CRT monitors might be best remembered for breaking the backs of anyone trying to haul them from place to place, but they might still be one of the best ways to play games. Digital Foundry recently conducted a deep dive into modern gaming on classic CRT displays. Especially since gaming at lower resolution meant that a locked FPS rate was easy to achieve and made for steady and smooth gameplay throughout. These devices are cheaper, consume less power, and can be produced to much broader dimensions without also investing a near-equal amount of space for their sheer depth.
Due to the way the underlying display technology works, CRT monitors still hold some advantages over even the best OLED screens available today. The most obvious concerns form-factor: CRT displays are big, bulky and weigh a lot. I invested in a display widely considered to be one of the greatest CRTs ever made - the Sony Trinitron FW - a inch screen. As the video hopefully demonstrates, picture quality is immense, but so is the heft of the screen.
It weighs 42kg and with a xmm footprint, the amount of real estate required is not insignificant. Then there's the input situation.
Very few widescreen CRTs are available and even the Sony FW has a aspect ratio, meaning that console gaming isn't really a good fit for CRT displays - screens, even less so. Yes, you can run consoles on a CRT, but my feeling is that for many reasons, this is a pursuit best suited to PC users. Finally, there's the cost - which can cut both ways - along with the quality of the display you'll actually get.
The FW is a legendary screen with massive asking prices to match. However, the fact is that in both John's case and mine, the screens weren't in optimal condition when we bought them - which is to be expected for screens well into their second decade of life. Suffice to say, getting image quality to the expected levels can take a lot of time, effort and plenty of research.
And on a more basic level, CRT screens are made of glass and glare can be an issue. In shooting the video on this page, I had to film at night in order to show the screen in the best possible light. There are plenty of pitfalls then - but the end results while gaming are highly satisfactory.
Modern titles on a CRT can look sensational, you have the benefits of high refresh rates if you want them, you can turn up all the eye candy and you don't need to worry so much about resolution as a major defining factor of image quality. Today's premium-priced gaming LCDs are trying very hard to recapture CRT's major benefits - low latency, high refresh rates and reduced input lag - but as good as many of these screens are, for our money nothing beats a good old-fashioned cathode ray tube display for desktop gaming - not even the very best LCD screens on the market.
Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they're capable of. In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. So we did. Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we've chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads.
We think it's a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. Thank you. Find out more about the benefits of our Patreon. Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our policy. The Philips Discoverer is an incredibly rare TV that hardly ever shows up on second hand sites.
But when they do, you can be sure that they get snapped up super quickly! Yes, I know it looks way too modern to be on this list, but hear me out. The Hi Scan series is pretty expensive these days, so be prepared to part with a big chunk of cash if you want to add one into your collection. It has lines of resolution and can be operated by a wired remote. This little TV is perfect for taking around to a friends house and even comes with a cool handle.
They all look good up on this thing! How cool does the JVC Videosphere look?
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