OK, I may have 1.95TB instead of 2.00TB - I don't have that much irreplaceable data - I tend to back it up. The thing is, if a 2TB drive fails, I just lost almost 2TB of data, most of it can be replaced but it's still a pain. If one of the 4x500GB drives fails, I lose 500GB of data, which is less than 2TB and all of it can be replaced.
Also, buying a new drive means I have to have the money right now - I don't really want to turn the drives off and save the money by not paying for the electricity that the drives are not using (since they are off) over a year or so.
If you believe in evolution, the answer is obvious - the egg. There were dinosaur eggs long before there were chickens
Agreed.
If you believe in creation, the answer is obvious - the egg.
Not really, God may have created adult chickens which then laid eggs. After all, Adam and Eve were created as adults, not babies, so the same may be true for the animals.
Let's say a drive uses about 10W of power. Running 10 drives uses 100W or, about 73kWh/month, which to me would cost about 9EUR. The cheapest 1TB drive costs ~80EUR, so buying a new drive instead of using 10 old ones would pay off in 9 months. But if I do not have that 80EUR now, it's either wait 9 months and then buy a hard drive or grab an axe, go outside and ask kind strangers for money. If my drives are 200GB instead of 100GB the payoff time is longer (because a 2TB drive is more expensive).
Even if you only make $10/hr. at your job, that means 2 hours of time spent messing around with this is worth the entire value of one of those old drives!
Too bad that if even if I work additional two hours at my job, they don't pay me more, just a fixed salary. So, the time when I am not working is worth zero. Also, while somebody would not pay a lot for my car if I was selling it, the car is still worth to me more than that (that's why I'm not selling it). Same thing with the drives. If I sold all the old drives, I would not be able to buy a new drive of equivalent capacity, so it means that the drives are worth to me more than what the buyer would pay and that's why I'm not selling them.
I have a few old drives ranging from 120GB to 500GB (mostly IDE) that are still in use, but just set up as separate drives. Some are even in separate PCs (ran out of case space).
Still, new drives are expensive, I bought one recently, but for use in addition to all the old ones. Buying a 2TB drive just to replace all the old drives (with no gain in total capacity) is really not worth it and puts most of the data on a single drive (at least now if one drive fails I don't lose all the data, so I can just make multiple copies of the really important data and put them on different drives).
Really nice. 8 hotswap bays + 1 FDD bay (can also hold a non hotswap drive) and 3x 5.25" bays. I'll look for it locally (LT) (shipping such a heavy device from abroad wouls be too expensive.
Finding an empty case with space for a lot of hard drives is not that big a problem (2U cases require special power supply, CPU cooler and PCI cards though, that's why I use 4U). I cannot find an actual server (with redundant power supplies, hotswap drive bays, monitoring hardware) that has a lot of drive bays, but less than 4 CPUs, because the $CPU ones are extremely expensive and I don't need 4 CPUs anyway. The only affordable ones have 4-6 bays max.
I'd also like a 4 unit server, but cannot find one that has less than 4 CPUs and instead has a lot of space for hard drives (I basically want a 1U server in a 4U case).
On the other hand, when building a computer myself, I use a 4U case so that I can use all the standard components instead of having to find the low height ones. And I get enough space for hard drives.
Seconded on the 42U rack. I have one and it is nice - it is about half empty currently, but the extra height does not take up useful space (I wouldn't put anything on top of a smaller rack anyway) and can be useful in the future. After all, 10 years ago I thought I would have only 1 PC ever so I did not reserve space to others. Result - huge mess.
Both of my UPSs are not rack mountable so I placed them beside the rack the smaller one (700VA) on top of the bigger one (2200VA).
So what? True film should include some vertical scratches by the way.
I set my (SD) camcorder to interlaced mode (50Hz) instead of progressive (25fps) so that I get better frame rate. With a good deinterlacer (or watching on a CRT TV) the video looks almost as good as 50fps progressive.
Current 3D technology is not real 3D, just a hack, this is why it looks bad. When I watch a 2D TV, it is pretty much like looking at a painting or a photo - I know it is flat. On the other hand, 3D TV looks almost like looking trough a window. Great, but that illusion breaks down quickly when I realize that I cannot change the angle to see things that are obstructed by an object in front of them, like I could if I was looking trough a real window.
On the other hand, increasing framerate is the same as increasing resolution - higher is better or at least the same, not worse (people in the past preferred the lower quality of acoustic records over the electronically recorded ones, but we now know that while 768kHz sampling rate probably won't add anything to the sound quality as compared to 192kHz, it won't make the sound worse).
I, however, dislike the very difficult games If I play a single-player game, I want to see the ending, to get the full story. This is why I listen to all the audio logs I can find. If I have to redo a sequence more than 10 times I get a bit frustrated. If it's 50 or more times the probability that I'll drop the game starts approaching "1". Especially if I can only save at checkpoints or the reloads take a long time. I dislike repetition and while you can say that, say, a shooter is repetitive in that most of the time you are shooting at an enemy, it usually is a different enemy or a different setting or whatever instead of "START run to cover, get killed, goto START" especially if there is no way around that (I can't go around that open area or throw grenades to where the enemy is).
I can get frustrated in the real world quite well, I do not need to pay to get the same from a game.
And before you ask - yes, I play adventure games. And no, I never pay real money for in-game items.
I think that tutorials are needed, though they should not be mandatory (kinda like the "hazard course" in half-life). Modern games are more complex than the old games so it's either a tutorial or RTFM.
88C, while a bit warmer than the 78-84C that you measured is very close and probably would drop to 84 quite fast. Still, it is too hot by a few degrees.
Even my TV takes about 5-10 seconds after I hit power before I can actually watch anything.
As LCD TVs no longer have the warm-up time needed for CRTs, additional delay had to be implemented somehow to make the TV turn on in the same time as a CRT. This allows for a future "instant-on" TV because there are not many improvements left to do to make someone replace their good TV with a new one.
Psion Series 5/5mx ran quite long on two AA batteries. IIRC it was somewhere between 10 and 20 hours, which is quite OK - I never had to use the PDA for 20 hours straight. Even if it ran out of energy, a new set of battereis can be bought almost anywhere (I mainly used rechargeable batteries).
Imagine if movies sold were watched once, returned, and resold over and over. That's essentially what happened to the games business. But movies have special rental licencing arrangements games that never really worked with.
But that's the thing - if I want to watch a movie only once, I can rent it much cheaper than buying new, watch it and then return it. Some years ago I watched a lot of movies this way. If I want to try out a game legally, there are not a lot of options. The licensing arrangements (or lack thereof) are not really my concern as a customer. Also, I think it is legal to resell movies (I bought some on laserdisc a few years ago), however, the rentals are providing the service quite well, so people do not need to "rent" movies by buying them with intent to resell the next day, so there are few stores that specialize in buying/selling used movies. So, the only people who sell movies are those who bought them with the intention to keep (otherwise they would have rented them) and sell them a long time later (selling the DVD to buy the Bluray, need the space/money). Still, eBay is full of used movies (on any format), and music. Also, the majority of music I buy is in the form of used records. The reasons are price and the fact that even if there is a CD release of the music, it is usually remastered to make it sound modern, but I like the originals more. I also borrow records and tape them. Or tape music off the radio (even if I wanted to, I cannot buy most of the songs that play on the radio, because my favorite station does not announce the song title).
New game: 60. Gamestop pays 40. Resells used for 55. If you drop your price to 50 they buy at 30-35 resell at 45.
On the other hand, maybe more people would buy the game initially when there are no/few used games returned. Or more people would buy the used games so there would not be enough of them for everyone, so some would be forced to buy new.
When gamestop resells, I get nothing.
When the guy sold his Sony GDM-FW900 to me, I'm pretty sure Sony didn't get a penny.
So I'd rather sell to you on steam for 10 than to you through gamestop for 50.
So how about making the Steam price 10 instead of keeping it pretty much same as the retail? I'm sure that would pull a lot of people away from buying used games. It would also drastically reduce the new retail sales, but, as you say, you get more money from Steam. So why are you not doing it? Actually, this is one of the things that I have been thinking - with retail, you need to make the disc, box, ship them to the store, that has to cost something. So why download prices are the same as retail, even though I do not get the disc/box/etc when buying a download.
Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now?
Good, less paper to take up space. You can also advertise this as "saving the trees". A digital manual does not take up much space, it usually fits on the same disc as the game - great. If only hardware manufacturers did that... though I think they do, other than a quick setup guide (which you may need to read before the computer is operational enough to read a pdf) the rest of the manual is on the driver disc. TV/audio equipment still comes with full manuals - instead the manuals should be on a CD, so they take up less space and can be found more easily (I would copy all of them to one CD or just keep on a hard drive - that way I could find the manual quickly and not need to keep it near the device).
I haven't seen game in boxes locally too, just the disc in a DVD case, pretty much like movies. I have no problem with that - less paper to take up space or throw out.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all.
I bought used monitors, tape decks, servers, UPSs and other equipment because of the price (and some devices are not made anymore). The manufacturers are for the most part still in business. If your games is so short that it can be finished quickly and has no replay value or is just bad, then of course people will want to sell it. I can return broken equipment (or even if it works as intended, but for some reason I do not like it, as long as I decide than in 14 days) for a full refund. Can I return a game? Oh, right, I can't. If your game is good then people will play it instead of reselling it immediately.
Maybe this is why used games are so popular - no returns. When I buy a used device, I cannot return it, even the warranty given is a few days, useful only if the device stops working when I bring it home. When I buy a new device, I get 1-5 year warranty and the ability to return it for any reason in 14 days. Games are sold without warranty (and without even the promise that it will work, even if the game disc was blank, I couldn't do anything) and no way to return them (and most games are bad), so the "new" has no advantage over "used". Of course, I could pirate the game, see if it is any good then buy it, but by pirating it I make the developer lose at least a billion dollars, so me buying the game afterward will still result in almost $1G loss.
I buy games on steam for up to 10EUR. Anything more expensive and I just wait for the price to drop or a Christmas sale or whatever. If the game is bad, well, I lost 10EUR, a bit much, but survivable. OTOH, if I want to buy some device that is more expensive, I study it really carefully - read reviews, get the user manual to find out if it has all the features I assume it does (I once bought a VCR that cannot output the tape trough the RF port, while it wasn't a deal breaker, it is an annoyance) and sometimes may even download the service manual to see if something is as I assume it to be (and nothing is written in the user manual) - older devices are easier, since the schematic is easier to trace to find out. This may take me a few days to choose between various options or to see if a particular device is useful to me.
When the brightness is not set too high the blacks are great (better than LCD) but not perfect. When the brightness it at 100% it is worse than the cheapest LCDs.
Yes, because "brightness" for a CRT means "black level" or "offset" - the setting basically makes blacks not that black. If you want white color to be brighter, you should increase "contrast" which means "gain".
True, I especially like the high refresh rate. As for the input lag, my skills are far too low to take advantage of this.
Input lag for me isn't so much about skills as it can make the image "feel wrong" if it is excessive. And LCDs increase input lag to achieve fast response, I guess more processing is needed if you want the pixel to change the state faster.
I lost about 20% contrast in red and blue leading to a greenish tint in dark areas that is difficult to correct.
My Dell P1130 also has this problem. However, it can be corrected in one of two ways. I managed to approximate it in the advanced color settings, where I could adjust the offset and gain for each color. A better way to do it is using the WinDAS software (connecting monitor to a RS232 port) to adjust it properly, but that requires a colorimeter, the software basically says "show full screen white, adjust these sliders so that colorimeter showx x:... y:...". That software works for Sony Trinitron monitors, maybe there is software that works with yours. Also, at least AMD video card drivers allow me to set the offset, gain and gamma for each color.
At high resolution / high refresh rate, my CRT becomes blurry.
Get a better cable. 1920x1200@85Hz is about 300MHz pixel clock, the cable has to be really good to pass it without blur (limited bandwidth) or ghosting (reflections because of impedance mismatch somewhere). Also, I bought Nvidia GTX 260 video card and it made the monitor blurry at high resolutions - most likely the analog circuitry was poorly designed or too cheap to cope with the high frequencies. I returned the card and continued to use AMD HD2900XT, later replaced it with a 6850 and the analog output is still good.
Usually static charge attracts dust instead of pushing it away, the flyback transformer and EHT wire inside a monitor are usually covered with a layer of dust. Maybe my monitor is better or whatever, but I have no problems with eye strain watching it. Then again, I have set the contrast/brightness to a low level and the the light in my room is not intense either, maybe that's why. If I look at a laptop screen at full brightness for long I can get a headache, but if I turn it down (in my room that means down to the minimal setting) it's OK.
Or, if I want to play Doom3 or some other very dark game, I can just turn off the light in the room, then the only light source will be the monitor (and some LEDs on the PC) and the color of the phosphor will not matter.
I have seen failed caps, dead pixels and a dead driver chip (which results in an entire bar of dead pixels).
As for strain, I can look at my CRT monitor (runing at 85Hz) for over 12 hours/day, so I don't think it's that big a deal, unless you are comparing an LCD with a crap CRT (that only runs at 60Hz).
This is because the cold cathode lamp cannot output any light level from zero to its maximum, the way an incandescent lightbulb, or an LED can. CRTs also can, because the amount of light depends on the current which can be varied from zero to some maximum.
meh, they tend to have large gamma. If you want to make them more linear at the bottom end you have to turn the brightness up, no more perfect black.
This is why there is software that lets you adjust gamma. Even some games allow it, but it can also be done with the video drivers (at least ATI/AMD ones, there are separate adjustments for desktop and full screen 3D).
It seems like there should be an impact for video, that you'd want 60Hz for NTSC, 75Hz for PAL, 72Hz for film, and that not having this would mean stuttering or tearing.
I would rather have 120Hz for NTSC, 100Hz for PAL and 96Hz for film. My monitor could support that for SD resolutions, but I do not know about 1080p, it is not written in the manual and I do not know how to calculate it based on the horizontal frequency (which goes up to 121kHz). However, like you, I have not noticed tearing. I do notice LCD scaling artifacts though.
I've tried to repair CRT's and usually failed.
Depends on what has failed. I repaired a CRT TV that would no longer display anything. It turns out that the horizontal deflection transistor failed for some reason. I put a new one in and the 18 year old TV works fine. If the tube fails then it's over, but if the problem is with the electronics then it can be found and fixed.
The biggest advantage is probably that LCD's are significantly brighter
Depends on the user. I agree that bright displays are good for laptops so that I can still see the image even though it's sunny and I am wearing sunglasses. However, for my room, I don't need a bright monitor as I don't wear sunglasses and the lighting is a single 40W lightbulb. It also means that I notice the not-so-black blacks more easily.
The biggest advantage is probably that LCD's are significantly brighter.
And also very well designed/built. For example, using special software it is possible to adjust convergence in 64 (IIRC) separate sectors. Also, all the wires inside are thick, so there are no worries about breaking some really thin wire when taking the monitor apart (the high voltage is another matter though).
I put my monitor in the corner and move the desk away from the corner of my room by a few cm. Pushing the monitor even more back would require me to lower the resolution, so a thinner monitor would mean unused space behind it). Also, my desk has a keyboard tray. The desk is also strong enough to not only support the 42kg monitor, but also a 25kg tape deck. As the desk was bought a long time ago (when LCDs were only used in laptops), putting the monitor in the corner was a good idea, and still is now (since I still use a CRT, not the same one though). If your monitor is flat against a wall then you will have problems with the size of a CRT, byt then again, the desk was designed with a LCD in mind.
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OK, I may have 1.95TB instead of 2.00TB - I don't have that much irreplaceable data - I tend to back it up. The thing is, if a 2TB drive fails, I just lost almost 2TB of data, most of it can be replaced but it's still a pain. If one of the 4x500GB drives fails, I lose 500GB of data, which is less than 2TB and all of it can be replaced.
Also, buying a new drive means I have to have the money right now - I don't really want to turn the drives off and save the money by not paying for the electricity that the drives are not using (since they are off) over a year or so.
If you believe in evolution, the answer is obvious - the egg. There were dinosaur eggs long before there were chickens
Agreed.
If you believe in creation, the answer is obvious - the egg.
Not really, God may have created adult chickens which then laid eggs. After all, Adam and Eve were created as adults, not babies, so the same may be true for the animals.
Let's say a drive uses about 10W of power. Running 10 drives uses 100W or, about 73kWh/month, which to me would cost about 9EUR. The cheapest 1TB drive costs ~80EUR, so buying a new drive instead of using 10 old ones would pay off in 9 months. But if I do not have that 80EUR now, it's either wait 9 months and then buy a hard drive or grab an axe, go outside and ask kind strangers for money. If my drives are 200GB instead of 100GB the payoff time is longer (because a 2TB drive is more expensive).
Even if you only make $10/hr. at your job, that means 2 hours of time spent messing around with this is worth the entire value of one of those old drives!
Too bad that if even if I work additional two hours at my job, they don't pay me more, just a fixed salary. So, the time when I am not working is worth zero.
Also, while somebody would not pay a lot for my car if I was selling it, the car is still worth to me more than that (that's why I'm not selling it). Same thing with the drives. If I sold all the old drives, I would not be able to buy a new drive of equivalent capacity, so it means that the drives are worth to me more than what the buyer would pay and that's why I'm not selling them.
I have a few old drives ranging from 120GB to 500GB (mostly IDE) that are still in use, but just set up as separate drives. Some are even in separate PCs (ran out of case space).
Still, new drives are expensive, I bought one recently, but for use in addition to all the old ones. Buying a 2TB drive just to replace all the old drives (with no gain in total capacity) is really not worth it and puts most of the data on a single drive (at least now if one drive fails I don't lose all the data, so I can just make multiple copies of the really important data and put them on different drives).
Really nice. 8 hotswap bays + 1 FDD bay (can also hold a non hotswap drive) and 3x 5.25" bays. I'll look for it locally (LT) (shipping such a heavy device from abroad wouls be too expensive.
Finding an empty case with space for a lot of hard drives is not that big a problem (2U cases require special power supply, CPU cooler and PCI cards though, that's why I use 4U). I cannot find an actual server (with redundant power supplies, hotswap drive bays, monitoring hardware) that has a lot of drive bays, but less than 4 CPUs, because the $CPU ones are extremely expensive and I don't need 4 CPUs anyway. The only affordable ones have 4-6 bays max.
I'd also like a 4 unit server, but cannot find one that has less than 4 CPUs and instead has a lot of space for hard drives (I basically want a 1U server in a 4U case).
On the other hand, when building a computer myself, I use a 4U case so that I can use all the standard components instead of having to find the low height ones. And I get enough space for hard drives.
Seconded on the 42U rack. I have one and it is nice - it is about half empty currently, but the extra height does not take up useful space (I wouldn't put anything on top of a smaller rack anyway) and can be useful in the future. After all, 10 years ago I thought I would have only 1 PC ever so I did not reserve space to others. Result - huge mess.
Both of my UPSs are not rack mountable so I placed them beside the rack the smaller one (700VA) on top of the bigger one (2200VA).
So what? True film should include some vertical scratches by the way.
I set my (SD) camcorder to interlaced mode (50Hz) instead of progressive (25fps) so that I get better frame rate. With a good deinterlacer (or watching on a CRT TV) the video looks almost as good as 50fps progressive.
Current 3D technology is not real 3D, just a hack, this is why it looks bad. When I watch a 2D TV, it is pretty much like looking at a painting or a photo - I know it is flat. On the other hand, 3D TV looks almost like looking trough a window. Great, but that illusion breaks down quickly when I realize that I cannot change the angle to see things that are obstructed by an object in front of them, like I could if I was looking trough a real window.
On the other hand, increasing framerate is the same as increasing resolution - higher is better or at least the same, not worse (people in the past preferred the lower quality of acoustic records over the electronically recorded ones, but we now know that while 768kHz sampling rate probably won't add anything to the sound quality as compared to 192kHz, it won't make the sound worse).
I, however, dislike the very difficult games If I play a single-player game, I want to see the ending, to get the full story. This is why I listen to all the audio logs I can find. If I have to redo a sequence more than 10 times I get a bit frustrated. If it's 50 or more times the probability that I'll drop the game starts approaching "1". Especially if I can only save at checkpoints or the reloads take a long time. I dislike repetition and while you can say that, say, a shooter is repetitive in that most of the time you are shooting at an enemy, it usually is a different enemy or a different setting or whatever instead of "START run to cover, get killed, goto START" especially if there is no way around that (I can't go around that open area or throw grenades to where the enemy is).
I can get frustrated in the real world quite well, I do not need to pay to get the same from a game.
And before you ask - yes, I play adventure games. And no, I never pay real money for in-game items.
I think that tutorials are needed, though they should not be mandatory (kinda like the "hazard course" in half-life). Modern games are more complex than the old games so it's either a tutorial or RTFM.
Thanks, now I'll know :)
88C, while a bit warmer than the 78-84C that you measured is very close and probably would drop to 84 quite fast. Still, it is too hot by a few degrees.
I am sure the employees were really happy when they heard that they weren't fired after all (well, except the guy who was fired).
Even my TV takes about 5-10 seconds after I hit power before I can actually watch anything.
As LCD TVs no longer have the warm-up time needed for CRTs, additional delay had to be implemented somehow to make the TV turn on in the same time as a CRT. This allows for a future "instant-on" TV because there are not many improvements left to do to make someone replace their good TV with a new one.
Psion Series 5/5mx ran quite long on two AA batteries. IIRC it was somewhere between 10 and 20 hours, which is quite OK - I never had to use the PDA for 20 hours straight. Even if it ran out of energy, a new set of battereis can be bought almost anywhere (I mainly used rechargeable batteries).
Imagine if movies sold were watched once, returned, and resold over and over. That's essentially what happened to the games business. But movies have special rental licencing arrangements games that never really worked with.
But that's the thing - if I want to watch a movie only once, I can rent it much cheaper than buying new, watch it and then return it. Some years ago I watched a lot of movies this way.
If I want to try out a game legally, there are not a lot of options. The licensing arrangements (or lack thereof) are not really my concern as a customer. Also, I think it is legal to resell movies (I bought some on laserdisc a few years ago), however, the rentals are providing the service quite well, so people do not need to "rent" movies by buying them with intent to resell the next day, so there are few stores that specialize in buying/selling used movies. So, the only people who sell movies are those who bought them with the intention to keep (otherwise they would have rented them) and sell them a long time later (selling the DVD to buy the Bluray, need the space/money). Still, eBay is full of used movies (on any format), and music.
Also, the majority of music I buy is in the form of used records. The reasons are price and the fact that even if there is a CD release of the music, it is usually remastered to make it sound modern, but I like the originals more. I also borrow records and tape them. Or tape music off the radio (even if I wanted to, I cannot buy most of the songs that play on the radio, because my favorite station does not announce the song title).
New game: 60. Gamestop pays 40. Resells used for 55. If you drop your price to 50 they buy at 30-35 resell at 45.
On the other hand, maybe more people would buy the game initially when there are no/few used games returned. Or more people would buy the used games so there would not be enough of them for everyone, so some would be forced to buy new.
When gamestop resells, I get nothing.
When the guy sold his Sony GDM-FW900 to me, I'm pretty sure Sony didn't get a penny.
So I'd rather sell to you on steam for 10 than to you through gamestop for 50.
So how about making the Steam price 10 instead of keeping it pretty much same as the retail? I'm sure that would pull a lot of people away from buying used games. It would also drastically reduce the new retail sales, but, as you say, you get more money from Steam. So why are you not doing it?
Actually, this is one of the things that I have been thinking - with retail, you need to make the disc, box, ship them to the store, that has to cost something. So why download prices are the same as retail, even though I do not get the disc/box/etc when buying a download.
Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now?
Good, less paper to take up space. You can also advertise this as "saving the trees". A digital manual does not take up much space, it usually fits on the same disc as the game - great. If only hardware manufacturers did that ... though I think they do, other than a quick setup guide (which you may need to read before the computer is operational enough to read a pdf) the rest of the manual is on the driver disc. TV/audio equipment still comes with full manuals - instead the manuals should be on a CD, so they take up less space and can be found more easily (I would copy all of them to one CD or just keep on a hard drive - that way I could find the manual quickly and not need to keep it near the device).
I haven't seen game in boxes locally too, just the disc in a DVD case, pretty much like movies. I have no problem with that - less paper to take up space or throw out.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all.
I bought used monitors, tape decks, servers, UPSs and other equipment because of the price (and some devices are not made anymore). The manufacturers are for the most part still in business. If your games is so short that it can be finished quickly and has no replay value or is just bad, then of course people will want to sell it. I can return broken equipment (or even if it works as intended, but for some reason I do not like it, as long as I decide than in 14 days) for a full refund. Can I return a game? Oh, right, I can't. If your game is good then people will play it instead of reselling it immediately.
Maybe this is why used games are so popular - no returns. When I buy a used device, I cannot return it, even the warranty given is a few days, useful only if the device stops working when I bring it home. When I buy a new device, I get 1-5 year warranty and the ability to return it for any reason in 14 days. Games are sold without warranty (and without even the promise that it will work, even if the game disc was blank, I couldn't do anything) and no way to return them (and most games are bad), so the "new" has no advantage over "used". Of course, I could pirate the game, see if it is any good then buy it, but by pirating it I make the developer lose at least a billion dollars, so me buying the game afterward will still result in almost $1G loss.
I buy games on steam for up to 10EUR. Anything more expensive and I just wait for the price to drop or a Christmas sale or whatever. If the game is bad, well, I lost 10EUR, a bit much, but survivable. OTOH, if I want to buy some device that is more expensive, I study it really carefully - read reviews, get the user manual to find out if it has all the features I assume it does (I once bought a VCR that cannot output the tape trough the RF port, while it wasn't a deal breaker, it is an annoyance) and sometimes may even download the service manual to see if something is as I assume it to be (and nothing is written in the user manual) - older devices are easier, since the schematic is easier to trace to find out. This may take me a few days to choose between various options or to see if a particular device is useful to me.
When the brightness is not set too high the blacks are great (better than LCD) but not perfect. When the brightness it at 100% it is worse than the cheapest LCDs.
Yes, because "brightness" for a CRT means "black level" or "offset" - the setting basically makes blacks not that black. If you want white color to be brighter, you should increase "contrast" which means "gain".
True, I especially like the high refresh rate. As for the input lag, my skills are far too low to take advantage of this.
Input lag for me isn't so much about skills as it can make the image "feel wrong" if it is excessive. And LCDs increase input lag to achieve fast response, I guess more processing is needed if you want the pixel to change the state faster.
I lost about 20% contrast in red and blue leading to a greenish tint in dark areas that is difficult to correct.
My Dell P1130 also has this problem. However, it can be corrected in one of two ways. I managed to approximate it in the advanced color settings, where I could adjust the offset and gain for each color. A better way to do it is using the WinDAS software (connecting monitor to a RS232 port) to adjust it properly, but that requires a colorimeter, the software basically says "show full screen white, adjust these sliders so that colorimeter showx x: ... y: ...". That software works for Sony Trinitron monitors, maybe there is software that works with yours. Also, at least AMD video card drivers allow me to set the offset, gain and gamma for each color.
At high resolution / high refresh rate, my CRT becomes blurry.
Get a better cable. 1920x1200@85Hz is about 300MHz pixel clock, the cable has to be really good to pass it without blur (limited bandwidth) or ghosting (reflections because of impedance mismatch somewhere).
Also, I bought Nvidia GTX 260 video card and it made the monitor blurry at high resolutions - most likely the analog circuitry was poorly designed or too cheap to cope with the high frequencies. I returned the card and continued to use AMD HD2900XT, later replaced it with a 6850 and the analog output is still good.
Usually static charge attracts dust instead of pushing it away, the flyback transformer and EHT wire inside a monitor are usually covered with a layer of dust.
Maybe my monitor is better or whatever, but I have no problems with eye strain watching it. Then again, I have set the contrast/brightness to a low level and the the light in my room is not intense either, maybe that's why. If I look at a laptop screen at full brightness for long I can get a headache, but if I turn it down (in my room that means down to the minimal setting) it's OK.
Or, if I want to play Doom3 or some other very dark game, I can just turn off the light in the room, then the only light source will be the monitor (and some LEDs on the PC) and the color of the phosphor will not matter.
I have seen failed caps, dead pixels and a dead driver chip (which results in an entire bar of dead pixels).
As for strain, I can look at my CRT monitor (runing at 85Hz) for over 12 hours/day, so I don't think it's that big a deal, unless you are comparing an LCD with a crap CRT (that only runs at 60Hz).
This is because the cold cathode lamp cannot output any light level from zero to its maximum, the way an incandescent lightbulb, or an LED can. CRTs also can, because the amount of light depends on the current which can be varied from zero to some maximum.
meh, they tend to have large gamma. If you want to make them more linear at the bottom end you have to turn the brightness up, no more perfect black.
This is why there is software that lets you adjust gamma. Even some games allow it, but it can also be done with the video drivers (at least ATI/AMD ones, there are separate adjustments for desktop and full screen 3D).
It seems like there should be an impact for video, that you'd want 60Hz for NTSC, 75Hz for PAL, 72Hz for film, and that not having this would mean stuttering or tearing.
I would rather have 120Hz for NTSC, 100Hz for PAL and 96Hz for film. My monitor could support that for SD resolutions, but I do not know about 1080p, it is not written in the manual and I do not know how to calculate it based on the horizontal frequency (which goes up to 121kHz). However, like you, I have not noticed tearing. I do notice LCD scaling artifacts though.
I've tried to repair CRT's and usually failed.
Depends on what has failed. I repaired a CRT TV that would no longer display anything. It turns out that the horizontal deflection transistor failed for some reason. I put a new one in and the 18 year old TV works fine.
If the tube fails then it's over, but if the problem is with the electronics then it can be found and fixed.
The biggest advantage is probably that LCD's are significantly brighter
Depends on the user. I agree that bright displays are good for laptops so that I can still see the image even though it's sunny and I am wearing sunglasses. However, for my room, I don't need a bright monitor as I don't wear sunglasses and the lighting is a single 40W lightbulb. It also means that I notice the not-so-black blacks more easily.
The biggest advantage is probably that LCD's are significantly brighter.
And also very well designed/built. For example, using special software it is possible to adjust convergence in 64 (IIRC) separate sectors. Also, all the wires inside are thick, so there are no worries about breaking some really thin wire when taking the monitor apart (the high voltage is another matter though).
I put my monitor in the corner and move the desk away from the corner of my room by a few cm. Pushing the monitor even more back would require me to lower the resolution, so a thinner monitor would mean unused space behind it). Also, my desk has a keyboard tray. The desk is also strong enough to not only support the 42kg monitor, but also a 25kg tape deck. As the desk was bought a long time ago (when LCDs were only used in laptops), putting the monitor in the corner was a good idea, and still is now (since I still use a CRT, not the same one though). If your monitor is flat against a wall then you will have problems with the size of a CRT, byt then again, the desk was designed with a LCD in mind.
When my monitor displays "black" it looks like it is turned off.