 Retro gaming is really taking off and as good as modern displays have become, there's something about the big boy CRT that has enthusiasts paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to game like it's 1999. I would know. I just bought one and made a video about it. But that's stupid. What? You heard me right. People are out there like him paying top dollar for displays like this one that you probably didn't even know existed. Check this thing out. This is an HD CRT TV straight out of 2003. This boy is 16 by 9, runs at 1080i resolution and has input lag so low that David says he doesn't even bother with his LG CX OLED anymore. And that sir is where you lost me. It can't be that good, can it? I am here to convince you otherwise. Just like I'm here to convince you of our sponsor segs. I wonder what's my line? AMD. If you're looking to upgrade or build a new gaming PC, the Game on AMD sales event is on right now until August 5th, where you can get their best deals on AMD Ryzen and Radeon products. Learn more today at the link down below. There are a few key factors that drive enthusiasts to seek out the best CRTs they can find. They have next to no input lag, their pixel response times are instantaneous, and they have high contrast ratios since like an OLED display, the pixels, if you could even call them that, simply do not emit light when they're off. That's right guys, before OLED took center stage, CRTs were actually the technology with the outstanding contrast ratio, something that average consumers gave up for thinner, lighter LCDs. But even as someone who recently blew 3G's on a top tier gaming CRT monitor, I'm still not even a little convinced that I should go back to daily driving one of these monstrosities. I mean, LCD sucks. It was an inferior technology from the get go. Fair enough. But OLED is here now, and some of the recent ones are amazing. I mean, we are now getting most of the brightness of mini LED with the inky blacks and the response times of CRT. We actually measured this thing at what, like 8 milliseconds? That's incredible. On top of that, I would actually argue that the blacks of an OLED are black-er, simply because of the way that the display absorbs surrounding light. Sure, in a completely darkened room, the CRT might get close, but definitely not under these conditions. I mean, how can you possibly want to game on this when you can game on this? The thing is, it's not about the input lag. More than response time, there's nothing that looks like a CRT. CRT is its own thing. There's something that happens, some kind of magic. I don't know what it is. Actually, I do know what it is. That when you play an old game on a CRT, it just looks so much better than on an OLED. For now, we need to play some games. I have so many things I want to show you, but I want to start with the reason I got into this TV, which is seventh generation gaming. So PS3, Xbox 360. Those games look absolutely horrid on modern displays, and this is the best display for that. We're going to have some tests where we're upscaling from 240 and 40i going up. We're going to have some stuff where we're going down from 1080p down. And what I want to convince you is that there is definitely a place in your living room for this bad boy. In my living room. I mean, I can tell you right now, I don't miss the flicker. I don't miss the wine. I get that people are all like, CRT blocks, CRT blocks, perfect blocks. In a light controlled environment, maybe. But we actually saw that with Samsung's QD OLED versus LG's W OLED, in a lit room, certain display panel technologies reflect more light back than others. And LG's W OLED really is black. One of the nightmares of CRT gaming is getting different devices to display properly on it. Yeah, we're going to have a full float plane exclusive about David's octopus of scalers and adapters. And he can kind of walk the float plane peeps through it. But that's beyond the scope of this video, I think. It's wild. Tell me what you're experiencing looking at these two displays. I strongly prefer the more contrasty look of the blacks on the OLED. However, the motion is definitely better on the CRT. Is this an interlaced signal? This should be, yes. Unless something changed. Wait, the OLED is more responsive. Well, that's the thing about HDCRTs. They have the best tubes, but they actually have the dumbest brains. So as it comes, there's a processing, a scaling that happens on pretty much every resolution. So I wanted you to experience it as it would be out of the box. Luckily, you can turn that off, but then you just want to give your display only 1080i signals. And so that's why I have that scaler. I can get all kinds of different resolutions, different refresh rates. But then it all lands on what something this TV can look good at. It's noticeable, though. We measured about 40 milliseconds of delay in our testing. But when I turned off the processing, it went down to eight milliseconds, which is pretty much exactly the same as the OLED. Yeah, that's perfect. Then should we turn that off? Yes, we should. Were you testing me? Did you want to see if I would notice? I wanted to give you the absolute best experience. I wanted to walk you through and blow your mind. But I think it was good to show you that you kind of have to do a little fendangling yourself to get the best experience. Got it. I'm so sorry. But the contrasty look, the more modern anti-glare reflective coatings. I think it looks better. I'm sorry. I was just this time. Well, why don't we try a different game? Let's try something 1080p on the PS3. Something that's sprite based. Sure. And let's see what you like there. Sprites are going to be disadvantaged modern panels. This was actually the first game that blew me away. So it's a 1080p game, but it's based on a 4DI game. So it's scaled internally. It's got smooth smoothing on. But there's something about sprite based games that I think just look better on CRTs. Like the... Not even close. Yeah. There's a magic that happens with sprites in particular, because it looks great on the OLED. Like this looks fantastic. No, I disagree. Actually. OK. It looks like absolute ass. Like, ew. Like, look how bad Wolverine's face looks on there. Yeah, you can see the individual pixels. Well, not even... You can't. It's all kind of smooth and blurred together. Yeah. That is nasty. Now the background, Mr. Clown Face or whatever back here looks all right. And obviously text. Way better on the OLED. But particularly, I don't know. I don't know my Marvel superheroes. Yeah, Colossus here. Look at his face. You know what it reminds me of? Those photo to painting filters that you can apply. That's what it reminds me of. It looks awful. OK, that's a win for the CRT. Whoa. Tell me something, though. I noticed you're not applying any scanline filters or anything like that to the OLED. Could we get it closer? We definitely can. And we can play around with that. There's a few issues that happen with the upscaling and downscaling when I add scanlines. I can get scanlines to look good on the HD CRT, so additional ones to kind of emulate more of an older look. And I can get them to look good on the OLED. I can't get scanlines to look good on both at the same time. Got it. OK. So we're not necessarily putting its best foot forward. Yeah. But there's no question natively that the CRT looks much better. All right. What am I looking at here? This is a fun comparison because now we're getting 4DI out of the Dreamcast. We're going to a Retro Tink and we're upscaling to 1080p on these two displays. But this is getting its original 480i output. So this is its best foot forward. This is probably its best foot forward. And that's pretty damn close to its best foot forward. Something about yellows just doesn't look as good on the OLED. I can't tell if it's a calibration issue or if it's something else. I frankly don't perceive much difference between the 480i native image and the upscaled 1080i image, which I think is a good thing. Yeah. If what they're going for is true to the original resolution of the game fidelity, then I think they've actually done an outstanding job here. As for the OLED, somehow it lacks the color punch. Is that possibly lost in the conversion? It's possible, but it's going through the same chain pretty much until the scalar. But the scalar shouldn't be adding any color. Ploof described it as kind of washed out looking. And it is. That looks like ass on the CRT compared to the better blacks on the OLED. Which one would you give it to of the three? I'd say this is just a straight. Oh, huh. Interesting. Your overscan is off. In that case, I'd give it to the HDCRT. I hate overscan. Overscan sucks. Should never have existed. This game to me is kind of the best case scenario of the Dreamcast. It looks sharper on the HDCRT than the 4 by 3 one. Barely. Barely. But I think the clarity is really there. The color is great. And the OLED just looks, yeah, just kind of blurry. It looks upscale to me, whereas on the HDCRT, it looks good. It looks tight. All right. Let's give you a different Dreamcast game that you might have a different experience with. This one in my quick testing is the one Dreamcast game that I think looks way better on the 4 by 3 than the HDCRT. Oh, 100%. You need the scan lines. You need the scan lines. It immediately makes this image much more attractive. It's particularly noticeable for me in the depth of field bokeh effect backgrounds. Yeah. This just looks like a blurry, crappy, low resolution texture. Totally. That looks like bokeh. I find the trees too, like there's the illusion of the details in the tree feels real, the foliage. Whereas in this, you can just see it's like paper. Yes. It does not look right. These have more depth to them. Totally. Well, here's a fun comparison that you might want to try. We could keep the Dreamcast playing it in 480i on this TV, and we could pull up the HD remaster on the PS3 and compare those two playing that versus this. That's an interesting dynamic that I find really appealing on the HDCRT is HD remasters of old games. Because you can get the widescreen, you can get the upscale, the sharper image, but you get the CRT effect. Sonic Adventure 2. The black is so much better. It really is not an ideal situation for this. It's not, but it looks a lot better. 100%. I mean, that's the thing about the real world. It's messy and you're often not in the ideal situation. Sometimes the sun is up and you want a game. Sorry. This one's pretty close to me. I might even give it to the OLED. I think this one's pretty darn close. Again, close is pretty impressive for a 20 year old TV. I know you like Final Fantasy X quite a bit. I think it's your last Final Fantasy you like. The Final Fantasy HD remaster is good, but it has that weird too sharp effect. I forgot my copy of Final Fantasy X. I got excited. We have a copy of Final Fantasy X. Do you want to see what condition it's in? Oh no. Remember those kits to polish the buff. You ain't polishing this one. I don't know. It might buff out. Just put a little tape. You know, it's fine. What do you think of the graphics though? There's no question in my mind that I would play it on this. Really? Not even close. This is a cut scene. Let's get to somewhere where you can see more textures. The textures on this, the muddiness is just like exaggerated or something because the display is so sharp. I like the softness of this image and I find it, again, there's a uniformity to the image that this does better. You know what, man? I'm sorry, but I got to take the clean digital look here. Fair enough. The facial hair there, it looks like a smear on his face. Whereas here I can see discreet hairs for better or for worse. For better or for worse. And like his chain looks like links. OK, that's pretty linky too, but that's linkier. I hear what you're saying and it's definitely a preference thing. Yeah. But like I like that the hair is soft. Like hair doesn't look like that. That looks weird and paper, like there's paper friggin' things that are coming out of his head. That looks like a blurry mess that looks like hair. The foliage looks better here. Yeah. On the CRT. OK, toss up. I'll take it as a tie. Let's go back one more generation. Oh, we're going back another generation to my day. We're going back to my childhood. What you're currently playing on is an analog Super NT. So it's an FPGA device designed to play Super Nintendo on a modern display. I actually think this is one of the best use cases for the HD CRT. Let's compare. Oh, it looks so bad on the OLED. Oh, it looks so bad. It looks just right on the HD CRT. And it's not even an actual Super Nintendo. We can compare it to an actual Super Nintendo. I think this is one of the most fun use cases, is these modern revised consoles playing on an HD CRT. They look really good. I don't know if I can deny it. That's what I've seen. Walk me through what you're feeling in the difference between all three TVs, Linus. I can't even look at the OLED. I am honestly shocked. I thought this was going to be, you were going to choose the OLED more often than you did. I like to think that I'm capable of being objective and I can tell when something is not as good. And there's no question that the higher resolution upscaling works really well in this game. Not in certain situations, not in text. Yeah. One thing we would be remiss not to mention is the fact that modern emulation has solved a lot of these problems. Yeah. Shout out emulation community. It's phenomenal. You guys are amazing. Like bringing people's childhoods back one bug at a time. And better than it was. Like in a lot of consoles, emulation is so much better than the actual hardware is. Like I'm pretty- Yeah, like Super Mario World widescreen. You've seen that stuff, right? 100%. You can change the render resolution on a lot of PS1 stuff, but then actually fix the geometry issues. So that's an interesting one too. I kind of want to show you. The PS5 just got some PS1 games. So it has like backwards compatibility now. And so I want to show you what an actual PS1 game looks on all of these versus the PS5 emulation on these. Recently, PlayStation has offered their PS Plus Pro Gold Plus who cares what it's called service where you can now play PS1 and PS2 games. Not just like ripped, they're higher rendered or they're rendered at a higher resolution. So they're rendered at 1440p. The problem is an actual 1440p kind of looks like crap. The geometry looks really weird. You can see like the way it pops. Yeah, the way that objects kind of shift around a lot. It's not that noticeable on the HTC RT. Yeah, that looks bad. It looks horrible. I mean, it's not great, but it is definitely that effect is reduced. When it's sharper, a line moving like this is absolutely more noticeable. And it's interesting because again, I might choose the four by three CRT, but I like the extra clarity that the 1440p offers. Yeah. So like Miley Cyrus told us, this is the best of both worlds. Really, a Miley reference? What year is it? She's still cool. Is she? Tell me what you're feeling. Wow, look at his skin. Looks- It's like modeled. Yeah. And I guess that was just how they shaded. Yeah. It looks awful. So bad. But on the HTC RT, it does it. Look how smooth that gradient on her hair looks. It looks almost like correct. You know what it reminds me of is, it reminds me of like a vector image versus a scaled JPEG. Clearly that's vector based. That is mathematically shaded. Yeah. Whereas here, it doesn't look mathematically shaded. It looks like blown up low resolution texture. Totally, 100%. Based on this 30 second gameplay snippet, which one do you think you'd want to play? I would play the HD CRT, no question. That's what I'm saying. Absolutely no question. Heck yes. I think we're going to stick to one final one. And it's a game you know and love, Crosscode. And I think the HD CRT has a strong case for HD 2D games. What's interesting about this game is that I first played it on pretty much that display. Okay. LG OLED 65 inch in my living room. The color does look better immediately to me on the OLED. Ooh, wow. And you really notice as you pan from side to side, the geometry issues and the warping of the image on the HD CRT. So it's not really a matter of the style of the art. It's more a matter of what kind of display the developer was working with when they mastered the content. I would play this on OLED every time. You would? Yeah. Oh no, not me. This is definitely a HD CRT game for me. No question. Just that you lose so much detail in the sprites compared to the OLED. I actually think the sprites look better on this one. I think that's fair. That kind of looks like it has that integer scaling. It's clean, clean pixels. I think though I like the softening look. Again, I'm now pretty accustomed to that when I play retro games is the CRT look where everything's a little blended. And in some games I liked the additional warmth of the image on the CRT, but here it just looks yellow. It does not look correct. It's so interesting. I love that you like the OLED better because it's no contest to me. Like I much prefer the overall impression this gives me, but I just think that goes to show you that like there is no one display for all games. Like you said, it's the whatever the game was designed for is what you probably should play it on. We're at the end of the experience Linus. What has been your takeaway from using an HD CRT on a multitude of different consoles? That I think it's super cool that you have this collection that I can borrow when I need to make a video. I will not be making my own collection and I will not have one of these in the living room. I did not think so. It's just, oh man, I just, I can't justify the space. And we didn't even talk about the power consumption. I just can't justify it. No, I think for most people, it does not make sense. But if you play a lot of retro games and you play a lot of widescreen retro stuff, it's pretty frigging sweet. It has its moments. And this is definitely one of them. And this is the moment to tell you about our sponsor, Pulseway. Imagine having the power to remotely manage and control all the devices on your network with just your voice. With Pulseway, you can do just that. Pulseway's all-in-one IT management platform helps you centrally control your desktops, servers and network devices. 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