These days, monitor manufacturers are trying to entice us
with high refresh rates, high resolutions, and high sex appeal, I guess,
with those curved panels and sleek chassis. But despite all this,
some gamers still prefer clunky, old CRT monitors.
You know those heavy, power-hungry boxes that you could probably use as a murder weapon?
But with their obvious inconveniences next to modern LCD and LED displays,
why in the world would anyone still want to use them? Well, one very important factor,
especially for competitive gamers, is response time.
You see, anytime a pixel on a contemporary LCD display
needs to change, something physical has to happen.
Specifically, different voltages are applied to the tiny liquid crystals that make up the display,
causing them to turn and twist to let different amounts of light through,
which ultimately produces the image that you see. And although this is an incredibly fast process,
it does still cause a delay between pressing a button
and the corresponding action appearing on the screen. That delay is called input lag.
Old CRTs, though, don't suffer from nearly as much input lag,
partly because their process of changing the image is much faster.
An electron beam hits phosphors that coat the screen to produce light,
and these electrons travel at the speed of light, and the phosphors themselves emit light
nearly instantaneously. Additionally, the signals inside the CRT
are analog in nature and don't require extra processing
the way that a digital display does, further cutting down on lag.
Competitive gamers can often actually perceive
a noticeable difference in titles like fighting games, where getting your punch in a split second earlier
can make a big impact, pun definitely intended.
Games with particularly fast action also benefit from the CRT's lower amount of motion blur.
You see, modern LCDs use a technique called sample and hold,
meaning that a moving object will be shown as a series of still images,
and each image remains on the screen for one full refresh.
However, the phosphors on a CRT flicker for shorter amounts of time,
and only small amounts of the screen are lit up at once,
meaning moving objects aren't held in one position on the screen for as long, reducing perceived motion blur.
And although there are some technologies out there that can reduce motion blur on flat panels,
such as strobing back lights that aren't turned on all the time,
this is an intrinsic property of CRTs that doesn't require any special features.
And CRTs also don't have a native resolution
like modern flat panels, which have a set number of pixels aligned in a grid.
So if you have a 1080p LCD display
and you try to run lower res content on it, the upscaling can often make your older games look blurry in,
distorted. CRTs, by contrast, don't have their phosphors
pre-arranged into discrete pixels, and the electron beam can be adjusted
to light up the phosphors with different amounts of spacing, meaning they can look good at a wider variety of resolutions,
as the image doesn't have to be scaled to fit into certain area on a fixed grid.
Since older games were designed to run at lower resolutions than HD,
this is part of the reason that old consoles actually look better hooked up to a CRT.
But even with all these benefits, it still doesn't mean that CRTs
are gonna be making a big comeback anytime soon.
It's still much cheaper for the display industry to produce LCDs.
And since the image quality that they provide is definitely good enough,
especially for most folks who aren't in a niche market of gamers,
the average CRTs bulkiness and higher power consumption
mean that there's no real reason for manufacturers to not to keep churning them out.
However, if you still want that smooth, buttery smooth CRT experience,
you can still find plenty of CRT monitors on eBay.
Just be prepared to pay out the nose for shipping and get your waylifter buddies
to help you lug it up the stairs. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, subscribe, give it a thumbs up,
and hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for future topics.