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CRTs Still Beat Flat-Panel TVs
mr.henry writes "Consumers scrambling for sexy new flat-panel televisions may want to tune in to this less-publicized feature of the trendy boxes: They don't deliver pictures as clearly as traditional tube TVs do. Consumers think they're buying the best in technology (with flat-panel televisions), but it's more of an emotional purchase."
My wife does marketing and likes to label this class of people as "stupid rich".
Well I'm so happy with my 19" LCD. first of all, it is larger than 19" CRTs. Second, since it is using the digital cable it gives _extremely sharp_ image quality, which is very noticeable when working with small fonts, I can count the pixels and there is no irritating blending effects. But then I played soldat... spooked by the ghost-ing:( though mine is not the one with a very low response rate. Oh, and it loks cool:)
There is an interesting set of articles over at Extremetech that compare CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP display systems.
Your typical CRT TV may not be better, but a CRT HDTV will outperform a flat HDTV. And it'll be a hell of a lot cheaper too.
Or is the site not loading? Googlecache: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:6qWFhaqeaZYJ: www.zdnetindia.com/reviews/product_news/stories/11 4569.html+&hl=en&client=firefox-a
Mirror dot: http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/2712f2435ee5df05c c584434364b7951/index.html
In picture quality and price, the CRT wins hands down, but they only go up to about 36" in size. Any bigger and you'll be looking at a rear projection set which, sure enough, also uses CRTs, but the CRT's disadvantages of size, weight and power consumption are multiplied even more in a projection set. If you want a 40" big screen and don't want a huge projection set, $2000 for a plasma is pretty reasonable, but if you're a big time couch potato who'll leave it on a lot of hours, it'll fade noticably in a few years. $2000 for what's essentially a throwaway TV is a little steep for me, but hey, it's not my money. Also remember the plasma screens are power hogs just like CRTs. If I were buying now, I'd say the 32" HDTV CRTs are at the sweet spot in price, under $900. Or I'd get a 20" computer LCD and add a tuner box.
Color theory dictates a gamma of about 3.0 for our eye's perception of color; i.e. the cube root of voltage changes appear to be about the same distance apart in color space. The L*A*B* color space reflects this.
All output devices except CRT's are more or less linear, gamma about 1, thus the DAC's need LOTS of bits to represent differences near black without contouring/banding - or without lots of dithering noise added in. The good old CRT has a native gamma of about 2.2, better than square root, but not quite the cube root our eye sees. As a result many fewer bits in a DAC produce excellent results. Most good CRT's operate flawlessly with 10 to 12 bit DAC's, while at least 16 bits would be needed to equal this in a linear gamma display.
On another topic, CRT's can be scanned at the native rate of the video source, 720p or 1080i for HDTV; or, if desired, upsampled/deinterlaced by an INTEGER factor 2, 3 or 4 to 1. Fixed pixel displays require all kinds of fancy DSP chips to resample by odd factors and still don't look as good.
1. It seems nobody cared that the user interface becomes blurry and unreadable if you set screen resolution to anything other than integer fractions of the maximum resolutions supported by the flat screens. Unless you want to pay premium for killer video cards to go along with the flat screens, or watching a giant black border on the screen, your 3d gaming performance will go down because of this flat panel 'feature'. You definitely DON'T want ugly scaling on real time streategy games.
2. As someone have mentioned before, you can pay twice as much money for the LCD screens of high resolution. The strange part is, the cut-off resolution for which flat screen becomes a luxury. Searching in price engine shows following:
cheapest 1024x768 LCD: $~300 (KDS Radius RAD 5gs)
cheapest 1280x1024 LCD: $~400 (Samsung 713V)
cheapest 1600x1200 LCD: $~1000(!) (Viewsonic VP201b)
cheapest 1920x1200 LCD: $~2750 (Samsung 243T)
cheapest 1920x1440 CRT: $~300 (Samsung DynaFlat 997DF)
Is the technology of eliminating dead pixel on LCD _that_ expensive? It looks like it, until I discovers when upgrading LCD screens on notebook, the price differential is much smaller when jumping between resolutions:
Stock Dell Inspiron 9200 w/ 17 inch Ultra Sharp WXGA+ screen (1440x900): $2079
Stock Dell Inspiron 9200 w/ 17 inch Ultra Sharp WUXGA screen (1920x1200): $2279
The resolution difference is even bigger than Viewsonic VP201b vs Samsung 243T, and yet it costs only $200 more instead of $1750. Why the hell companies keep on overcharging on higher resolution screens?! If they want people to buy new technology, they should just make stand alone monitors with extra resolutions on smaller screens, instead of forcing consumers to buy 20/23/30-inch monitors just to get the same damn resolutions!
3. Marketing practices aside, the competing flat panel technologies (LCD, [Organic|Polymer]LED, plasma, DLP) means that manufacturers can't concentrate on bringing down the cost of flat panels in general to the point of replacing existing CRT user base, especially for high-res models.
You are wrong about TV refresh rates. NTSC has 60FPS refresh rate and PAL 50Hz. So, you need maximum 16.7ms refresh rate to view NTSC and 20ms to view PAL.
The motion artifacts you see are from the digital MPEG-2 source. In time of motion, you'll see some "blocking" due to how digital video is compressed (Macroblock/Discrete Cosine Transform). You'll also see ringing (halos or "mosquito" noise) due to the discarded frequencies that take place in MPEG quantization. Motion puts an added stress of digital video compression. The accuracy of LCD and Plasma displays help to show these more than a blurry CRT.
They're getting better and cheaper all the time. Over Christmas, two members of my immediate family bought themselves projectors instead of a new TV. One was looking at spending $3000 on a 62" rear projection TV, but instead picked up one of those BenQ SVGA projectors for under $1000 CDN. The screen is easily twice the size, and they're just blown away by the clarity and how their Xbox looks on it with component cables.
Of course this solution doesn't fit all comers, as you have to put the projector somewhere that doesn't always see direct sunlight, and you need something to provide the signal (cable box, DVD player, game system, VCR with tuner, etc) and the audio (most use a stereo or 5.1 home theatre system), but in the end a lot of people I know who have gone the projector route are far happier with it than if they just got the TV. And in the majority of cases it's cheaper too. Even factoring in replacement bulbs. As my brother-in-law summed it up: "After everything is said and done, this is costing me $0.15 an hour to have a movie theater experience in my TV room!"
Consumers are constantly being told that newer is better and that new is progress. LCD and plasma displays are newer than CRTs, and therefore they must be better. Americans may not be progressive politically, but we're quite "progressive" technologically.
due to the pressures involved in maintaining the vacuum inside a large CRT set, the largest standard CRTs you can find are usually 36"-42". They get exponentially heavier as they get larger.
Practically nothing is being done at 48-bit. Never really was. Thirty-six bit was common for a while (what people in the biz call "12-bit integer"), but it's basically gone the way of the dodo now.
Virtually all film and d-cinema work is being done in OpenEXR format now, which uses 32-bit floating-point pixels. Video work, of course, is all done in 10-bit integer. Well, not all. A surprising amount of it is still being done in 8-bit integer. But the pro stuff is practically all 10-bit.
While it's true that neither CRT nor LCD monitors can handle the complete dynamic range of 32-bit floating-point, LCD is quite a bit closer. DLP comes closest, of course, which is why it's being used in new movie theaters.
Interestingly, OpenEXR support is native in Mac OS X Tiger. That's the power of the BSD license, right there.
Umm Hello?!
Cheapest 1920x1200 LCD: $1800 (Apple 23" Cinema HD)
Cheapest 2560x1600 LCD: $3000 (Apple 30" Cinema HD)
Ohh and the space you save by buying a 20" LCD versus a 21" CRT is huge. Im in college right now and let me tell you, my 17" Samsung takes up almost my entire desk, right now I would kill for a LCD so that I could have more space to do work. Not to mention the eye strain I get from CRTs, its annoying.
Yes, so any individual pixel only needs to show 30 FPS, because it is only updated once every other 60 FPS frame. Today's good LCDs have pixel response times of 16 ms or better, which is actually better than 60 FPS anyway. So LCD TVs are fine, and most people who claim otherwise are spouting gibberish they heard secondhand on some internet forum (other than Slashdot, of course ;-). It's possible that some (cheapo) models of LCD TV use older LCDs with refresh rates worse than the baseline of 25 ms, but specific models are never cited by those who bash LCDs. To condemn all LCD TVs as worse than CRTs is just horseshit, in the words of the above Anonymous Coward. LCDs have so many advantages over CRTs it's not even funny.
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As far as I know, the largest direct-view CRT is the 40" Sony XBR Wega HDTV. IIRC, it weighs about 350 pounds and costs about $2500, more than a nice 42" plasma TV (but not a high-def plasma).
My other first post is car post.
RCA to BNC connectors are $1 at Radio Shack. Or if you want to buy a new cable, you can buy one with RCA on one end and BNC on the other for $20.
My other first post is car post.
Furthermore, later on in the article they point out that flat panels are better for digital because they can deal with the higher resolutions of HDTV. Now how can a CRT have better picture quality than plasma, but plasma have a better resolution making it better for HDTV?
Interlacing
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
...is that they're heavy. My Sony 36" CRT HDTV weighs just a tad under 300lb. I had to build a special moving crate out of 3/4" plywood and 2x4s in order to move it up a flight of stairs. The crate is basically a plywood box cut in half diagonally with the 2x4s attached outside for structure, and 1" of foam insulation inside for padding. The TV gets secured in the box with ratcheting tie downs, then the box gets secured to an appliance dolly and then four 200lb guys move the whole 400+lb of TV/box/dolly up the stairs one heave at a time. Oh what fun.
:D
Making things better is the fact that these televisions have absolutely no structure to them whatsoever. The whole case bends when you just pick the thing up. It's about the scariest item I've ever moved. One minor error will write the whole thing off.
All that said, I absolutely love the thing on every day except moving day
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
To read about the sort of things that are important to getting a good quality picture out of HDTV, I would recommend picking up any random issue of Widescreen Review magazine that features some CRT TV reviews to see what parameters they test on. The main thing that cheap sets (and any Plasma unit for that matter) really screw up are color linearity/accuracy and black level.
I'm going to address CRTs as far as good brands go, because if you're not getting a CRT you're prioritizing something other than image quality under normal viewing conditions. As such the non-CRT recommendation process becomes very specific to your priorities and it's hard to give a good answer. I'm not trying to be snotty here, because I certainly understand that it's often the case that display quality is not even close to the main decision parameter. For example, the last TV box I bought was a small projector, which I knew perfectly well wasn't as good as a CRT. But I was living on a 5th floor walk-up apartment and not about to haul a good TV up there when I had a short-term lease.
Anyway, Mitsubishi's high-end Diamond CRTs have the best factory calibration regime I'm aware of to make sure they are faithfully displaying their inputs, and their less expensive models are invariably at the top of the accuracy (and build quality) heap as well. Usually on the expensive side in get what you pay for fashion. At lower price ranges, Toshiba CRT sets usually give the best accuracy relative to their price. Some of the Sony sets look very good, but talk to any statistically significant number of people who have dealth with Sony repair centers and you'll never consider one of their products again.
As always with TVs, displays in showrooms are totally bogus unless you are verifying color temperature and brightness/contrast/sharpness yourself across sets. Most showrooms sets are too bright and too blue, because those are the characteristics that make people prefer a TV at first glance in the same way that louder stereo equipment always seems better at first.
My rear projection self calibrates the convergence, so that's no longer an issue on a modern set. (of course you can still put it into a manual 64-pt convergence function, which takes about 20 minutes. but most videophile forums say that the auto convergence is almost as good as the manual, especially at 720p and below).
Dimness can be a factor if you watch movies in direct sunlight. (I suppose most people put RP tv in their living room instead of a nice dark and cozy den).
One problem with rear projection is that the quality of the picture can vary dramatically between brands. The difference between my Mitsubishi and my buddy's Sony is pretty dramatic.
But for the most part your post hit the nail on the head. RJ has a lot of drawbacks, but if you want a really large crisp screen cheaply, it's certainlly wroth considering. And CRT HDTV is nice if you don't mind a heavy set and smaller picture.
There are some CRT HDTVs that are 3:4 and just do letterbox for 16:9 signals. They actually are extremely crisp for 3:4 viewing because they are true 1080i in the letterbox form, so there are a lot of extra lines in 3:4 mode (but the extra lines are filled in artificially with some fancy circuitry which helps produce a crisper brighter picture).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I couldn't possibly agree with this article more.
Flat panels are a DECREASE in quality in most cases but due to the slimness of them and people sitting far enough away, consumers are happy to use them - now marketing people are selling them as the "ultimate picture quality"
A very high quality HDTV CRT will blow any flat panel away, period.
The only real issue is CRT is generally smaller than what RP / LCD / Plasma can acheive.
(I have a 36" I beleive 40" is the largest possible)
Oh and for reference I saw the following technologies in action before I chose my TV.
(all High def models)
Rear projection standard CRT tube
Rear projection LCD
LCD
Plasma
DLP
3 Toshiba
Just recently, in the UK, LIDL were selling a 28" CRT with NICAM stereo and 3 years warranty for 129GBP (so about US$250) - albeit a relatively unknown brand (probably built in Turkey by Beko or Lodos like most TVs available in Europe these days, though). I paid 110GBP for an ex-rental 20" set about 7 years ago.
Crispness is one of the few aspects where LCDs do best CRTs, because LCDs have precisely defined pixels whereas CRTs just have an electron beam that sweeps across the screen. The CRT wins in other areas, like blackness (compare a CRT and LCD "black" screen, there's no contest), resolution flexibility, and color response.
60 fields a second for interlaced display. So while it's not 60 full frames, it is refreshing 60 times per second. Besides, an HDTV CRT would be displaying in 480p, which is 60 full frames/second.
Now how can a CRT have better picture quality than plasma, but plasma have a better resolution making it better for HDTV?When did resolution come to equal picture quality? What about color accuracy for example? Besides, by definition, the set has to display both 720p and 1080i to be an HDTV (or hd ready). HD CRTs do. Have you ever seen an HD broadcast on an HD Tube?
The fact is that this article is all hype.No, they make a fair assertion. The last half of the article is crap, but CRT still offers better quality than Plasma or LCD.
Yeah, I know the advantages of a CRT display over plasma, but the layout of my family room made it awkward to place a big, heavy TV in a place that it would look "right". So I got a 42" Panasonic plasma and mounted it over the fireplace. It frees up floor space (although I guess I can't hang a picture over the fireplace now, darn) and it looks *incredible* (HD TiVo). Trust me, it's not like people walk in and say "well that looks OK, but I bet it would look even BETTER if you had bought a CRT display".
I guess I made an emotional purchase, but 6 months later, I have no regrets.
What if the Hokey-Pokey really is what it's all about?
Most 30-32 inch widescreen CRTs I looked at were 480i, only 1 was 540p.
Hardly what I would call HDTV, even though that is what they are advertised as.
Any real 1280x720 sets out there? With computer inputs?
You have to be very careful with projectors.
While they have come down in price significantly and they offer a great picture, the bulbs still don't last long enough, and they are very expensive.
It would be one thing if the bulbs were resonably priced but paying $500 every six months for new bulbs when the machine only cost $800 is silly.
Projectors are good if you don't use them too much. But if you use them a lot, as your normal TV, bulb life is a problem.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Off the top of my head it doesn't look like I'll be paying FICA or Medicare on top of everything else, but that adds another %12.4 on your first 87,900 (only 2.9% above that). The tax code is so bad, I don't really know what I am paying until I figure it out, in April.
So, it looks like my $3986.74 "free shopping spree" will cost me about $1474. Worst case $1570. Not too bad.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
who the hell modded you insightfull?
Well you might get eye strain from a CRT, you've hit on none of the possible reasons.
a CTR doesn't "fire" dust into your eyes, a CRT give the glass a charge that ATTRACTES dust. There is no truth to that at all and you should be modded down for that sigle statement.
Eyestrain with a CRT is almost always caused buy a huge resolution on a small moniter and/or a low refresh rate.
60-100hz and my eyes can't take it, but 1040x768 at 140hz no problems at all, AND i wear contacts.
You know, I wrote this late last night, and I really shouldn't have. I left out some important stuff.
The OpenEXR format does include support for the 32-bit float pixel type, but it's not commonly used for color. Much more common is the "half" pixel type for color: 16-bit floats. The 32-bit float format is used for other types of image data, but rarely for color.
See, if you use the "half" format, you get about 30 f-stops of dynamic range, compared to about 7 f-stops in an 8-bit integer image. (You can squeeze that to 10 or 11 stops in 10-bit integer, but that's hardly much of an improvement.) That's plenty, and you can store your images in half the space. When you're looking at more than 36 MB per 2K frame for uncompressed 32-bit float, cutting that in half is a very big deal. (Lossless wavelet and ZIP compression can give you something on the order of another 1/3rd to 1/2 of your disk space back.)
What that means is that you can apply pretty extensive color correction to an OpenEXR "half" file without introducing artifacts or getting an unacceptable level of graininess. So "half" is good enough for color work. The 32-bit float format is available when you need even more precision. Typically that's for things like alpha channels and depth mattes.
The other important thing about OpenEXR's "half" is that it's bit-for-bit compatible with the "half" data type in the Cg language, which means that OpenEXR image data in "half" format can be passed to GPUs without conversion for processing in hardware. That's important.
All of this technology is available from ILM under a BSD license, which is how Apple was able to build it in to Mac OS X Tiger. I should have made that more clear, too. "Half," or 16-bit floating-point, is a native pixel format in Tiger, and OpenEXR is a native file format, and CoreImage supports downloading files in OpenEXR format straight to the GPU along with pixel algorithms or convolution kernels for transforming them. Amazingly fast. It's basically Photoshop with 10 times the color precision implemented entirely in hardware.
Anyway, I should have made all that clear last night. Blame it on the sleepy.