Are you a retrogamer?

[Cerebralbore101]

HoloDust said:

Cerebralbore101 said:

A lot of professional tubes are rated for 100,000 hours and up. They will all be dead one day but sets that get the proper maintenance will last another 30-40 years at least. 

As far as tech that properly emulates a CRT we have that in the RetroTink 4k. It's not PVM level perfect but really does rock for simulating good consumer sets. 

Oh and someone has been working on an open source CRT chassis for years. Once that is finished a lot of old tubes will be restorable and moddable. 

From what I've seen of RetroTink's CRT filters (unfortunately, only videos and images) it does a solid job. I'd say nowhere near as good as some of GPU shaders out there, but it's fairly descent.

I think that we're getting there to actually replacing CRTs in next 5-10 years - shaders are already very good and we're getting there with actual display tech to support actual cathode ray movement emulation (like ShaderBeam) on 480Hz OLEDs, or even better, ultimately in the future, on MicroLEDs.

At one time, some decade or so ago, I was hoping that Prysm, or someone like them, will maybe get into consumer market as well - they make large format LPDs (Laser Phosphor Displays) for enterprise purposes, that are very similar to CRT, but with UV laser instead of cathode ray. But I don't think that retro market is big enough to be lucrative for anyone to actually produce something similar, so I guess shaders + MicroLED (or something else, Quantum Dot displays maybe) is the way to go in the future.

As someone that owns a multi-format BVM and several PVMs, I'll attest to the Tink 4K being much better than GPU shaders. Lots of other retrogamers agree, because they wouldn't pay $700 for it otherwise. You could just pass the signal from your older game systems through your PC for less than that otherwise. Also, yeah, videos on the internet do not do a PVM, BVM, or Tink 4K justice. It needs to be seen IRL.