thanks lenovo namd for sponsoring a portion of today's video lenovo's slim7
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description or watch till the end to learn more i just treated myself to the greatest
monitor that money can buy 20 years ago
oh wow
but even today this absolute unit of a
desktop display goes for more than 3 000
us dollars why what could a crt from
2002 do better than a state-of-the-art
gaming display from 2022. did i just
waste my freaking money
when lcd panels arrived on the scene they had some big pants to fill the
development of the crt display had a 60 year head start and what's crazy is that
modern displays are still playing catch up to your grandma's old tv in some ways
especially when you compare to one of the best consumer crts ever the sony gdm
fw 900 but why is this thing so big well
it's because of the actual crt the
cathode ray tube in the back of this big
box is a heavy glass vacuum tube with
electron guns inside it the electrons are shot at a layer of phosphors on the
glass screen at the front now phosphors are materials that emit light when
they're hit with electromagnetic radiation remember those glow-in-the-dark stars you had on your
ceiling as a kid well it's the same fundamental principle but to create a
color image we've got three electron guns one for red one for blue and one
for green and each has their beams aimed by magnets to hit the corresponding
section of your screen illuminating the phosphors this whole process happens
very fast at full resolution on this display it redraws the entire screen 80
times a second but that's not even close
to 240 hertz let alone 360 hertz like
the fastest displays today why pay over three grand for a monitor that looks
like it belongs on the back of an underfunded public library why do people
want this this is where we get to my first experience with it because i
haven't actually gotten to play with it yet oh it's on there are two basic camps
there's retro gamers like Anthony and sweaty gamers like david sorry david i'm
a retro david's also a retro gamer you're more sweaty sweaty sweaty retro
that's not true you're a sweat gamer sweat
92 pounds 92 pounds let's talk about
what makes this crt so special it was
sorry no is a top-of-the-line product
with rare for the time features like a 16 by 10 aspect ratio and a nearly
undrivable rated resolution of 2304 by
1440. add in that it's equipped with an srgb mode for super accurate colors and
a high vertical refresh rate and there was pretty much nothing that this thing
couldn't do better than early lcds and even many modern ones like how about
zero pixel response time or wait
how can pixel response time be zero b0
in an lcd light shines through crystals
that physically shift and turn to allow the light through that process takes
time but in a crt when an electron hits
the phosphor it instantly produces a photon and then stops once the electron
gun is no longer blasting it what actually makes the image stay on the
screen is a limitation of our own human monkey vision when you point a
high-speed camera at a crt you'll actually see that the entire screen is
drawn line by line by a single point but
when we scale time back to the human perception level it appears that the
whole screen is lit up and that's actually why this video is gonna look a
little bit funky because we have to play around with our shutter speed in order
to make the screen stop flickering and looking weird
it's so crisp i haven't seen a crt of
anywhere near this grade in man i went lcd in 2004. you see that
slow moving line going down the screen that's due to the desynchronization
between the frame rate of our camera and the refresh rate of this display ah
let's put it back to 80. that better david that's so much better wonderful oh
i forgot to explain why we're using a gtx titan x because that's the last
NVIDIA card that still included analog outputs that's why you chose it right is
there anything after that i don't know that's that's the best card crazy this
is the best crt gaming setup you can
have can you do dp to vga active conversion probably right okay that was
interesting is that i looked for like a good way to try and con to switch to
analog i'm not sure if there really is one that actually allows you to access
all of the settings in here because if you just do like a plug and adapter yeah
you can only do 60 hertz you're limited by like the HDMI spec or whatever
yeah that's a good tech tip i love it yeah well if it's on the wrong monitor
Windows shift arrow key and you could whoops you can move it around between
the monitors amazing adam just tech tipped me we have
to kind of fool around with all displays connected because if this one turns off
it takes 45 minutes to warm up but we're going to check the refresh rate yes
currently it's running 300. is that like a g-sync limitation or
something what is that oh you know what it probably is this is a
titan x we're running dp 1.2 yeah
can't have the best of all worlds that's okay we'll settle for 300. really what
we're going to be looking at here is brightness which is obviously in two
completely different leagues and of course
image persistence now here's something i didn't miss the phosphor layer is
actually like this far behind the front pane of glass so you kind of have this
perception that you're looking through a window at your monitor as opposed to
just at your monitor it's like your monitor sitting in a shadow box the
slight blur of having round
phosphor light emission rather than square pixels you really don't need any
aliasing at all it looks
so clean
flick around oh man this thing is crazy why do they not
still make these things does it ever look good i mean we
probably had to reduce our shutter speed so much that
you're not even getting the the sense of how sharp and crisp it is
the motion is just flawless though another thing that's really cool is
subtle gradients like this cloudy sky to the clear blue sky up here you don't get
any of that blocking or
banding that you would potentially see on an lcd there's a twitter account that
has like side-by-side comparisons of 2d sprites from the 16-bit era and it will
show them on a like crisp lcd display as
well as on like a cheaper crt and it
makes a huge difference in how things look like they have a one shot of
dracula from castlevania on an lcd he has these tiny little beady little red
eyes but when you put it on a crt the like natural kind of blur makes it fill
up the whole space in his eyes and it looks so much more painterly and like
it's crazy the Windows shift arrow key over to the other monitor yeah is that
gonna work yeah was i just imagining how much better it looked going back to
1080p definitely sucks although fun fact
actually driving that thing at the rated resolution back when it came out
basically impossible yeah and it still doesn't look as clean the additional
brightness is definitely a plus though and guys lcds have improved a lot to the
point where under normal circumstances i would be whipping the mouse around on
this thing going man lcds have gotten great for image persistence
but even this is not quite there
i would choose the lcd what what why i've grown very accustomed
to this level of smoothness of animation and the response time difference at my
level of play is just not enough to
matter do you think you can feel a difference between this and the monitor or is that
all just that's you wouldn't know i doubt most humans would feel a
difference terrorists win i didn't even see an opponent
and immediately upon switching to the qdo led this is using samsung's latest
panel technology in this alienware monitor the last thing i said was a big
fat lie because no i would definitely go with this man that brightness that
contrast that pop OLED is a super cool technology because
it marries some of the biggest advantages of both crt and lcd one of
the big problems with early lcds in particular was awful black levels well
with OLED you can turn the pixels off entirely just like a crt where you just
don't illuminate that section no how do i miss crap
that sucked another big advantage is that due to the
nature of OLED displays the pixel response time is near instantaneous so
you get that excellent persistence of the image even when you're moving around
rapidly like this although i do have to note that without black frame insertion
it's not quite the same is it of course that's not to say OLED doesn't have its
advantages you probably noticed it's quite a lot brighter than our crt well
that's for a couple of reasons one is that this used to be rated for 125 nits
of peak luminance and it has aged down to a mere 69 which is not as nice as it
might sound but turn off the lights
how do i do that so now it's all gross because the blue phosphors have probably
worn out a little bit more so after calibration
i mean the thing about luminance is that it's all relative to
the dilation of your pupil right like that's why the standard for theater
level HDR is what like 80 nits or something like that
it's not a lot in a light controlled environment you don't need a ton of
luminance wow has that never been more
clear how am i supposed to decide see i could never afford this kind of thing
back when i was a gamer teenager this is what
i have something if you're still struggling to make a decision oh see
that's the thing all right OLED and crts share a lot of
the same advantages but an OLED will
never draw in scan lines
it is absolutely mind-blowing how immediately better a
retro game that was designed for a display with scan lines looks when you
fire it up how did this lose to the playstation
oh look at that grinding baby but it's been so long since i've seen retro
content on a proper display i forgot how good it looked there is no
way that i would guess 480i
480i is half the vertical resolution of
480p theoretically right because they're interlaced i mean there's some trickery
so that it doesn't look like it and that's exactly what we're seeing here
look at the cobblestone like look at how good that texture looks i know right
like this brick obviously by modern standards right this brick is not that
amazing but with proper scan lines in
your display which is something that you can't really replicate on modern
hardware fake scan lines are a thing you can buy adapters that will sit in
between your retro console and a modern display and will kind of
mostly add the effect of scan lines or what you can do is you can run it in
emulator and many emulators support fake scan lines to get more of that retro
look but boy is it ever not quite the same man in a dark room and here's
another thing that's really incredible the dreamcast outputs at 480i like i
mentioned but this isn't a 480i display it runs at 2304 by 1440 80 hertz crts
don't have a native resolution you see lcds and oleds have physical pixels that
cannot be relocated so when you run them at anything other than the resolution
the number of actual pixels it's more of a pixel count than a resolution really
they look blurry or they have artifacts crts you can put in any input within
their supported range and they will run it natively so there's no drawback to
using a console versus a computer with this thing it'll just look flipping
awesome no matter what oh and another cool thing is that the limitation of
what resolution or what refresh rate you can run comes down to the speed with
which the gun can go back and forth so you could lower your resolution and up
your refresh rate or lower your refresh rate and increase your resolution the
choice is yours within reason to compare our native image quality with an lcd we
actually had to go find an older one that still has a vga input and it should
be noted that depending on the scalar built into the panel that vga input
could behave very very differently this particular benq was a fairly high end
display wow does that ever look like dog crap the craziest part of how much worse
this looks to the eye is that this crt for low-res games like
this actually isn't necessarily your best case scenario having your pixel
points and uh not quite a pixel more of a dot having
your dots so pinpoint accurate actually takes away some of the softness that low
resolution consoles benefited from it was kind of a natural anti-aliasing so
if we had a crt tv we might even be
having a better experience look at what this brick looks like in comparison
it looks like trash okay let's go back let's go back to the
crt way better like it even looks more 3d
do you guys see how like it just has more of a 3d pop the color it doesn't
shift at all i forgot
it's absolutely perfect one of the things that makes this particular set so
accurate is that it uses a technology that sony developed in the 60s that they
called trinitron to improve the video quality of their televisions when
electron guns were developed they weren't entirely accurate and often
electrons would stray from their intended path causing them to activate
other unintended phosphors it wasn't a big issue with black and white
televisions but once colors got involved stray electrons hitting nearby phosphors
would unacceptably distort the image with unintended colors and fuzziness to
solve this rca developed the shadow mask
a metal sheet full of tiny holes that would block stray electrons from hitting
the wrong phosphors but the downside to this was it greatly reduced display
brightness because the metal panel blocked a lot of the energy the
trinitron though uses an aperture grille which is instead made up of vertical
slits this was accompanied by a change in the arrangement of electron guns from
a triangle to a straight line and it allows much more of the energy to make
it to the screen and thus a brighter display sony actually won an emmy for
this technology so apple isn't the only emmy award-winning tech company the
disadvantage of aperture grille so my old viewsonic p95f plus was an aperture
grill display are we connected to the computer stuff here let's switch over
yeah and there's one up here as well right there
those lines there are a visible element of the aperture grille and they're
noticeable enough that adam when this thing arrived came to me he's like minus
i think you spent three thousand dollars on a monitor with visible defects on it
actually they're completely normal and i can tell you from experience daily
driving an aperture grill monitor that you completely forget about them after
the first couple of hours the LTT Store
screwdriver has a super strong magnet in it and a magnetic bit
and the funny thing about electrons is they interact with magnetic fields right
so
what's going on here but actually all you're doing is just taking the electron
beams and deflecting them so i'm supposed to talk to you guys about why
people don't buy these one obvious one is price although you can find tvs
especially if they're not in great condition for significantly cheaper than
what we paid for this the issue is that finding one in good shape is getting
more and more challenging and as that becomes more and more true the costs are
only going to go up even this one which we paid a lot for suffers from degraded
phosphorus and some nicks in the anti-glare coating another big one is
cost even if the price isn't high transporting these things can be a
nightmare how much does it cost to ship one of these especially without the
original packaging it was cheaper for me to pay an employee for 10 hours of
driving and reimburse their mileage than to ship it via mail and then there's the
luminance crts just don't get as bright
and as they're used it only gets worse and unlike a projector there's no way to
change out the lamp it's not a lamp it's an electron gun after years of service
this thing just ain't gonna look the way that it used to so what's the answer in
my opinion modern tvs between OLED and
particularly qdo led which is in tvs now
and on the horizon for monitors we no longer have to deal with the
shortcomings of lcds and while they do have some drawbacks themselves the
biggest one which is burn-in is actually
shared with crts there's also the fact that they run at a fixed resolution but
from my personal experience as we've gone to 4k and beyond it's become far
less of an issue because the pixel density is so high that
especially from couch distance it doesn't make that much of a difference
but if you want the ultimate tracking down a high quality crt might be worth
it for you for the rest of you maybe you should just stick to checking out our
sponsor thank you for sponsoring this section of the video the lenovo legion
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that section of the video if you guys enjoyed this video and you like watching
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major part of our content strategy also you can check out this video where
i bought a gigantic the first ultra wide display which was actually a rear
projection display we still have it it still works
a shootout this versus that the king of the ancient kings
oh my god we have to