 Thanks Lenovo and AMD for sponsoring a portion of today's video. Lenovo's Slim 7 laptop offers excellent performance and fantastic battery life, all powered by AMD's Ryzen 9 5000 series mobile processor. Click the link in the description or watch till the end to learn more. I just treated myself to the greatest monitor that money can buy. 20 years ago. Whoa! Oh wow! Bleh! Wow! Rrngh! But even today, this absolute unit of a desktop display goes for more than $3000 US dollars. Why? What could a CRT from 2002 do better than a state-of-the-art gaming display from 2022? Did I just waste my freaking money? When LCD panels arrived on the scene, they had some big pants to fill. The development of the CRT display had a 60-year head start, and what's crazy is that modern displays are still playing catch-up to your grandma's old TV, in some ways. Especially when you compare to one of the best consumer CRTs ever. The Sony GDM-FW900. But why is this thing so big? Well, it's because of the actual CRT. The cathode ray tube. In the back of this big box is a heavy glass vacuum tube with electron guns inside it. The electrons are shot at a layer of phosphors on the glass screen at the front. Now, phosphors are materials that emit light when they're hit with electromagnetic radiation. Remember those glow-in-the-dark stars you had on your ceiling as a kid? Well, it's the same fundamental principle. But to create a color image, we've got three electron guns. One for red, one for blue, and one for green. And each has their beams aimed by magnets to hit the corresponding section of your screen, illuminating the phosphors. This whole process happens very fast. At full resolution on this display, it redraws the entire screen 80 times a second. But that's not even close to 240 Hz, let alone 360 Hz like the fastest displays today. Why pay over three grand for a monitor that looks like it belongs in the back of an underfunded public library? Why do people want this? This is where we get to my first experience with it because I haven't actually gotten to play with it yet. Ooh, it's on! There are two basic camps. There's retro gamers like Anthony and sweaty gamers like David. Sorry, David. David's also a retro gamer. You're more sweaty than him. Sweaty retro. That's not true. You're a sweatshirt gamer. Sweat-tro. 92 pounds. 92 pounds! Let's talk about what makes this CRT so special. It was, sorry, no, is a top-of-the-line product with rare-for-the-time features, like a 16 by 10 aspect ratio and a nearly undrivable rated resolution of 2304 by 1440. Add in that it's equipped with an sRGB mode for super accurate colors and a high vertical refresh rate, and there was pretty much nothing that this thing couldn't do better than early LCDs and even many modern ones. Like, how about zero pixel response time? Uh, wait. How can pixel response time be zero? Ah. In an LCD, light shines through crystals that physically shift and turn to allow the light through. That process takes time, but in a CRT, when an electron hits the phosphor, it instantly produces a photon and then stops once the electron gun is no longer blasting it. What actually makes the image stay on the screen is a limitation of our own human monkey vision. When you point a high-speed camera at a CRT, you'll actually see that the entire screen is drawn line by line by a single point. But when we scale time back to the human perception level, it appears that the whole screen is lit up. And that's actually why this video is gonna look a little bit funky, because we have to play around with our shutter speed in order to make the screen stop flickering and looking weird. It's so crisp! I haven't seen a CRT of anywhere near this great in... Man, I went LCD in 2004. You see that slow moving line going down the screen? That's due to the desynchronization between the frame rate of our camera and the refresh rate of this display. Ah, let's put it back to 80. That better, David? That's so much better. Wonderful. Oh, s***! I forgot to explain why we're using a GTX Titan X, because that's the last Nvidia card that still included analog outputs. That's why you chose it, right? Is there anything after that? No, that's the best card you can... Crazy! This is the best CRT gaming setup you can have. Can you do DP to VGA active conversion? Probably, right? Okay, that was interesting. Is that I looked for like a good way to try and can to switch to analog. I'm not sure if there really is one that actually allows you to access all of the settings in here, because if you just do like a plug and adapter, you can only do 60 Hz, you're limited by like the HDMI spec or whatever. Poo! Hey, that's a good tech tip. I love it. Yeah, well, if it's on the wrong monitor, Windows Shift arrow key, and you could, whoops, you can move it around between the monitors. Amazing. Adam just tech tipped me. We have to kind of fool around with all displays connected, because if this one turns off, it takes 45 minutes to warm up. We're going to check the refresh rate. Yes. Currently, it's running 300. Oh, is that like a G-Sync limitation? What is that? Oh, you know what it probably is. This is a Titan X. We're running DP 1.2. Yeah. Can't have the best of all worlds. That's okay. We'll settle for 300. Really, what we're going to be looking at here is brightness, which is obviously in two completely different leagues, and of course, image persistence. Now, here's something I didn't miss. The phosphor layer is actually like this far behind the front pane of glass. So you kind of have this perception that you're looking through a window at your monitor, as opposed to just at your monitor. It's like your monitor sitting in a shadow box. The slight blur of having round phosphor light emission rather than square pixels. You really don't need any aliasing at all. It looks so clean. Flick around. Flick around. This thing is crazy. Why do they not still make these things? Does it ever look good? I mean, we probably had to reduce our shutter speed so much that you're not even getting the the sense of how sharp and crisp it is. The motion is just flawless though. Another thing that's really cool is subtle gradients, like this cloudy sky to the clear blue sky up here. You don't get any of that blocking or banding that you would potentially see on an LCD. There's a Twitter account that has side-by-side comparisons of 2D sprites from the 16-bit era, and it will show them on a crisp LCD display as well as on a cheaper CRT. And it makes a huge difference in how things look. Like they have a one-shot of Dracula from Castlevania on an LCD. He has these tiny little beady little red eyes, but when you put it on a CRT, the natural kind of blur makes it fill up the whole space in his eyes, and it looks so much more painterly and it's crazy. Windows shift arrow key over to the other monitor. Yeah, is that gonna work? Yeah. Was I just imagining how much better it looked? Going back to 1080p definitely sucks, although fun fact, actually driving that thing at the rated resolution back when it came out, basically impossible. Yeah, and it still doesn't look as clean. The additional brightness is definitely a plus though. And guys, LCDs have improved a lot to the point where, under normal circumstances, I would be whipping the mouse around on this thing, going, man, LCDs have gotten great for image persistence, but even this is not quite there. I would choose the LCD. What, why? I've grown very accustomed to this level of smoothness of animation, and the response time difference at my level of play is just not enough to matter. Do you think you can feel a difference between this and the monitor, or is that all just, that's, you wouldn't know. I doubt most humans would feel a difference. Terrorists win, I didn't even see an opponent. And immediately upon switching to the QD OLED, this is using Samsung's latest panel technology in this Alienware monitor. The last thing I said was a big fat lie because no, I would definitely go with this man. That brightness, that contrast, that pop, whew. OLED is a super cool technology because it marries some of the most obvious advantages of both CRT and LCD. One of the big problems with early LCDs in particular was awful black levels. Well, with OLED, you can turn the pixels off entirely, just like a CRT where you just don't illuminate that section. No, how did I miss? Crap. That sucked. Another big advantage is that due to the nature of OLED displays, the pixel response time is near instantaneous. So you get that excellent persistence of the image. Even when you're moving around rapidly like this, although I do have to note that without black frame insertion, it's not quite the same, is it? Of course, that's not to say OLED doesn't have its advantages. You probably noticed it's quite a lot brighter than our CRT. Well, that's for a couple of reasons. One is that this used to be rated for 125 nits of peak luminance, and it has aged down to a mere 69, which is not as nice as it might sound. But turn off the lights. Well, how do I do that? So now it's all gross because the blue phosphors have probably worn out a little bit more. So after calibration. I mean, the thing about luminance is that it's all relative to the dilation of your pupil, right? That's why the standard for theater level HDR is, what, like 80 nits or something like that? It's not a lot. In a light controlled environment, you don't need a ton of luminance. Wow, has that never been more clear? How am I supposed to decide? See, I could never afford this kind of thing back when I was a gamer teenager. This is what I have something if you're still struggling to make a decision. Oh, see, that's the thing. All right. OLED and CRTs share a lot of the same advantages, but an OLED will never draw in scan lines. It is absolutely mind blowing how immediately better a retro game that was designed for a display with scan lines looks when you fire it up. How did this lose to the PlayStation? Oh, look at that, grinding, baby. But it's been so long since I've seen retro content on a proper display. I forgot how good it looked. There is no way that I would guess 480i. 480i is half the vertical resolution of 480p, theoretically, right? Because they're interlaced. I mean, there's some trickery so that it doesn't look like it, and that's exactly what we're seeing here. Look at the cobblestone. Look at how good that texture looks. I know, right? Like this brick, obviously by modern standards, right? This brick is not that amazing, but with proper scan lines in your display, which is something that you can't really replicate on modern hardware. Fake scan lines are a thing. You can buy adapters that will sit in between your retro console and a modern display and will kind of mostly add the effect of scan lines. Or what you can do is you can run it in an emulator, and many emulators support fake scan lines to get more of that retro look. But boy, is it ever not quite the same, man, in a dark room. And here's another thing that's really incredible. The Dreamcast outputs at 480i, like I mentioned, but this isn't a 480i display. It runs at 2304 by 1440, 80 hertz. CRTs don't have a native resolution. You see, LCDs and OLEDs have physical pixels that cannot be relocated. So when you run them at anything other than the resolution, the number of actual pixels, it's more of a pixel count than a resolution, really, they look blurry or they have artifacts, CRTs. You can put in any input within their supported range and they will run it natively. So there is no drawback to using a console versus a computer with this thing. It'll just look flippin' awesome no matter what. Oh, and another cool thing is that the limitation of what resolution or what refresh rate you can run comes down to the speed with which the gun can go back and forth. So you could lower your resolution and up your refresh rate or lower your refresh rate and increase your resolution. The choice is yours, within reason. To compare our native image quality with an LCD, we actually had to go find an older one that still has a VGA input. And it should be noted that depending on the scalar built into the panel, that VGA input could behave very, very differently. This particular BenQ was a fairly high-end display. Wow, does that ever look like dog crap? The craziest part of how much worse this looks to the eye is that this CRT for low-res games like this actually isn't necessarily your best-case scenario. Having your pixel points, not quite a pixel, more of a dot, having your dots so pinpoint accurate actually takes away some of the softness that low-resolution consoles benefited from. It was kind of a natural anti-aliasing. So if we had a CRT TV, we might even be having a better experience. Look at what this brick looks like in comparison. It looks like trash. Okay, let's go back. Let's go back to the CRT. Way better, like it even looks more 3D. Do you guys see how like it just has more of a 3D pop? The color, it doesn't shift at all. I forgot. It's absolutely perfect. One of the things that makes this particular set so accurate is that it uses a technology that Sony developed in the 60s that they called Trinitron to improve the video quality of the televisions. When electron guns were developed, they weren't entirely accurate, and often electrons would stray from their intended path, causing them to activate other unintended phosphors. It wasn't a big issue with black and white televisions, but once colors got involved, stray electrons hitting nearby phosphors would unacceptably distort the image with unintended colors and fuzziness. To solve this, RCA developed the Shadow Mask, a metal sheet full of tiny holes that would block stray electrons from hitting the wrong phosphors. But the downside to this was it greatly reduced display brightness because the metal panel blocked a lot of the energy. The Trinitron though uses an aperture grill, which is instead made up of vertical slits. This was accompanied by a change in the arrangement of electron guns from a triangle to a straight line, and it allows much more of the energy to make it to the screen, and thus a brighter display. Sony actually won an Emmy for this technology, so Apple isn't the only Emmy award-winning tech company. The disadvantage of aperture grill, so my old ViewSonic P95F Plus was an aperture grill display. Are we connected to the computer still? Here, let's switch over. And there's one up here as well, right there. Those lines there are a visible element of the aperture grill, and they're noticeable enough that Adam, when this thing arrived, came to me, he's like, minus, I think you spent $3,000 on a monitor with visible defects on it. Actually, they're completely normal, and I can tell you from experience, daily driving an aperture grill monitor that you completely forget about them after the first couple of hours. The LTT store screwdriver has a super strong magnet in it, and a magnetic bit. And the funny thing about electrons is they interact with magnetic fields, right? So, right, whoa, hey, what's going on here? But actually, all you're doing is just taking the electron beams and deflecting them. So I'm supposed to talk to you guys about why people don't buy these. One obvious one is price, although you can find TVs, especially if they're not in great condition, for significantly cheaper than what we paid for this. The issue is that finding one in good shape is getting more and more challenging, and as that becomes more and more true, the costs are only going to go up. Even this one, which we paid a lot for, suffers from degraded phosphors and some nicks in the anti-glare coating. Another big one is cost. Even if the price isn't high, transporting these things can be a nightmare. How much does it cost to ship one of these, especially without the original packaging? It was cheaper for me to pay an employee for 10 hours of driving and reimburse their mileage than to ship it via mail. And then there's the luminance. CRTs just don't get as bright, and as they're used, it only gets worse. And unlike a projector, there's no way to change out the lamp. It's not a lamp, it's an electron gun. After years of service, this thing just ain't gonna look the way that it used to. So what's the answer? In my opinion, modern TVs, between OLED and particularly QD OLED, which is in TVs now and on the horizon for monitors, we no longer have to deal with the shortcomings of LCDs, and while they do have some drawbacks themselves, the biggest one, which is burn-in, is actually shared with CRTs. There's also the fact that they run at a fixed resolution, but from my personal experience, as we've gone to 4K and beyond, it's become far less of an issue because the pixel density is so high that, especially from couch distance, it doesn't make that much of a difference. But if you want the ultimate, tracking down a high quality CRT might be worth it for you. For the rest of you, maybe you should just stick to checking out our sponsor. Thank you for sponsoring this session. This section of the video. The Lenovo Legion Slim 7 is thin, lightweight, and one of the most portable laptops in the Lenovo Legion lineup. You can experience excellent performance and fantastic battery life powered by its AMD Ryzen 9 5000 series mobile processor, and it's thoughtfully created to ensure the maximum audiovisual experience while getting the most game time out of its battery life, making it an ultimate mobile gaming machine. The Legion Slim 7 allows for professional level gaming performance no matter who you are and where you are, and you can click the link in the description to learn more. Thanks again to Lenovo and AMD for sponsoring that section of the video. If you guys enjoyed this video and you like watching me spend way too much money on stupid stuff, get subscribed because that's a major part of our content strategy. Also, you can check out this video where I bought a gigantic, the first ultra-wide display, which was actually a rear projection display. We still have it, it still works. A shootout! This versus that. The King of the Ancient Kings! Oh my god, we have to.