[simias]

I reluctantly discarded my last CRT a few years ago. They're not just heavy to move, they also take a lot of room on my desk and they generate a lot of heat.

For a long time LCDs really couldn't compete with CRTs. They had bad resolutions, terrible viewing angles and terrible colors (and especially horrendous blacks).

Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving. Hopefully we'll get OLED or something similar in the near future that will solve that once and for all. I decided that it was good enough to finally make the switch definitively.

[Jeema101]

I also stuck with CRTs long after everyone else abandoned them for TFT panels which I mostly hated. The widespread availability of IPS panels with decent viewing angles finally convinced me to switch, though.

[jerf]

"Resolution is (finally) no longer an issue, colors and viewing angles are still meh but steadily improving."

Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/ The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to buy a good LCD screen. Monitors you may have to dig into relatively technical reviews of to find out (generic tech magazine reviewer may not tell you), and finding out what specific kind of screen a laptop has can be very difficult sometimes. Manufacturers don't really want to talk about it as they tend to benefit from being fuzzy about exaggerated specs, and a lot of "reviewers" aren't really aware enough of these issues to make a point of it in their review.

I'm not an expert but I'd swear even in the TN space there's a lot of variation. I once accidentally bought a latop that basically literally didn't have a viewing angle; even at the "optimum" angle only the vertically-middle 50% of the screen was correct and the top and bottom were already showing major brightess drop-off and color inaccuracy. I don't just mean "I don't like to admit it but sometimes I can be a bit of a videophile" sort of complaints, either, I mean more like "literally can't read the word 'Start' on the Start Menu because the text and the background have both color shifted that much". Ironically, sold as a media laptop that only the most casual casual would have wanted to actually watch movies on. Dumped that one right quick. And this particular laptop was priced in the range where it really should have had a decent screen.

By contrast, I'm coding on what is almost certainly a TN monitor, and I really don't care. I wouldn't want it on my personal laptop, the Macbook screen driving it is much, much better by comparison, but I don't do anything color sensitive at work. There's very minimal viewing angle distortion and that's all I really need. (I mean, push comes to shove, I could pretty much do my job on a monochrome monitor and only be somewhat annoyed.)

[simias]

>Are you buying good LCDs? There's a whole range of types: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/lcd-panel-types-explored/ The worst LCDs today are crap, but the best ones are going to be hard to tell apart from a CRT without putting it next to one. Since the only CRTs made today are high quality CRTs because there's zero market for bad CRTs anymore (and only barely a market for CRTs at all), a modern CRT may still outclass the best LCD, but mostly because of the fact that if the CRT couldn't outclass the best LCD it wouldn't exist at all.

You're right, I should've been a bit more explicit, I was mainly comparing "average" CRTs from up to about 2005 (back when they were still relatively mainstream) from an average LCD monitor today. Not the top of the line but not the bargain bin either.

For a long time switching from CRT to a comparably-priced LCD was a massive downgrade. You had a lower resolution, ridiculous ghosting, bad colors, black levels that looked like the rising sun and a viewing angle on par with the angular diameter of Pluto.

Nowadays you can find relatively cheap 4k LCDs that perform decently. Sure the blacks aren't perfectly black and it's not good enough for any serious color-sensitive work but for coding and gaming it's good enough for me.

[LocalH]

Black level is the biggest tell. Any set based around an LCD panel will never generate truly dark blacks, unless you have addressable backlighting where you can turn off or dim the backlight behind individual pixels.

That is, until they improve LCD's ability to block light. When you can turn off an LCD pixel and block virtually all light from coming through (or around) that pixel, then you'll get much deeper blacks