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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."
Seen the Best Buy commercials? How about Circuit City? Or maybe a cable or satellite company?
The thing I like most about the new LCDs and Plasma screens is that it makes the CRTs less expensive...
I don't mind the bulkiness because I get bonuses: Cheaper price and (not just according to this article, but personal experience) a better picture...
but flat panels still look so cool...
Emotional purchases, indeed. "Yeah, but this one goes up to eleven!!"
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
shell out $1700 for a 17" LCD tv and then hook it up to an antennae for 4 stations...
He also thinks "mid engine" on his Boxter means the engine is still in front of him, just not all the way up to the bumper. He justifies this by pointing out the washer fluid reserves and whatnot as being part of the engine.
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
I have been tempted many times by the sleak and sexy LCD's, but why would I want to spend $1500+ on two replacement monitors that have a limited viewing angle, limited resolutions selections, limited game performance?
I've yet to see, however, a LCD that makes me want to replace my beasts.
People (especially ladies) like the flat screens because of their super slim depth, massive picture size, and amazing light-weight.
Show me a 60" CRT -- and if you can even find one, find a rec-room it would fit in, and try and lift it!
Sam
My wife does marketing and likes to label this class of people as "stupid rich".
The warm fuzzy feeling alone that you get when you hang on TV on your wall like a picture I think makes up for the lower picture quality.
:)
Although if you got an old-style TV, I guess you could replace your table with a pile of money and break even
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
But then, for lowly consumers, when is it the technology that matters ?
:-) but both free up a huge area of floorspace and don't intrude. The LCD looks nicer when it's not on...
:-)
At the end of the day, you want something nice in your living room, and a flatscreen TV fits the bill. Personally I prefer a projector (nothing like an 8' image to give you a sense of cinema
I'm typing this on a 23" Apple Cinema Screen LCD display, which I bought because it was gorgeous. Simple as. The fact that for significantly less cash I could have had 2 CRT's and a slightly larger screen real-estate didn't matter (which is saying something for me - I like having lots of windows open at once...). Looks matter
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The issue isn't resolution or viewing angle.
There's no HDTV I can justify buying now. The only one worth buying is the $35,000 Mitsubishi one which is basically a 50" computer monitor.
Even the $15,000 plasmas you see on MTV cribs have motion artifacts.
I'm not saying they all suck, I'm just saying I can't justify any of them right now.
This article is rather nebulous when it comes to support for its wild assertions. This paragraph sums it up:
"LCDs are great as desktop PC monitors because they don't have to refresh pictures rapidly--more LCD desktop monitors were shipped in 2004 than those using CRT technology, according to researcher iSuppli--but they don't work as well when used as televisions. Plasmas tend to lose brightness over time and don't offer images as sharp as those served up by CRTs. Manufacturers are working to improve these shortcomings."
First of all, LCD refresh rates are now excellent. Modern units can do better than the 25ms refresh time of yesterday's screens. Besides, that adds up to 40fps, which exceeds TV's ~30fps.
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?
The fact is that this article is all hype. It's trying to portray the manufacturers as trying to squeeze every last dollar out of honest Americans through lies and chicanery. Well I call foul.
I go down to the local electronics store all the time, and the difference between CRT and LCD/Plasma is seen quite clearly. In fact, the best picture comes from the projectors, which are by far the best price.
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.
I work at a retailer that sells several different kinds of TVs and I've found that the average consumer that I'm dealing with is really in the dark about current TV technology and tends to follow the notion that more expensive = better.
I found myself having to really educate people who come in since they often have no idea that LCD is diffrent from flat CRTs, or plasmas, or HDTV. Most consumers really have very little to go on, and the battles between manufacturers on what will be the next standard really isn't helping.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
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
Yep. I had a cadre of physicists, engineers, and architects work out where to put my TV in case I wanted to watch it from bed, my desk, or the computer.
Oh wait. No I didn't. I got a flatscreen CRT and put it wherever the hell I wanted.
they cost thousands of dollars right now, but the sunnybrook high dynamic range monitors seen at last year's SIGGRAPH were a showstopper... They currently have a model that offeres a dynamic range of 40,000:1x .html has a good visual on how effective the system is.
compared to the best of today's displays ~700:1, that's something to brag about. most are about 300:1!
I believe 40,000:1 reaches the limits of human vision.
They work by individually illuminating the pixels with LEDs, thus facilitating higher dynamic range and local control. Darks are darker lights are brighter.
http://www.sunnybrooktech.com/hdr/inde
Once the price drops to reasonable levels, I think that the act of purchasing a flatscreen will become something more than an "emmotional" venture.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
are you telling me that "Regular Ol' TVs" are better than flat HDTVs?
No, they are telling you that HDTV's made with CRT technology (The huge, heavy boxes) display a better picture than the thing plasma or LCD screens. The article is pointing out -- quite rightly -- that general consumers have associated "thin" with "high tech and good picture."
In fact, if you have the space, you can buy a sizable CRT HDTV for a relatively affordable price. Not cheap, but something an average consumer could afford if they were willing to sacrifice a bit.
On the other hand, I believe this trend has continued because people genuinely really do like the thin, lighter screens.
Like it or not a television is one of the most dominant objects in a many peoplees homes. They don't want it big, bulky and ugly.
One theory I read awhile back was that there has always been a significant number of wealthy men who wanted to go buy a big screen televeision, but were basically restrained by their wives who didn't want the huge ugly beheamouth in their living room. Sure, that flat screen costs twice as much, but now the wife says go for it because its not ugly.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Cnet has nice article on FED screens using carban nanotubes
Something about retiring a 60 lb behemoth for a seven pound monitor.
I'll take a little picture degradation to be able to hang a 37" TV on the bedroom wall rather than having a 200-pound behemoth taking up 3/4 of my dresser. And you'd have a hard time telling the difference in picture quality from 15' away unless you saw them side by side.
That's why I got my LCD monitor (which also has a TV built in, btw): it just makes more room. My previous monitor (14 inches) was 16 inches deep. The new one (17" 16:9) is only about 4 inches deep, 9 for the very base. It made a HUGE difference on my cramped desk.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
OLED will be what finally displaces CRTs-- the picture quality is supposed to improve dramatically with OLED, and the viewing angle (IIRC) becomes a non-issue. As they emit their own light, they don't need heavy backlighting which reduces both weight and depth, and the production costs are much cheaper on OLED as compared to LCD.
Hopefully in another 2-3 years (5 tops) we'll see these out in the mass consumer market at competitive prices.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
It is a shame direct view 16x9 picture tubes come no larger than 34 inches. The only big screens that look nearly as good are DLPs, and Damn! Those are expensive.
How ya like dat?
As much as this can create some benefits for those of us who are poor (like dual g4's with 512mb ram on ebay for $400), they cause a lot of problems in the market in places where the goods are a little bit more necessary.
Take food, for instance. I would very much like to buy organically grown, chemical and gmo free vegetables (which my grandfather was able to buy when he was my age), but because those have become yuppie foods, they're priced out of my price range. There's no reason that veggie burgers should be more expensive than real burgers, where you have to raise a whole damn cow as opposed to growing some soybeans, but because they're trendy, people pay a lot of money for them.
The "stupid rich" create benefits for things like technology, because they offset R&D costs when the company overprices when it first comes to market. But for goods that I feel everybody deserves the highest quality, they really make life difficult.
Your CRT monitor according to some studies shows it can cause brain damage and short term memory problems due to the radiation.
This is just silly. Why, many of us here on Slashdot have been using them every day for years now... some for decades! And when you look at the fine group we have assembled here, I'm sure you won't find any evidence of brain damage or short-term... ah... wait a sec, now. What were we talking about again? No, of course I remember... heh. Just give me a few moments to review some polaroids and these notes that I've written on my skin, and I'll comment further.
I bought a Sharp Aquos LCD television last year. It's only a 20" model, not a giant one, and it's only normal TV, not HDTV.
It's way better than the CRT it replaced.
There are no issues with ghosting; it clearly refreshes fast enough for TV, DVDs, or console video gaming.
I am looking forward to the day when I get a much bigger one (the 37" and 42" both look nice). When I get the bigger one, it will be a model with a DVI input, and I'll hook up a computer to that. I want to play first-person games on a giant screen with my living room's surround sound all around me.
steveha
P.S. I figure LCD is pretty much a stable technology at this point. It's basically a large laptop screen, and those have been around for years. Plasma has burnin issues, and OLED may simply fade with time. I look forward to SED displays... but LCD is here now and getting more affordable every year.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
DLP's are not nearly as expensive as Plasma displays, which do not look nearly as good.
Consumers think they're buying the best in technology (with flat-panel televisions), but it's more of an emotional purchase.
Emotional purchase? Yes, I know, marketers and retailers think the buyers are all dumb as bricks. These are not the ones checking the needs of consumers and developing the products, however.
Since when was video quality the only factor? Power consumption, less space, more features and the abscence of x-rays from a CRT are viable reasons for many to go with LCD.
I can find both CRT and LCD good and bad, so that should actually factor out.
I've sold them for a long time now, but I've never thought they had NEARLY as good of a picture as a CRT. And the next closest in the larger sizes is DLP, by far. LCD and Plasmas always look very pixellated.
I've always thought it was pretty obvious, but maybe not.
Blake
They don't want it big, bulky and ugly.
Yeah, watching TV shouldn't remind them of their spouse!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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.
Don't get all excited - when you are in my tax bracket, my first thought, was "great, I just won the right to buy a $4499 TV for half price (after taxes)"; And I wasn't in the market for a $2250 TV!
After a prudent amount of skepticism [checking out the company that the fullfilment guy said he was from, etc] before turning over "1099" information, it seemed like the real deal. We really had won something. I inquired whether or not we could take cash in lieu of the TV. Having had first-hand experience with plasma burn-in (on the same set we had won, for a work project), I knew I didn't really want one.
The bottom line: "no cash", however, since the actual prize delivery was via our friends at Best Buy, I was able to finagle a deal with the local manager to do a one-time, use-it-or-lose-it buying spree for the value (which turned out to be "street" not "MSRP"). They just processed the TV as an in-store, no-receipt credit.
This turned out to be a much better deal than taking a TV. My daughter got a nice stereo, my younger son got lots of video games. The big ticket items were a DV camcorder and a Toshiba laptop. Toss in some nice Boston Acoustic clock-radios that I otherwise wouldn't have purchased at $150 each, and some blank DVD media and the family was much better off than taking one expensive, short-lived Plasma TV.
I mean, how much better could Sponge Bob look on a big screen? I'll stick to my Costco (Toshiba) 32" CRT for now (landfills be damned, someday).
Now, I only hope that 1099 says "only" $3699+sales tax. I feel much better paying taxes equivalent to a bunch of useful "half-price" stuff than I ever would have paying close to $2000 for one TV with 80 channels of crap on the cable.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Coz' it makes me kew!
Seriously, CRT is definitely a better picture and tt was definitely an emotional purchase except for one overriding factor.
I didn't want to lug up a 300 lb 50" TV screen up stairs to my apartment.
The picture had looked fantastic at the store, but when I got it home into a lower light setting, ooh boy... My plasma magnified every mpeg artifact in the DirectTV compression. Color banding was everywhere. Watching Band of Brothers episode 4 (I believe) resulted in a great primal scream from me. (It's the episode where they sneak up to the German camp on a foggy night with a full moon in the background. All I could see was 64 shades of gray coming off the moon in circular bands. Jeep headlights in that same episode exhibited the same problem).
However, with the proper calibrations (using a dvd like video essentials) you can get a decent picture. You can get an even better picture with DVD material using an upconverting DVD player with DCDI (especially if your Plasma/LCD TV doesn't have good picture correction to begin with.)
But take away the geeky sexiness of it, if they had a lighter wide screen CRT, I'd probably be looking at that.
I have an LCD panel driven via DVI and find the display to be crisper than the CRT I had before.
Is the perceved superiority of CRTs (as mentioned in the article) because most people just plug LCD screens into the old analog output from their video card?
... or am I just imagining things?
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!"
#Turning Economics Lecture Mode ON#
The reason veggie burgers are more expensive is not too much demand from those yuppies, but just not enough supply from producers. There isn't a big supply because there isn't a big demand at any price. Most people prefer real meat.
To get the economies of scale needed to provide cheap veggie burgers, a lot more people would need to want to eat veggie burgers.
As to your Grandpa getting cheap "organic" food, my guess is that relative to his income, his "organic" food was more expensive than your organic food is relative to your income. Food prices have declined sharply over the last century.
evanchik.net
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.
Actually, I'm not too sure they are talking about HDTV CRTs. The "traditional tube TVs" (their words) they are talking about might be analog NTSC/PAL CRTs. The article doesn't make this clear. Note that "they" are from India, which seems to have very little HDTV content available. The article goes on to say:
An article from the Hindustan Times ("HDTV: Bigger, better but at a price") says that HDTV "could touch the lives of high-end consumers in India by 2007."
Buyers of HDTVs in India might be seeing the enhanced artifacts of 720x480 video that are less visible on a non-HDTV CRT. I wish the freakin' article had more details.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
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.
The article is pointing out -- quite rightly -- that general consumers have associated "thin" with "high tech and good picture."
In the same way, they think that electronic voting machines must be better than other methods.
Those fancy Princeton 19" LCD's still max out at 1280x1024. Look at LCD's in the 1600 range, and you'll see the prices double. And have fun playing down-res'd games. Of course, my NEC MultiSync 21" goes up to 2048x1536, but can play games at 800x600 if I need the high framerates, yet only cost $550. Go figure.
"Yeah, but try moving it around!" you might retort.
How often do you move around your screen? Twice. When you move in, and when you move out. Big deal. If I wanted a portable screen, I'd have to get a portable computer as well. We call those laptops.
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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I was indecisive for a few months on getting a new TV. We're at the start of a transition. The 36" & 40" CRTs are probably the best pictures I've seen..but they are massive, and 4:3.
If you watch lots of TV on lots of different channels (most will be in 4:3), then get one of those, or even just buy a $200 27" CRT. cos in a few years HDTV will be phased in.
If you watch mostly network TV, or the other HDTV channels (ESPN, Discovery, HBO & movie channels, we only get about 15 here now out of a few hundred regular ones) or mostly movies, then get a HDTV now! The sports stuff (mainly football) looks completely amazing. & newer movies (unfortunately only big studio ones) will blow you away. Sopranos in HD will definitely have people flocking to your house too.
Most of the cable channels are NOT HD/16:9 (at least here): Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, CNN, IFC, Sundance, all other HBOs except for main one, History. This leads to a stretched picture, or bars on the side to keep it 4:3. this is the suck part I mentioned earlier.
With Netflix tho, I watch a movie a night & you gotta have widescreen, unfortunately the largest 16:9 CRT TV I've seen was 30-33", which might be ok for a small bedroom but its really super tiny screen.
I personally like the LCD projection ones, 42", 50", 60"..less than half the price of HDTV plasma (EDTV plasma is lower resolution), not as thin but lots thinner than other projections of the same size...so not cheap, but affordable for home theater types.
So use a projection system. Then, when you sit up, you can rotate the picture onto the wall.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
I recently got a 15" Sharp Aquos. The picture quality compares very favorably with the Sony Wega TV I have. I have a Dell 19" LCD monitor. I don't get nearly as fatigued looking at it because I can't discern any retrace flicker.
In the 80s, I worked at RCA's TV set design facility. I became sensitive to video quality there. I just don't agree with this reviewer's assesment. CRTs are definitely less expensive, particularly for larger screen sizes but I like the LCD's picture better. There's less power dissipation and heat with LCD sets. They're lighter and take up less space.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
If it isn't, I do have a problem.
I think before any one complains about these TV's being hype they should come over to my house and watch for a few minuties.
Where do you live? Do you have stairs in your house?
My other first post is car post.
...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 believe you meant to say that "beauty is in the eye of the beerholder" !
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
Also, CRTs give a better image for only certain measures of 'better'.
I'll completely agree with both article and many posters that the small LCD screens are a waste of money for most people. They look crap compared to a CRT of equivalent size.
That said, we aren't usually talking about those. Anything much over 28" in a direct-view CRT usually suffers from noticeable geometry issues - even the £2000 ($4000) fancypants 36" 16x9 Loewe sets I've looked at. Geometry problems obviously aren't even possible on a Plasma or LCD, because the pixels are physically stuck in place.
32" Direct-view CRTs weigh an absolute tonne (well, 50+kg, anyway) - we nearly did ourselves an injury carrying mine upstairs with two people. So I dread to think how we'd lift a 36" up to the living room, even if there wasn't the issue of how difficult it was to squeeze my 32" TV round the corner on the stairs. A 37" flat-panel would, however, be easy to move.
Finally, from a normal viewing distance, I can't even see the difference between SD and HD resolution on anything smaller than a 37". So when talking about how much better HD looks, I can't really see the point in even discussing CRTs.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I work in an IT store and stare at new CRT and LCD screens most of the day, without a shadow of a doubt the CRT has a far clearer and crisper image. (to my eyes anyway) I agree most people just get LCD because they think it is the latest technology so it must be the best. If someone comes in wanting to do serious graphic work I alway direct them to the top end CRT screens.
Buy a smaller set and sit closer!
I stole this
Yeah, if I can't hang it on the wall, I'm not going to own it.
It's the same reason I don't own a toilet or a washing machine.
Buy a digital projector (and possibly a screen). The picture quality is fantastic on the recent models I've had experience of, and with the right kind of screen and room lighting, you can even be finicky about brightness/contrast and still be happy.
Besides, it just has that "home cinema" feel.
If you work for really nice people, they might let you bring one home from work! More fool them (and you if you can't afford to replace it). But if you trust yourself, it's a cheap way to have a home cinema (and you can just use a wall rather than screen!)
I can testify that it's the only way to play games console car racing games . Or watch LOTR.
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Viewing angle??????
...unless you think opposite and consider it an advantage that nobody looking at your screen from a side would see a thing.
That word was unknown before the LCD era. It's a strictly LCD-related problem and still serious though great advances have been made...
CRT has full 180 degrees viewing angle. So does Plasma. LCDs are the ones with problems in this area.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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?
Something missing altogether from the article is any mention of power consumption. A typical CRT monitor burns 120 watts while an LCD can work with 30 watts. Depending on your electrical rates, this can translate into hundreds of dollars a year. It also lowers the load on your UPS during a brownout, which means it's more likely your complete system will be able to stay up for extended periods of time.
While a CRT can offer superior contrast ratios, a quality LCD can provide 500:1 or better (CRT's are generally 1000:1). The advent of OLED will help LCD's advance in this area, and quite likely surpass CRT's in the very near future.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Does that $35k include the forklift required to move it?
Yes, damn it... throwing distance! When will all these ISO standards and fancy AV forums enter the 21st century??!? It amazes me that no one realizes the most important criteria for a display system is throwing distance. I'm off to Petition.com to force all those fat cats in congress to get off their asses. We will have throwing distance as an specification attribute in my life time!
Who's with me???
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.