At about the age of 14 I somehow came into ownership of 5" black and white TV. I wasn't allowed to have a TV in my bedroom, but this thing probably looked useless to my parents so they didn't say anything.
Little did they know, while they were at work, I went up into the attic and ran a coaxial cable from a splitter down into my room and into the back of the VCR, all neatly tucked behind my desk. I spliced an old mono 1/8 jack onto an RCA component for the video (ext.ant to VCR) and did a similar splicing for the audio, but I had to run it through an old 8 track player to amplify the audio. It may be obvious that I collected a lot of old junk and cables (I still do).
I did this all so I could primarily watch Conan O'Brien... which was available on channel 4 anyway (accessible via antenna) but I just wanted to watch the show in the highest definition possible.
Having my first kid soon, I'm curious if he'll be as determined to work around the rules.
When I was 14, my dad got us dialup internet in 1994. At the ISP, I had never paid more attention in my life, and when we got home I rushed to install the tcp software and 'internet in a box' for windows 95. My dad got irate at how quickly I was moving through it and told me that he wouldn't help me fix it after I messed it up.
When he came down an hour later and I was transfixed with the primordial web, he gave me a deadly serious warning - that he had a report he could run on the computer to list everything I was visiting. I was dubious. So I proved to myself that he didn't.
18 months later I was working at the ISP. I always wonder if that threat by him to avoid smut and bomb making was a deliberate seed being planted, or just a panicked father veneering over a complete loss of control.
So many memories. I remember riding my bike to the local ISP's office to get my internet welcome packet. Because I wasn't going to wait 5-7 business days for it to arrive in the mail. It came complete with a dozen floppies for Mac and PC, account details, and the Internet Yellow Pages. Which is sitting on a shelf in my parents garage.
At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was some local guy with enough scratch to afford a T1 and a bank of modems.
The memories indeed! We had a T1 and a pile of Livingston Portmaster 2e terminal servers, connected with a centrex hunt group to a single dialup phone number.
I learned a lot about people very quickly. As we got more popular, we started to get busy signals, because we couldn't grow our hardware fast enough - and then people learned how to do keepalives, so that they wouldn't get stuck offline on a busy signal. That was a race to the bottom. Sharing a physical resource like a phone port is a dark ages thing I am glad we no longer contend with.
We have it much, much better than we did back then.
But I'd still like to go on a time-vacation to enjoy the selection bias of the times - I'm glad we made the Internet easy enough for everyone to get online, but it would be neat to visit 25 years to visit the greener pastures of old.
LOL. I was one of those keepalive hackers. Once I discovered newsgroups and IRC I'd leave the line up to download while I was at school. Downloading a single MP3 over 19.2kbps took the better part of a day.
I remember learning about the existence of the Internet from encountering a local ISP's kiosk in the mall in 1995. They had an ISDN line serving the kiosk, and as long as I didn't outright block anyone from trying the Internet out they didn't mind me sitting there and surfing. That was also when I discovered the concept of emulation, and I feel I was very fortunate to have been able to had my first experiences with both concepts simultaneously.
In the DC area in the 80’s, there was a system called Super TV that broadcast adult entertainment at ~900 MHz. I believe they removed the vertical sync, in addition to requiring a UHF dish and tuner.
Anyway, as a kid, I found you could take an old B&W set with the fine tuning knob, and set it between channel 87 & 88, then manually get a few seconds of restored sync by twiddling the fine tuning.
Used that same TV on my C64, and few years later, the same TV could be used to eavesdrop on AMPS cell phones. Versatile devices.
He will. Kids try to find loop-holes in every single rule, and they will deliberately misinterpret everything you say in order to use it against you later on. :)
That's a phase. And it's more annoying when the parent teach the child how to argue and value discussions as a mean to solve conflicts or find a solution to problems. So,... sometimes it's really annoying :).
I don't have a kid, but I recall one of my nieces friends went to the kitchen. We turned around and asked if she needed anything and she said "oh I'm just getting some food for the group." We nodded and went back to our conversation. In the corner of my eye, I realized she was scrounging up chocolate/candy. I sort of shrugged and thought, well technically that is food.
Well, different kids are different. It was a lot of work, but eventually I convinced my kid that a) we were on the same team so rules were more for everyones' quality of life than just harassment, b) I knew more than they did so my feedback on what they should do was useful to them, and (importantly) c) "rules lawyering" was just as risky as simply breaking rules.
When my daughter asks me "Daddy, can you <something>", I usually reply with "Yes" and then leave it at that. Then should responds with "WILL you <something>", and I do it. I very clearly taught her the difference between can and will by doing so. And now she does the same thing to my wife. And I get in trouble for it. It's great.
This sort of thing drove me insane in elementary school and still does to this day. In vernacular English, "can you" is just a more polite and less aggressive form of "will you". Having those two options is really useful. Distinguishing between them like that always feels more like a power play by someone trying to force someone else to use an arbitrary phrasing, rather than an actual lesson in how English works.
What's the point of that "lesson"?
In English and many other languages politeness in asking for something is achieved by beating around the bush. That's just how it works.
"Could you do me a favor and look into that issue?". Answering yes implies you'll do it. Same goes for the "woulds" and "cans" and "mind doing ... s".
They two different questions. One is asking if you are you able to, the other if you are willing to. I don't teach my daughter to correct people outside the house, but I do want her to speak properly when out there.
It's the same as everyone knows what she means when she says "libary", but I correct her to pronounce it "library".
Pragmatically, neither of them is a question: they are more and less polite requests (or a request and an order). Your daughter is perceptive enough to have worked this out; probably you did too, but at some point decided to override your unconcious competence with concious nitpicking.
My friend and I did something like that to get cable to his room. He lived in a double-wide, his bedroom in the back, and the cable was in the front. We scrounged.
Came up with an adapter here, wire there, and some cellophane tape. Oh, and some thumbtacks.
Some of the wire was speaker cable, the rest was telephone cord. A pair of scissors, some cutting and splicing and taping and tacking - we had it ran.
Other than a very janky signal (gee - why's that?) - he had cable TV. We then proceeded to wire up his stereo to the TV (because we wanted better sound for the Sega Genesis, dangit!). In the end somehow it all worked, and didn't burn his mother's home down.
A month later his older brother saw what we did, and ran a proper run of coax under the trailer, and cleaned up our stereo/tv mess.
Hah! I had one of these hooked up in my car around the turn of the century! Mounted under the dash, with a micro (mini?) atx computer in the trunk, all powered by an inverter. I controlled it with a thumb ring trackball, and a mini keyboard that I would stow under the driver's seat. Once I got going, I only needed the trackball, since I was just using it with Winamp to play my mp3s. No wireless anything back then (at least not reliable). It looked cool enough that someone broke my window to steal it!
I think that this TV is from the 1990s, not from 1980s, because design screams it. Also there is no brand name anywhere, so the manufacturer is not proud of this cheap device, the front panel captions are screen printed, DC barrel connector has the modern polarity sign with a negative sleeve.
Yeah, so mumble years ago my second monitor was a B&W workstation monitor that I picked up for next to nothing. It was actually slightly higher resolution than my other "proper" monitor, and much sharper. I had to make a converter from a VGA output on my video card to a single coaxial signal for the monitor. Luckily the monitor just wanted pull-to-ground for the blanking signals (both of them), so I could make a passive converter with just a few resistors (to mix the three colours) and a couple of transistors (to pull the signal to ground when blanking).
Waaay back in the day of PCs (late 80s, early 90s) the way to get "high res graphics" and "dual screens" was to hook up to your PC (which was usually an actual IBM machine) a CGA monitor for regular usage, and then add a Hercules card and monitor for the "second display".
Downside was that the Hercules - while being very high resolution for the day - was only monochrome, and amber. But it was a common solution for many CAD systems (with a price to match of course).
IIRC, it was also a setup that some later game programmers used (I may be wrong, but IIRC, Carmack used something like this?) - because they could run the debugger on the monochrome Hercules, while outputting the game on the color monitor (CGA/EGA/VGA). This was well after better solutions came around for CAD, so the Hercules setup was a relatively inexpensive upgrade.
I had Hercules for my first "IBM PC" computer, while everyone else either had CGA, EGA or even VGA! - It was the computer that my uncle left, before leaving for US - And yes, it was meant to run AutoCAD - lol
Being bored of not too many games working, I decided to take matter in my hands. Early on, I got into making various resident applications - and made one (used Turbo Pascal with inline assembly), where I would "convert" the 320x200 VGA buffer into Hercules bits. It was not taking care of what the palette was, but just happened to work by accident for some of the games (like Trolls). I also had to hack Trolls to first ignore the fact that I did not have VGA, then hack it instead of using 0xA0000 as VGA buffer (the standard address for an VGA adapter), but I would hack that location with my own buffer.
It kind of worked, real slow - I've got about - I dunno - maybe 5-10fps - lol.
Fun fact of trolls that I've found, but could not completely understood it back then (I was probably 9th or 10th grade, english is my secondary language) was this: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls/trivia
"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"
So having hercules card made me - lol - did a bit of fun hacking :)
If I only knew back then, but it might've not been been available to me. Or it's possible that I've tried it, and might've even relied on it, as I played other games, but this one, along with few others were VGA only. Wow, now that i think of it... it was long time ago... Just trying to squeze that last bit of 640kb with QEMM... looool
I still use a CRT. Works great, no fuss. Its just heavy to move, which I don't do often. People comment on how rich the colors are. 85hz refresh solves the 'flicker' issue.
CRTs are unmatched for specific use cases. Retro consoles that predate HD support (and a few that can technically output HD like the PS2 are still better on a CRT), rhythm gaming (I play Clone Hero, which is an independent Guitar Hero-style engine, on a 120Hz CRT), and viewing SDTV content are three use cases where flat panel displays just cannot match all of the benefits that CRTs offer.
However, I still agree that for the majority of the public, flat-panel displays are probably better. They take up less room, generally provide a sharper and higher-resolution image, and they're more compatible with the most common video devices found in homes today (connnecting many devices to SD CRTs requires jumping through some hoops).
I'd say for PC usage they _were_ unmatched, but that's no longer the case. I played games professionally at one point, of course using CRTs when they were the superior choice, but in this day and age with affordable 240hz sub-1ms G2G LCD displays...
I just can't see any argument for using a CRT with a PC in 2019.
The arbitrary resolution support and superior color saturation might still justify using a CRT in some cases. Back in the day I ran a CRT at some bizarro resolution with custom XFree86 timings to get as much screen space or as high a refresh as possible while matching width or height of another different display. LCD scaling will always be blurrier.
I reluctantly discarded my last CRT a few years ago. They're not just heavy to move, they also take a lot of room on my desk and they generate a lot of heat.
For a long time LCDs really couldn't compete with CRTs. They had bad resolutions, terrible viewing angles and terrible colors (and especially horrendous blacks).
Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving. Hopefully we'll get OLED or something similar in the near future that will solve that once and for all. I decided that it was good enough to finally make the switch definitively.
I also stuck with CRTs long after everyone else abandoned them for TFT panels which I mostly hated. The widespread availability of IPS panels with decent viewing angles finally convinced me to switch, though.
"Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving."
Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/ The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to buy a good LCD screen. Monitors you may have to dig into relatively technical reviews of to find out (generic tech magazine reviewer may not tell you), and finding out what specific kind of screen a laptop has can be very difficult sometimes. Manufacturers don't really want to talk about it as they tend to benefit from being fuzzy about exaggerated specs, and a lot of "reviewers" aren't really aware enough of these issues to make a point of it in their review.
I'm not an expert but I'd swear even in the TN space there's a lot of variation. I once accidentally bought a latop that basically literally didn't have a viewing angle; even at the "optimum" angle only the vertically-middle 50% of the screen was correct and the top and bottom were already showing major brightess drop-off and color inaccuracy. I don't just mean "I don't like to admit it but sometimes I can be a bit of a videophile" sort of complaints, either, I mean more like "literally can't read the word 'Start' on the Start Menu because the text and the background have both color shifted that much". Ironically, sold as a media laptop that only the most casual casual would have wanted to actually watch movies on. Dumped that one right quick. And this particular laptop was priced in the range where it really should have had a decent screen.
By contrast, I'm coding on what is almost certainly a TN monitor, and I really don't care. I wouldn't want it on my personal laptop, the Macbook screen driving it is much, much better by comparison, but I don't do anything color sensitive at work. There's very minimal viewing angle distortion and that's all I really need. (I mean, push comes to shove, I could pretty much do my job on a monochrome monitor and only be somewhat annoyed.)
>Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/ The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.
You're right, I should've been a bit more explicit, I was mainly comparing "average" CRTs from up to about 2005 (back when they were still relatively mainstream) from an average LCD monitor today. Not the top of the line but not the bargain bin either.
For a long time switching from CRT to a comparably-priced LCD was a massive downgrade. You had a lower resolution, ridiculous ghosting, bad colors, black levels that looked like the rising sun and a viewing angle on par with the angular diameter of Pluto.
Nowadays you can find relatively cheap 4k LCDs that perform decently. Sure the blacks aren't perfectly black and it's not good enough for any serious color-sensitive work but for coding and gaming it's good enough for me.
Black level is the biggest tell. Any set based around an LCD panel will never generate truly dark blacks, unless you have addressable backlighting where you can turn off or dim the backlight behind individual pixels.
That is, until they improve LCD's ability to block light. When you can turn off an LCD pixel and block virtually all light from coming through (or around) that pixel, then you'll get much deeper blacks
What do you use it for? When I read the headline I hoped it was about using that TV for programming/browsing, just to see with what little you can get by.
I know someone who converted one of these into a home-made terminal, so they could connect to the computer at school and work from home. They drilled a hole into the TV, added a socket for video input which bypassed the antenna/demodulator, and hooked it up to a home-made 8-bit computer. 32 columns!
Sounds like I need to hook up my 2" Sinclair MTV1 or Seiko wrist TV watch, both of which have just been gathering dust. However, neither have any sort of input -- is there a USB or HDMI ultra low power VHF or UHF transmitter so I can go total Terry Gilliam in the house with multiple displays??
The TV watch is all-in-one? I thought those usually had an external tuner that plugged into the wrist "monitor" via a cable of some sort? If so, then find the pinout and type of connector it is, and try to hack it that way.
Whatever you do with that TV watch, though, don't destroy it. It might not be right now, but someday in the not-too-far future it could be worth some serious cash by a TV collector. Honestly, it might be that way now - so check into that before jumping into something like this.
Yes, external battery box / tuner. I'm not sure if the tuner to display interface is actually video, or is basically a proprietary LCD driver at that point. This one is NIB, so I'd probably get another to experiment with first...
Ha, I got the same model 5" portable TV from Goodwill - the composite input work perfectly with the Raspberry Pi's composite output (some basic soldering is required on the RPi Zero).
My plan was to make it a self-contained old-school PC (with green cellophane film on the monitor for aesthetics) and internally mounting the RPi inside the shell, but I'm being held back by my fear of the high-voltage circuitry of the CRT, and a couple of stripped screws.
Okay. For my first-year university physics project, I made a jumble of wires attached to the parallel port of a computer on one end and the X/Y inputs of an oscilloscope on the other end, and could get it to display vector graphics. (Badly. Very badly. There was far too much stray capacitance in the circuit.)
Yep, a blog post that teaches you nothing except 'adapters exist' and is also poorly written. Not sure what the criteria are for making the front page is, but I'm baffled how this could meet them.
I have a bunch of computer CRT monitors and the only way to get bad refresh rate that you actually notice is to set them at 60Hz. At 70Hz or above (most can do 85Hz, any good CRT monitor should be able to go above that) you wont have any issues.
Also while this can cause eye fatigue (which depends from person to person), i could never find any proof (and i just did a quick search) that there is any sort of permanent eye damage.
The counter proof is TV viewing skews extremely old, and there's plenty of elderly who've been staring into 60Hz screens for multiple decades with no obvious TV related illnesses.
To be fair, there is a significant perceptual difference in flicker between a 15KHz interlaced display, and a 31KHz progressive display. With interlaced video, the flicker is distributed across the scanlines, whereas a progressive display will seem to flicker the entire screen at once.
Edit: added "seem to", as I'm fully aware that CRTs scan the tube rather than doing anything to the entire screen "at once".
You are typically not watching them at the same distance either, and the fact that TV screens are interlaced might also affect the flickering effect (I understand 1990s monitors weren't).
I remember that my 67Hz macintosh monitor was really stressing my eyes as a teenager, while I never had this problem with a TV.
My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. Neon green screen with "black-ish" text, 32 col x 16 rows. Cursor was a rainbow flashing block. I'm still not certain whether someone with epilepsy couldn't be triggered into a seizure by that screen...
Now imagine being 10 years old, and having that in front of your face while coding in BASIC, glowing from a 19" TV mere inches in front of you...hehe. That was me!
I won't claim one way or the other to not have suffered damage of some sort - I'm really not sure.
Strangely, my mom always complained to me about "sitting to close to the TV" - but had no problem when I was in front of this thing for hours on end, typing away, etc.
You're misunderstanding interlacing. Interlacing was a way to still keep 50Hz (or 60Hz in some parts of the world) while having twice as many rows. It didn't give you a higher refresh rate than that.
No, but the difference in scanning pattern does provide a quite stark perceptual difference between 15KHz interlaced and 31KHz progressive at 60Hz. The scanning of fields seems to provide a higher chance that field 1's bottom lines won't have disappeared by the time the monitor is scanning field 2's bottom lines. Of course, it's largely dependent on a monitor's specific phosphor persistence, and why high-persistence monitors were so common in the earlier days of personal computing.
Not necessarily lasting physical damage, but flickering CRTs, or for that matter flickering fluorescent or LED lights can cause headaches, nausea, ...
I've certainly noticed it myself, using 75 Hz CRTs made me feel tired after a few hours, unlike 85 Hz.
> In 1989, my colleagues and I compared fluorescent lighting that flickered 100 times a second with lights that appeared the same but didn’t flicker. We found that office workers were half as likely on average to experience headaches under the non-flickering lights.
I always worry about what those jarringly bright LED brake lights with a low refresh rate (the ones that leave highly distracting dotted red trails across your field of vision when you move your eyes) are doing to my eyes and everyone else's.
Little did they know, while they were at work, I went up into the attic and ran a coaxial cable from a splitter down into my room and into the back of the VCR, all neatly tucked behind my desk. I spliced an old mono 1/8 jack onto an RCA component for the video (ext.ant to VCR) and did a similar splicing for the audio, but I had to run it through an old 8 track player to amplify the audio. It may be obvious that I collected a lot of old junk and cables (I still do).
I did this all so I could primarily watch Conan O'Brien... which was available on channel 4 anyway (accessible via antenna) but I just wanted to watch the show in the highest definition possible.
Having my first kid soon, I'm curious if he'll be as determined to work around the rules.
When he came down an hour later and I was transfixed with the primordial web, he gave me a deadly serious warning - that he had a report he could run on the computer to list everything I was visiting. I was dubious. So I proved to myself that he didn't.
18 months later I was working at the ISP. I always wonder if that threat by him to avoid smut and bomb making was a deliberate seed being planted, or just a panicked father veneering over a complete loss of control.
At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was some local guy with enough scratch to afford a T1 and a bank of modems.
I learned a lot about people very quickly. As we got more popular, we started to get busy signals, because we couldn't grow our hardware fast enough - and then people learned how to do keepalives, so that they wouldn't get stuck offline on a busy signal. That was a race to the bottom. Sharing a physical resource like a phone port is a dark ages thing I am glad we no longer contend with.
We have it much, much better than we did back then.
But I'd still like to go on a time-vacation to enjoy the selection bias of the times - I'm glad we made the Internet easy enough for everyone to get online, but it would be neat to visit 25 years to visit the greener pastures of old.
In some areas - probably. Here in Phoenix, I got the internet in 1993 - dialup shell access - from Internet Direct.
Yes - that Internet Direct.
Anyway, as a kid, I found you could take an old B&W set with the fine tuning knob, and set it between channel 87 & 88, then manually get a few seconds of restored sync by twiddling the fine tuning.
Used that same TV on my C64, and few years later, the same TV could be used to eavesdrop on AMPS cell phones. Versatile devices.
"Could you do me a favor and look into that issue?". Answering yes implies you'll do it. Same goes for the "woulds" and "cans" and "mind doing ... s".
It's the same as everyone knows what she means when she says "libary", but I correct her to pronounce it "library".
Ps how did you make your 2nd smiley so smug? :P
I did something similar, also to watch late night comedy.
However, I used two 300 to 75 ohm converters and speaker cable to connect with a splitter to the TV.
I remember proving my father and RadioShack salesman wrong about the proper adapter needed to go from 3.5mm mono to the female coax connector.
I recently bought two 5” black and white portable TVs at a flea market for $5 total.
One of them does have a video input.
My friend and I did something like that to get cable to his room. He lived in a double-wide, his bedroom in the back, and the cable was in the front. We scrounged.
Came up with an adapter here, wire there, and some cellophane tape. Oh, and some thumbtacks.
Some of the wire was speaker cable, the rest was telephone cord. A pair of scissors, some cutting and splicing and taping and tacking - we had it ran.
Other than a very janky signal (gee - why's that?) - he had cable TV. We then proceeded to wire up his stereo to the TV (because we wanted better sound for the Sega Genesis, dangit!). In the end somehow it all worked, and didn't burn his mother's home down.
A month later his older brother saw what we did, and ran a proper run of coax under the trailer, and cleaned up our stereo/tv mess.
Regular old B&W TV connected via HDMI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMiMz1uGCXI
A tiny 1/2 inch CRT used as a display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY7olqQF8iM
Downside was that the Hercules - while being very high resolution for the day - was only monochrome, and amber. But it was a common solution for many CAD systems (with a price to match of course).
IIRC, it was also a setup that some later game programmers used (I may be wrong, but IIRC, Carmack used something like this?) - because they could run the debugger on the monochrome Hercules, while outputting the game on the color monitor (CGA/EGA/VGA). This was well after better solutions came around for CAD, so the Hercules setup was a relatively inexpensive upgrade.
Being bored of not too many games working, I decided to take matter in my hands. Early on, I got into making various resident applications - and made one (used Turbo Pascal with inline assembly), where I would "convert" the 320x200 VGA buffer into Hercules bits. It was not taking care of what the palette was, but just happened to work by accident for some of the games (like Trolls). I also had to hack Trolls to first ignore the fact that I did not have VGA, then hack it instead of using 0xA0000 as VGA buffer (the standard address for an VGA adapter), but I would hack that location with my own buffer.
It kind of worked, real slow - I've got about - I dunno - maybe 5-10fps - lol.
Fun fact of trolls that I've found, but could not completely understood it back then (I was probably 9th or 10th grade, english is my secondary language) was this: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trolls/trivia
"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"
So having hercules card made me - lol - did a bit of fun hacking :)
Just knocking up a VGA to composite circuit similar to the one linked below (AD724 chip) to put my laptop onto a 21" Philips colour TV from the 1990s:
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/403637/vga-t...
However, I still agree that for the majority of the public, flat-panel displays are probably better. They take up less room, generally provide a sharper and higher-resolution image, and they're more compatible with the most common video devices found in homes today (connnecting many devices to SD CRTs requires jumping through some hoops).
I'd say for PC usage they _were_ unmatched, but that's no longer the case. I played games professionally at one point, of course using CRTs when they were the superior choice, but in this day and age with affordable 240hz sub-1ms G2G LCD displays...
I just can't see any argument for using a CRT with a PC in 2019.
For a long time LCDs really couldn't compete with CRTs. They had bad resolutions, terrible viewing angles and terrible colors (and especially horrendous blacks).
Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving. Hopefully we'll get OLED or something similar in the near future that will solve that once and for all. I decided that it was good enough to finally make the switch definitively.
Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/ The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to buy a good LCD screen. Monitors you may have to dig into relatively technical reviews of to find out (generic tech magazine reviewer may not tell you), and finding out what specific kind of screen a laptop has can be very difficult sometimes. Manufacturers don't really want to talk about it as they tend to benefit from being fuzzy about exaggerated specs, and a lot of "reviewers" aren't really aware enough of these issues to make a point of it in their review.
I'm not an expert but I'd swear even in the TN space there's a lot of variation. I once accidentally bought a latop that basically literally didn't have a viewing angle; even at the "optimum" angle only the vertically-middle 50% of the screen was correct and the top and bottom were already showing major brightess drop-off and color inaccuracy. I don't just mean "I don't like to admit it but sometimes I can be a bit of a videophile" sort of complaints, either, I mean more like "literally can't read the word 'Start' on the Start Menu because the text and the background have both color shifted that much". Ironically, sold as a media laptop that only the most casual casual would have wanted to actually watch movies on. Dumped that one right quick. And this particular laptop was priced in the range where it really should have had a decent screen.
By contrast, I'm coding on what is almost certainly a TN monitor, and I really don't care. I wouldn't want it on my personal laptop, the Macbook screen driving it is much, much better by comparison, but I don't do anything color sensitive at work. There's very minimal viewing angle distortion and that's all I really need. (I mean, push comes to shove, I could pretty much do my job on a monochrome monitor and only be somewhat annoyed.)
You're right, I should've been a bit more explicit, I was mainly comparing "average" CRTs from up to about 2005 (back when they were still relatively mainstream) from an average LCD monitor today. Not the top of the line but not the bargain bin either.
For a long time switching from CRT to a comparably-priced LCD was a massive downgrade. You had a lower resolution, ridiculous ghosting, bad colors, black levels that looked like the rising sun and a viewing angle on par with the angular diameter of Pluto.
Nowadays you can find relatively cheap 4k LCDs that perform decently. Sure the blacks aren't perfectly black and it's not good enough for any serious color-sensitive work but for coding and gaming it's good enough for me.
That is, until they improve LCD's ability to block light. When you can turn off an LCD pixel and block virtually all light from coming through (or around) that pixel, then you'll get much deeper blacks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter
Times was hard for some of us!
;-p
Whatever you do with that TV watch, though, don't destroy it. It might not be right now, but someday in the not-too-far future it could be worth some serious cash by a TV collector. Honestly, it might be that way now - so check into that before jumping into something like this.
The Seiko T001 does have an external tuner and routinely go for $400-500+ on eBay, depending on condition.
https://monochrome-watches.com/seiko-t001-mother-smart-watch...
My plan was to make it a self-contained old-school PC (with green cellophane film on the monitor for aesthetics) and internally mounting the RPi inside the shell, but I'm being held back by my fear of the high-voltage circuitry of the CRT, and a couple of stripped screws.
One thing I don't miss from CRT monitors from the 90s.
Also while this can cause eye fatigue (which depends from person to person), i could never find any proof (and i just did a quick search) that there is any sort of permanent eye damage.
Edit: added "seem to", as I'm fully aware that CRTs scan the tube rather than doing anything to the entire screen "at once".
I remember that my 67Hz macintosh monitor was really stressing my eyes as a teenager, while I never had this problem with a TV.
Want an idea? Look at this:
https://www.haplessgenius.com/mocha/
Now imagine being 10 years old, and having that in front of your face while coding in BASIC, glowing from a 19" TV mere inches in front of you...hehe. That was me!
I won't claim one way or the other to not have suffered damage of some sort - I'm really not sure.
Strangely, my mom always complained to me about "sitting to close to the TV" - but had no problem when I was in front of this thing for hours on end, typing away, etc.
I've certainly noticed it myself, using 75 Hz CRTs made me feel tired after a few hours, unlike 85 Hz.
> In 1989, my colleagues and I compared fluorescent lighting that flickered 100 times a second with lights that appeared the same but didn’t flicker. We found that office workers were half as likely on average to experience headaches under the non-flickering lights.
https://www1.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/1989-82.pdf