I was a CRT engineer back in the 1960s. This video is a pretty good basic explanation. But, the stuff on the front glass is “phosphor,” not phosphorous. Warning, do not put your hands near a CRT while it is on, or you may be zapped. Also, don’t try opening a CRT that is under vacuum. The whole tube could implode, shooting glass everywhere. The dots or stripes were aligned with the shadow mask and electron guns. The inside front of the envelope was first coated with a phosphor of one color mixed with a light sensitive material. The mask was put in place and a light was shined from the position corresponding to the location of the electron gun for that color. The light caused the dots or lines to bind to the front glass. The mask was removed and the unbound phosphor was rinsed away. Repeat two more times for the other colors. Then remove the mask once more and flash a thin layer of aluminum on the gun side of the phosphors, to reflect emitted light forward and avoid static charges. Finally, seal the front panel to the rest of the envelope. Amazing for mass production of a $190-$200 CRT!!
I thought that it should be stated that this is not a light shock either. Heed this warning. This is a VERY massive and potentially lethal shock. The shock is 15,000 to 30,000 volts and what is more the major issue is the current. 1 amp is enough to stop the heart and this can happen even if the CRT is unpluged because the capacitors can hold a massive charge and that can discharge on to you. So do NOT service a CRT TV unless you are properly trained to do so.
@@InnocentSoul0283 It should further be noted that the capacitor in question is the tube itself. So disconnecting a tube's EHT cap doesn't mean you can't still get a shock.
I used to repair TVs until the early 80's... when he reached into the one that was turned on, I could feel the shock. Been there, done that. I salute his steady and unshocked (on camera at least) hands.
I always wondered how they "printed" the phosphor dots so accurately, with perfect alignment. They were doing it with light in the electron gun position! Thanks for answering this.
Once you get the proportion right of the distance between shadow mask and screen, and the distance between electron gun and shadow mask, and you can get the holes in the shadow mask and the widths of the phosphor bands accurate enough, it's mostly a matter of putting a couple of permanent magnets in the right place on the outside of the tube, to let the electron beams hit their own phosphor correctly. Unfortunately especially in older CRT monitors and TV's it wasn't so easy to make the three beams hit the same spot at the same time, so you often see convergence errors especially around the edges and in the corners.
@@MatthewCenanceblack and white. Only needs white contrast for variation, but good question nonetheless. There was tons of lost data in old CRTs, but still some good detail for being the forerunner of moving images.
It's weird to think about but CRTs are a primitive sort of particle accelerator. If you're over 30yo you spent a significant period of time staring at a particle accelerator.
For those who want to know. The TL:DR of the Trinitron is they use an aperture grille instead of the shadow mask, as well as a single electron gun, with three separate cathodes.
Honestly, the way CRTs work just sound so much more “advanced” in a way, like just the thought of getting an electron gun to shoot across the field that fast is incredible in hindsight, especially when you consider how some games were able to actually use that to creative effect- like how the waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog have a rainbow effect on a CRT.
@@foch3 I think that's what keeps my passion fixated on crts over modern displays, there's just so much more to learn about Sure, modern displays have their own limitations that take genius to overcome, but the end result has always been less interesting, at least to me personally
Just fyi the Sonic rainbow effect came from the Genesis/Megadrive's subpar composite output, not from CRTs. You'll get the same effect viewing it on any display through the composite out.
until you try using one i had 17" until mid 00s it's extremely slow at 75hz the whole picture is floaty and fuzzy, the corners are never aligned properly and it was 1280x1024
@@tsartomato I’ve used them plenty, grew up with a 13” mono color CRT that needed to be punched in its speaker if the sound went out(which was legit fun). I still love them, and the neat things you can do with them :3
Thank you for the shadow mask demonstration. I've always understood the concept of "There's a metal sheet in here which magically somehow makes the guns only strike certain phosphors", but I never understood it was an alignment trick until your demonstration!
There's a more recent technology called the "Laser Phosphor Display" where it's similar to a CRT but the beam of light is driven mechanically with a UV laser. This removes the need for a vaccuum seal and therefore a bulky weight, and also allows it to have very low power consumption on par with or better than today's OLED displays. I always thought this is a great way to preserve the look and feel of retro games, but no company seems to realize it.
No need for a phosphor screen. There are large projection systems that use separate R G B lasers deflected by spinning mirrors. Perfect convergence and focus no matter what the shape, angle or size of screen. Really expensive and hazardous to the eyes should one get in the way.
There was a class action lawsuit about the misleading way CRT sizes were described. That's why, in later ads, you'll see the size listed with wording like "15" TV (14" viewable)"
Must have only applied to the US. Years ago I remember a comedian on TV bring out a TV box as part of his act, and mocked the " 14" size (15" Canada) " markings.
The set makers advertised the screen size by using the same diagonal dimension that the CRT maker used - overall. But sets are made with bezels to cover the edge resulting in a smaller viewable area. There is no image right to edge of a CRT because of the thickness of the side glass. And a small part of the outermost edge of the image is covered because it turns out blurry due to the curve in the glass on the inside corner.
I honestly never paid any attention to the "size" or "viewable area", with CRT's in the years past, or LCD's today. I look at the monitor in operation, and see if it's the size I want or not. Couldn't care less about the measurements.
I remember that! I owned a Compaq laptop back in the ‘90s and I got around $3 from a class-action lawsuit over the claimed size of the laptop’s screen.
I used to rotate the yoke many a time on old TV's, back in the 1980s... Of course I was just a teenager so the few shocks I got never scared me. I didn't realize it was that dangerous to adjust and square up the picture. I quickly learned that rotating the three sliders on a color tube would line them up exactly. Nice clear picture. Otherwise it's like a double vision image. I used to get free TVs back then, but they were never working properly until i fixed them.. The most common thing that stopped the TV was a bad thermistor.. I used to twist it like a bread tie, essentially removing it from the circuit and it would power right on. That was way before I knew electronics well.
*_Resolution_* (not dot pitch) is how closely a CRT can display lines to each other that can still be visually separated (or "resolved"). Resolution is measured in lines: it's how many parallel alternating black and white lines can be displayed and visually separated. *_Dot pitch_* only applies to color CRTs: it's the distance from the center of one phosphor dot to the center of the next phosphor dot of the same color. Monochrome CRTs don't have dots: they have a continuous field of one color of phosphor. A *_spot_* is the area lit up at a given instant by an electron beam. Monochrome CRTs have one spot, and color CRTs have three. The spot(s) are constantly moved (scanned) across the screen from left to right to draw the image in horizontal lines from the top to the bottom. *_A CRT's resolution_* is effectively limited by the spot size, the dot pitch, the scanning format (how many scan lines per picture), and the signal bandwidth (how quickly the signal can change between light and dark). The *_vertical resolution_* is the number of horizontal black & white lines that can be resolved across the picture height, and is generally limited by the number of scan lines per picture in the scanning format. The *_horizontal resolution_* is the number of vertical black & white lines that can be resolved across a width of the screen equal to the screen's height ("TV lines per picture height"), and is limited by the source signal's bandwidth and the bandwidth of the display's signal processing.
I remember moving from one state to another back at the end of the CRT era... moving a 40 something inch crt up a flight of stairs was like moving an elephant... the weight difference is certainly an advantage of flatscreens. Great video David.
I gave up my last CRT, a 21" monitor, because it was so hard to move on my own. (CRT Monitors are heavier than TVs of the same size due to the harder vacuum.) *Huge* mistake! It would take over 10 years before I had an LCD screen nearly as good. Being widescreen, the 23" LCD I'm using now still feels more cramped than that 21" CRT. The 20" wide LCD I had in between times was cramped, poor contrast, had gratingly visible pixels, and a viewing angle bad enough that I got neck pain from instinctively holding my head in a very specific position for hours.
I still own 34 inch Adi monitor. Plus a pair of crated 37 inch VECTOR tubes meant for a giant Vector display, from a friend who worked at McDonald's Detweiler and associates. I have some idea to turn it into a giant vector multicade machine with multiple Vector games in it
i replaced my 36 inch tv in the basement with a flat screen, then it sat there for 4 years until i finally remembered it while someone was around to help get it out of there!
I never knew either that it could remove so easily. I thought it was some form of like metallic or plastic, whatever, film that's completely embedded phosphor.
In terms of aspect ratio. I think the key reason why 16:9 got popular, was because it fit most movie and DVD videos better. Even though for computing one usually wants more horizontal space.
Yeah, and at that time lots of video games were coming out with FMV cut scenes, taking advantage of CD-ROMs and graphics. So there was a general appetite/expectation that soon everything would be a movie.
Good thing that you can rotate most screens around a pivot point nowadays. I used to have such a setup at work to have one screen only for the purpose of viewing documentation. Only downside is when they have a limited viewing angle.
I'm definitely old. I went to High School in the mid '70s and took a Radio/TV repair shop class and we learned how to repair TVs. My achievement was finding two different TVs that were both broken but the guts were the same even though they were different models. So I took the CRT from one and put it in the other and got myself a Free 25" color TV and I put it in my bedroom. The family TV was a 19" black and white one in the den. I have lots of experience with playing around with the yokes and such. Also I burned my finger once in the flyback cage. It actually just went in one side and out the other side of my finger. Otherwise I'd be dead now.
What an impact screen technologies have had even on furniture. TVs used to be pieces of furniture. Next they moved to sitting on furniture. Now they mount on the wall. How many households have entertainment centers anymore? I’m sure many do, but I’m sure the number of mounted TVs is growing. Great content, David. Thank you.
My issue everyone hangs the LCD TV's so dang high on the wall. Guess I'm just so used to looking eye level or down at a tv, because of CRT's being so heavy. I grew up with having the Furniture box type, that would sit on the floor.
I have a 32" Sony WEGA CRT and I want to buy a new stand for it, but I literally can't find one. All the TV stands are weak-looking little things that would crumble under the weight of that beast..
@@spencers4121 And like half the time it's because the best wall to have a TV on is occupied by a fireplace that they probably never used but INSISTED their half-million-dollar McMansion HAD to have anyway.
I remember CRT tvs gave off a high pitch noise, something like tinitus. It wasn't hard on the ears but it did give you away to your parents if you were staying up late playing your NES.
This video is a masterpiece. First I thought: "I've seen Technology Connections already", but this video goes very deep and is more hands-on. I have never seen a CRT tube from the inside before :-) Thanks!
Yeah, if Alec explained what a shadow mask is and how it works, I clearly missed that part. As crude as it was, David's little animation explained it really well.
My experience from selling TVs in the early 2000s was that people didn't like widescreen. If they were heavily invested in 4x3 video content, the picture was smaller.
because games haven't adopted the format yet. The moment people realized a properly done widescreen support gave them a whopping 30%+ edge over square-screen users in competitive games - square screens were on their way out.
@@wrmusic8736 i mean regardless of any competive advantage I still massively prefer a 4:3 or similar aspect ratio, i find the taller screens a lot better as i dont have good pherepheral vision especially to the sides and find taller more immersive
USA lagged behind Europe in widescreen. In the UK by 2000 all large screen sets were widescreen. Only portables would be 4:3. I was watching widescreen satellite transmissions from France in 1993.
A lot of people didn't understand that to properly use a widescreen TV you needed a wide screen video source. I remember hearing some woman in. a store saying how she would ever buy a wide screen TV because it made everyone look fat, not realising that it was just because she was watching a 4:3 tv broadcast that was being stretched to fill the screen. Personally i was an early adopter of wide screen tv, so much so that I actually had a wide screen CRT.
@@KonradZielinski and that was how the shops demonstrated them. I just checked and in the U.K. until at least 2002 the main channels with the most popular programmes like EastEnders were still broadcasting in 4:3.
Reminds me of seeing screen content programmatically (!) fading from or to black in the VGA era for the first time, something that was only doable by adjusting the knobs on the screen before, as part of a personal adjustment, but not in software.
@@s4ndwichMakeR It's always wild seeing something which wasn't possible before. :D Now I understand why so many DOS games do it; it was one of the cool new things of the era. I hadn't made the conection before.
There is a very specific feeling when playing on a CRT arcade. Games become more cartoonish I think. That I think is what us retro people actually remembers and miss the most of from those days, I think that feeling is stronger than what specific console or computer it was. The CRT feeling.
You forgot another drawback of LCD displays: They require time to change the brightness of each pixel or subpixel, whereas the intensity of an electron gun can be changed instantly. And because the CRT rebuilds the entire image from scratch each time the screen is refreshed, pixels can change as fast as the CRT can refresh the screen. With an LCD, how fast pixels can change depends on many factors, including which color you want to change from to which color. For many years, response time was one of the most important limiting factors of any TFT. Thanks to tricks like overdrive, they have gotten better over the years, but even today, switching from black to white or vice versa is typically faster on a TFT than switching from one gray scale to another. And while TFTs may claim 9 ms switching times in their manuals (enough to display 111 frames per second), that's usually just their "best case" time. On average, the same monitor may have a switching time of only 14 ms (just enough for 71 frames per second), and if that is the average, you can estimate the worst case switching time. Keep in mind that there is little point in running a monitor at 120 Hz if it cannot actually display 120 frames per second, as some information will simply never make it to the screen. Worse, the image will become blurred as the information from two or more images is blended together to some degree. The result is unwanted motion blur, which gamers especially hate. None of these problems existed with CRT. The only limiting factor with CRT was the refresh rate, and if your CRT had a refresh rate of 120 Hz, it really did display 120 completely separate images per second.
How can the human eye still detect motion blur here? I cannot even full screen 80Hz flicker. 120 Hz is the GPU (and gameloop) making up for the lag of LCD and internet.
Even modern LCDs struggle to keep up with the refresh rates that are advertised. They all do overdrive, but usually for the higher refresh rates the overdrive has to be so aggressive that you end up with overshoot which creates inverse ghosting
Good point. I always wondered at how and why corrunt lcd screens could display 120kz content of a panel itself simply cannot even keep up with 60 or 80fps? Thus resulting in motion blur. Crt screen could keep up with 120fps content thus it will not view any motion blur. However so i have only seen 100hz tv’s wich even don’t process 100hz content at all, all what they do is doubling or creating new frames from 30fps or 60fps content (depending on it’s resolution and/or type cable) to generate 100fps on screen but it’s artificially created by a processor, so it’s not real 100hz content. And with such low response time of lcd screens in mind, i simply just don’t understand why and how on earth todays smartphones are 120hz, that’s just silly and power wasting to me.
I was one of those who hung on to CRTs as long as I could. I simply did not like the "ghosting" that was so common on early LCDs -- that's one thing that CRTs definitely did not suffer from. Pixel response times were essentially zero on a CRT. Heck, my first high-definition television was a DLP, not an LCD, because I hated the "streaks" that would appear on early LCD televisions when the picture would pan left or right. (And I didn't suffer from the "rainbow effect" that bothered some people watching DLP TVs.) I was very much anti-LCD for a very long time. It was 2009 before I bought my first LCD monitor. And 2010 before I bought my first LCD TV. But I freely admit that *today's* LCDs are superb. The technology finally overcame the shortcomings that bothered me most -- pixel response time and contrast ratio.
It's pretty amazing how far LCDs have come. There were other techs that were well developed earlier like DLP, SXRD, and Plasma but the LCD kept progressing. LEDs are really what really changed things, especially when they become to use backlit arrays that could turn on and off lighting in areas. Mini-LEDs have progressed that further, although there is still some light bleed visible on black screens when other areas are lit, but they do give LCDs something closer to black than before. Quantum dots can further help here. But the CRT was and is an amazing technology. Ultimately I think the biggest thing that gave the LCD its victory was not merely price, it was also weight and ease of use. It is ridiculous how light a 60" LCD TV is compared to Plasma, Rear projection screens, and CRTs. The 40" Sony Trintron Wega weighed 304 lbs. A 65" Bravia X90L weights just 53.4 lbs without the stand. Price + ease of use + weight all make the LCD hard to beat. The LCD has also led the way in driving down TV costs. My family bought a front projection RCA television with three CRTs that folded open. Analog Tuner. Analog to fold it open. Cost over $10,000 in current dollars when adjusted for inflation and was 50". You can buy a good 50" TV nowadays (with a little less real estate, as was noted in the video) for less than 1/10 of that price. TV prices have fallen by over 90% in most cases when we adjust for inflation over the past 40-50 years.
Yeah my third monitor is an early 2000s LCD and the ghosting is BAD, everything has motion blur. I only use it for static things like discord though so its fine. Although I do have to say that it is still very usable and miles better than the passive matrix display on my 1994 IBM thinkpad 340 laptop, you can lose the mouse with that and it makes playing DOOM quite challenging!
There was a promising display tech known as SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) which had many of the perks of CRTs, but was also flat. They only built a few 720p prototypes and promised 1080p, but it's literally a lost technology today. Finding one would be a holy grail.
I once had a stereo unit connected up to my TV, with a large subwoofer underneath. Learned I had to move my subwoofer when the corner of the TV was magnetized and the colors became smeared!
Your videos are always well paced while covering a lot of ground. Sometimes on other channels I find that videos can drag and feel too long regardless of their duration, but when I watch yours I always feel that I got all the information and no time was wasted. Thank you!
You are so right. Upon buying my first 16:9 flat screen (had a 4:3 flat before), I was a bit shocked that my new monitor was way smaller than the old one.😂
Dave I worked in a factory that built CRT's (black and white as well as color) for almost 30 years. I was amazed that so many of my coworkers had no idea of how they worked. Your explanation was in my opinion basic enough that most people should be able to understand the basics.
4:45 - the little monitors attached to studio TV cameras were still B&W in the 90s when I operated them. It gave you the sharp image you needed to tell if you were in focus, and the control booth proc amps saw to the color calibration. I haven’t worked one in a long time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they still are.
As someone born very late into the CRT era, around the turn of the millennium, this was quite interesting to me! I was especially surprised that the phosphor coating was just a powder barely attached to the glass like that!
If you've ever seen a CRT that has been "necked" (aka the back of the tube broke off from rough handling), you will see a light or dark circle in the center of the screen from the phosphor being partially blown away by rushing air. Easy way to spot a worthless tube from a distance and avoid picking it up and wasting time on it.
I think one important aspect about contrast ratio that wasn't discussed is that it's highly dependent on the environment you're in. If you're in a dark environment, CRTs are excellent, but when there's light, you get a lot of reflection of the grey phosphor coating, and the image will never, ever be darker than however bright that grey color is.
And that gray color is itself already due to the gray filter on the front CRT glass, which can either be a colorant in the front glass itself, or a plastic film laminated to the front. (TVs tend to be the former, computer displays the latter.) Without the gray filter, the phosphors appear nearly white. You could put a darker filter on it to improve contrast, but you’d have to increase the CRT brightness to compensate. (This is part of what made Triniton CRTs so successful: their thin wire aperture grille covered up far less of the phosphor than the shadow mask did, which had two effects: a) more of the phosphor lit up, and b) the wires didn’t heat up as much as a shadow mask, so you could run the electron guns at higher power without the shadow mask distorting. Both of those meant a much brighter image, which meant in turn that Sony could sacrifice more brightness towards contrast.)
Was trying to play some games on a consumer tube today, on my terrace, in a unusually sunny Finnish summer day. Playing Super Mario 64, I could indeed see a fat dude on the screen...
Exactly CRTs can only archive better contrast in a pitch black room any ambient light will raise the black level. Modern LCDs(especially VA) actually have better contrast than CRTs in typical viewing environment because the panels themself are much darker.
It's funny how easy it is to forget about quality of life issues like that when something is no longer an issue. You really did need to turn off any lights in the room or close the curtains/blinds all the way to watch anything, or there would be a reflection on the screen the whole time. It's amazing how LCDs normally mitigate that enough, if a light source isn't pointing directly at the screen.
The eyes focus on the same point, so no. Some people actually look up and down -- as shocking as that might be -- and those people had to suffer through about _15 years_ of hideously cramped screens until 16:9 screens of a decent height finally became affordable.
@@eekee6034 Nonsense. Test it yourself. Focus on a fixed point and move your finger left and right and then up and down. Your horizontal field of view is far greater than your vertical--that is, you can move your finger a greater distance left and right and continue to see it than you can up and down. And your argument doesn't make sense regardless because it would apply to vertical field of view too, and your eyes aren't above and below one another.
I had a really high end 20" ViewSonic monitor back in the day and kept with that for a quite a few years, because it was a long time before any LCD with a reasonable price-tag could touch it in terms of quality.
This was the most illuminating "how CRTs work" video I've ever seen. Seeing the mask with the phosphor it, and suddenly it all made sense and CRT went from "magic" to "understandable".
I believe the way the phospor stripes/dots were created is that they first coat one colour, then use a UV source at the position of that colour's electron gun to harden it. Then wash off the un-exposed phosphor and repeat for the other two colours.
I was JUST thinking about this the other day, and wondering how anyone managed that level of precision in commodity manufacturing as far back as the 60s. It seemed like there would be tons of alignment issues that would be like the "dead pixels" of the CRT industry. You must have 20% of your screen show the wrong color before you can claim the tube as defective. haha
Back in the early 70's my father and I put together a 25" Heathkit Color TV. It had a whole section on theory, and test equipment like a signal generator & external degaussing coil included. It took us a couple of weeks, and that's how I learned to solder. It replaced our 9" portable monochrome TV, and boy was it a huge upgrade.
Funny that this video came out now that I told my aunt to finally switch from a CRT to an LCD that she got from her daughter (because she was upgrading to a bigger one) just a week ago and was just sitting behind the CRT. It was a Samsung TV that had the top left corner magnetised from something and was visibly red but was still very bright.
When you get a 40 inch 16:9 LCD display, it's EXACTLY 34 inch 4:3 CRT display in terms of height thus widening a 34 inch 4:3 display. The same screen size only wider.
I appreciate your comment about new technology. Some in the retro community have the attitude that everything now is terrible and that it was so much better in the [80s/90s/2000s], that they had better childhoods than kids today, etc. There's a lot today that is both better and worse. It's just different and that is okay!
I was born in 85 so I had decent use of CRT's for many years and I'm so glad they are long gone, big, weighed a ton, limited to a certain size unless you have a fork lift handy, gave me eyestrain if used for too long and power hungry. My grandparents were very early adopters of everything so they had widescreen CRT's as well though those things never lasted long before LCD's started to take over. I changed my PC monitor over to a 4:3 LCD back somewhere around 2002/2003 when they started to become pretty cheap and never looked back since. LCD's were so much easier on the eyes along with the significantly crisper text, smoother dead flat lines and no degaussing.
Hooray! I have been critical about your last vids but this one shows you totally still got it! I was very much into it and suddenly it was already over. Keep up the good work, we need more of this!
If you are interested in seeing a video of how a CRT draws individual lines on a screen, it might be worth checking out the video the Slowmo guys did. It was very cool to see.
Highly recommended. They show how that at any given moment, only 1 point of the screen is fully illuminated. The eyes are just not quick enough to follow the point and give the illusion of a whole image.
Fun aside on the black and white note: you can still get a black and white TV licence in the UK, I presume for those who still have black and white screens?
little known fact about this little known fact : while you'd think most B&W licences are people with colour TVs who are lying to get a cheaper licence, they are in fact mostly bought by security companies that monitor/record B&W cameras in places that have a TV visible.
It is weird to me how all the dates in your timeline are 20-30 years less than actual dates in my country. First TV transmission : 1950 First Color TV transmission: 1980 And for the LCD displays.... I only see one once, there were too expensive. We used CRTs until circa 2010.
Sounds a lot like Korea. They started doing Color TV in 1980s too. For having to use CRT until around 2010s you’re lucky because LCD display is horrible in my experience
*Thank you!* Finally! Every single video that explains CRTs just says something like, "It has an electron gun and a..." And I'm always like, "Wait, wait, wait. An electron _gun?"_ They never explain how the gun works. Ever. This video finally does it. *Thank you.*
Man, this is _exactly_ my kind of video. 90's kid, so I grew up with these TVs. I knew how CRTs worked before this video, but there were multiple times that I exclaimed "huh!" when you showed me something I never considered (like the colored stripes going up vertically uninterrupted before the shadow mask.) EDIT: I just realized, I'm watching this video on a 49" 32:9 monitor that runs at 5,120x1440. We truly live in the future.
motion clarity is still far better on a CRT then any modern display. except for a few LCD with really good backlight strobing. even then CRT still have the edge.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention motion clarity. It’s the most obvious thing to see when you show other people when playing games. CRTs are crystal clear in motion while LCDs and even OLED despite its instant response times. CRTs are still king of response times because they are instant. I love using both CRTs and LCD/OLED. I wish CRTs stuck around but I know why they disappeared. Despite their advantages being great, their downsides were too big for most people to want to keep them around
I was surprised by this omission as well, it is really the only remaining advantage of CRTs and a big advantage at that. The way I understand it is that CRTs ‘blink’. The phosphorus dims after each passing of the beam. This makes for very short dark frames between each frame. Moving objects on screen jump from one position in one frame to their new position in the next frame. In between is a dark ‘frame’ which makes our brains fill in the gap between the two positions. With modern sample and hold displays (LCD and OLED) there is no dark frame in between, the moving object instantly jumps from one position to the next. There is no space left for the brain to fill in the gap and for an instant you see both positions at once. This makes the motion smear out. Try to play a Sonic game on a LCD or OLED. It looks horrible, one smeared out mess. Some screens have black frame insertion options to artificially insert a completely black frame between displayed frames to improve motion clarity. It works, but especially OLEDS are so damned fast that the effect is too perfect. Phosphorus ‘slowly’ dims, OLED pixels switch almost instantly. So the effect on an OLED can be perceived as harsh, people sensitive to it see the screen flickering. Another disadvantage is that black frame insertion lowers the light output of a screen, so it is (far) less bright. This makes it unsuitable for brightly lit rooms. Another way to solve motion clarity on modern screens is by increasing the framerate. But to achieve the same motion clarity of a CRT we need to approach 1000Hz. We are going over 400Hz already, so we are on a path to that destination, but there is still quite a way to go. It would also require rendering games at 1000 fps to get the result, so perfect motion clarity will always be limited to old and/or simple games. Or play on a CRT now :)
One of my earlier jobs was as a quality control technician at a tool and die plant that manufactured the three aperture pieces inside the CRT. We measured random lots of parts on a variety of guages down to tolerances of +/- thousandths of an inch. It was an interesting part of my career.
CRT is a holy grail of FPS games. I only gave up my CRT once gpu's stopped the support. Gdm-fw900 was a helluva monitor. Still got 420 euros out of it when I sold it couple years ago.
@@smiththers2 That GTX Titan doesn't hold a candle to the clarity that a Radeon can achieve on the same monitor and this is coming from a huge Nvidiot. Everything passed the GeForce 7000 series has shit clarity on a CRT, believe me I wish it wasn't so. I would much rather run a Titan X for my ultimate XP box.
I remember thinking that LCDs would never be cheaper than CRTs because of how much they had come down in price. I distinctly remember the first time a 17" CRT became "affordable" for normal people. At the same time the pros were using 21" and 24" monsters. Its crazy to think that we have essentially settled on 27" to be a normal sized screen now.
I still really like CRTs. I grew up when CRTs were being phased out in favor of LCDs, and while they do have their benefits, mostly just cost to produce and size/weight, I think CRTs just look a lot better personally. This is especially true when you have an LCD with super washed out looking colors, which is pretty common especially in the past, when LCDs were still somewhat new.
David: you did a great job elucidating the differences between CRTs and LCDs. I loved the teardown of the CRT and it was great seeing some of my other favourite CZcamsrs!
The main reason is because CRTs are already dead. The industry to make them is gone and people who know how to make them are retired. That said, there are also some technical reasons why CRTs were a dead end. For 4k you want a big CRT, however, the larger the CRT, the thicker the glass needs to be to withstand the vacuüm pressure. So CRTs would have become even heavier. Second, in CRT there is a trade-off between brigthness and resolution. Television CRTs can be brighter than VGA CRTs and a 4K CRT would have had to further reduce brightness.
I once had a 21" CRT monitor which was very likely made in the mid-late 90s. I normally ran it at 1600x1200, but for a couple of weeks I ran it at 2048x1536 instead. It was almost good enough; there was just a little blur which made me feel a tiny bit uncomfortable. I didn't try adjusting the beam focus; I should have. I also didn't try running it at an even higher resolution; I don't know if it would have handled even more lines. :)
Thank you David always enthusiastically when I see you have produced a new video. I have watched many of of your past videos and they are excellent. Thanks again.
That's so cool that you can just rotate the coil or put a magnet up to that monochrome screen and mess with it like that! And without damaging it! Really cool
You say vacuum tubes were found in any electronic device made before the 1960s? My family purchased our first color TV in 1965. It was a Zenith console madel with all tubes. When I had my own apartment I purchased a new TV in 1972. All tubes. Tubes were in use well after the 1960s.
No. OLEDs don't have burn-in like CRT and plasma did, where static image could literally burn-in. OLEDs are rather millions of individual lighbulbs that have limited lifespan. The brighter they need to be, the faster they'll degrade. This is why you can't burn-in OLED by watching 21:9 movie on 16:9 screen with static black bars, but you had to run cleaning on Plasma after each movie. 3 movies in a row without cleaning and you had permanent burn-in. You will burn oled with news channels watched regularly while, Plasma won't if you mix usage like 1 hour of news and 2 hours of movies filling the screen. In other words CRTs and Plasma were burn-proof when used correctly, while OLEDs can be used however you like and they just have limited lifespan. Like 1000 hours of news channels or 1000 hours of displaying desktop. Using OLEDs for different content helps in uniform brightness degradation. Display gets dimmer without significant image quality loss. I have CX and C13 LG OLEDs, the first one is slightly darker after 3 years, but it has no burn-in despite it was used mostly for console gaming with static UI.
I was a CRT engineer back in the 1960s. This video is a pretty good basic explanation. But, the stuff on the front glass is “phosphor,” not phosphorous.
Warning, do not put your hands near a CRT while it is on, or you may be zapped. Also, don’t try opening a CRT that is under vacuum. The whole tube could implode, shooting glass everywhere.
The dots or stripes were aligned with the shadow mask and electron guns. The inside front of the envelope was first coated with a phosphor of one color mixed with a light sensitive material. The mask was put in place and a light was shined from the position corresponding to the location of the electron gun for that color. The light caused the dots or lines to bind to the front glass. The mask was removed and the unbound phosphor was rinsed away. Repeat two more times for the other colors. Then remove the mask once more and flash a thin layer of aluminum on the gun side of the phosphors, to reflect emitted light forward and avoid static charges. Finally, seal the front panel to the rest of the envelope. Amazing for mass production of a $190-$200 CRT!!
I thought that it should be stated that this is not a light shock either. Heed this warning. This is a VERY massive and potentially lethal shock. The shock is 15,000 to 30,000 volts and what is more the major issue is the current. 1 amp is enough to stop the heart and this can happen even if the CRT is unpluged because the capacitors can hold a massive charge and that can discharge on to you. So do NOT service a CRT TV unless you are properly trained to do so.
@@InnocentSoul0283 It should further be noted that the capacitor in question is the tube itself. So disconnecting a tube's EHT cap doesn't mean you can't still get a shock.
I used to repair TVs until the early 80's... when he reached into the one that was turned on, I could feel the shock. Been there, done that.
I salute his steady and unshocked (on camera at least) hands.
Ah, that explains the tingling sensation! Now for some reason I wish I could do that again.
I always wondered how they "printed" the phosphor dots so accurately, with perfect alignment. They were doing it with light in the electron gun position! Thanks for answering this.
It’s impressive how they were able to line up the shadow mask and the phosphor so accurately.
Once you get the proportion right of the distance between shadow mask and screen, and the distance between electron gun and shadow mask, and you can get the holes in the shadow mask and the widths of the phosphor bands accurate enough, it's mostly a matter of putting a couple of permanent magnets in the right place on the outside of the tube, to let the electron beams hit their own phosphor correctly. Unfortunately especially in older CRT monitors and TV's it wasn't so easy to make the three beams hit the same spot at the same time, so you often see convergence errors especially around the edges and in the corners.
How did they do that back in the early 1900s?
@@MatthewCenance They didn't, black and white televisions don't have a shadow mask
@@MatthewCenance maybe turn it on, move it live and see what happens?
@@MatthewCenanceblack and white. Only needs white contrast for variation, but good question nonetheless. There was tons of lost data in old CRTs, but still some good detail for being the forerunner of moving images.
It's weird to think about but CRTs are a primitive sort of particle accelerator. If you're over 30yo you spent a significant period of time staring at a particle accelerator.
Technically...Nope. It's still electron gun. Accelerator, well it accelerates particles. Yeah I know it's nitpicking, but still.
For those who want to know. The TL:DR of the Trinitron is they use an aperture grille instead of the shadow mask, as well as a single electron gun, with three separate cathodes.
I thought a Trinitron was more le one of those old projection screen TVs. Because you can adjust the convergence on a Trinitron.
Trinitron - where the 2 black horizontal lines let you know you had Quality, lol!
@@philojudaeusofalexandria9556 Depends on the screen size. 17" and under generally only had one brace wire, while 19" and larger had two.
@@philojudaeusofalexandria9556 The black horizontal lines were wires to stabilize the aperture grill on the screen.
Honestly, the way CRTs work just sound so much more “advanced” in a way, like just the thought of getting an electron gun to shoot across the field that fast is incredible in hindsight, especially when you consider how some games were able to actually use that to creative effect- like how the waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog have a rainbow effect on a CRT.
Modern displays are boring by comparison, just a matrix of wires and pixels.
@@foch3 I think that's what keeps my passion fixated on crts over modern displays, there's just so much more to learn about
Sure, modern displays have their own limitations that take genius to overcome, but the end result has always been less interesting, at least to me personally
Just fyi the Sonic rainbow effect came from the Genesis/Megadrive's subpar composite output, not from CRTs. You'll get the same effect viewing it on any display through the composite out.
until you try using one
i had 17" until mid 00s
it's extremely slow at 75hz the whole picture is floaty and fuzzy, the corners are never aligned properly and it was 1280x1024
@@tsartomato I’ve used them plenty, grew up with a 13” mono color CRT that needed to be punched in its speaker if the sound went out(which was legit fun). I still love them, and the neat things you can do with them :3
Thank you for the shadow mask demonstration. I've always understood the concept of "There's a metal sheet in here which magically somehow makes the guns only strike certain phosphors", but I never understood it was an alignment trick until your demonstration!
Same! This was a great demo!
There's a more recent technology called the "Laser Phosphor Display" where it's similar to a CRT but the beam of light is driven mechanically with a UV laser. This removes the need for a vaccuum seal and therefore a bulky weight, and also allows it to have very low power consumption on par with or better than today's OLED displays. I always thought this is a great way to preserve the look and feel of retro games, but no company seems to realize it.
They would need a larger market besides retro gamer's, plus I would think the mechanical nature would wear out quickly.
@@spencers4121 If that was true, mechanical jukeboxes would stop working within 1 month
mfw the company that has a patent on it hasn't made a consumer monitor with this tech and it doesn't expire for another 7½ years
A company called prysm is making them but they're only designed for business purposes.
No need for a phosphor screen. There are large projection systems that use separate R G B lasers deflected by spinning mirrors. Perfect convergence and focus no matter what the shape, angle or size of screen. Really expensive and hazardous to the eyes should one get in the way.
Cathode Ray Dude is doing computers now and 8-bit Guy is doing cathode ray tubes!
Little guys is the highlight of my year so far
Guess we need a collab. I liked the quickstart series too btw....
I thought of him too
My fav creator lately
1hr long ramble vids where then the comment section corrects everything he says. His camcorder/pro gear content was way more interesting.
There was a class action lawsuit about the misleading way CRT sizes were described. That's why, in later ads, you'll see the size listed with wording like "15" TV (14" viewable)"
Must have only applied to the US. Years ago I remember a comedian on TV bring out a TV box as part of his act, and mocked the " 14" size (15" Canada) " markings.
The set makers advertised the screen size by using the same diagonal dimension that the CRT maker used - overall. But sets are made with bezels to cover the edge resulting in a smaller viewable area. There is no image right to edge of a CRT because of the thickness of the side glass. And a small part of the outermost edge of the image is covered because it turns out blurry due to the curve in the glass on the inside corner.
This also was only true for televisions. Monitors were generally still advertised with the total tube size until the very end.
I honestly never paid any attention to the "size" or "viewable area", with CRT's in the years past, or LCD's today. I look at the monitor in operation, and see if it's the size I want or not. Couldn't care less about the measurements.
I remember that! I owned a Compaq laptop back in the ‘90s and I got around $3 from a class-action lawsuit over the claimed size of the laptop’s screen.
Touching the internals while the screen is on gives me chills.
Agreed, is that safe?
He was touching plastic. So yes, it is safe if you know what you are doing.
arcade technicians shitting their pants when being shocked
@@jumbledfox2098 it's "safe" until suddenly it's very deadly.
I used to rotate the yoke many a time on old TV's, back in the 1980s...
Of course I was just a teenager so the few shocks I got never scared me. I didn't realize it was that dangerous to adjust and square up the picture.
I quickly learned that rotating the three sliders on a color tube would line them up exactly. Nice clear picture. Otherwise it's like a double vision image.
I used to get free TVs back then, but they were never working properly until i fixed them..
The most common thing that stopped the TV was a bad thermistor.. I used to twist it like a bread tie, essentially removing it from the circuit and it would power right on.
That was way before I knew electronics well.
*_Resolution_* (not dot pitch) is how closely a CRT can display lines to each other that can still be visually separated (or "resolved"). Resolution is measured in lines: it's how many parallel alternating black and white lines can be displayed and visually separated.
*_Dot pitch_* only applies to color CRTs: it's the distance from the center of one phosphor dot to the center of the next phosphor dot of the same color. Monochrome CRTs don't have dots: they have a continuous field of one color of phosphor.
A *_spot_* is the area lit up at a given instant by an electron beam. Monochrome CRTs have one spot, and color CRTs have three. The spot(s) are constantly moved (scanned) across the screen from left to right to draw the image in horizontal lines from the top to the bottom.
*_A CRT's resolution_* is effectively limited by the spot size, the dot pitch, the scanning format (how many scan lines per picture), and the signal bandwidth (how quickly the signal can change between light and dark).
The *_vertical resolution_* is the number of horizontal black & white lines that can be resolved across the picture height, and is generally limited by the number of scan lines per picture in the scanning format.
The *_horizontal resolution_* is the number of vertical black & white lines that can be resolved across a width of the screen equal to the screen's height ("TV lines per picture height"), and is limited by the source signal's bandwidth and the bandwidth of the display's signal processing.
Sitting here in my game room with 6 Sony PVMs and an HD CRT. CRTs still are alive and well for me.
I remember moving from one state to another back at the end of the CRT era... moving a 40 something inch crt up a flight of stairs was like moving an elephant... the weight difference is certainly an advantage of flatscreens. Great video David.
I couldn't give away my 17 pc monitor and 32 tv, took up so much room and so heavy.
I gave up my last CRT, a 21" monitor, because it was so hard to move on my own. (CRT Monitors are heavier than TVs of the same size due to the harder vacuum.) *Huge* mistake! It would take over 10 years before I had an LCD screen nearly as good. Being widescreen, the 23" LCD I'm using now still feels more cramped than that 21" CRT. The 20" wide LCD I had in between times was cramped, poor contrast, had gratingly visible pixels, and a viewing angle bad enough that I got neck pain from instinctively holding my head in a very specific position for hours.
I still own 34 inch Adi monitor. Plus a pair of crated 37 inch VECTOR tubes meant for a giant Vector display, from a friend who worked at McDonald's Detweiler and associates. I have some idea to turn it into a giant vector multicade machine with multiple Vector games in it
When I think of new technologies I always think of that remark by Magneto "The pawns always go first."
i replaced my 36 inch tv in the basement with a flat screen, then it sat there for 4 years until i finally remembered it while someone was around to help get it out of there!
Smearing away the phosphor with your finger like that was MIND BLOWING.
? It's just like a florescent lightbulb...
You're easily amused.
@@WinterInTheForestOh no, he’s not a dopamine zombie 🙄
you never smashed tvs when you were a kid.......
I never knew either that it could remove so easily. I thought it was some form of like metallic or plastic, whatever, film that's completely embedded phosphor.
In terms of aspect ratio. I think the key reason why 16:9 got popular, was because it fit most movie and DVD videos better. Even though for computing one usually wants more horizontal space.
Yeah, and at that time lots of video games were coming out with FMV cut scenes, taking advantage of CD-ROMs and graphics. So there was a general appetite/expectation that soon everything would be a movie.
Good thing that you can rotate most screens around a pivot point nowadays. I used to have such a setup at work to have one screen only for the purpose of viewing documentation. Only downside is when they have a limited viewing angle.
And movies are widescreen because people have two eyes side by side. We see wider than tall
@@Tyneras 16:10 would still be the better choice for general computer use...
I’m still enjoying two 30” apple cinema displays in 16:10. Sure miss that extra height on 16:9.
I'm definitely old. I went to High School in the mid '70s and took a Radio/TV repair shop class and we learned how to repair TVs. My achievement was finding two different TVs that were both broken but the guts were the same even though they were different models. So I took the CRT from one and put it in the other and got myself a Free 25" color TV and I put it in my bedroom. The family TV was a 19" black and white one in the den. I have lots of experience with playing around with the yokes and such. Also I burned my finger once in the flyback cage. It actually just went in one side and out the other side of my finger. Otherwise I'd be dead now.
thank *YOU* for explaining *TUBEs*
How do you have a verified badge and posted on this already? It's only been six seconds since the thing was posted...
@@MatthewCenance My best guess is Christian is a Patreon of David's ;-)
Yeah but that's Old News. 😀
And WE love TUBEs
@@nicklasvegas4737 Yeah we do 😍
What an impact screen technologies have had even on furniture. TVs used to be pieces of furniture. Next they moved to sitting on furniture. Now they mount on the wall. How many households have entertainment centers anymore? I’m sure many do, but I’m sure the number of mounted TVs is growing.
Great content, David. Thank you.
My issue everyone hangs the LCD TV's so dang high on the wall. Guess I'm just so used to looking eye level or down at a tv, because of CRT's being so heavy. I grew up with having the Furniture box type, that would sit on the floor.
i remember when tvs were wooden boxes with doors on so they blended in with real furniture!
I have a 32" Sony WEGA CRT and I want to buy a new stand for it, but I literally can't find one. All the TV stands are weak-looking little things that would crumble under the weight of that beast..
@@spencers4121 And like half the time it's because the best wall to have a TV on is occupied by a fireplace that they probably never used but INSISTED their half-million-dollar McMansion HAD to have anyway.
I can't stand TVs high on the wall. Don't even get me started on people who put them over a fireplace. Mine is on an 18" credenza.
I remember CRT tvs gave off a high pitch noise, something like tinitus. It wasn't hard on the ears but it did give you away to your parents if you were staying up late playing your NES.
This video is a masterpiece. First I thought: "I've seen Technology Connections already", but this video goes very deep and is more hands-on. I have never seen a CRT tube from the inside before :-) Thanks!
Yea, I didn't think I'd find "yet another" CRT video interesting but, here we are. Maybe because CRTs are somewhat of a fetish.
Yeah, if Alec explained what a shadow mask is and how it works, I clearly missed that part. As crude as it was, David's little animation explained it really well.
My experience from selling TVs in the early 2000s was that people didn't like widescreen. If they were heavily invested in 4x3 video content, the picture was smaller.
because games haven't adopted the format yet. The moment people realized a properly done widescreen support gave them a whopping 30%+ edge over square-screen users in competitive games - square screens were on their way out.
@@wrmusic8736 i mean regardless of any competive advantage I still massively prefer a 4:3 or similar aspect ratio, i find the taller screens a lot better as i dont have good pherepheral vision especially to the sides and find taller more immersive
USA lagged behind Europe in widescreen. In the UK by 2000 all large screen sets were widescreen. Only portables would be 4:3. I was watching widescreen satellite transmissions from France in 1993.
A lot of people didn't understand that to properly use a widescreen TV you needed a wide screen video source. I remember hearing some woman in. a store saying how she would ever buy a wide screen TV because it made everyone look fat, not realising that it was just because she was watching a 4:3 tv broadcast that was being stretched to fill the screen. Personally i was an early adopter of wide screen tv, so much so that I actually had a wide screen CRT.
@@KonradZielinski and that was how the shops demonstrated them. I just checked and in the U.K. until at least 2002 the main channels with the most popular programmes like EastEnders were still broadcasting in 4:3.
There's something so absolutely wrong about seeing an old computer menu just cleanly and uniformly rotate like that. 3:50
I know, right? :D
Reminds me of seeing screen content programmatically (!) fading from or to black in the VGA era for the first time, something that was only doable by adjusting the knobs on the screen before, as part of a personal adjustment, but not in software.
it's oddly satisfying
I imagine a lot of zoomers' minds were blown.
@@s4ndwichMakeR It's always wild seeing something which wasn't possible before. :D Now I understand why so many DOS games do it; it was one of the cool new things of the era. I hadn't made the conection before.
There is a very specific feeling when playing on a CRT arcade. Games become more cartoonish I think. That I think is what us retro people actually remembers and miss the most of from those days, I think that feeling is stronger than what specific console or computer it was. The CRT feeling.
Man the thumbnail gave me flashbacks to a creepy Canadian PSA where a talking tv just said sitting around watching tv was bad for you.
i need to see this
You forgot another drawback of LCD displays: They require time to change the brightness of each pixel or subpixel, whereas the intensity of an electron gun can be changed instantly. And because the CRT rebuilds the entire image from scratch each time the screen is refreshed, pixels can change as fast as the CRT can refresh the screen. With an LCD, how fast pixels can change depends on many factors, including which color you want to change from to which color. For many years, response time was one of the most important limiting factors of any TFT. Thanks to tricks like overdrive, they have gotten better over the years, but even today, switching from black to white or vice versa is typically faster on a TFT than switching from one gray scale to another. And while TFTs may claim 9 ms switching times in their manuals (enough to display 111 frames per second), that's usually just their "best case" time. On average, the same monitor may have a switching time of only 14 ms (just enough for 71 frames per second), and if that is the average, you can estimate the worst case switching time. Keep in mind that there is little point in running a monitor at 120 Hz if it cannot actually display 120 frames per second, as some information will simply never make it to the screen. Worse, the image will become blurred as the information from two or more images is blended together to some degree. The result is unwanted motion blur, which gamers especially hate. None of these problems existed with CRT. The only limiting factor with CRT was the refresh rate, and if your CRT had a refresh rate of 120 Hz, it really did display 120 completely separate images per second.
How can the human eye still detect motion blur here? I cannot even full screen 80Hz flicker. 120 Hz is the GPU (and gameloop) making up for the lag of LCD and internet.
Even modern LCDs struggle to keep up with the refresh rates that are advertised. They all do overdrive, but usually for the higher refresh rates the overdrive has to be so aggressive that you end up with overshoot which creates inverse ghosting
Good point.
I always wondered at how and why corrunt lcd screens could display 120kz content of a panel itself simply cannot even keep up with 60 or 80fps? Thus resulting in motion blur.
Crt screen could keep up with 120fps content thus it will not view any motion blur.
However so i have only seen 100hz tv’s wich even don’t process 100hz content at all, all what they do is doubling or creating new frames from 30fps or 60fps content (depending on it’s resolution and/or type cable) to generate 100fps on screen but it’s artificially created by a processor, so it’s not real 100hz content.
And with such low response time of lcd screens in mind, i simply just don’t understand why and how on earth todays smartphones are 120hz, that’s just silly and power wasting to me.
Let's not forget the phosphors had a decay time yet it was very very low, about 100usec for blue and green typical phosphor, 1msec for red.
@@Bob-1802 this is slower than drawing a scanline, yet on high speed cameras you can see that only part of the line lights up at any time.
I was one of those who hung on to CRTs as long as I could. I simply did not like the "ghosting" that was so common on early LCDs -- that's one thing that CRTs definitely did not suffer from. Pixel response times were essentially zero on a CRT. Heck, my first high-definition television was a DLP, not an LCD, because I hated the "streaks" that would appear on early LCD televisions when the picture would pan left or right. (And I didn't suffer from the "rainbow effect" that bothered some people watching DLP TVs.)
I was very much anti-LCD for a very long time. It was 2009 before I bought my first LCD monitor. And 2010 before I bought my first LCD TV. But I freely admit that *today's* LCDs are superb. The technology finally overcame the shortcomings that bothered me most -- pixel response time and contrast ratio.
I heard the PSP had ghosting issues on the old one, and the new PSP apparently had interlacing issues instead.
It's pretty amazing how far LCDs have come. There were other techs that were well developed earlier like DLP, SXRD, and Plasma but the LCD kept progressing. LEDs are really what really changed things, especially when they become to use backlit arrays that could turn on and off lighting in areas. Mini-LEDs have progressed that further, although there is still some light bleed visible on black screens when other areas are lit, but they do give LCDs something closer to black than before. Quantum dots can further help here.
But the CRT was and is an amazing technology. Ultimately I think the biggest thing that gave the LCD its victory was not merely price, it was also weight and ease of use. It is ridiculous how light a 60" LCD TV is compared to Plasma, Rear projection screens, and CRTs. The 40" Sony Trintron Wega weighed 304 lbs. A 65" Bravia X90L weights just 53.4 lbs without the stand. Price + ease of use + weight all make the LCD hard to beat.
The LCD has also led the way in driving down TV costs. My family bought a front projection RCA television with three CRTs that folded open. Analog Tuner. Analog to fold it open. Cost over $10,000 in current dollars when adjusted for inflation and was 50". You can buy a good 50" TV nowadays (with a little less real estate, as was noted in the video) for less than 1/10 of that price. TV prices have fallen by over 90% in most cases when we adjust for inflation over the past 40-50 years.
Yeah my third monitor is an early 2000s LCD and the ghosting is BAD, everything has motion blur. I only use it for static things like discord though so its fine. Although I do have to say that it is still very usable and miles better than the passive matrix display on my 1994 IBM thinkpad 340 laptop, you can lose the mouse with that and it makes playing DOOM quite challenging!
Indeed! I posted quite a long comment about this. The 500hz gaming screens are pretty nuts 🥜
On CRTs, you can still see a bright object leave a trail behind against a black background. So there is still "fade out" time, just not fade in time.
There was a promising display tech known as SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) which had many of the perks of CRTs, but was also flat. They only built a few 720p prototypes and promised 1080p, but it's literally a lost technology today.
Finding one would be a holy grail.
if only it was released think it would compete with lcd and oleds
It sounds interesting.
@@superlavahair1536Looking at a diagram of how an SED works, it's way too close to an OLED to be distinct
It's the reason Sony got left behind in LCDs.
is it like a high pixel density vfd, basically?
I once had a stereo unit connected up to my TV, with a large subwoofer underneath. Learned I had to move my subwoofer when the corner of the TV was magnetized and the colors became smeared!
From speakers to screens to motors, it's amazing how many things only exist thanks to electromagnets.
Your videos are always well paced while covering a lot of ground. Sometimes on other channels I find that videos can drag and feel too long regardless of their duration, but when I watch yours I always feel that I got all the information and no time was wasted. Thank you!
A wild Clint appears!
I love when videos like this remind me of things. I remember when DVDs gave you the option of what format you wanted to watch it in.
You are so right. Upon buying my first 16:9 flat screen (had a 4:3 flat before), I was a bit shocked that my new monitor was way smaller than the old one.😂
Dave I worked in a factory that built CRT's (black and white as well as color) for almost 30 years. I was amazed that so many of my coworkers had no idea of how they worked. Your explanation was in my opinion basic enough that most people should be able to understand the basics.
That intro never gets old. Love this channel, keep up the great work!
I'm 24 and when he said that mostly only 'old' people keep CRTs, I turned around to look at my (growing) CRT collection.
Nothing like the glow of the electron beam
I am in hopes to buy a HD CRT at some point.
I wish they were cheap
They are only getting dimmer and pricier
@@gabrielvieira6529they arr if you dumpster dive
I played the original Super Mario Bros on an old CRT TV recently and the picture was amazing. It was a really, really good experience.
Old game consoles really do need to be played on the displays of the era.
Even the N64, and original Xbox look better on a CRT.
Even the Flat CRT look great on them. I am now officially an LCD hater that’s mean LED, Mini LED and QLED
I love the degaussing coil that is built into the old CRT computer monitors. Always fun to watch the screen twist and turn for a few seconds.
"Hello and welcome to the 8bit guy". I had to rewind to check if I had missed it . 😂
This is the type of content I love the most from your channel, David. Keep up the great work and congratulations on all of your success!
4:45 - the little monitors attached to studio TV cameras were still B&W in the 90s when I operated them. It gave you the sharp image you needed to tell if you were in focus, and the control booth proc amps saw to the color calibration. I haven’t worked one in a long time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they still are.
As someone born very late into the CRT era, around the turn of the millennium, this was quite interesting to me! I was especially surprised that the phosphor coating was just a powder barely attached to the glass like that!
In his VCF video, he broke neck of the tube to the space invaders clone cocktail table and you could see where the air blew the phosphor off the tube.
@@cooperschwartz318So the thing was launched very far?
@@MatthewCenance No, it's a vacuum so the air was rushing in.
If you've ever seen a CRT that has been "necked" (aka the back of the tube broke off from rough handling), you will see a light or dark circle in the center of the screen from the phosphor being partially blown away by rushing air.
Easy way to spot a worthless tube from a distance and avoid picking it up and wasting time on it.
I think one important aspect about contrast ratio that wasn't discussed is that it's highly dependent on the environment you're in. If you're in a dark environment, CRTs are excellent, but when there's light, you get a lot of reflection of the grey phosphor coating, and the image will never, ever be darker than however bright that grey color is.
And that gray color is itself already due to the gray filter on the front CRT glass, which can either be a colorant in the front glass itself, or a plastic film laminated to the front. (TVs tend to be the former, computer displays the latter.) Without the gray filter, the phosphors appear nearly white.
You could put a darker filter on it to improve contrast, but you’d have to increase the CRT brightness to compensate. (This is part of what made Triniton CRTs so successful: their thin wire aperture grille covered up far less of the phosphor than the shadow mask did, which had two effects: a) more of the phosphor lit up, and b) the wires didn’t heat up as much as a shadow mask, so you could run the electron guns at higher power without the shadow mask distorting. Both of those meant a much brighter image, which meant in turn that Sony could sacrifice more brightness towards contrast.)
The light effect can easily be fixed with a filter on the glass that prevents sunlight from refracting
Was trying to play some games on a consumer tube today, on my terrace, in a unusually sunny Finnish summer day. Playing Super Mario 64, I could indeed see a fat dude on the screen...
Exactly CRTs can only archive better contrast in a pitch black room any ambient light will raise the black level. Modern LCDs(especially VA) actually have better contrast than CRTs in typical viewing environment because the panels themself are much darker.
It's funny how easy it is to forget about quality of life issues like that when something is no longer an issue. You really did need to turn off any lights in the room or close the curtains/blinds all the way to watch anything, or there would be a reflection on the screen the whole time. It's amazing how LCDs normally mitigate that enough, if a light source isn't pointing directly at the screen.
I saw the notification and thought, that "8-Bit Guy" had a collab with "Cathode Ray Dude". 😅
Recipe of my perfect morning is: flavorful coffee + tasty dessert + new video from 8bit Guy
Humans have two horizontally aligned eyes, which allows a wider horizontal aspect ratio to use more of our vision.
The eyes focus on the same point, so no. Some people actually look up and down -- as shocking as that might be -- and those people had to suffer through about _15 years_ of hideously cramped screens until 16:9 screens of a decent height finally became affordable.
@@eekee6034 Nonsense. Test it yourself. Focus on a fixed point and move your finger left and right and then up and down. Your horizontal field of view is far greater than your vertical--that is, you can move your finger a greater distance left and right and continue to see it than you can up and down. And your argument doesn't make sense regardless because it would apply to vertical field of view too, and your eyes aren't above and below one another.
Sunday night (for me in Germany), a 8-bit guy video drops and everything stops for 20 minutes! Hope to see your arcade when I visit TX this August.
I had a really high end 20" ViewSonic monitor back in the day and kept with that for a quite a few years, because it was a long time before any LCD with a reasonable price-tag could touch it in terms of quality.
This was the most illuminating "how CRTs work" video I've ever seen. Seeing the mask with the phosphor it, and suddenly it all made sense and CRT went from "magic" to "understandable".
Amazing video! One of the best I've seen on the subject. Very cool to see so many from the community in your studio too. Cheers and thx!
It's a tiny particle accelerator!
It is, actually the faster they move (more voltage difference) the brighter the picture
@@maikudoutube Is it? It isn't accelerating particles. Imo the electron gun is more suitable and correct term.
I believe the way the phospor stripes/dots were created is that they first coat one colour, then use a UV source at the position of that colour's electron gun to harden it. Then wash off the un-exposed phosphor and repeat for the other two colours.
I was JUST thinking about this the other day, and wondering how anyone managed that level of precision in commodity manufacturing as far back as the 60s. It seemed like there would be tons of alignment issues that would be like the "dead pixels" of the CRT industry. You must have 20% of your screen show the wrong color before you can claim the tube as defective. haha
Back in the early 70's my father and I put together a 25" Heathkit Color TV. It had a whole section on theory, and test equipment like a signal generator & external degaussing coil included. It took us a couple of weeks, and that's how I learned to solder.
It replaced our 9" portable monochrome TV, and boy was it a huge upgrade.
Great episode again! Thanks for sharing!
Funny that this video came out now that I told my aunt to finally switch from a CRT to an LCD that she got from her daughter (because she was upgrading to a bigger one) just a week ago and was just sitting behind the CRT. It was a Samsung TV that had the top left corner magnetised from something and was visibly red but was still very bright.
When you guys were signing it I saw many of you that I follow. It's great to see you guys being in touch and sharing all this information.
When you get a 40 inch 16:9 LCD display, it's EXACTLY 34 inch 4:3 CRT display in terms of height thus widening a 34 inch 4:3 display.
The same screen size only wider.
I appreciate your comment about new technology. Some in the retro community have the attitude that everything now is terrible and that it was so much better in the [80s/90s/2000s], that they had better childhoods than kids today, etc. There's a lot today that is both better and worse. It's just different and that is okay!
Very interesting and well done. Thanks for making this.
I was born in 85 so I had decent use of CRT's for many years and I'm so glad they are long gone, big, weighed a ton, limited to a certain size unless you have a fork lift handy, gave me eyestrain if used for too long and power hungry. My grandparents were very early adopters of everything so they had widescreen CRT's as well though those things never lasted long before LCD's started to take over. I changed my PC monitor over to a 4:3 LCD back somewhere around 2002/2003 when they started to become pretty cheap and never looked back since. LCD's were so much easier on the eyes along with the significantly crisper text, smoother dead flat lines and no degaussing.
The only thing I didn't like about CRT's was the 16khz whine you could hear from anywhere when young.
Hooray! I have been critical about your last vids but this one shows you totally still got it! I was very much into it and suddenly it was already over. Keep up the good work, we need more of this!
If you are interested in seeing a video of how a CRT draws individual lines on a screen, it might be worth checking out the video the Slowmo guys did. It was very cool to see.
Highly recommended. They show how that at any given moment, only 1 point of the screen is fully illuminated. The eyes are just not quick enough to follow the point and give the illusion of a whole image.
Fun aside on the black and white note: you can still get a black and white TV licence in the UK, I presume for those who still have black and white screens?
that's amazing if true
The very idea that you guys had to have a tv license is incredible.... you need your own "tea party" lol.
little known fact about this little known fact : while you'd think most B&W licences are people with colour TVs who are lying to get a cheaper licence, they are in fact mostly bought by security companies that monitor/record B&W cameras in places that have a TV visible.
We really don't.
oh the UK where you actually need a license to have a TV
Our family CRT TV from the 80s still works while we have gone through several flat screen, lcd, led, and oled TVs.
This is an excellent video. You really explained difficult concepts with clarity and great analogies/examples. Loved it.
It is weird to me how all the dates in your timeline are 20-30 years less than actual dates in my country.
First TV transmission : 1950
First Color TV transmission: 1980
And for the LCD displays.... I only see one once, there were too expensive. We used CRTs until circa 2010.
Sounds a lot like Korea. They started doing Color TV in 1980s too. For having to use CRT until around 2010s you’re lucky because LCD display is horrible in my experience
*Thank you!* Finally! Every single video that explains CRTs just says something like, "It has an electron gun and a..." And I'm always like, "Wait, wait, wait. An electron _gun?"_ They never explain how the gun works. Ever. This video finally does it. *Thank you.*
Man, this is _exactly_ my kind of video. 90's kid, so I grew up with these TVs. I knew how CRTs worked before this video, but there were multiple times that I exclaimed "huh!" when you showed me something I never considered (like the colored stripes going up vertically uninterrupted before the shadow mask.)
EDIT: I just realized, I'm watching this video on a 49" 32:9 monitor that runs at 5,120x1440. We truly live in the future.
This was one of my favorite videos from your channel. Thank you so much for the good content! ❤
motion clarity is still far better on a CRT then any modern display. except for a few LCD with really good backlight strobing. even then CRT still have the edge.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention motion clarity. It’s the most obvious thing to see when you show other people when playing games. CRTs are crystal clear in motion while LCDs and even OLED despite its instant response times.
CRTs are still king of response times because they are instant.
I love using both CRTs and LCD/OLED. I wish CRTs stuck around but I know why they disappeared. Despite their advantages being great, their downsides were too big for most people to want to keep them around
Nearly instant, but not absolutely instant. Part of why CRTs do motion so well is because they natively match the input signal format.
I was surprised by this omission as well, it is really the only remaining advantage of CRTs and a big advantage at that.
The way I understand it is that CRTs ‘blink’. The phosphorus dims after each passing of the beam. This makes for very short dark frames between each frame. Moving objects on screen jump from one position in one frame to their new position in the next frame. In between is a dark ‘frame’ which makes our brains fill in the gap between the two positions. With modern sample and hold displays (LCD and OLED) there is no dark frame in between, the moving object instantly jumps from one position to the next. There is no space left for the brain to fill in the gap and for an instant you see both positions at once. This makes the motion smear out. Try to play a Sonic game on a LCD or OLED. It looks horrible, one smeared out mess.
Some screens have black frame insertion options to artificially insert a completely black frame between displayed frames to improve motion clarity. It works, but especially OLEDS are so damned fast that the effect is too perfect. Phosphorus ‘slowly’ dims, OLED pixels switch almost instantly. So the effect on an OLED can be perceived as harsh, people sensitive to it see the screen flickering. Another disadvantage is that black frame insertion lowers the light output of a screen, so it is (far) less bright. This makes it unsuitable for brightly lit rooms.
Another way to solve motion clarity on modern screens is by increasing the framerate. But to achieve the same motion clarity of a CRT we need to approach 1000Hz. We are going over 400Hz already, so we are on a path to that destination, but there is still quite a way to go. It would also require rendering games at 1000 fps to get the result, so perfect motion clarity will always be limited to old and/or simple games. Or play on a CRT now :)
One of my earlier jobs was as a quality control technician at a tool and die plant that manufactured the three aperture pieces inside the CRT. We measured random lots of parts on a variety of guages down to tolerances of +/- thousandths of an inch. It was an interesting part of my career.
Dude, this was really fascinating! Great job.
If you imagine the dots on the phosphor as "bits" you have a form of random-access computer memory. Of course this was actually in use at one time.
shoutout to the Usagi Electric bendix g15 cameo
I can't believe he's going to resurrect that! It will be incredible to see that run.
Ok the powder on the screen is so cool. I love how delicate it is yet it stayed in position for obviously a significant time
This was an awesome video. Thank you so much for posting!
CRT is a holy grail of FPS games. I only gave up my CRT once gpu's stopped the support. Gdm-fw900 was a helluva monitor. Still got 420 euros out of it when I sold it couple years ago.
i keep a GTX Titan card around for JUST that reason. its obviously not my daily driver anymore, but its the fastest vga capable gpu.
was
@@smiththers2 That GTX Titan doesn't hold a candle to the clarity that a Radeon can achieve on the same monitor and this is coming from a huge Nvidiot. Everything passed the GeForce 7000 series has shit clarity on a CRT, believe me I wish it wasn't so. I would much rather run a Titan X for my ultimate XP box.
Wait he hasn't done this before??????
no way, madeline celeste! he has in fact NOT which is very surprising
I remember thinking that LCDs would never be cheaper than CRTs because of how much they had come down in price. I distinctly remember the first time a 17" CRT became "affordable" for normal people. At the same time the pros were using 21" and 24" monsters. Its crazy to think that we have essentially settled on 27" to be a normal sized screen now.
Best video you have put on for a while, enjoyed that. 🎉
Love your style, keep rocking it!
BOT
I still really like CRTs. I grew up when CRTs were being phased out in favor of LCDs, and while they do have their benefits, mostly just cost to produce and size/weight, I think CRTs just look a lot better personally. This is especially true when you have an LCD with super washed out looking colors, which is pretty common especially in the past, when LCDs were still somewhat new.
David: you did a great job elucidating the differences between CRTs and LCDs. I loved the teardown of the CRT and it was great seeing some of my other favourite CZcamsrs!
WHY Hasn't anyone made a 4k CRT Tube??? it would be the epitome of technology and look AWESOME
The barco 909 crt projector is the only tube in existance that could approach 4k
@@crtautist220 Great to know! So it is possible. So it can reach at least 1440p. Nice. Thanks for sharing
You can send 4k60 to very high end crt monitors or projectors
The main reason is because CRTs are already dead. The industry to make them is gone and people who know how to make them are retired. That said, there are also some technical reasons why CRTs were a dead end. For 4k you want a big CRT, however, the larger the CRT, the thicker the glass needs to be to withstand the vacuüm pressure. So CRTs would have become even heavier. Second, in CRT there is a trade-off between brigthness and resolution. Television CRTs can be brighter than VGA CRTs and a 4K CRT would have had to further reduce brightness.
I once had a 21" CRT monitor which was very likely made in the mid-late 90s. I normally ran it at 1600x1200, but for a couple of weeks I ran it at 2048x1536 instead. It was almost good enough; there was just a little blur which made me feel a tiny bit uncomfortable. I didn't try adjusting the beam focus; I should have. I also didn't try running it at an even higher resolution; I don't know if it would have handled even more lines. :)
YES
Thank you David always enthusiastically when I see you have produced a new video. I have watched many of of your past videos and they are excellent. Thanks again.
Thank you David, as usual a very interesting content.
CZcamsr explains Tubes on CZcams video to You via your Tube. Good stuff
3:46 - Now, kids don't try it at home!
At least wear some rubber gloves.
@@jacko101 don't give ideas about that! 😂
That's so cool that you can just rotate the coil or put a magnet up to that monochrome screen and mess with it like that! And without damaging it! Really cool
Really well explained and with well-used examples. Probably the best video on this topic I have seen. Thank you!
Hey new video!
You say vacuum tubes were found in any electronic device made before the 1960s? My family purchased our first color TV in 1965. It was a Zenith console madel with all tubes. When I had my own apartment I purchased a new TV in 1972. All tubes. Tubes were in use well after the 1960s.
He said any, not some... So he is correct...
@Jackpkmn The transistor was invented in 1947. In 1954, the first transistor radios was sold.
@@roncaruso931 Alright I removed the comment.
@@Jackpkmn No need to do that.
This is great. I was just thinking about how I haven't watched you in a while! I'm going to enjoy this later!
Such an amazing history video David about crts and the comparison to LCDs... Thanks for sharing this
Oled suffers the same problem with burn ins.
especially AMOLED, I've owned two AMOLED phones and both have had significant burn in. It's a very flawed technology
On the other hand, it doesn't suffer from poor contrast ratio.
No. OLEDs don't have burn-in like CRT and plasma did, where static image could literally burn-in.
OLEDs are rather millions of individual lighbulbs that have limited lifespan. The brighter they need to be, the faster they'll degrade.
This is why you can't burn-in OLED by watching 21:9 movie on 16:9 screen with static black bars, but you had to run cleaning on Plasma after each movie. 3 movies in a row without cleaning and you had permanent burn-in.
You will burn oled with news channels watched regularly while, Plasma won't if you mix usage like 1 hour of news and 2 hours of movies filling the screen.
In other words CRTs and Plasma were burn-proof when used correctly, while OLEDs can be used however you like and they just have limited lifespan. Like 1000 hours of news channels or 1000 hours of displaying desktop.
Using OLEDs for different content helps in uniform brightness degradation. Display gets dimmer without significant image quality loss.
I have CX and C13 LG OLEDs, the first one is slightly darker after 3 years, but it has no burn-in despite it was used mostly for console gaming with static UI.
But much much worse.
@@Leeki85 THis is the same thing as a CRT, limited lifespan
PLEASE stop using white backgrounds for your infographics!!! It's VERY hard on my eyes when watching at night and/or on a very large display!!
I copied this style in one of my videos but yeah I'll take this to heart haha
me when i turn down the brightness (it makes it easier to sleep anyways)
grey backgrounds could help. Just thrn the screen brightness down
Call the whambulance
This is an excellent explanation - a model of clarity. Well done!
Really fascinating. Definitely the best explanation I've seen on the topic.
Always love your videos David. This was great learning. Thanks again.