The CRT monitors do have a faster response time and higher refresh rate (I've seen up to 640x480@480hz <1ms).

But you would be sacrificing fidelity for this "competitive advantage".

You might find this note[1] interesting to read. I would love to see a commercial off the shelf cathode ray tube (CRT) that could do 480 Hz, so please share with us a link if you can find it in your notes.

A CRT monitor, with a refresh rate of 480 Hz, allows just 2 mS (2.083333 mS to be precise) for excitation of the phosphor. As you know, (here is a similar explainer [2]) the phosphor is excited by the arrival of electrons which contribute their kinetic energy when they impact the phosphor to the electron energy of the particular phosphor. When the energy decays back to base level, it emits a photon at a frequency that is characteristic of the band gap between the excited and rest state of the electrons in the outer orbit of the crystal.

The more electrons you can get excited in the phosphor crystal, the brighter the display. But the more electrons in the beam gives the beam more inertia and so rapidly moving it from one side of the screen to the other requires higher voltage potential.

I haven't seen any high refresh rate CRTs but back in college we had a device which was a "flying spot" scanner which had a very fast phosphor but it was enclosed in a black box and basically relied on photographic film for persistence (it was made by a company called "Dicomed"). The shorter the persistence of the phosphor gave it a very high dynamic range of brightness which allowed us to transfer digital photos with a high dynamic range to film without losing fidelity.

I haven't really followed the evolution of cathode ray tubes post the Sony Trinitron era, I would really love to play with the tube you mention, or at a minimum get the engineers specification for it. I'm assuming it was full color? (the Dicomed's screen was a sort of yellowish white and it had three filters that it would place over the screen to scan out a color image).

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/87778main_H-609.pdf

[2] https://www.phosphor-technology.com/how-do-phosphors-work/

P22 phosphors are the ones used in all trinitron PC monitors. I get conflicting numbers on the actual decay time of these phosphors, but with a 240 fps camera the decay time is difficult to judge by flipping through frames. I’d have to make a proper set up to try and even give an estimate.

I can safely say the P22 decay time is below 1 ms. Here [0] it is stated to be 100 us for G & B and up to 1 ms for red. A commonly referenced list of phosphor decay times [1] lists it as “medium”. In general, CRT phosphors seem to have sub 1-ms decay times unless you want a long persistence.

The limiting factors will be in a monitor’s max horizontal scan rate (typically 130 kHz or lower) or the DAC’s maximum pixel clock (it used to be 400 MHz but most VGA adapters these days struggle to keep 200+ MHz stable).

0. https://www.epanorama.net/documents/video/phosphor_decay.htm...

1. http://www.bunkerofdoom.com/tubes/crt/crt_phosphor_research....

Excellent data! Now you need to add the time to saturation (TTS) which gives you how long the beam has to sit on the phosphor to achieve the maximum amount of light. Different tubes do this differently from moderating the energy in the beam itself to modulating "time on spot".

What you end up with at the end of all this research is a really nice ideas of the "hard bits" around engineering a CRT for a particular application. When we looked at CRTs in depth in the EE program one of the things that came across was how so many of the things you had to vary were interconnected. The professor suggested that was why there were so many different models to choose from, even when they were all the same form factor.

Thanks for the links too, I've added the bunkerofdoom one to my collection.

And to be clear, the time it takes for a phosphor dot to go from "off" to "full bright" to "off" again is its frequency response. And every dot of phosphor has to be "visited" by the electron beam on every frame. With those two numbers you can get the absolute fastest you can scan through the dots with full dynamic range.

In the CRT designs we looked at in college they typically used a fixed "dwell time" of the beam, so it was on each pixel for a fixed amount of time, and modulated drive power to get different intensities. (some phosphors are non-linear in their response so you can correct that in the drive table).

And as I was reminded in email, the beam has to visit every pixel AND get back to the top of the screen for the next frame. So on a 480i screen that is 640 x 240 per frame at 30Hz, that is 30 frames per second / 640 * 240 pixes per frame so you have just 195 uS to spend on each pixel. (less than that actually since with overscan you have 720 pixels per line but it is a very short time).

Somewhat tangential, but Dicomed also made pretty special large format digital backs at one point [1] that really have yet to be eclipsed in terms of chip size (definitely in quality). Interesting they also produced what sounds like a really high quality digital to film solution too.

[1] http://www.epi-centre.com/reports/9604cs.html?LMCL=xIZMrP

FYI the SI unit of the second is abbreviate with a lower case “s”. Only units named after humans have uppercase abbreviations.

Are you talking about specialty industrial monitors? I've seen 60-90hz normally. I heard there were 120hz...but 480hz? Which company made that?

I’m used to seeing VGA CRTs with maximum vertical scan rates of 170 Hz and horizontal scan rates of up to 130 kHz. Impressive stuff to be sure, and still relevant compared to LCD in terms of motion clarity. If you can afford a 4K 120 Hz OLED with black frame insertion, that has all of the technical advantages.

However, CRT TVs playing 240p games still have those thicc scanlines and good nostalgic feels.

The CRT monitor being discussed in the article does 160hz at < 2K resolution and 80hz otherwise.

That 240hz panel will have terrible colour reproduction compared to the CRT. Only TN panels are clocked that fast, and TN are ugly.

If you want nicer colours you go for IPS, which has a very slow response time (especially when compared to a CRT).

The only modern display technology that comes close to CRT in terms of colour, contrast and responsiveness, you need to go OLED. And that's great (Oled with scanline emulation and black-frame insertion is incredible!) but OLED has the issues everyone knows about regarding degradation of the organic compounds (burn in).

I want my cake and to eat it, I want great colours and contrast and a stupid fast response time, with a panel that won't burn-in my desktop.

Tech changes fast. Nano-IPS 144hz IPS panels are becoming common now, with upper 90s DCI-P3 coverage, something you'd only dream of a few years ago.

Becoming common isn't quite how I'd phrase it, but they certainly are becoming available if you're willing to pay.

I've been interested in Nano IPS to replace my current ultrawide, but it appears the contrast ratio of Nano IPS panels isn't that great vs. my current MVA panel.

And their contrast is still shit.

I recently bought a couple of Alienware AW2521HFL monitors that are 8-bit IPS and do actually run at 240Hz. They don't even use FRC to achieve that 8-bit color! There's also the MSI MAG251RX which uses the same panel but adds FRC to get 10-bit color!

The downside to them is that they're 24.5" and 1920x1080. I'm ok with that because I paired them with my 34" 3440x1440 screen as side screens. However, it's a really low pixel density to use as a primary monitor.

That's the part that sucks. A nice 4k or 5k monitor like the LG Ultrafines will only do 60hz.

All that said, the Alienware screens seem expensive until you look at how much the other 240hz IPS screens cost. At the price, they also come with a nice 3 year warranty and a really good stand. The part that irritates me is they don't calibrate them. One was way off compared to the other, so I'm waiting on a warranty replacement just on the basis that I think that one is not going to be easy to correct.

These are solid points, the IPS stuff is getting better though. And if there is a miniled salesman out there he will be calling :-), it promises all the win of OLED and none of the downside.

There was also the tech which was basically an array of really small 1-pixel CRTs, it is too bad they couldn't get that to scale to the pixel densities of OLED.

> IPS stuff is getting better though

Not when it comes to contrast. There has been pretty much no improvement on IPS black levels over the past years.

> f you consider the amount of RAM and processing power you have to have inside the monitor at 4K resolution

You need nearly zero memory inside an LCD monitor of any resolution. Technically all you need is 256 bytes for EDID and that’s it. You can drive the panel directly from the graphics card from DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, often with a single format conversion chip.

In fact, Apple’s HD Cinema Displays were built using LG panels with a DVI interface built right into them (which isn’t the norm).

Source: I designed custom FPGA-based LCD panel interfaces for many years.

> I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD monitor it will look better than your CRT :-)

Since you bring up the refresh rate, then i'd assume that you include motion in the "look better" - in which case, i can easily respond with "no, it absolutely does not".

I have a CRT next to me which can do 120Hz at 640x480 (which is a low resolution but the CRT is also very small and i use it on a mid-2000s PC for playing some older games, so it doesn't bother me). It is a Samtron which is basically poor man's Trinitron, so not even among the best out there (i also have a Trinitron but that was also not among the best out there... it was one of the cheaper models).

Despite that, motion on this thing at 120Hz can only be described as liquid butter smooth. Just moving the mouse around makes you want to... well, keep moving the mouse around because it feels so good. FPS games feel amazing.

It is so good that i decided to buy a high refresh rate monitor for my main PC. I avoided that for a long time for two reasons: a) good monitors use high resolutions like 2560x1440 often at huge sizes like 27" and i do not really like high resolutions nor huge monitor (huge in terms of viewable area) and b) all flat panels have persistence issues so chances are they wouldn't be that good.

But you know, having that CRT next to me and using it from time to time really made me want to have a similar experience on my main PC. So i decided to find something that would be close enough and bought a (rather expensive) 165Hz monitor. I mean, ok, how bad can it be?

I rarely get disappointed with new purchases i make and i can't say i was completely disappointed, but i can easily say that if i hadn't experienced using a decent CRT for years (like many that seem to praise modern display tech do - assuming they ever experienced a CRT at all, things aren't getting younger) i'd probably be much more enthusiastic.

The thing is however, i had experienced a CRT and my brand new expensive monitor is far from being as good as the CRT i bought for barely 15 euros.

It is day and night. Not just something that you need to go back and forth to compare - i realized how worse the new monitor was the moment i tried to move some windows around and launched a game i also had played on the older PC and that even though i hadn't used the older PC since a while. All it takes is using both once to realize how better the CRT is.

And it isn't like the new monitor doesn't feel smoother than the 60Hz, but it just isn't as good at the old CRT i have next to me. At best it brings back some of the responsiveness i lost when Windows forced a vsync'd compositor on me. But i never used vsync in games so that sort of responsiveness in games wasn't something i lost and i disable vsync for almost two decades now, so any tearing not only doesn't bother me - it barely registers.

Also, aside of motion, CRTs (at least the decent ones) have much better contrast than any tech outside OLED (which isn't available in PC monitor form, at least not at a non-ridiculous size, non-ridiculous resolution and non-ridiculous price).

Sadly it isn't just a matter of older or cheaper monitors. It is just that modern monitor tech simply sucks at most things outside being flat and having high resolutions. It is fine for office work, etc, which is how i guess they became popular, but for gaming they just aren't as good as the better CRTs (sure there were many crappy CRTs out there - and i am certain that anyone who complains that they dislike CRTs because they flickered used a crappy one - but people who say that they prefer CRTs do not refer to the crappy ones as i'm certain that people who say things are better nowadays do not refer to crappy TNs with washed out colors either).

> So many ways to optimize for particular markets.

I'd like an optimization for a high end CRT please :-/. The article mentions $500, i'd actually pay $1500 for a brand new (not old stock, i mean truly new) good CRT like those mentioned in the article.

I don't know what brand of LCD you might have, but do you have an opinion on the refresh rate settings? My Samsung 4k LCD has a feature I only a few days ago realized I had jacked up to "Fastest" as soon as I got it (from its default of "Standard"). It apparently does something wonky with the backlight? (And without it I think the published refresh rate is nowhere near accurate, as that's like the maximum if you are willing to accept the ramifications of this strobing?)

It is an Agon though i do not remember the exact model name[0]. What you refer to is some trick a few high end monitors have to alleviate image persistence. I think some also do black frame insertion (ie. they insert a black image inbetween updates) which also tries to reduce pixel persistence.

Both of them try to mimic how CRTs work (though i think black frame insertion is closer) but as a side effect they affect the image brightness (usually causing everything to become dimmer) and can introduce perceptible flickering. And yes, some monitors are indeed marketed as the theoretical refresh rate you'd achieve with these effects in action - you'd need to find dedicated monitor review sites (e.g. i've heard some good comments about rtings.com, though ignore the scores and look for the metrics... their scores take into consideration stuff you often wont care about) and of course look for comments on places like Reddit's /r/monitors subreddit for people who already bought a monitor.

[0] https://twitter.com/System32Comics/status/131319474720949862...

I recently got to experience a 240hz IPS monitor. Colors and viewing angles are way better than the 120hz TN monitor i had in the past.

That said, even at 240hz, motion is still blurry. If i move a window and try to read text in it in motion it's still not smooth like real life.

I wish i could experience a Trinitron CRT to compare the motion resolution! On Digital Foundry they make it sounds as you do: amazing. I wish i could judge for myself

My experience is the opposite, a high refresh rate LCD is far more pleasant than my old CRT ever was.

What do you mean with "far more pleasant"? If it is about eye strain, your old CRT was probably either bad or you had it at a very low refresh rate. But a bad modern flat panel will have a lot of its own issues too (e.g. a very cheap Fujitsu monitor i bought some time ago had colors so washed up and awful, it was straining just to look at a static image on it).

If it is something else... i'm not sure what that would be. Can you elaborate?

It seems like 4k is pretty darned wasteful part of the hedonic treadmill. At a more reasonable resolution, this processing power could be used for higher-end graphics algorithms, better AI, longer battery life, and so on.

I've had 4K monitors on both my work laptop, my PC, and my TV for as long as that was possible. Nearly 7 years.

This has cost me thousands and thousands of dollars.

My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at. I don't sit next to the case staring at RGB LEDs. I can't "experience" a processor in any aspect except speed, and that's been perfectly acceptable for a decade.

But I'll stare at the screen for 8 hours a day for work, and an additional few hours at home.

Spending money on improving the image quality of something I look at for 10+ hours a day is absolutely worthwhile!

This is also the advice I give people: Buy a bigger, better monitor than you planned, and make sacrifices elsewhere. A larger 4K monitor is a very visible upgrade in the literal sense versus, say, a few hundred more megahertz on the processor.

I feel this way not only about monitors, but chairs and shoes, and for the same reasons.

I've heard the saying as "spend good money on what separates you from the ground" - tires, shoes/boots, mattress, etc.

In this sense, it'd be "spend good money on what separates you from the virtual". That is, of course, our I/O devices :)

And keyboard, mouse, headphones, bed, pillow, and underclothes.

>My logic is that when I use a computer, it's the monitor that I'm looking at.

Sure. But that doesn't get over the law of diminishing returns. It might not be 4K that, but would you buy 8K or 16K because "it's the monitor I'm looking at", when the only thing it does is waste CPU/GPU, resources, and battery -- for angular resolution lost to the human eye anyway?

>for angular resolution lost to the human eye anyway?

Personal experience tells me that the resolution difference between 4k and lower resolutions (for the same size screens) are Very Noticeable on my 27 monitors. (I have one 4k and one 1440p.) Text is noticeably easier to read on the higher resolution monitor. I think this is primarily because we sit much closer to monitors than to TVs. (I don't think I can tell when my TV plays 4k vs 1080p, as I sit about eight feet away.)

If I had a 30" monitor with 8k resolution, I would probably not be able to tell a difference, unless I went looking very closely to it, so I don't think I'd spend the money on that. However, at 40" or 42", I suspect one would notice it at the distances one normally sits from a computer monitor. At that point, my reason for not buying it would be that I can't afford it. ;)

I've seen an 8K monitor in person.. and... wow. It's like a glossy magazine that can move. It's absolutely astonishing how much additional detail you can see in fonts: subtle differences that are totally lost in normal rendering suddenly come to life. Each font has a unique personality that's just lost in the clunky rendering to a few dozen(!) pixels of a mere 4K display.

If you have poor eyesight it's even more noticeable! Personally, the higher dpi the better for me. I have a 24in 4k monitor and want to buy another but these sizes with 4k are rare

> Buy a bigger, better monitor than you planned

But! Do a bit of research. I sent back a 24" 1080p monitor and got a 21.5" one instead, because the pixel density was too low. And it always will be, but still there's tons of 24" monitors out there at 1080p because people think bigger is better.

Make sure you're going bigger and better in the right ways.

I feel this way about high refresh rate.

Having a 120Hz monitor feels like having a computer that keeps up.

(Provided your input devices are also fast enough.)

A larger monitor I can understand, but on a laptop, how can 4k resolution be visible if it's... too small to see?

That’s sort I’d the point: that you can’t see the pixels … Text looks amazing because you don’t have to anti alias the jaggies away now that the pixels are so tiny. I much prefer text on a very high dpi monitor because everything just looks so crisp. Like a really good printed page, or something else physical. Going back to a low dpi monitor is real hard for me now—pixelated text is really hard to look at.

Well, you wouldn't run the computer at a 1:1 resolution, it would be a logical lower resolution displayed at a higher resolution. For a 4K display, everything would show at the size it would be on a 2K display — but actually rendering at 4K, everything is much crisper rather than just blown-up pixels.

Apple calls it Retina Display, Windows calls it display scale. Apple made it mainstream in 2010 (iPhone) and 2012 (iPad, Macs) whilst Microsoft seems to have made it much more mainstream since Windows 8 and the introduction of its Surface computers.

Depends how close you sit to it (touchscreen models promote closer use) and how good your eyes are :)

I can definitely see the difference between 4K and Full HD on a 15".

Compared to what? A cheaper monitor? On a relative basis, spending $400 on a 4k monitor vs $250 on a similar 1440p monitor is wasteful. But if you compare to any other category of goods, it's a drop in the bucket. Most people don't even consider efficiency when adding thousands of dollars of options to a new car purchase. You can buy a lot of 4k monitors for the amount families spend on larger than needed houses throughout the suburbs of the United States.

Things are getting obscene at the high end of the treadmill though. Current high-end monitors like 38GN850G and X27 are already plumbing the $2000 price point and the X32 is expected to tip the scale at $3600 MSRP. "Compared to" just going out and buying a TV and using it as a monitor - you could buy a 55" OLED for your PC and a 65" for living room at that price. Or two 55" oleds, replace it in 3 years when it starts having burn-in from years of marathon Starcraft sessions or whatever.

There really isn't a lot to justify a 32" IPS 4K144 over a 48" OLED 4K120 other than burn-in.

Enthusiast, early adopter products have always been expensive. This doesn't seem that exceptional to me. It's not like tons and tons of people are buying that high end monitor. I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist? Hdmi 2.1 isn't even done yet is it? How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device? And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk?

Fwiw I have a 4k 144 monitor that I got for $800-900. I believe I first heard about it on this site actually. 4k is important to me for text and 120hz is important to me for gaming. It's nice to have both, and gsync compatibility, all in one device. Well worth a small splurge.

Yes, high-end is a thing but high-end gaming monitors have tripled over the last 3 years or so, and now they are to the point where they are competing with premium televisions which offer a better overall picture quality. So you really have to figure out what you actually want.

IPS contrast is not good and OLED contrast is amazing (it's the only way to get "real" HDR except for VA which has poor motion clarity), with the only real downside to OLED being burn-in (it's gotten massively better over the last few years but heavily UI type stuff in lightmode-type color schemes with fixed elements is the worst case scenario, this should not be your daily driver for Excel spreadsheets). But again, you have to bear in mind that you could literally buy two OLEDs for the price of that "premium" IPS monitor, so if it doesn't become obnoxiously burned within 2.5 years or so (assuming a 5y lifespan on your IPS monitor) you are coming out ahead on burn-in.

> I'm also not sure what 4k 120hz tv you're referring to. Do they exist?

Yes, LG's OLED series has supported 4K120 input (not strobing/interpolation, true input at 120fps) since the last generation (C9, support continues with CX). Also supports HDMI VRR.

CX adds 120 Hz black frame insertion - so it can take 60 hz and alternate between a signal frame and a black frame for additional motion clarity.

> How do you get a 4k 120hz signal into such a device?

For the LG OLED series, HDMI 2.1, from an NVIDIA 3000 series or Radeon RDNA2 GPU.

Or, display stream compression over DP 1.4, which is what the 4K144 gaming panels are currently doing (none of them currently support HDMI 2.1). Also, that currently only gets you to 4K120 without chroma subsampling, another disadvantage of the current "gaming monitor" crop.

> And how am I meant to fit it in my 3ft deep desk?

Wall mount. CX 48" wall mounted 3 feet away is probably about the same as a 34" ultrawide that's 18" away (which is what I'm currently using) I'd think. Certainly a "big" monitor but the people who are really up shit creek are the ones with shallow desks and/or who are currently situated in a corner and can't wall mount.

I don't disagree at all with this.

In an adjacent field, graphics, we used to debate spending cycles on simulating thing like lens flare, as if in a first person shooter you are wearing goggles with tubular optics? Sure it showed off mad math skilz but what was the point?

I do appreciate the lack of eyestrain for detail work on a high resolution CRT though.

at least on a 27" display, I mostly agree 2160p is overkill for games. it's hard to notice the additional sharpness over 1440p, and it breaks a lot of old games that don't support UI scaling. the performance hit isn't necessarily that bad though; at 2160p, I'm satisfied with much lower AA settings which almost splits the difference between 1440p and 2160p. if the game is really demanding, you can always drop down to 1080p with perfect scaling. it wasn't too long ago that 1080p was an acceptable resolution on a 27" display. not really an issue for me anyway. my 1080ti can do better than 60 fps in most games I play.

knowing what I know now, I'd almost rather have a higher refresh rate 1440p monitor. but now that I'm working from home, I really appreciate the higher dpi for coding. the difference in font rendering really is night and day. I can't unsee it.

yeees. Just look at the crappy Netflix 4k, which is less bandwith than a 1080p Bluray (like 30% less iirc). Now, obviously, it's a better codec, but h265/VP-9 (or whatever they use) won't give you a > 400% increased efficiency over h264. So, people are buying new Fire-TVs/TVs/GPUs all so that they can enjoy a 4k artifact show.

Meanwhile I've fallen under the hedonic treadmill and bought a TV. Sitting 3m from this 49inch screen, I play Netflix in 540p (on Linux) – and it totally looks fine. Well...

But, truth be told: I'm typing this on a 32inch 4K monitor. For work it's gorgeous (yet some people still buy FHD...).

Even worse, you can't see in 4K. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM

Yeah but could you play duck hunt?

And in the old old days you could skip the scanning and just go draw what you wanted where you wanted with vector graphics. (as long as there weren't too many "what"s)

There were even tricks like defocusing the beam.

:)

"I can pretty much assure you that with a 240Hz refresh rate 4K LCD"

It depends what you will plug on it. CRT are considered the best solution to play unmodded old consoles (up to the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox/Gamecube generation, and even the Wii) or VHS tapes. Games and consoles were made to look good on CRT, and to take advantages of specific features of these TV.

I agree with this and it is key. Video that has been "designed to be displayed on TV" looks better than stuff that wasn't designed to be shown there. The same is true for LCDs of course.