and so terrible was it visually that for about a good 10 years the thing that mattered most to gamers was better graphics(partly because I don't think it ever occurred to us the storytelling, artistry, and mechanics would degrade in the process) t. cranky 90s boomer

I want to see how the retro games look on a plasma.

That's cause all it's gotta do is make the electron beams closer together or farther apart, is also why when things get bigger (beams farther apart ) they get washed out colors like watering down paint

It's more auto-scaling than upscaling since most CRT TV never get past SD (525-625 lines). And LCD TVs still fail to adjust lower definitions than their native one. BTW if you're trying to use a CRT TV with a computer that can display higher RGB resolutions (likely something like a Commodore Amiga or an Atari Falcon) you will have a TV that will flicker in a very painful way.

I point blank refused 720p when digital came out. I settled on a 24" 1080 when I did switch, people called me crazy now some 20 years later...

Yep, Linus’ staff didn’t quite do all their homework

15:26 "Trinotron" yeah agreed @lolkLogan, it seems like the videos are more rushed lately

Dude same!!!

Well windows 11 fixed that specific issue of changing setups. however it brought many bugs and visual glitches with multi virtual desktops

I've heard it's still awesome, even if thr FW900 is the holy grail.

@@lepidotos fingers crossed! Some seriously big capacitors in there if something goes wrong.. lol

Exactly, the 454 is a beast, imo the diamontron series is better than the trinitron, because Sony just didn't try to improve it much when they still had their patent intact, once it got lifted and others were able to copy it, some copied and improved it. The 454 i have was sort of "new old stock", bought by a company and only used for a few weeks before being replaced by early LCDs and then kept in a box. Had to replace the main line capacitor tho, it blew up on me when i first powered it on and used it for a few hours, it was quite old anyway.

I've got an Iiyama VisionMaster 400 (found at the local dump, perfect condition), and it's really nice as well. I would be using it with my gaming rig, but for some reason windows completely locks up if I connect it...

@@marcindzamroga8945 only happens with your gaming rig or every other pc you tried it on?

I’d be cool if like Samsung, asus or any company like this would come up with like a limited production of CRTs just for the fuck of it

In the past two years I have snagged a dozen or so CRT TVs and monitors for free. One of the monitors has some burn in but the rest are in great shape. One of them is an old RCA pattern Colortyme console TV from the '80s and one is a Panasonic from the '90s with their pinhole type shadow mask but the rest are all Trinitron pattern. I used a couple of Trinitron monitors from 1995-2009. I keep a Toshiba flat Trinitron pattern 27" VCR/DVD combo in my living room for movies and a Sharp curved type Trinitron pattern 27" in my master suite for playing all my old consoles. Currently, I just have SNES, Gamecube and Wii, plus a Retron NES clone but I really want another PS2. I ended up owning 5 of them because I would think I was done, sell it and then eventually want another one. Dreamcast is getting too expensive so I just emulate that on an older laptop with analog output. One thing I need to do is get busy and start adding component input to all my TVs.

create custom resolution in windows for 240p

I remember walking into a CompUSA back in the day and they had a row of PC CRTs setup, the Sony G400 stood out of the crowd due to its higher aperture grille contrast punch vs the shadow mask CRTs around it, I ended up buying the G400 it was a great monitor and one of many CRTs I'd end up owning, the G520P & FW900 were my favorites and I regret not having the FW900 repaired after the flyback transformer failed.

I think most high end monitors used .23 dot pitch.

The dot pitch measured the distance between physical shadow mask elements, not the pixels themselves. You could have pixels smaller than your dot pitch occasionally - I remember seeing that in the days of .39 dot pitch "interlaced" vs .28 dot pitch "noninterlaced", referring to whether 1024x768 pixel resolution was displayed interlaced or not. On a .39 display, that resolution had a kind of supersampled/downrezzed look, where you could somehow tell that there was more detail behind the shadow mask, but you weren't getting all of it.

@@jimmay8627 That's true. Because the mask only affected which part of the phosphor coating was getting hit by the electron beam, it was/is theoretically possible that the beam power (an in practice brightness of phosphor) of a single dot changes in the middle of dot (assuming beam focusing is sharp enough which didn't happen with cheaper monitors). However, the mask dot pitch obviously puts heavy limitations of possible usable resolution because no information can be passed at the shadow parts of the mask.

1024x768 is XGA, SVGA is 800x600

Yeah Adrien's Basement has a ton of good videos on how to do this kind of work, mainly for older tube monitors for pcs. And depending on the specific monitor, I've heard of recaps being very effective.

How would you increase brightness? Is it the G2 dial on the flyback and the RGB gain and cutoff pots? Adjusting the anode voltage?

@@metaleggman18 absolutely a fantastic source, i think he's in Portland Oregon? a collab would be sick.

My whole ambition is quickly becoming to work as little as possible because man I feel that, but even in my early 20s is like "have some time to play, no money" now I have as many games as I want on a great system and no time. Eventually plan for most people is grow old, have lots of money and lots of free time but very little time left lol

@@pandemicneetbux2110 Yeah... where was Gamepass 15 years ago?

@@HAWXLEADER Game Pass replaced the game rental shops/services. :\

@@pandemicneetbux2110 Oh, the joys of capitalism.

Still remember this girl had a badass sony setup, back in the mid-late 90s when Sony was going high-end. The entire setup was LIGHTYEARS past my rigged-up e-machines. Her Dad was a car salesman with no tech background, have to imagine some sales team took him for a ride lol.

Who

Truth

@@ancientaliensarecoming7201 john linneman is a member of the digital foundry channel, they mainly talk about videogames, graphics technology, history of videogames, and other technical stuff.

@@ancientaliensarecoming7201 digital foundry. They have actually consulted on a few of LTT's retro games video and game engine optimization videoes

Well they do show a clip of one of his DF videos at 17:55.

It will be different, the CRT is beaming the picture to the eyes 1 pixel at a time, taking longer to draw the whole picture 1 pixel at a time, while OLED is drawing the whole frame and is NOT drawing individual pixels one at a time. The brain knows it gets more feeling watching the CRT, especially at the CASINO.

This gave me chills lol

@@austinwolfe7295 There are still a decent amount of good condition CRT monitors around, even a few new in box, so you can still experience top tier CRT displays for now at least.

@@olivermood8003 I miss my CRT Trinitron TV for Smash Melee, Sonic and F-Zero. They are unplayable on a traditional 60 or 75Hz LCD, specially 2D Sonic,

I might have the exact same monitor sitting on top of my gaming PC right now as my second monitor! Was it a ViewSonic Professional Series PT770?

There’s a reason it takes so long to warm up, it’s on its last legs. CRT televisions only last about 8 years, maybe 10

I still hope that SED/FED is being worked on in some lab somewhere. The insane SED/FED resolution potential makes 4K monitors look like 480p, and it can deliver the blackest of black plus near zero latency of CRTs.

To be fair, old tech literally costs an arm and a leg. We complain about how Apple is overpriced now, but a DynaTAC 8000X costs $3,995 (adjusted for Inflation its about $10,000 today) for just a wireless phone. If you want to cough up 10 grand, sure, there may be extremely durable and rugged laptops and phones in that bracket that will never die.

@@cosgrovefamily295 this is far from true and in cases that they don’t last they can be repaired.

@@zayneytem $2/hr Chinese slave labor brings prices down. Before China nearly all tech was manufactured in Japan, and before that the US.

i hooked a 32inch 1366x768 HDTV to a PC 17 years ago. and today my monitor is still 32 inch

The cheapest LCDs cost less new than the cheapest CRTs did at the time. Good luck getting a new desktop crt for 60 dollars (which comes out to around 100 dollars in 2022 money).

So one major thing Linus missed. The CRT advantage is basically mainly for gaming. For real work, including graphics work - you need an LCD based display (or one of the newer off-tech that branches off from it). So unless you mainly only game on the PC, then a CRT will be basically trash. I went from a high end CRT to a mid-range lcd screen in the AMD Althon X2 days, and will say - LCD wins. Just don't buy some cheapo LCD today as even the quality of LCD varied as much as it did back in the day vs today when you shop ultra cheap, vs not cheap but not costly.

But cheap CRT would do high pitch noises and you could not sit before them for longer time periods. The even flickerd a lot. The first, cheapest, LCD with 60Hz had no flickering at all.

@@stonium69 you can often get crt for free

It’s okay, now your GPU which is 1/10 of the size is sucking more power that that😂

I also had a hell of a job wall mounting my CRT

Well that's a crazy monitor. My much more reasonable A90f+ uses only 60 watts.

Max size too, and the respective power draw

@@wilkinlow At full power? Yes. On idle, watching a movie, or when doing office stuff? not by chance.

yeah about 95% of dreamcast games supported 480p progressive scan mode with the vga box, which were already plentiful and easy to find back in 2000. it's not like the Gamecube or PS2, where a minority of games supported progressive. The games that didnt support progressive where usually 2d games like SNK fighters. Funfact, where I live, our Xbox [og] didnt support anything but 480i, and they looked like bad. PAL users got shfted by Microsoft in image quality.

@@anasevi9456 most GameCube games that you would care to play support progressive scan, but the only way to output 480p natively is with a first party adapter that sells for like $350 now.

Bro just get the wii to component cables. Wii uses the same connector as gamecube iirc. These 3rd party cables legit cost 10$ and work great.

@@nebby3 Yeah I should correct my comment to say 480p over VGA (RGBHV). PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox all support at least 480p over YPbPr (Component) but the circuitry for decoding those signals isn't in computer monitors for whatever reason. So you have to find converters for that which are pretty niche, the only one I know of is by the Beharbros, the same people who made the dreamcast box they use in the vid Edit: Also your xbox comment is super wild considering some games support 720p and 1080i on the OG Xbox in NA!

@@nebby3 This isn't as true as is used to be, check out the GC-Video Project, the whole port has been reversed engineered and there's clone solutions on the market for cheaper now Also the Wii is an option like that other guy said but is known to have slightly softer quality

I never stopped using one... lmao

and i was surprized that the crt technic i all about 'reaction time' producing an image. Looking over to my OmenX27 and got simply beeing afraid - even with it's 3ms real timings. Slower than 3 grandpas or more sitting in a ferrari in their rest rooms in their rest rooms house. Also afraid when the alienware qd-oled ist buyable with my budget

Depends how you connected. A lot of people will have used composite or RF which look terrible. Most probably didn’t have VGA adapter for Dreamcast which was a huge leap.

Like Linus mentioned, cheap monitor or a TV are even better for console games.

@@Blox117 nope scanlines are usually part of the design, so not having them in some games makes them look less shaded

CRT Monitors with speakers, Component inputs and VGA were rare and extremely pricy. Most consumers had 480i CRT TV's which looked nothing like a 2048x1536 36" NEC Monitor. Nor did they pay 20000$ usd

@@Blox117 This guy knows. It really depends what monitor you're on because a high end monitor now wipes the floor with CRT, or even just 1440p75, 1080p144 etc. I played Fallout 2 on a normal civilian monitor and it looked bad but we dealt with it because it's what we had, and one of the biggest reasons why "better graphics" became the whole focus of the industry from early 90s throughout the 2000s until the stagnation period of 2010s. It's because if you played Thief even not knowing better you could tell how bad it was just based by what impressed us back then (he shot a bottle and it shattered! wow! so lifelike!) and how low our real expectations. Like I couldn't even imagine being a kid shown today's technology even just the numbers like consumer grade 16 core, hyperthreaded, 4.9ghz chips with northbridge on it and 32[G]b RAM, [T]b storage, microSD, graphical accelerator cards with a hundred times the VRAM that are many times faster than CPUs etc., let alone being shown today's games. I'd just be so blown away, that I've honest to God sat here and thought "if I could tempt you as a devil, young me, what's the most I could've gotten out of you by offering this system in exchange for sacrificing something else, even part of your future" and realized I'd get a hell of a lot out of old me. That's practically "die at age 30 in a car crash no family or friends and fall to Hell" tier to a late 90s kid, and it's not just the graphics, which 1999 me would literally not be able to distinguish from photographs and live action acting[iirc motion capture just started around that year], but also the full scale to mechanics, even though most genres had already been developed by then. This includes things like destructible environments, combined effect mechanics like oil+fire in D:OS2, getting thrown from vehicles and real damage to cars or falling from planes in GTAV, and all that is mid-2010s.

And then on the PC side we had 24" trinitrons that did 2048x1536 at 85hz.

It did 1080i most likely. People gave a lot of crap to 1080i but that's only because they were viewing it on the wrong display. 1080i on a CRT whether it be a VGA monitor or a HD CRT looked amazing

Yeah, but it sucked for 240p content. Don't buy hd crts for retro games, kids :D

@@superslash7254 Somehow the higher resolution felt like it was murdering my eyeballs and that was when I was in my 20's. nowadays I run 4k on a 28"screen now have no issues with eye fatigue.

*This* EXACTLY!

I need this to happen with my Sony PVM 20L2MD, I’m in the freakin Philippines and finding a CRT tech in rural areas, well good luck me.

@@chronology556 u can do it yourself it isn't hard

CRT rejuvinators don't work with Sony tubes. At best it'll do nothing, at worst, it'll kill it.

What do CRT rejuvenators actually do? Like how do they work?

Holy hell, that is an obscure monitor. I can hardly find XP37 / XM37 on Google and Bing.