retro gaming is really taking off and as good as modern displays have become
there's something about the big boy crt
that has enthusiasts paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to game like
it's 1999. i would know i just bought
one and made a video about it but that's
stupid what you heard me right
people are out there like him paying top dollar for displays like
this one that you probably didn't even know existed check this thing out this
is an hd crt tv straight out of 2003.
this boy is 16x9 runs at 1080i resolution and has
input legs so low that david says he
doesn't even bother with his lg c10 OLED
anymore and that sir
is where you lost me it can't be that good can it i am here
to convince you otherwise just like i'm here to convince you of our sponsor segs
i wonder what's my line is that
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there are a few key factors that drive enthusiasts to seek out the best crts
they can find they have next to nowhere input lag their pixel response times are
instantaneous and they have high contrast ratios since like an OLED
display the pixels if you could even call them that simply do not emit light
when they are off that's right guys before OLED took center stage crts were
actually the technology with the outstanding contrast ratio something
that average consumers gave up for thinner lighter lcds but even as someone
who recently blew 3gs on a top tier
gaming crt monitor i'm still not even a little convinced that i should go back
to daily driving one of these monstrosities i mean lcd sucks it was an
inferior technology from the get-go fair enough but OLED is here now and some of
the recent ones are amazing i mean we are now getting most of the brightness
of mini led with the inky blacks and the
response times of crt we actually measured this thing at what like eight
milliseconds that's incredible on top of that i would actually argue that the
blacks of an OLED are black er simply
because of the way that the display absorbs surrounding light sure in a
completely darkened room the crt might get close but definitely not under these
conditions i mean how can you possibly want a game on this
when you can game on this the thing is it's not about the input
lag more than response time there's nothing that looks like a crt crt
is its own thing there's something that happens some kind of magic i don't know
what it is actually i do know what it is that when you play an old game on a crt
it just looks so much better than on an OLED for now we need to play some games
i have so many things i want to show you but i want to start with the reason i
got into this tv which is 7th generation gaming so ps3 xbox 360. those games look
absolutely horde on modern displays and this is the best display for that we're
gonna have some tests where we're upscaling from 240 and 40i going up and
we're gonna have some stuff where we're going down from 1080p
down and what i want to convince you is that there is definitely a place in your
living room for this bad boy in my living room i
mean i can tell you right now i don't miss the flicker i don't miss the wine
yeah i get that people are all like crt blacks crt black perfect blacks in a
light controlled environment maybe but we actually saw that with samsung's qdo
led versus lg's w OLED in a lit room
certain display panel technologies
reflect more light back than others and lg's w OLED really is black one of the
nightmares of crt gaming is getting different
devices to display properly on it
yeah we're gonna have a full Floatplane exclusive about david's octopus of
scalars and adapters and you can kind of
walk the Floatplane peeps through it but that's beyond the scope of this
video i think wild tell me what you're experiencing looking at these two
displays i strongly prefer the more contrasty look of the blacks on the OLED
however the motion is definitely better
on the crt is this an interlaced signal
this should be yes unless something changed
wait the OLED's more responsive well that's the thing about hdcrts they have
the best tubes but they actually have the dumbest brains so as it comes
there's a processing a scaling that happens on pretty much every resolution
so i wanted you to experience it as it would be out of the box
luckily you can turn that off but then you just
want to give your your display only 1080i signals and so that's why i have
that scalar i can get all kinds of of different resolutions different uh
refresh rates but then it all lands on what something this tv can look good at
it's noticeable though we measured about 40 milliseconds of delay in our testing
but when i turned off the processing it went down to eight milliseconds which is
pretty much exactly the same as the OLED yeah that's perfect then yeah oh should
we turn that off then yes we should were you testing me did you want to see if i
would notice i wanted to give you the absolute best experience i wanted to
walk you through and blow your mind but i think it was good to show you that you
kind of have to do little fan dangling yourself to get the best experience got
it i'm so sorry but
the contrasty look the more modern anti-glare reflective coatings i think
it looks better i'm sorry i wouldn't check this
well why don't we try a different game let's try something 1080p
on the ps3 something that's sprite based sure and uh let's see what you'll like
there okay sprites are going to be disadvantage modern panels this was
actually the first game that blew me away so it's a 1080p game but it's based
on a 40i game so it's scaled internally it's got smooth smoothing on but there's
something about sprite-based games that i think just look better on crts like
they're not even close yeah there's a magic that
happens with sprites in particular because it looks great on the OLED like
this looks fantastic uh no i disagree
actually okay it looks like
absolute ass like ew like look how bad
wolverine's face looks on there yeah you can see the individual pixels well not
even you can't it's all kind of smoothed and blurred together yeah
that is nasty now the background mr
clown face or whatever back here looks all right and obviously text
is way better on the OLED but particularly uh i don't know i don't
know my marvel super heroes yeah colossus here look at his look at his
face you know what it reminds me of those
photo to painting filters that you can apply that's what it reminds me of it
looks awful okay that's a win for the crt whoa
tell me something though i noticed you're not applying any scan line
filters or anything like that to the OLED could we get it closer we
definitely can and we can play around with that there's a few issues that
happen with like the upscaling and down scaling when i add scan lines i can get
scan lines to look good on the hdcrt so additional ones to kind of emulate more
of an older look and i can get them to look good on the OLED i can't get
skylines to look good on both at the same time got it okay so we're not
necessarily putting its best foot forward yeah
but there's no question natively that the crt looks much better all right what am
i looking at here this is a fun comparison because now we're getting 40i
out of the dreamcast we're going to a retro tinker upscaling to 1080p on these
two displays but this is getting its original 480i output so this is it's
best put forward this is probably it's best put forward and that's pretty damn
close to its best foot forward something about yellows just doesn't look as good
on the OLED i can't tell if it's a calibration issue or if it's something
else i frankly don't perceive much difference between the 480i native image
and the upscaled 1080i image which i think is a good thing yeah if what
they're going for is true to the original resolution of the game fidelity
then i think they've actually done an outstanding job here as for the
OLED somehow it lacks the color punch
is that possibly lost in the conversion it's possible but it's going through the
same chain pretty much until the scaler
but the scaler shouldn't be adding any color pluth described it as kind of
washed out looking and it is that looks like ass on the crt compared
to the better blacks on the outlet so which one would you give it to of the
three i'd say this is just a straight oh huh
interesting you're over skin yeah off yeah in that case i'd give it to the
hdcrt i hate overscan overscan sucks no
should never have existed this game to me is kind of the best case scenario of
the dreamcast it looks sharper on the hdcrt than the 4x3 one barely barely but
i think that like the clarity is really there the color is great and the OLED
just looks yeah just kind of blurry it looks upscaled to me whereas on the
hdcrt it looks good it looks tight all right let's give
you a different dreamcast game that you might have a different experience with
this one in my quick testing is the one dreamcast game that i think looks way
better on the 4x3 than the hdcrt oh 100
you need the scan you need the scan lines it immediately makes this image
much more attractive it's particularly noticeable for me in the depth of field
bokeh effect backgrounds yeah this just
looks like a blurry crappy low resolution texture totally that looks
like bokeh i find the trees too like there's the illusion of the details on
the tree feels real the foliage whereas in this you can just see it's like paper
yes it does not look right these have more depth totally well here's a fun
comparison that you might want to try we could keep the dreamcast playing it in
4di on this tv and we could pull up the hd remaster on the ps3 and compare those
two playing that versus this that's an interesting dynamic that i find really
appealing on the hdcrt is hd remasters of old games because you
can get the widescreen you can get the upscale the sharper image but you get
the crt effect sonic adventure 2.
the black is so much better yeah this it really is not an ideal situation for
this it's not but it looks a lot better 100 i mean that's the thing about the
real world it's messy and you're often not in the ideal situation sometimes the
sun is up and you want a game sorry this one's pretty close to me i might
even give it to the OLED i think this one's pretty darn close
again close is pretty impressive for 20 year
old tv i know you like final fantasy 10 quite a
bit i think it's your last final dance you like the final fantasy hd remaster
is good but it has that weird too sharp
effect i forgot my copy of final fantasy 10. i got excited we have a copy of
final fantasy 10 do you want to see what conditions
remember those kits to uh to polish the bot
you ain't polishing this one i don't know my buff out
just put a little tape you know it's fine what do you think of the graphics
though there's no question in my mind that i
would play it on this really not even close this is a cut scene let's get to
somewhere where you can see more textures the textures on this
there the muddiness is is just like exaggerated or something because the
display is so sharp i like the softness of this image and i find it again
there's a uniformity to the image that
this does better you know what man i uh
i'm sorry but i gotta take the i gotta take the clean digital look here fair
enough the facial hair there it looks
like a smear on his face whereas here i can see discrete hairs for better or for
worse for better or for worse and like his chain looks like
links okay that's pretty linky too but that's linkier i hear what you're saying
and it's definitely a preference thing yeah but like i
like that the hair is soft like hair doesn't look like that that looks weird
and paper like there's paper freaking things that are coming out of
his head that looks like a blurry mess that looks like hair the foliage looks
better here yeah on the crt okay toss up i'll take it as a tie
let's go back one more generation oh we're going back another generation to
my day we're going back to my childhood
what you're currently playing on is an analog super nt so it's an fpga device
designed to play super nintendo on a modern display
i actually think this is one of the best use cases for the hdcrt let's compare oh
it looks so bad on the OLED oh it looks so bad it looks just right on the hccrt
it's not even an actual super nintendo we can compare to an actual
super nintendo i think this is one of the most fun use cases is these modern
revised consoles playing on an hdcrt they look really good i don't know if i
can deny it that's what i'm saying walk me through what you're feeling and the
difference between all three tvs Linus i can't even look at the OLED
i'm honestly shocked i thought this was gonna be you were gonna pull choose the
OLED more often than you did i like to think that i'm capable of being
objective and i can tell when
something is not as good and there's no question that the higher resolution
upscaling works really well in this game not in certain situations not in text
yeah one thing we would be remiss not to mention is the fact that modern
emulation has solved a lot
of these problems yeah shout out emulation community
phenomenal you guys are amazing like bringing people's childhoods back
one bug at a time and better than it was like
in a lot of consoles emulation is so much better than the actual hardware is
like i'm pretty yeah like super mario world widescreen you've seen that stuff
right yeah 100 you can change the render resolution on a lot of ps1 stuff but
then actually fix the geometry issues so that's an interesting one too i kind of
want to show you the ps5 just got some ps1 games so it has emu like backwards
compatibility now and so i want to show you what an actual ps1 game looks on all
of these versus the ps5 emulation on these recently playstation has offered
their plays plus pro gold plus three who
cares what it's called service where you can now play ps1 and ps2 games not
just like ripped they're an uh higher rendered or they're they're rendered at
a higher resolution so that they're rendered at 1440p
the problem is at actual 1450p it kind of looks like
crap the geometry looks really weird you can see like the way it pops yeah the
way that objects kind of shift around a little bit
it's not that noticeable on the htc rt yeah that looks bad it looks horrible
i mean it's it's not great but it is definitely that effect is reduced when
it's sharper a line moving like this
is absolutely more noticeable and it's interesting because again i might choose
the 4x3 crt but i like the extra clarity
that the 1440p offers yeah so like miley
cyrus told us this is the best of both worlds
really a miley reference what year is it she's still cool is she
tell me what you're feeling wow look at his skin looks
it's like mottled yeah and that i guess that was just how they shaded yeah and
it just it looks awful so bad but on the hdcrt it doesn't look how smooth that
gradient on her hair looks it looks it looks almost like correct
you know what it reminds me of is it reminds me of like a vector image versus
a scaled jpeg clearly that's
vector based that is mathematically shaded yeah whereas here it doesn't look
mathematically shaded it looks like blown up low resolution texture totally
100 based on this
30 second gameplay snippet which one do you think you'd want to play i would
play the hdcrt no question that's what i'm saying absolutely no question heck
yes i think we're going to stick to one final one and it's a game you know and
love cross code okay and i think the htcrt has a strong case for hd 2d
games what's interesting about this game is that i first played it on pretty much
that display okay on an lgo led 65 inch
in my living room the color does look better immediately to me on the OLED ooh
wow and you really notice as you pan from
side to side the geometry issues and the warping of the image on the hdcrt
so it's not really a matter of the style of the art it's more a matter of what
kind of display the developer was working with when they mastered the
content i would play this on OLED every time you would yeah oh no not me this is
definitely an hccrt game for me no question just that you lose so much
detail in the sprites compared to the OLED i actually think the sprites look
better on this one i think that's fair that kind of looks like it has that integer scaling it's clean
clean pixels i think though i like the softening look again i i'm i'm now
pretty accustomed to that when i play retro games is the crt look where
everything's a little blended and in some games i liked the additional warmth
of the image on the crt but here it just looks yellow it does not look correct
it's so interesting i love that you like the OLED better because it's no contest
to me like i much prefer the overall impression this gives me but i just
think that goes to show you that like there is no one display for all
games like like you said it's the whatever the game was designed for is
what you probably should play it on we're at the end of the experience Linus
what uh what has been your takeaway from
using an hdcrt on a multitude of different consoles that i think it's
super cool that you have this collection that i can borrow when i need to make a
video i will not be making my own collection
and i will not have one of these in the living room i do not think so it's just
oh man i just i can't justify the space
and we didn't even talk about the power consumption i just can't justify it no i
think for most people it does not make sense but if you play a lot of retro
games and you play a lot of widescreen retro stuff it's pretty freaking sweet
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enjoy the last time david and i hung out fixing up our retro consoles he put a
new screen in his gba i put our battery
screen on the gba but then uh new vita stuff too that's right and i
put a new screen into a game gear with some help i needed help