CRT tube TVs have been Irrelevant for so
long that I have people working for me who have never used one but in a lot of
ways they are still number one I mean
look at this little buddy right here zero latency Stellar motion Clarity and
Inky blacks not only that but look at the way its unique properties blend
blocky ugly Sprites into art take a mere
256 colors and turn them into a digital
rainbow just sucks they come in such
giant heavy package the wait a minute
that's not a CRT this is just an OLED in disguise
really convincing though what dark magic
is this retro tank 4K dark magic Hey look
it's that guy this is admittedly a pretty Niche product but I don't think I
care if it gets views it's really cool
or at least on paper it is they claim
it's the best and most versatile retro
video game scaler to ever hit the market and after using it for a few weeks we're
left wondering is it finally time to
stop hoarding these bad boys and stop hoarding all these messages we could
give you from our sponsor build Redux they make it a breeze to customize your
own personalized build with support guides and a bunch of configuration
options just throw stuff in there put a power supply in there ah head to build
build ru.com Linus and start your new build today you may already know that a
scaler scales one input resolution to a
different usually higher output resolution but like with anything not
all scalers are created equal and this is most apparent when you watch your
modern TV struggle with older content
like the approximately 240 P that is
coming out of this Sega Genesis and I mean I kind of get it why would TV
manufacturers bother to invest in a feature that most people won't notice
but come on guys to show you just how
bad it is let's have a look at how a
$1,300 OLED TV fares using its internal
scaler against a random CRT that we got for 50 bucks on Facebook Marketplace hey
finally get a report yeah yeah okay we're good look at his face like that
looks like a picture almost like a TV feed from that era whereas that's just
like a mess of reddishness why did we leave that one stretched it's uh you
don't have much options when you use Little Boxes like this that's why you
were going off on this when we saw this during Adam's upgrade that one no this
entire video is just a slam dunk on this something you wouldn't expect the
scaler to affect based on its name is the color representation but it is
amazing knowing that these are accurate displays how far off they are I mean the
ice is green yeah Brandon's even even calibrated these two so we can trust
that they're exactly right I don't notice any issues with input latency on
the CRT obviously it's lightning fast
but there's definitely a bit of leg on this top left one oh yeah we're going to
swap the direct one to a retro tank
ooh oh wow I didn't realize how bad the
latency was on here because I just kind of compensated for it I think and then
all of a sudden it's playable now the color is not matching
our CRT at all it's very hard to match
the CRT on every game we can mess with
it and that's one of the joys of the retrotink is that you can Tink with it
all day long there is so many settings that we can get into uh including color
correction and stuff whatever deficiencies or even just differences
that it might have in color though there is no question in my mind that it is a
super clean image and yet it still looks
CRT this is just a quick and dirty mask
and filter that I've set up for this the
Genesis uh this is also kind of the worst case scenario for the Retro tank
Mike Chi the creator of retro tank likes composite image and there's kind of like
a a Mystique to the blurriness of composite but as a general rule
everything else is better and so the fact that it can make this look as
decent as it does is kind of incredible you got to get a a goal man I I don't
think I can I don't think I could score tying this game otherwise we
Riot no no no oh they cut it cut cut
it's impossible to get everyone to agree on what looks best but I think what we
can all agree on is that both of the larger oleds looked awful and they feel
awful we measured about 45 milliseconds
of added input latency when connecting a composite Source directly to the TV or
through that little piece of crap scaler for context the highest input latency
that we measured from the rest of the scalers that we're going to be talking about and showing today is one of that
there are a surprising number of options out there and many of them are excellent
but they have always had their compromises like no support for 4K so
the retrotink 4k's claim to fame is surprise surprise it's the world's first
4K scaler for retro games in our opinion
that's not even the best thing about it power a cyclone 5 series fpga the Retro
tank 4K has cuttingedge CRT phosphor emulation filters imperceptible
processing delay and it has some of the most robust io on a single consumer
device that we have ever seen it's powered by USBC which is really nice
it's got scar RCA and a brand new VGA
port which was missing from the previous Top Dog retrotink 5x and each of these
can handle a variety of analog video standards with inexpensive expensive
adapters Mike the Creator retro tank even added extra composite and S video
to the front which means you don't have to share your RCA jacks between your
component and your composite anymore it's got toss link as well as a 3 and
half mm audio jack here which can be assigned to any of your video inputs
it's got an HDMI output to go to your TV and what's this an HDMI input now why
you might ask would a retro gamer need an HDMI input put well not to make you
feel old or anything but the PS3 with its HDMI output came out 17 years ago
not only that but we've also seen an increase in HDMI equipped older consoles
some of these are coming in the form of mini re-releases some are thirdparty
Recreations and some are just aftermarket mods to original consoles
the bottom line here is HDMI is the standard and it unlocks a lot of of new
possibilities like pairing up your retro tank with a Mr fpga for the ultimate in
Retro Gaming goodness I'm about to try it probably cry a little bit but first I
actually want to show off our retro battle station here it might not look like much from this side but this
monster is capable of playing any of our systems simultaneously across four TVs
without any loss in image quality and a big part of that is thanks to this guy
when we told AV Pro Edge what we were trying to do they sent over this
ludicrously overpowered 8K HDR 8 input 8
output HDMI Matrix switcher huge thank
you to those guys and I'd love to talk about all the other little pieces that
we have going on here but it gets pretty in the weed so instead we're going to
have a Floatplane exclusive where David is going to walk you through the whole
setup uh LMG g/f Floatplane for now
let's game this is the part of the video where if you're anything like me you're
going to fall deeply in love with the Retro tank when you have a chance to
customize your mass and all the settings to your preference you'll start to see
how powerful this thing really is this is how I set it for my own eyes and what
I found with people kind of walking around and giving their perspective is
people have very different preferences to me this looks so much better than the
raw Mister but some people like that Pixel Perfect Look but no right it looks
so much better this has that TV look
that looks awesome looks great why would I ever even look at these and you can
really see the age of these CRTs and some of the
just off highlights like the the red hat
yeah I can't even see any of the detail in it but this is clean yeah but also
still has that CRT look to it it's a tragedy that CRTs are just gonna kind of
fade away and they're going to only get worse and worse uh every time they're
used and it's kind of nice to know that we're finally getting to the point with
scalers where we don't have to be sad
yeah we don't have to be sad well I mean the fact that you just want to keep playing on this screen like you you
don't even look at the CRTs is a good sign no there's no reason to look at
them like this is just freaking awesome and what I find is so nice with modern
devices is just the consistency I know when I turn it on it's going to be good
with that cheap CRT every time I came back to it it would
look different sometimes it would have like scan lines going up sometimes it
would be like the capacitors are going right now it's a little flickery it's actually doing pretty good um but it's
like the temperature you know the way I look at it it changes what that image is
going to look like whereas every time I turn on a retro ttin in this OLED it's
going to look exactly how I set it holy I have never gotten all five in my
entire
life no way am I supposed the script is just
rolling we're just we're going completely off script here boys well here's the 4K remote versus the 5x
remote so they did a remote this time they did a remote this time it's
actually so useful I could just be like n dog how about 1080p well it's actually
well that doesn't look great but it's kind of a huge deal when I first got my
retro ttin 5x it was defaulting to 1440p but had a TV that didn't accept
1440p image and so it like would come in
a one frame every like 3 seconds so this
would have saved you just one button press boom that's just through the
mister without the that's just the Mis yeah so it's got that super super clean
sharp I mean honestly yeah sure I could
play on that too yeah but it doesn't look like a CRT so we don't need to
change the input although we could look at it the profile right now it's my like
Mr profile that I kind of quickly set um
the ones where I would start where it's the most fun is the image processing M
so there's a scan line and a mask the scale line it's emulating scal lines but
there's quite a bit of control within it uh The Masks are like that simulation of
you know the the aperture Grill and the phosphor lights kind of interacting and
then there's a horizontal blur which I think is actually kind of like the the
little salt that you add at the end to make it all kind of come together oh
yeah otherwise it just looks too sharp and this is why 4K is so important for
this because you actually have the pixel density on this display to use pixels as
individual phosphor colors I mean if you look at certain diagrams of how Shadow
mask versus aperture Grill worked uh
this is basically it it was either a
grill a vertical lines like this or it was like a a perforated plate we've had
Shadow mask before like even the Mis has Shadow MK but they've never been this
detailed because like you said it it we've never had 4K and you need that
amount of pixel to be able to push that detail that you would see on a CRT HDR
is already on uh we can turn it off just so you can get an idea how much the
Retro ttin is designed for HDR displays when you add the scan lines in the mass
it adds a lot of black to the image and so it darkens it a ton and so without
HDR becomes really really dark with HDR
it pops like a phosphor glowing at the front of a display but without it it's
but with the masks you get that it really does look like a phosphor glow I
really liked on the 5x that it was kind of just plug andplay I never really
thought too much about it I kind of said it once you know it works but the amount of fun I've had messing around with
these settings is insane it's been so fun one thing to mention before someone
in the comments does is the mister can do direct video where you get the actual
resolution of the game outputed
natively we could unplug and plug
directly into a retro tank but it won't work with our matrixes it's just not
going to play nice direct video generally has bad compatibility this
looks like you've got smoothing on yeah so that's basically what you don't like
it that's a yikes I like it I like so
there's a more sophisticated one you can get than than this it looks like one of
those cheap AI filters that you can apply to graphics and make it look like
a photo or painting or whatever it's a little more sophisticated than that but
I I definitely understand why people don't like it there's no wrong options
here except whatever they except that
now I noticed there's an SD card but unlike the Mr fpga this is not a console
so you're not keeping ROMs or anything on there no it's primarily for updating
the firmware uh as well as putting
profiles on it you can create profiles on the retrotink save them to the card
put them on a computer modify them but you can also download a ton online the
Retro Community is very active there's already a ton of people working on
getting kind of Ideal per console per game settings uh and then you can let
them do the work and enjoy the fruits of their labor and I don't have to think
about it yeah exactly or I could think about it a lot you like the retrotink
more than even the CRT not even close yeah yeah no question it's so bright uh
the colors are so right blur artifacting
is a little bit annoying I'm hoping that maybe there can be like some filter
that's added onto it to prevent that but most of the time when you're in a busy
screen you don't see it I don't notice when I'm actually playing I only notice
when I'm watching 100% they carefully kept me away from this area for the last
couple of weeks so I didn't get a chance to check this out before but now that I
have there's no question in my mind I would rather play on a modern OLED with
these filters than on a CRT even if it
was in its prime and literally none of them are anymore adding HDMI to the
Retro tank might be the most meaningful upgrade over the 5X
resolution matters a lot though too I don't know they're both really great but
we haven't even seen its full capabilities let's test that Port even
further with an HDMI console that might not be retro but also isn't really
properly modern given it not only can't hit 4K but can barely even do 1080p most
of the time the Nintendo switch now hold
on a second is it doing some kind of SDR
to HDR tone mapping here it's seems to be doing that cuz this is yeah raw out
of the switch um but as it is now this
looks the that looks right that looks markedly better we can agree you
probably don't want to put like scan lines or mass or anything on a game like
this but what I was curious was is the scaling of the Retro tin better than
what the switch can do with in conjunction with a TV you can't really
tell from this far back it looks basically the same but if you get up
close and personal you can actually see that the Retro one will be a little bit
sharper you know I don't think I'm a fan
you get an increase in sharpness using the Retro tank to scale but you also get
a bit more stairs it depends what you're
looking at this is one of those ones where I
really don't think there's a right or a wrong
answer I totally agree it's going to be a preference thing yeah like this is a
bit shimer in it's dealing with alas sing whereas this is a bit blurrier in
its dealing with aliasing and neither is desirable obviously it'd be great if
nintend just released a console that could run their flipping games at a
decent resolution but I find this less distracting I wonder if part of it too
is that we're sitting a little bit too close to these for how low res this
content is that's totally and the smaller display with that pleasing
blurriness the round pixels guys it makes a big
difference makes this look not sharper
obviously but more natural yeah like you
can see that distant Tower see the aliasing as I'm moving back and forth oh
yeah it's still there the CRT it's there but it's not so much less it's not
bothersome no you know what I can't say that I actually like the uh that kind of
jutter and that super super high motion
Clarity at 30 FPS it's not yeah it's a
little distracting that's totally fair that was probably the one slight
disappointment of my experience with the Retro ttin is that it doesn't save 720p
gaming I thought it was going to maybe like bring it into the Next Generation
not quite like obviously that's a little bit excessive but it's more for under
720p yeah I think 40p is a big use case
and it does make 720p sharper but I did try gaming on the PS5 through the Retro
ttin the retrotink can only handle 1080p so if you give it 4K it just won't work
uh and if you send HDR through it it'll strip the HDR even if it tries to put it
back in after and it just loses all color looks terrible uh and so you want
to send it 1080p SDR and then it can do its thing at the highest it's almost
like it was right in the name it's the Retro tank plug a modern console into it
you're going to have a pretty bad time one thing we noticed regardless of the
generation of console is the input latency or rather the lack of it we
measured the Retro tank in a variety of modes and we saw less than a millisecond
in the 60 HZ mode and about 8 and 1 12
milliseconds in the 120 HZ mode which funnily enough ends up being almost
identical end to endend because 120 HZ
is about 8 milliseconds faster than 60
HZ per refresh but wait a second did did
we just gloss over the retr take 4K support for 120 htz in both 1080P and
1440p well well we have it now it even
has support for variable refresh rate and support for black frame insertion
for better motion Clarity so now there's
questions that we have to answer do we
maximize our resolution with our scaler
or do we go for higher refresh rates but
at lower resolutions oh and that's why we're going to do Dreamcast and Neo now
yes that looks much better to me than the than the switch did at 120 no
question yeah like that looks totally great that looks awesome honestly I
don't even like this on the HD crrt yeah it doesn't look right it looks smear it
looks like an LCD Yep this looks great it looks better than the CRT yeah the
real test honestly is just to put people in front of the four and then just see
which one they're looking at cuz different games it's not purely ergonomic different games I have 100%
found myself looking at different displays yeah I think we're both just
always looking at this one just not interested in looking at anything else
cuz it's still got that clean look like it doesn't look blurry at all but it
softens it and just just looks right
when my opponents go high I go low oh no
oh no no no oh my goodness oh my goodness rude if
your preference is absolute maximum motion Clarity then 120 HZ with with
black frame insertion might be a good option for you but I think both David
and I are aligned on that if you're planning to use CRT filters which
hopefully you are because you just spent a lot of money on a device that is
solely designed for that then you're probably better off sticking with 4K The
Mask details just look so much better at
that higher resolution and there's no
question this is the closest we've seen an OLED get to the look of his here te
oh yeah did it ever occur to to us to
try it on the 8K OLED
no David I heard you have a challenge for me yes I do it's time to play CRT or
wannabe oh okay uh basically I got macro
shots of different screens playing the same game so this is OLED with a retro
tank versus the CRT and honestly I give me a sec give me a sec give I've
forgotten which one is which I think that's the OLED you are
incorrect I don't have a sense of the scale of these images which makes it a
little bit tougher but the reason I chose that one was it seemed like the
area in between the sub pixels was so
black that it would have had to be like OLED black like a filter but
then that's one of the advantages of CRT is that anywhere where the phosphor
aren't glowing it's black
OLED yeah you're right that's that's the OLED that's the CRT say RT uh retro tank
oh okay OLED crap CRT okay now there's an HD CRT
in the mix so there's one CRT one retrotink one HDC the HD crrt is the
bottom middle cuz it looks so ra freaking obvious right so that would be
using aperture Grill yeah and it just
looks so sharp and yet
so so BL delightfully blurred you know
it's I think the top right is the Retro tank no shoot no follow your gut no no
no it's the CRT yes you were right it's
got to be the real CRT on the left yes okay but what did we do to the Retro
tank to make it look so weird here I maximized the filters when I said it to
like what looked best to my eye it was too clear it was a little too easy to
tell got it but then when I maximize everything then it's a little bit harder
to tell so that's not representative of the best case scenario for what a
retrotink would look like if you dialed it in he's more just making me choose
what is an actual display versus what is playing around with filters on it got it
this one's tough I think that's the Retro tank top right but it looks better
yes you're right these pixels aren't real like the subpixel layout is not
real it's fake but it looks like a macro of a display at all which is I guess
half the point here 100% if I hadn't already seen how good the Retro tank can
look I would have been blown away even more by how close it got to emulating
the look of a CRT but one way that CRTs
have maintain the lead over modern displays is how they handle interlaced
resolution content now you may already know that interlaced simply means
alternating between the odd and even horizontal lines of an image on each
frame which is really difficult to do especially at non-native resolutions on
a Modern Display but the Retro tank should help us compensate we've gone PS2
then PS2 got award I chose it because you can turn on and off Progressive or
interlaced uh that makes it a good test for how the de interlacing is on both
retro tanks got it there's no question in my mind right now that the HD crrt
running through the Retro tank 5x looks the best here and it again comes down to
that pleasing blurriness yeah but this
game in interlace mode could it look better here I definitely like the
increased pop from being able to run that OLED in HDR mode that looks better
than the CRT no question okay so this is
Progressive it looks pretty good on all these things considering how old of a
game this is you can almost tell though
that it's not quite right okay like the
the flames in the background though and like right the extra brightness on those
the extra pop yeah I might take that
over the softer looking lighting and like the sky I think is a
perfect place to look where you get this vibrancy in the color on the OLED
through the Retro tank you get this reduced banding almost in the appearance
on the old CRT I think it's incredible that the Retro tank is within shooting
distance on something that the CRT has kicked ass at before and it makes it
that like you really don't need a CRT anymore there's
still advantage even text yeah like a
lot of the time text just looks like a big blocky ugly mess and then all of a
sudden you know you throw it on a CRT you're like oh yeah okay I guess it was
readable and they were just compensating for the display technology of the time
but it looks it looks right like that hit counter it looks right even up close
dude it's really convincing yeah
but these have their strengths too and I
think the bottom line guys is that that no one setup is always going to be the
best and there's going to be some subjectivity based on a billion
different factors even things like the environment you're going to be sitting in David made a really good point
earlier that this CRT is not at its
blackest in the blacks because it's picking up some Reflections off of our
gray floor here and anti-glare glass has
come a long way in the last 25 years the
good news though is that for anyone but the purist of purists the retrotink 4K
is going to get you so close that you probably won't miss your giant 200 lb
tube TV there are still some challenges the
newest OLED displays for example you might have been wondering why are we using a C1 and a C10 ah the new ones use
a different black frame insertion method that is less CRT like so you might have
to go and find an older one if you care about that which is going to dang it are
we going to create another bloody in Gold brush but this time on older oleds
or maybe not because you'll also be giving up some brightness compared to
the very latest oleds but then again for the purists so has your CRT that's been
sitting for a quarter of a century or so
so maybe it's time to get with the times except it's going to cost you more than
just time the good news is you don't need any of the other stuff like that
fancy HDMI Matrix all you need is the Retro Ting 4K
the bad news is it's $750 that is so expensive that it makes
the $325 for the old 5x sound like an
absolute bargain but and yes I doing
that again when you consider the costs associated with building this thing it
doesn't look that unreasonable anymore the Cyclone 5 fpga in here alone is
listed for around $260 on Digi key and a
full board with that processor is going to cost you upwards of ,000 000 which
totally ignores the development costs of bringing something like this to life so
it's not some madeup scam number and besides the existence of a new high-end
product doesn't make the more affordable or the older ones worse if anything it
might hopefully put some downward pricing pressure on them in the long term and even now an ossc or a gbsc is
more than enough for most people and that last one can be had for around $50
also the Retro tank 5x still a phenomenal scaler if you don't need HDMI
or that higher resolution but if you like what you saw and a lot of you
apparently do and you want 4K along with the improved CRT filters the extra IO
and quality of life things like the better remote we think this thing is
super cool and we're going to have a link to where you can buy it down below
when it comes back in stock what we do have in stock though is
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is the last time we asked the question our CRT is finally dead and that time I
don't know what to tell you man the answer was a little different it was
very different