No Flat Screen Looks As Good as CRT Feels
Bittersweet reminisces of an abandoned technology
The technology we use has changed dramatically in my 25 year lifetime and I’m younger than the majority of my readers, so I can’t imagine how it feels for you.
I could mention how gadgets like the portable DVD player, the once ubiquitous IPod, VHS tapes and the Blackberry smartphones have all seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth but what I really miss are CRT TV’s; they were first outsold by flat screens in 2008 and by 2010, it seemed like they too vanished.
A couple of years ago, I was looking for a cheap, relatively portable CRT TV to play my then small collection of retro consoles on but the simple act of researching which to buy and what to look for in a good quality tube led me down a deep rabbit hole. I learned about things like geometry on a CRT scree, curved screens versus flat ones, 4:3 versus 16:9, progressive scan versus interlaced, broadcast viewing monitors, names like Trinitron and JVC… what started as a cheap and cheerful measure to sidestep spending several hundred pounds on upscaling equipment turned into me trading CRT’s with a Czech guy who drove 3 hours from Birmingham and hauling an enormous Trinitron Wega into my house from his car boot.
Now, I’m going to introduce you to this very boring passion of mine.
Picture from a now-deleted r/crtgaming user
This beast: the Sony Trinitron Wega KV-28HX15B is one of the 2 CRT’s I use for retro gaming.
This beauty is a Beko: a Turkish consumer electronics brand, I can’t find the model number right now (and I REALLY don’t feel like moving it around to check) but this is my display.
But why do you own 2, Scanlines? Why do you need a CRT at all?
Modern TV’s: the LCD or liquid crystal display work (in a very oversimplified way) by filtering an LED backlight through a liquid crystal layer to produce the image on screen. Old style CRT’s: cathode ray tube TV’s fire an electron beam onto a coated screen and the image is made up of thousands of tiny red green and blue pixels.
Old video games: especially those from the 8 and 16 bit-era (the 1970’s until the mid-1990’s) were purpose built for this technology and tend to look dreadful when removed from it.
Not my Images
All of the subtle colour blending, smooth edges and details are homogenised and rendered jagged on an LCD display. A lot of retro-style indie games go for this blocky look and it drives me crazy, old games don’t and never did look like that!
On top of the actual display technology, most modern displays are build for 16:9 aspect ratio: also known as widescreen, which is the standard for HDTV’s… HD CRT’s were rare and expensive. If you play old games in 16:9 (which some absolute cretins do) they get horribly stretched out.
LCD, LED and OLED displays all suffer from worse motion blur, worse contrast and lower durability than CRT displays; in the case of LCD’s and LED’s, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that they are an objectively inferior display technology. So why did we make the switch? Unfortunately, CRT’s consume a lot of energy, the tube technology makes them huge and heavy (an issue that would only have gotten worse given how huge living room TV’s are now) and they were environmentally costly to manufacture so, like with most things, we switched from durability to disposability, swapping out these tough old CRT’s for churned out slop.
My cosy retro setup in late-2022, I took this picture around the Holidays
No matter how high the refresh rate is on a monitor, no matter how crisp a high-resolution modern game looks, nothing beats the experience of using a CRT.
You tap your knuckle gently against the screen: that’s real glass, you could throw a brick at it and it wouldn’t break. You press the power button and will the tube awake with a static crackling; it’s dark and late at night, the TV has mercy on your eyes and gradually awakens, giving you time to adjust, time to relax. You fumble with the remote, or maybe the buttons on the front, swapping through channel after channel of white noise and empty space; all gone now, no analogue TV left, until you find the right place. A purple cube begins to dance across the pitch black screen, or maybe a blue swirl, or a green mass?
In a world where every screen has an algorithm, a processor, a brain, an agenda, the CRT is an unthinking, unfeeling source of endless comfort.
That Sony Wega you've got there is a real thing of beauty.
"...given how huge living room TV’s are now..." - Chuckling at the thought of people having a 55" CRT mounted on their lounge wall. 😂
I remember having this giant Trinitron from Sony, and we bought it in 07 right when LCD monitors were gaining popularity. Played my Xbox 360 from it, like just looking at it 2 feet away, it's nothing much to worry about. Now, having adjusted to LCDs for so long, I do notice the significant differences. Also, god help me, I hate it when motion blur is enabled by default.