Rip-crt?

Great Debates
41

Well sure, but that stopped being the case around two years ago. I bought a very nice 19" widescreen LCD for £110 getting on for a year ago. I just went to the UK’s biggest online computer parts supplier to see what a rough equivalent would cost, and found you can’t buy a CRT at all. They just aren’t sold.

Okay, second-hand CRTs are cheap as chips at the moment. In fact I was trying to get rid of a 21" Sony Trinitron display on Craigslist recently and got not one response at £20 - in the end I swapped it for a six-pack of beer. But that just reflects their almost total undesirability; no bugger wants one, and this is when advertised on a forum for the cheapest cheapskates around :). The point where an LCD costs less than a comparable CRT was passed a good while ago, and that’s comparing them solely in terms of visible screen space, and ignoring their benefits in terms of desk space and general flexibility.

I think many people here aren’t realising what the major market for displays is; it’s not the piecemeal home upgrader. It’s the OEM market, and most importantly the business market. The volumes in those markets for middle-ground PCs replaced every few years are huge compared to individual consumers going out specifically to purchase just a monitor. And in those markets, the CRT is simply non-existent.

Sure, there’s a lot of CRTs out there, and will continue to be for some time. But they’re just not made in the same volumes that they were (as I say, you practically can’t get them here in the UK). As far as the mass market is concerned, they don’t exist any more.

ETA: Newegg lists 98 different kinds of LCD monitor. It lists five CRTs, and the only decent one costs more than an LCD fully four inches bigger. Case closed, surely.

42

OTOH, I have a basement full of perfectly usable CRT monitors of various models, sizes and vintage that people have given me when they upgraded. When one of mine breaks, I just pull out another from the basement. Interestingly, the replacement is usually better quality than the original.

So it will be a while before my backlog of CRTs gets depleted. Until then, they are cheaper than the cheapest LCD.

Now if only I can get rid of these dead CRT monitors clogging up my garage…

43

That’s not so much “on the other hand”, though; it’s just you taking advantage of the complete undesirability of CRTs, which is a symptom of their almost complete disappearance from the consumer market. And that’s perfectly sensible - the only reason I got rid of mine was that it weighed 25kg, and my desk was collapsing under the weight. But it doesn’t mean the technology has any meaningful life left in it, at least as far as the mass market is concerned.

44

In one breath you acknowledge that a person desires to use CRTs despite their “complete undesireability”. Doesn’t anything in that strike you as messed up?

Look, it’s clear that LCDs are currently by far outselling CRTs. It’s well-known that CRTs have several downsides (weight, depth, weight, weight, and weight) that make LCDs more appealing to people, especially businesses. It’s obvious that many people don’t notice or care about the things that LCDs are inferior at compared to CRTs (color accuracy, black depth, variable resolutions, screen door effect). It’s patently clear that LCDs are outselling CRTs by an infinite factor, as businesses and other people who don’t care about the downsides buy them up to replace their existing CRTs.

But this does not mean that CRTs have no upsides or legitimate uses, or that they have attained “complete undesirability”. That doesn’t follow; in fact, it’s clearly false.

If CRTs completely cease to be made or sold due to LCD screens, it will be because they’re not profitable enough to make with the lessened demand, not because the demand isn’t there.

45

No. I had to get rid of a professional-quality flatscreen CRT virtually for free because no bugger wanted it. I would have carried on using it were it practical (because I’m skint, and didn’t want to buy a replacement), but it wasn’t. You don’t seem to realise that everyone else here is talking about the current new monitor market. No matter how much you point out how old CRTs are still pretty good (and I agree), it’s irrelevant. They’re hardly manufactured, and barely sold. I don’t see how you can argue with that. And that’s what the OP was asking.

I didn’t say they have no upsides, and my “undesirability” comment was in respect to the current consumer market, as I made pretty clear. What I’m saying is that pretty much nobody, anywhere, wants to buy a new CRT. And that’s true; quite obviously so. Do you think CRTs are going to stage a comeback from here?

In other words, it will be because LCDs represent a better value proposition now; and they do. Which means that CRTs are pretty much a dead technology outside of niche markets and hoarders with a basement full of other people’s cast-offs. I don’t see why this is controversial. Just look; the biggest online retailer in the States has just five CRT models on sale. Dell don’t sell them at all. Does this really not tell you anything?

You seem to be under the impression that I’m saying CRTs are worthless, and always were. I have no idea why, because I’ve said nothing of the sort.

46

Assuming no other technologies emerge that actually eclipse the CRT’s positive qualities in combination with the space-savings? Yes. I think that once everyone has an LCD, just like everyone already has a CRT, sales on LCDs will slow down, and CRTs will emerge (proportionally) back to the point of being a specialty-use item for a limited market.

Of course, it’s also quite likely that some advancement in technology will come out that does offer most of the benefits of CRT and LCD together. In which case, CRT will be toast.

The operative word in this is the word “now”. The thread is about whether CRTs are dead, which includes “later” in addition to “now”.

I’m under the impression that you’re arguing that CRT sales will never recover, even some years from now. Aren’t you?

47

Pretty much, yes. It’s a mature technology - there aren’t any whizzy new developments to come along. In its current form, it’s a dead end. That doesn’t mean they’re crap, it just means we have something better now. And we do.

Maybe it’ll just so happen that a CRT-derived technology turns out to be the first to get some reasonable sort of 3D display going (although I doubt it). Maybe CRTs will be discovered to cure cancer at 50 paces. Maybe Barack Obama will name one as his running mate. But as it is, CRTs are quite simply dead. Not because they’re rubbish, but because LCDs have matched them on picture quality, beaten them on price, and have the added bonus of weighing a fraction of what CRTs do. Unless you can explain to me why any of these factors will suddenly change, then yes, CRTs are dead. Claiming, against all the evidence, that they’re about to stage a comeback would be like saying that any day now we’re all going to spontaneously ditch MP3s and make a headlong dash for 8-track. Not going to happen.

48

You guys sure aren’t shopping where I do. Last time I went to Best Buy, a good CRT-based monitor was about $200 and the equivalent LCD was over $500.

Yes, and a car today goes for roughly what a house went for 60 years ago. So what? TODAY, an LCD is considerably more expensive than a CRT with the same image size.

See above. I was shopping for a new monitor and a new TV, and comparing TODAY’s prices for both: LCD and CRT side-by-side with equivalent features.

49

Make? Specifications? Were these really “equivalent”?

Best Buy’s website shows precisely two CRTs, both with a 16" visible size, going for $115 each (and one isn’t in stock). The cheapest LCD is $189, granted, but it’s fully three inches (visible size) bigger. If I go on Google Products, a 19" CRT costs about $190 to $250. And that’s tube size, not visible area.

Move up the range, and a truly stunning Dell 24" widescreen LCD CRT costs $700. A comparable CRT? Two grand. And you’ll need to reinforce your floor to take the weight.

Yeah, you may get some great deals at the moment from places clearing their stocks of CRTs. But that’s symptomatic of precisely the thing you’re arguing against, namely that very few people are after them any more.

50

Screen door effect? What is this, 1992?

Seriously, you can fix colour accuracy issues almost entirely with software calibration. Calibrated LCDs will probably have more accurate colour than 90% of uncalibrated CRTs. Black depth differences are pretty marginal. I can’t see gaps between pixels on modern LCDs any more than I can on CRTs. Resolution variability is certainly a downside, but only if you’re playing games. Anything else you can either run at native resolution (office apps, etc) or scale well enough to be no issue (playing videos or whatever). And I have no issue playing games at 1280x1024 on my 1920x1200 lcd because I can just tell the monitor to display the image in the centre of the screen without rescaling it. I can see how some people wouldn’t like how that didn’t use the whole screen, though. And you forgot viewing angles, though again those are much better on modern flat panels than on 15 year old laptops.

And while we’re at this nitpicking pros and cons, let’s not forget to mention the annoying flicker many CRTs develop as they age, even when set to high refresh rates.

I will admit I miss the degauss button as a means of cheap entertainment, though.

51

So I tried an experiment. I’m not sure whether I’m getting this effect or not.

I made a large (about a quarter of the screen) patch just as you describe above–every pixel alternates black, white, black, white etc.

At my native resolution (1280x1024) it looks fine.

I then changed it to 1280*960. Still seemed to look fine.

I then changed it to 1280*760. Everything on screen seemed stretched a little bit. And I thought maybe I could detect a very faint “striping” effect. Nothing I can imagine bothering anyone though, assuming they even noticed it.

I then changed it to 800*600. Everything on screen was back to being in proportion. But I thought maybe I could still see a striping effect.

If there is an effect such as you describe, then I should be able to capture a bitmap of the 800600 version of the patch, view that bitmap in 12801024, and upon blowing it up, see misaligned pixels. But there turned out to be no misaligned pixels. It would appear then that at 800*600, the pixels are perfectly lined up as they should be. (Though I’m not sure where the faint striping effect came from in that case.)

I did discover something though. If my refresh rate (which I thought made no difference in LCDs!) is set to anything other than 70, then grey patches like the one I made in this experiment shimmer. At 70, no shimmering. I wonder what causes that.

So I’m still not sure I’m getting the problem you describe. I probably am, and there is probably something wrong with my reasoning about blowing up the 800 patch in 1280 mode. (Maybe a bitmap doesn’t save what’s on the screen but rather whats in the memory.)

Even if the faint striping I mentioned is what people are talking about, I can’t see how it would bother anyone. It’s only barely apparent in the highly artificial circumstance of my experiment. Doesn’t it become even less of a concern in the context of a game where everything’s colorful and moving around?

-FrL-

52

Make your patch the background wallpaper and set it to “stretch to fit.” THEN change your screen resolution and you’ll see what begbert2 was talking about.

53

I smell an opportunity. Write a program to simulate a degauss function.