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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Just picked up an old CRT TV and holy moly this is a gamechanger

OTBWY on 09 November 2019
curl-6 said:

So my grandmother is moving house and was going to throw out a big old SD TV she doesn't use anymore, one of those big buggers that's so bulky and heavy it takes two people to move it safely. I offered to take it off her hands instead of it going straight to landfill, and this morning I decided to fire up my old SNES on it.

Holy. Crap.

First off, the difference in input latency over a HDTV is immediately noticeable. It feels instantaneously responsive, as opposed to what felt like a good quarter second of delay playing SNES on my flat panel. The difference in just how good it feels to play is night and day superior. I used to think I'd just lost my touch at older games, but apparently it's just that I was being handicapped by input latency. Well no more, and it feels soooo good.

Then of course there's the difference in image quality. My SNES games look fucking gorgeous on it, especially compared to all the nasty artefacts you get when playing them on a HDTV. Everything is just so smooth and vibrant. Fired up Donkey Kong Country, and on the CRT it still might be one of the best looking games I've ever seen.

I'm just geeking out now, but wow, I never realized just how much I was missing by playing my older systems on a HDTV. Playing on CRT is just so much better in terms of gameplay and visuals I can't overstate it. I mean I knew this, in theory, but the hands-on, eyes-on difference is so much more stark than I was expecting.

It's kinda weird, in a way, that such obsolete technology is so much better than its modern equivalent in some ways.

Psssshh. That's nothing.

Get yourself a Sony PVM. The best for retro gaming. If you wanna go really crazy, get a DAC. A digital to analog converter. 



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Chris Hu on 09 November 2019
Mr Puggsly said:
The last years I used a CRT was to play 360.

I'm not sure if it reduced latency, but games did look polished on it. Many games surprisingly even supported 4:3 ratio.

Dead Rising on a CRT was terrible you couldn't read the text.  Pretty much all 360 games look better on a HDTV with a newer 360 that has the HDMI output.



SvennoJ on 10 November 2019

My 34" wide screen trinitron weighs 86 kg. It's not coming out the basement anymore. It's still hooked up to a ps2 and wii. Colors and black level still beat that of my 65" 4K HDR tv :/ I don't miss the interlaced crap though and bleeding colors with the standard video cables.



curl-6 on 10 November 2019

I just find it bonkers that in 2019, modern TVs still have worse input latency than TVs from before I was born. I thought it would be something technology had solved by now. Annoyingly my HDTV does not seem to have a "game" mode, at least that I can find.



Chrkeller on 10 November 2019

I've never noticed any input lag. I hear about it a lot, but never experienced it personally.



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COKTOE on 10 November 2019

One of my favorite TV's ever was my last CRT. Choosing it over the LCDs and plasma's of the day was easy. It just looked so much better in general, and it didn't butcher SD content. It was a large flatscreen ( sorry I can't recall the size ) Sony Trititron with 720p/1080i resolution. Amazing built in speakers. The best picture in picture function I've ever seen to this day. Unreal color. Deep blacks. It didn't have HDMI ( it was purchased in 2003 ),but what I believe was it's precursor, DVI. An outstanding, intuitive menu. Even the remote was top-shelf. It was also a monolith. It weighed over 300 pounds.

When it died in 2009, I was living in smaller place, but I held onto this giant for 5 years before giving up on fixing it when had my place remodeled. As shame, because I have the space for it now. I paid almost the exact price for the Samsung LCD that replaced it in 2009, and it took a while to adjust to some of the downgrades. Plus it was a Samsung, so it came broken out of the box and required repair again within 3-4 months.

Samsung: Quality Is Our Only Compromise.



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

Mr Puggsly on 10 November 2019
Chris Hu said:
Mr Puggsly said:
The last years I used a CRT was to play 360.

I'm not sure if it reduced latency, but games did look polished on it. Many games surprisingly even supported 4:3 ratio.

Dead Rising on a CRT was terrible you couldn't read the text.  Pretty much all 360 games look better on a HDTV with a newer 360 that has the HDMI output.

Some games were designed for HD screens, like the text in Dead Rising. Many games looked great on a SD TV, hid visual problems more easily noticed on a HD screen.

I actually had a Sony CRT TV with component input and that was much more clear. MGS4 was also difficult to play due to text, but the component input actually made it clear. S-Video input is also much sharper than standard AV. I used S-Video for Dreamcast.

On a side note, there were actually a few 360 games that ran better at 480p. I suppose doing that made sense when SD TVs were still pretty common.



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SvennoJ on 11 November 2019
Mr Puggsly said:
Chris Hu said:

Dead Rising on a CRT was terrible you couldn't read the text.  Pretty much all 360 games look better on a HDTV with a newer 360 that has the HDMI output.

Some games were designed for HD screens, like the text in Dead Rising. Many games looked great on a SD TV, hid visual problems more easily noticed on a HD screen.

I actually had a Sony CRT TV with component input and that was much more clear. MGS4 was also difficult to play due to text, but the component input actually made it clear. S-Video input is also much sharper than standard AV. I used S-Video for Dreamcast.

On a side note, there were actually a few 360 games that ran better at 480p. I suppose doing that made sense when SD TVs were still pretty common.

Some games took it way too far. I couldn't even read the cell phone text from gta4 on my 90" 1080p LCD projector screen. It seemed the games were made to play behind a monitor, not from a comfy couch.

360 had 1080p component output which looked great on my 34" widescreen trinitron. The text was perfectly readable in dead rising, however half of the hud and mission text was in the overscan area. LCD tvs were still pretty rare while devs apparently assumed everyone would be playing on a pc monitor :/ A problem that still persists with my ps4 connected to a 768p plasma tv. Always some crap hidden outside the visible area. Most games adjust to the global safe area settings, some still don't.

Now we have 4K, and my eyes are 15 years older, can't read anything anymore lol.



Mr Puggsly on 12 November 2019
SvennoJ said:
Mr Puggsly said:

Some games were designed for HD screens, like the text in Dead Rising. Many games looked great on a SD TV, hid visual problems more easily noticed on a HD screen.

I actually had a Sony CRT TV with component input and that was much more clear. MGS4 was also difficult to play due to text, but the component input actually made it clear. S-Video input is also much sharper than standard AV. I used S-Video for Dreamcast.

On a side note, there were actually a few 360 games that ran better at 480p. I suppose doing that made sense when SD TVs were still pretty common.

Some games took it way too far. I couldn't even read the cell phone text from gta4 on my 90" 1080p LCD projector screen. It seemed the games were made to play behind a monitor, not from a comfy couch.

360 had 1080p component output which looked great on my 34" widescreen trinitron. The text was perfectly readable in dead rising, however half of the hud and mission text was in the overscan area. LCD tvs were still pretty rare while devs apparently assumed everyone would be playing on a pc monitor :/ A problem that still persists with my ps4 connected to a 768p plasma tv. Always some crap hidden outside the visible area. Most games adjust to the global safe area settings, some still don't.

Now we have 4K, and my eyes are 15 years older, can't read anything anymore lol.

I have a 720p projector, the image tends to be soft compared to TV of equal resolution. The compromise is it can clean up jaggy visuals.

I have a 768p LCD TV. Modern consoles can switch between 720p and 1080p on it, but the pixels are obviously not fitting properly thus creating stretched pixels, mostly noticed in menus.  However, there is no problem with overscan because the picture size can be adjusted on the TV. I just use the 768p TV as a PC monitor because its big and its perfect for web browsing.

When it comes to reading small text, resolution hasn't been a problem since we hit 720p. But sometimes developer ought to consider we aren't like two feet away from the screen like PC gamers.



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theRepublic on 13 November 2019

Yeah, there is a reason I saved my old CRT for whenever I finally get around to finishing my basement. It is fantastic for those old consoles.



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