[retrac]

I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean about "you just can't recreate that glow".

It's hard to describe but the image is completely ephemeral. All display technologies involve sleight-of-hand that exploits visual illusion and persistence of vision to some degree, but the CRT is maybe the most illusory of the major technologies. It's almost entirely due to persistence of vision. With colour TV and fast phosphors the majority of the light energy is released within a few milliseconds of the spot being hit by the beam. If you had eyes that worked at electronic speeds, you would see a single point drawing the raster pattern while varying in brightness.

A bit of TEMPEST trivia: The instantaneous luminosity of a CRT is all you need to reconstruct the image. Even if it's reflected off a wall or through a translucent curtain. You need high bandwidth, at least a few megahertz, but a photodiode is all that's necessary. The resulting signal even has the horizontal and vertical blanking periods right where they should be. Only minor processing (even by old school analog standards) is required to produce something that can be piped right into another CRT to recreate the image. I'd bet it could be done entirely in DSP these days.

[everdrive]

Once we lost CRTs we began this insane race for all these duct tape solutions; all sorts of anti-aliasing, lighting, etc, and a resolution race that can only be described as pathological. Try modern games in low resolution with minimal effects on a CRT. You'll be surprised how much better they look, but also how much better they run; you don't need such a powerful rig when you turn your graphical effects down when using a CRT.

[Aurornis]

> all sorts of anti-aliasing, lighting, etc, and a resolution race that can only be described as pathological

I enjoy CRT nostalgia now and then, but modern high resolution games are absolutely amazing. The blurry, low resolution, low refresh rate CRT look is fun for old games, but playing in 4K at 100+ fps on a modern monitor is an amazing experience on its own.

[everdrive]

They're blurry in brand new ways due to how sloppy AI upscaling is.

[estimator7292]

There's also that godawful temporal shader or whatever that leaves black outlines drifting behind moving objects. I honestly cannot fathom why anyone would willingly use that effect, it straight up looks like a render error.

[bayindirh]

Plus the creative ways they generate new frames using AI without even rendering them. It's hilariously sad.

GamersNexus has a great video on it. I feel lucky that my golden era of gaming used 3DFX, early ATI and NVIDIA cards.

I don't have the space, time and enthusiasm to put together a compute-capable-space-heater to play games with great graphics but with meh stories, microtransactions, DLCs and thinly veiled gambling.

[xattt]

Why not (metaphorically) both? Consider a 16:9 Sony WEGA CRT that had HDMI input but also standard composite inputs.

[speeder]

I got very sad when my CRT monitor died. I was using a Radeon RX 380X, part of the reason is that it was one of the few cards to still have analog output.

Then I went and played lots of recent games in lower resolution, but could turn on lots of expensive effects even with such underpowered card, because I could do low-res with anti-alias disabled and no scaling and have decent results.

But true pleasure was playing for example Crypt of Necrodancer on that screen, the game felt so easy. I eventually stopped playing after that screen died, I could never nail the timing anymore on modern screens, the response time is not the same.

[Waterluvian]

Also don’t forget to rub your palm across the screen to collect the fuzzies that built up.

[BizarroLand]

My favorite thing to do around christmas was to take the aluminum foil garland strands and place them on the CRT screen.

Static would hold them in place, and when people would go to manually turn on the TV they would suddenly become energized with thousands of volts of static electricity from the ray gun in the tube and leap out like an electric snake to zap the everloving snot out of the unfortunate bastard that turned the tv or monitor on.

Which was usually me, because I liked the challenge, but if you ever have that combo available with kids who didn't grow up around them and know any better, it would be a good prank.

[black_knight]

Ah, I can feel it from just reading your comment! That’s a feeling I haven’t felt in a while!

[asdff]

How about the smell?

[markdown]

You gotta give it a few slaps too, when the image isn't very clear.

[Waterluvian]

Pre-Gameboy, when I was a child, my grandfather had a television— the kind that was furniture. Sometimes it would eschew modern trappings like colour and v-sync, and I would employ my Classical Vaudevillian training to set it straight with a wallop.

[estimator7292]

I always had to rap my knuckle on the screen. It has that nice, thick hollow resonance

[mikestaas]

Good ol' percussive maintenance.

[gadders]

Put a magnet by the screen as well.

[x187463]

The Slowmo Guys on YouTube have a great video showing the CRT scanlines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM

[auselen]

I might miss visual aspects of CRTs, but I mean most of them had a coil sound or some kind of cracking sound. May be as TVs, screens for gaming consoles they were fun, but as monitors I don’t miss the heat burning my face.