how did the shift from crt to flat panel lcds affect your gaming experience? was early iterations of the technology really that bad to go back to?
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for old anons here
how did the shift from crt to flat panel lcds affect your gaming experience? was early iterations of the technology really that bad to go back to?
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Playing SNES on LCD in the late 2000s and everything looking like complete ass made me almost think that maybe the old games just had bad graphics all along. Fortunately I never threw out my old CRT, it was at my parent's. Hooked up my SNES to it, and sure enough, everything looked amazing again.
For PC games, I don't know, the widescreen view kind of made up for any short comings.
I was never an early adopter; I bought my first LCD shortly after Wrath of the Lich King launched. Even then, late 2000s and 2010s LCDs have garbage picture quality and motion compared to a CRT. The whole LCD thing opened my eyes about technological progress. An obviously inferior technology can absolutely take over just because it is convenient or cheaper.
>An obviously inferior technology can absolutely take over just because it is convenient or cheaper.
The shit early LCDs are preferable to CRTs for word and excel monkeys. The eyestrain from a CRT for people staring at screens for 8 hours per day is bad.
Horseshit, the early LCDs were only bad when
A) you were plugging in composite video like a dipshit, like you did with SNES
B) you're looking at it 10-15 years down the line when the backlight had dimmed considerably
C) you're a fanboy moron
D) it had extra post processing like early HDTVs that added significant lag
I remember using LCDs in like 2001 in computer class and thinking "wow, these are so much better than those frickhuge old monitors".
The only time I would EVER use a CRT is if it's some kind of composite video like an old game console and then only with an actual low-res standard TV, not a CRT monitor.
zoomer
>you were plugging in composite video like a dipshit, like you did with SNES
nta, but this is horseshit. everyone happily used composite cables on CRTs and they looked totally fine. Subsequently everyone tried those same cables on LCDs and it looked awful.
Why is it stupid to be surprised when something that used to look good on a CRT now looks atrocious on your new LCD?
LCD TVs still had composite inputs. They obviously weren't advertised as being shitty to use with old stuff. Why would someone be a dipshit for trying it?
Were they supposed to use an imported RGB cable and some professional-grade line doubler or scaler in the early '00s? No one knew about that shit back then.
It didn't. There was a CRT in my parent's house still in use a few years ago before they finally replaced it. Was using a Commodore 1702 along side. By the time I was an adult, I was using a plasma TV as my monitor with HDMI plugs. Now it's an OLED TV. Still don't notice any issues.
I was completely devastated. The image quality was almost 2% different to the CRT. I was bedridden for almost 2 decades due to this fact and have only recently recovered
>I was bedridden for almost 2 decades due to this fact and have only recently recovered
You had me going there for a minute...you didn't recover, you liar.
I remember thinking LCDs were an upgrade but I used a cheap CRT monitor until 2008.
A lot of ghosting, bad colors and bad resolution support. Whoever decided that the default resolution for early LCD monitors should be a non-4:3 one ought to get testicular torsion.
However they were a lot smaller, text was more readable as long as you got the correct resolution and the lack of deep blacks was actually helpful in some early 00's games. You literally can't see anything in some parts of Doom 3 without the flashlight while gaming on a CRT but on an LCD you can at least see something, there were some other games too that had very dark sections almost unplayable on a CRT without cranking up the brightness to max.
Bought one c.2006 for PS2 I think £250? (A lot of money back then which I should probably have spent on schoolbooks kek)
So awful I sent it back within a fortnight and bought an old 8” crt off a Bulgarian bloke for £30 that lasted for over a decade and outlived several consoles
My friend was grossed out by my N64’s graphics and I needed an HDMI adapter/upscaler to play it on any modern TV. There are still only a few games he’d want to play.
Shit contrast, shit response times, shit viewing angles, shit light spill in dark areas, shit smeary non-integer upscaling.
Nowadays it's mostly just "not horrible".
Early lcds were bad. They had hobbile input lag. It was until i bought my first gaming optimized lcd that the experience began to improve. It was a CCFL backlit 40" Sony KDL-40XBR2. This was a crazy expensive TV at the time. I paid about $2500 for it.
Nowadays that will buy you a 77" oled.
We played a lot of halo 3 on that sony TV. It was good times with my roommates at the time. It performed really well. It must have had a 120hz panel. Eventually I used it as a gaming monitor through the vga input.
Later I replaced that TV with a led back-lit vizio that had "240hz" refresh. I thought this would be good for gaming but it turned out to be marketing wank. It was really a 60hz panel with crappy post processing to make it pretend to have a 240hz refresh rate. my earlier sony KDL was actually a better gaming TV. I gave it to my sister. That old sony TV is so nice she still uses it to this day.. though she should really upgrade as it's horribly energy inefficient by now. It draws about 230w while in use.
FIL gave us his KDL-60EX500 a few years ago when he upgraded. It weighs 80 pounds, dumps a lot of heat and has like a foot of bezel around it but to this day people comment on how nice it is when gaming on it. I kinda want the backlight to finally die so I can get something newer/cooler/lighter but I can't complain
Those CCFL bulbs are replaceable. It eill last forever. These were a top quality TVs at the time they were produced.
.. yea the 40" i had was 66lbs.
For PC I switched in 2009, straight to a 37" 1080P TV as my main monitor, the only immediate issues I noticed were some games simply didn't support 16:9 and that my 9600GT couldn't quite handle some games at that resolution
For console we rode a 30" 16:9 Panasonic Tau all the way to 2016, it was only 1080i but it looked great but weighed a fricking ton
I thought they were ugly but I was just relieved I didn’t have to carry my big ass CRT to lan parties/sleepovers anymore
I completely disregarded LCDs until 2013.
It was only in 2013 when I finally moved to LCD (and only because my old SUN Trinitron '21 finally and irreversibly went bonkers). By that time I was barely playing anything new anyway. But in a couple years I got myself a PIII with Voodoo 3 and CRT (it's generic Samsung but I'm ok with it).
From the years 2003 to 2011 high-end PC CRT monitors were widely available on the used market for pennies. There was no reason for anyone who cared about their display quality to settle for some shit-tier TN display.
I was poor so I kept my CRT even after flatscreens came out. Then I realized that there was nothing on television worth watching so I got rid of my TV entirely and hung out with friends and went to parties and stuff instead. Frequently got laid during that period for some reason. The emulation scene was getting big back then so I played pretty much everything on my CRT computer monitor until l finally got a flatscreen around 2008 right when Obama was taking over. Went back to CRT television for vintage gaming around 2015 because it's got the connectors you need and it looks better. The jankiness of the old tech helps blend the picture and SNES, PS1, and PS2 all look better.
Also eye-strain is God's way of telling you go outside and touch grass.
>Then I realized that there was nothing on television worth watching so I got rid of my TV entirely and hung out with friends and went to parties and stuff instead. Frequently got laid during that period for some reason
Lol, homosexual.
It was a mind blowing upgrade. When you grow up with shitty tiny TVs and switch to big screens you can't really go back
>how did the shift from crt to flat panel lcds affect your gaming experience?
There are basicly zero good 4:3 LCDs, and LCDs in general had fricking awful latency till around 2008 or so when they started to get better, but even then you have to shop around for monitors/tvs that were tested to have decent latency.
Even the most shit of panels today blow you your average panel of that era. LCDs were fricking trash for quite a while before they got decent. Because of that I held on to my CRT till around 2010 and only bought a LCD when the CRT was dying.
It was so bad that I only switched to LCD a couple years ago. It's nicer in some ways, but still can't match the motion blur.
I lucked into a really nice ViewSonic monitor, so it blew my mind.
Which sounds odd, now that I think about it, but I used that monitor for ages until relatively recently when I switched to IPS/OLED. I believe it was one of those few models that were worth a shit. I saved up for a long time to buy it, I think I paid 500 USD or so for it. For the number of years I got out of it, plus the fact that it still works fine, I think it was worth it.
I remember getting other monitors over the years and thinking they were shit so I returned them.
The conundrum is that the early LCDs were more likely to have the good inputs like S-video and composite, but it was a waste because you really wanted that stuff for a CRT. The average kid's bedroom CRT wouldn't have those inputs.
I didn't get a flat panel LCD monitor until 2005 when my CRT one died. At that point the monitors were responsive enough but the ghosting really sucked and the colors were obviously washed out. But the novelty of having a slim PC screen was so cool.
Early LCDs were terrible. I stuck with CRTs until 2010 when I bought a 120Hz LCD, which was more of a sidegrade than an upgrade (although it's still better than the majority of modern LCDs, because most modern LCDs are still 60Hz).
I went from CRT to a high quality IPS display with wide gamut at 16:10, an upgrade in every regard.
I bought my first LCD in 2005, a 17'' Samsung SyncMaster 710T. My old 15'' ADI MicroScan was burnt out, and could barely see shit even with the contrast to full. In some respects it was a downgrade (compared to a similar CRT of the time), but I liked the multi-swivel adjustment and the much, much lower weight (helped a lot when I had to move).
I still have that SyncMaster, I use it as a second display for my laptop. Portrait mode is quite useful for web browsing.
>15" ADI Microscan
Hey I know those words.
I still have one of those. It's what I used basically since day 1. I was born in 93, we have the receipt for it from 95 still.
Shit is super yellowed, part of the screw mechanism for the VGA cable is broken off so you can't use a screwdriver, she ain't as bright as she used to be, but she still runs.
Great little monitor. I actually used it as my main monitor for years on an old P4 hand me down laptop because I was a kid and parents (fairly) didn't want to spend a bunch of money on gaming crap for us.
my flash game rig was a Pentium 4 HP media center laptop with the LCD screen burned out and a 15" ADI Microscan attached to its VGA port, had to put the laptop on a cooling stand and hang the fans over the edge of the table so it wouldnt overheat. Also if you accidentally unplugged the power brick you had 10 seconds to plug it back in before it shut off. Also the speaker grille (whole front of the laptop under the like palm rest are) was like rusty from palm sweat and it'd like, shock you or some shit if you put your wrists on it in a certain way. Man what a setup that was. Good times.
I went from a small ADI Microscan in this post here
Through my earliest years. I did end up getting the laptop I mention there as well second hand from a family member. The LCD screen on it did work for a while, but it eventually burned out and I reverted to the old CRT. If the LCD had been working I would have kept using it as it was a pretty high end laptop when it was new. This was probably 2005-2007 time frame and the laptop was probably new in 2004 or so. So an earlier LCD for sure but not super early. I had seen flat panels before but it just never was an option for me as a child with no personal money, I got what I got.
In 2008 I built my first gaming PC and I used a roughly 24" slightly-sub 1080p display. 1680x1050 I think? I used it because I could get a lot more surface area and games felt "bigger" on it and the clarity was good due to the sharpness of the pixels.
Remember back then CRTs were good but seen as the default, the clarity of still images on semi-modern LCDs were enough to push me to them.
In 2010ish or so I upgraded to a 1920x1080 2ms LCD
In 2013 or so I upgraded to a 27" 1440 144hz TN LCD and I am still using this monitor today.
I am considering upgrading to a QD-OLED 1440 class mild ultra wide now since they can be had under 1000 dollars. The Phillips Evnia is at the top of my list to consider.
I am also dabbling in some old CRTs I obtained more recently as certain things do look good on them and I believe there is an intangible comfy factor that I have no desire to explain or resist.
Heh, a fellow ADI user. We're quite a rare bunch, among all the Iiyama and Viewsonic owners.
I managed to find a random pic of the same model I used to have.
Here's mine. Sitting waiting to be used again. That's the original manual and receipt on top. Wish I knew how many hours were on this thing.
watch out anon theres an LGBT behind you
lol it's Xmas lights I put up for a LAN party
PC Monitors were fine due to being sharp and high-res, so my PC gaming was not noticeably negatively affected. I mostly shit like Roller Coaster Tycoon, though. Nothing with fast-moving graphics that required fast reflexes.
My first time hooking up a game console to an LCD panel was a PS2 in 2006.
My disappointment was immeasurable, so I got a component cable. It did little to improve things, so I always kept a CRT on hand.
This experience is why I became interested in scalers. I still prefer CRTs, but trying to make old consoles look acceptable on LCDs is a fun project.
The CRT in-built dithering was actively used as part of game graphics (up until circa the PS3/X360 era), so running those games on an LCD was a notable downgrade. I distinctly remember being unimpressed with how Betrayal at Krondor and Master of Magic looked on my Syncmaster compared to even the old burnt-out Microscan. Everything was blockier in a bad way. OTOH, the difference in newer games (ex. Codename Panzers, Dawn of War) was relatively negligible.
A cousin of mine had one of those 4:3 lcd monitor circa 2006. The image was shit and full of ghosting when playin fifa and pes, no comparison with my samsung 17". Lcd monitor only got good around 2009
We didn't get an LCD TV until around 2008 or so when we got a 40 inch TV. We hooked it up in the basement, so upstairs still had a CRT and my bedroom still had a small CRT. At one point I took my N64 downstairs to play it on the big screen and it looked terrible but I stuck with it because hey, big screen (big screens were all the rage at the time. Nothing else mattered as long as your TV was BIG). Eventually I tried the SNES on it also and similarly it looked terrible. I only did that a few times and the vast majority of the time I continued playing on the small CRT in my bedroom and just used the big screen for the Wii which looked fine.
CRT -> Plasma would've been an amazing leap, but no, we got shit LCDs instead.
hopefully once microLEDs come into market LCDs can finally become decent.
Plasma has nice color, but it is still a fixed resolution display with a crappy internal scaler designed for de-interlacing VHS tapes. Not inherently great for low resolution games.
are high resolution LCDs at least better than loe resolution ones for retro gaming? I switched from a 900p display to a 1080p on my PS3 and PS1/PS2 games look better (not as good as on CRT but still)
You want a display that evenly divides by the resolution you are scaling to. So 900p is going to look bad because it is uneven. And you want an external scaler.
so is a 4k monitor going to be better since it scales both 720p and 1080p?
Yes, actually.
I never stopped using crts. I was gifted a pc flat screen in like 2010 that crapped out and found 2 flatscreens in the trash i now use for modern gaming and as a pc monitor (for non gaming).
7th gen was a particularly bad time for console gaming tech.
>Your basic consumer-level TV had horrible input lag
>Games regularly ran at a very unstable 30fps
>Awful screen tearing
>480p Wii games through looked fricking horrendous compared to your PS3/360 games, which also looked shit by modern standards.
480p wii games aged better than 720p ps3/360 games that ran at 500p internally
>grafixgay thinks that resolution is the only thing that makes graphics look "good" or "bad"
Every time.
the crt took up too much space which affected furniture placement in the room. the crt was also often very heavy nad it would get VERY warm in the summer. but I do miss the smell of burning crt while playing Quake multiblayer summer 1997. the smell of hot plastic really added to the doom/quake experience.
everyone threw out their crt monitors as soon as they possibly could. i think the reason zoomers think crts are so neat is that they never had to move with them, or make sure they bought strong and deep enough tables to accommodate them. they were physically bulky and the screen area was tied to the cubic volume of the display so every inch more you wanted was another like 5 pounds of monitor. you were pretty much stuck with 20' or smaller screens. it was very common for people to smash glass desks with overweight monitors. I could not wait to throw my crt monitor and tv in the fricking trash when flat panels became affordable.
>everyone threw out their crt monitors as soon as they possibly could.
Absolute nonsense and false. Lurk more.
>lurk more
what does that even mean in this context?
Behold: the opinions of the eternal boomer.
Pretty much this. Of course as time went on i noticed some of the things we took by granted from CRTs like the black levels, but back in the day all i thought was "holy balls, same screen size or more for less space on my desk"
I enjoyed not having my monitor weigh 60 pounds, that was nice
Early flat panels were pretty shit and indeed, CRTs still looked much better, but modern ones are fine
most gamers didn't switch to lcds until after the tech improved, everyone was always screeching about "ghosting"
>composite LCD monitor
Do zoomers really?
who are you quoting?
Honestly I never really thought much about it. I always had a CRT in my bedroom which I used to play console games, my desktop had a CRT which was what I used until I got a laptop in the mid-2000s, the main house TV went from regular CRT to rear projection CRT, and my dorm room and secondary TVs which actually were LCDs were never really used for old games. Basically, I never entirely switched over to LCDs or really played old games on them long enough to be disappointed with the image quality. The closest I had to that experience was playing PC games on a laptop (both when I got my own in the mid 2000s and for a short time previously when I played Doom for a bit on my dad's laptop), but it really never registered that things looked particularly bad; the LCDs were good enough for my PC gaming purposes. Nowadays, yeah, CRTs for all my old games (plus the Wii), LCDs for newer things.
Early lcds were dogshit. Terrible ghosting. Terrible color accuracy. Terrible blacks / contrast. Shit viewing angles.
Everyone serious about gaming stayed on CRTs, at least those of us that owned a good one.
by the time I switched LCDs were plenty good enough (2010). But I did hate the color reproduction of my LCD compared with the CRT.
Honestly, I was just more relieved that I didn't have to put up with a fat enormous screen shoved in my face and actually had room on the desk
I've never been so autistic enough to be affected by delays introduced from LCDs converting the video signal, or sperg over the sharpness of pixels.
If anything has affected me, is the loss of being able to play House of the Dead 2 and other light-gun games that relies on the CRT scan.
Early LCDs had terrible viewing angles. This is what stuck out to me about them the most. I stuck with CRT monitors long after most people had given up on them.
First flatscreen/LCD monitor was picrel which came with our Dell Dimension desktop in early 2005. 1280x1024 resolution and sharp as anything with under 5ms response time. I still use it with the still working desktop PC when I want to play retro/XP games when I'm up visiting my Mum.
forgot to post pic
First two games i recall playing on a flat screen were mirrors edge and dead space. Not vr but thats my answer. A vr answer would be playing star fox in hd then seeing it on crt, reaffirmed my opinion on crt in vivid clarity. Dkc would be a better example but i played star fox first that time c
"Wow I can actually see, this is great!"
"Look at how thin this TV is! I have so much more space in this room now!"
"Its so thin but its wide-screen and a bigger screen, I don't have to sit right next to the TV anymore!"
As well as various other statements and sentiments to that effect.
It’s fine. You just needed some type of an adapter.