[dbttdft]

You don't know what you're talking about.

LCDs were completely unusable until the mid 2000s, even then they were all 60Hz/75Hz with no black frame insertion, which made any animation what so ever, even text scrolling blurred to crap. It took me years to figure out that this was why I suddenly couldn't read any text scrolling on logs on terminals.

Yes, CRTs, flicker, it's a feature, it prevents motion blur. You're meant to put them up to 85Hz or so and flicker becomes less of an issue. There are two different types of flicker, the flicker fusion threshold, which is when humans still see flicker when looking directly at a flickering light source, and just general perceptible flicker, which can be seen easier at the corner of your eyes and in my experience goes up to 100s of Hz. The latter is an issue for all CRTs, and basically all LCDs up until 2015 or so when they started pushing flicker free. Before 2015, basically all LCDs flickered, typically between 100Hz-300Hz, and it was always visible, and also left artifacts on the screen during image panning (such as in a 3D game or when scrolling a map).

Yes, low end CRTs had lots of blur but by the late 90s any mid ranged model had somewhat acceptable levels of blur, and moreover much less blur than you get the moment an image pans across an LCD. As an experiment, if you simply move an image across the screen at 15pixels per frame on a 60Hz LCD, it will already be blured to hell.

Those Apple monitors have terrible grainy coating which some monitors choose to have for some reason. There's no tradeoff there, since there are plenty of LCDs without it. They also have bad viewing angles like all IPS contrary to marketing. The only advantage they have is high pixel density, and high color gamut which may or may not be functional or desirable but this is another can of worms. Wide gamut on a monitor is not just automatically good.

[xcv123]

> You don't know what you're talking about.

I used CRT for years until 2024 and I've lost count of how many Dell Ultrasharp and Apple LCD screens I've owned.

> LCDs were completely unusable until the mid 2000s

We're talking about monitors today. 2024. I switched to LCD in the mid 2000's when they became usable.

> Yes, CRTs, flicker, it's a feature, it prevents motion blur. You're meant to put them up to 85Hz or so and flicker becomes less of an issue.

It's a feature that I hated and caused a lot of pain. Maximum mine could do was 75 Hz. An 85 Hz screen was very expensive back then. And the flicker would still be crap even at 85 Hz.

> As an experiment, if you simply move an image across the screen at 15pixels per frame on a 60Hz LCD, it will already be blurred to hell.

Talking about the blurry low resolution. LCD is sharp. Not talking about pixel response time. We have 144hz+ LCD screens now. There were no 4k CRT displays BTW. Pixel response time on gaming LCDs is 1ms nowadays.

> Those Apple monitors have terrible grainy coating

Apple displays are glossy, not matte. The matte coating is optional on external XDR displays. Typing this comment now on my Apple 16" XDR display which is glossy, like a CRT. No grainy matte coating on this screen.

[dbttdft]

This discussion made me want to refresh my understanding of current Apple monitors and if they have anything to offer.

I looked at the Apple Studio Display glossy and matte versions at the Apple store. The matte version uses "nano coating" instead of whatever regular matte LCDs use, and is a $200 addon despite being inferior.

-1 The reflections of the glossy screen are far worse than what you get with most (all?) CRTs. This is standard with LCDs for some reason, they are just perfect mirrors that reflect even a T-shirt in a well lit room.

+1 The pixel density is superb as expected. The difference from average (~100PPI) monitors is night and day. I don't know why for the last 20 years ~100PPI has been standard. It's terrible. For some reason there are almost no monitors with high pixel density other than this Apple and some Dells.

-2 Contrary to the IPS hype of the last decade, the viewing angle is terrible. At a wide angle, (like if you are just standing anywhere near the desk and not bobbing your head down to the level of where it would be if you're sitting) the image is completely washed out. Sitting in front of the white screen at normal distance (a few feet back), the edges are grey. Just moving your head 10 degrees in any direction causes abrupt color / luminance shift on any content. This is exactly the same as all IPS monitors, from $2-$3000. Nothing unexpected here, unless you thought the $1500 price would magically fix this.

+1 I correct myself on one point in previous discussions: The glossy screen is not obscured by grids like with most other glossy LCDs. Normally, with a glossy LCD you still have a very fine grid of black on top of the image, said to be the transistors blocking a small portion of each pixel. Perhaps the high pixel density here alleviates that issue.

+0.5 The color gamut impresses with high saturation. The accuracy and real (as opposed to claimed) coverage, however was not tested. Setting the color gamut to "legacy" modes in the Apple OS menus, like BT. 709 (basically sRGB, as I didn't see an "sRGB" option) made the image too dark and washed out, worse than what you'd get with a standard sRGB IPS LCD as well as disabled the brightness setting for some made up reason.

-1 The input lag was abysmal, as bad as TVs. Which could be due to the fact that the store only has wireless Apple mice, but could also be the monitor itself or the OS or many other things. I tested 4 Apples each hooked up to one of these monitors. Out of 75 monitors I have tested in recent years, only a few (such as the Dell 2407WFP, Dell 2048WFP, and NEC LCD2070NX) come anywhere close to as laggy as this. The lag is too high for even desktop use. For reference it's twice as bad as if you played a video game on 60Hz with vsync. Since the monitor has GBs of RAM I'm leaning toward the lag being from it and not the wireless mouse.

-1 It only does 60Hz which is terrible because that causes intense motion blur. Just scrolling in a web browser drops the resolution below 640x480 and increases the blur above even the cheapest oldest CRT from the 80s.

0 The "nano coating" is worse than average LCD matte coatings. With nano coating, all of the above results were the same, except the image is obscured by what looks like rainbow colored sand, that shifts color when you move your head, just like Dell 2408WFP or Dell 2007FP, from ~2007, or later VA crap from 2012 by BenQ. The grains of sand are finer than those older monitors, but still unignorably visible at normal distance (a few feet back) on a screen of one color or white or some pale color. The glossy version is better (and $200 less).

-1 For a monitor it has terrible unwanted features like built in ultra high res webcam, microphone built in chips which are allegedly just copied from a phone, reportedly with 64GB RAM but "only 2GB is used at any given moment" (whatever that means). Absolute nightmare for security, hopefully you could just mod the monitor and make it take a signal straight to the panel without any of the massive and pointless chips and hidden OS in between. I review only based on image quality but this is too much of an atrocity to ignore, even paying $1500 for hardly anything is not nearly as bad as this.

Rating: 5/10, OLED is better and the poor image quality is not worth the pixel density increase. You're basically getting a premium calculator screen. You're better of just getting a 3840x2160 27" OLED which is 160PPI, a small decrease from 218PPI of the Apple Studio Display. LCD remains a dead end tech, no matter how much premium and "engineering" you add to it. High end CRT is still vastly superior to this, and were half the price, they are slightly blurry but they have superior contrast, no viewing angle issues, no lag, and no motion blur which makes them sharper any time you view a moving image (yep I'm aware that you people don't understand this).

[xcv123]

Wow. I'm impressed that you were crazy enough to come back and post this detailed review that no one else will ever read.

> and no motion blur which makes them sharper any time you view a moving image (yep I'm aware that you people don't understand this)

I understand they have motion blur. That wasn't my original point.

CRT made me sick. I was forced to use them for years and they fucked my eyesight. LCD resolved that issue.

Absolute zero fucks given to all of your points here. I have to use monitors for work and need something that doesn't torture my eyeballs. CRT is hell if I need to stare at it all day.

> You're a fucking dumbass.

No amount of autistic screeching bullshit will ever convince me to go back to using a CRT for daily work. Cheers.

[dbttdft]

Well, ironically CRT has less blur than LCD in practice unless you only ever look at still images. Both strain my eyes but CRTs would have much better focus by now if they kept on being developed. And as I said and you didn't understand, flicker on CRTs can be reduced by increasing to whatever rate you want, even 200Hz (although 85Hz should be enough) on a cheap 1999 model I have, and most LEDs in light bulbs and absolutely any appliance etc are already flickering at 120Hz at most, so you're basically just picking and choosing what things you think affect you.

[dbttdft]

When 85Hz CRTs were expensive, so were LCDs. CRTs were basically free by the time LCDs became remotely usable. There was basically no reason to ever buy an LCD until way after 2010. Everyone here who thinks otherwise has some dumb embarrassing reason like they thought they could finally get laid if they made their desk less cluttered.

> And the flicker would still be crap even at 85 Hz.

Oh yes, I'm sure, and you are just magically fine with 100Hz LCD flicker that existed in most of them until 2015+ and even then only on every odd model. You clearly know what you're talking about and not just assuming the values that matter align with your beliefs. Listen, you have zero clue what you're talking about. Please at least take the time to understand this next fact:

Practically all LEDs flicker, usually at some absurdly low level like 100Hz or even 60Hz in really cheap ones. This is on 99% of modern vehicle tail lights, light bulbs, shaver LEDs, dishwashers, microwaves, practically all electronics such as even an external hard drive bay or USB stick, laundry and every appliance. And it annoys me. Why? Because it's at the corner of my eye. A human's eyes are highly sensitive to flicker, but only for stuff on the sides of their head, not directly in front. Which brings me back to CRT. When I'm using CRT, I'm looking directly at it, and this makes the flicker imperceptible even as low as 75Hz or so. Only if I turned my head to the side such that the CRT was on the edge of my vision it would become noticeable. For this reason, outside of this backwards world, one would have non flickering lights everywhere, and the only thing that flickers would be their monitor (because this is needed to prevent motion blur, the only alternative is to have a huge refresh rate like 500Hz+ and software that can keep up). And you are implying things work otherwise. They don't.

> Talking about the blurry low resolution. LCD is sharp.

Which part did you not get? I said a panning object on LCD will not be sharp or anything remotely close to it, it will be worse than the worst CRT.

> Not talking about pixel response time.

As I said LCDs have motion blur. It has nothing to do with pixel response. We had 200Hz CRTs in 1999. 144Hz LCD is still badly blurry, and these "gamer" LCDs tend to have weird bugs adding more pixel response artifacts than there would be if the "gamers" didn't design the firmware.

> Pixel response time on gaming LCDs is 1ms nowadays.

No, they are not. Why did you even edit that in. Those marketing numbers are simply false. In reality you have a different pixel response for every pixel transition (0-255), (0-40), etc. And you continue to not know what you're talking about by thinking this would reduce the motion blur. The motion blur in LCD has absolutely nothing to do with pixel response.

> [i have the glossy apple]

Okay, and the glossy ones have terrible glare. Somehow glossy LCDs always have worse glare than most CRTs, probably because the vendor only cares about the wow factor of what can be achieved by just ripping off the anti glare coating of any $2 monitor. LCDs also have worse image clarity on a glossy screen than a CRT. A plain screen set to show one color on even a glossy LCD looks gritty, while on a CRT it looks clear.

[dang]

Please edit swipes (like "You don't know what you're talking about") out of your comments here. I realize the GP did it first, but that doesn't make it ok to break the guidelines yourself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[dbttdft]

Actually people who consistently spread misinformation that powers the corporate racket that normalizes low quality technology deserve to be shamed, you just naively value politeness over correctness, which I am very aware is a huge problem with sites like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit.

Where are you every time some stupid Apple or Tesla user explains how other people are just "poor" so they won't get why their overpriced garbage is so good? Nowhere. You're just an autistic moderator and will always be a bane to society with your social pedantry.

[dang]

Happily you can make your correct points while still remaining within the site rules, so there's no conflict with correctness. If, however, you continue to break the rules, then we're going to have to ban you no matter how correct you are or feel you are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html