I’ll have you know that if you uninstall updates from the launcher, I think, and something else, then turn off auto updates. You can get rid of the ads. This is on a Sony bravia.
I don’t recall seeing any that behave in that way. Not saying you’re wrong, but I have a <6 month old TV that doesn’t behave in this way. Plugged it in to the wall, ran through the “setup” choosing “setup later” options, plugged my receiver into the HDMI 1 port, and everything just worked.
I’d be interested in seeing which brands are doing this.
This is your nostalgia talking. CRTs were absolutely awful. I think my family still had one of lying around in the mid aughts. It was heavy, ugly, big, with truly awful picture quality and sucks down on power. Even the cheap LCD TVs we upgraded to were so much better than that crap.
I was very sensitive to that noise. Walking down the street in my neighborhood, I could always tell when someone had a tv on in their house. My friends were amazed by that.
I had to toss a Trinitron about a year ago. Was taking up too much space. I tried finding someone to pick it up with no takers, and had to junk it instead.
I’m happy with my old Apple color monitor for the IIe, but I would’ve happily taken it.
I had to give up an early 1080p CRT recently. It broke my heart, but I have toddlers.
They’re always messing with this 2lb giant flat thing. That would’ve crushed them if they had managed to knock it over. It needed a professional degaussing any way. Who the hell does that these days?
I had an old Radio Shack bulk tape eraser that I got good at using as a degausser. Cable TV installer came in and moved my speakers too close to the TV and it cast an off color to the side. Tried my hand with the big electro magnet and got rid of the discoloration.
Can confirm, I was just getting into it when someone was giving it away for free and arrived in time to see 2 people in a very heated argument that started to get physical… and I just got in my car and left.
Are you sure it was a CRT and not a projection TV? CRTs were limited in size, and they have a reputation for being between lcds and OLED in terms of picture quality (ignoring resolution). Projection TVs, on the other hand, had a reputation for being garbage and the only reason you’d buy one is because you wanted something bigger than a CRT could handle.
There were big CRTs. They were just expensive. We had a Proton that was pretty big. Maybe 40"? There were bigger TVs, but we didn’t have the money for them.
There were 40+" CRT TVs (my father got one thrown in for free when he bought his place some years ago and kept usings it because “waste not”) and those things had a big back and were pretty heavy, which makes sense because the entire screen area has to be covered by a single electron gun at the back, so bigger screen means it has to be further back as the angle of the electrons can be made to turn when they exit the electron gun is limited, plus it all has to be happenning in vacuum (so that gas molecules don’t stop the electrons on their way to the screen) so you end up with the whole screen assembly being a big thick glass vacuum shell, so very heavy.
Even the smaller CRT TVs had quite the big back, partly because of the whole electron gun and max angle thing but also because firing electrons in a vacuum requires more than 1000v, which have to be generated from mains on the TV, and high voltages means big chunky components (plus back in the day the components were naturally bigger than they are now for the same capabilities), so even the smaller screen ones were still quite large in the depth axis because of the space needed for high voltage electronics.
Meanwhile the screens for LCD, OLED and so on are basically sandwiches of thin film forming a grid of cells that get activated/deactivated with reasonably small voltages (depends on the tech but if I’m not mistaken they’re all less than 20v) with only the detail that those techs which do not emit light by themselves (such as LCD) need a bit more space for backlighting, all of which can be made way thinner than “enough depth for the electrons from an electron gun to reach the corners of the screen”, much lighter than “requires a vacuum shell for all that space” and then again smaller and lighter because it doesn’t have any high-voltage electronics inside.
The CRT’s that survive today are mostly the cream of the crop. Professional monitors that were used for decades at local TV studios. HD CRT’s from the 2000’s that were some of the last ones made, were prohibitively expensive at the time, and have been lovingly cared for by enthusiasts.
I think a lot of retro gaming enthusiasts who are in to CRT’s today are either too young to actually remember what the average CRT was like or are old enough that they were enthusiasts back even in the 90’s, only buying the absolute best of the best.
I would literally take my phone over the console TV I grew up with in my parent’s living room. I remember setting stuff down on it (it was pretty much a table), like an empty can, and the picture would go crazy. I think part of why we got rid of it was because my mom got new, wireless handsets for the landline phone that caused interference (and it was also around the time new technologies we’re replacing CRT’s).
At one point as a kid i got a 19" Zenith CRT in my bedroom. That thing was absolute garbage. Colors all over the place, the image noisy and warped. It was loud, deeper than it was wide or tall, and weighed probably 40lbs. The only two inputs were RF and RCA, but only mono because it only had one speaker.
I think most of the retro gaming community has just forgotten how bad the average CRT was.
However, I also wonder if this demand for CRT’s and that premium gaming experience is going to impact the market. Will there ever be enough demand for a Kickstarter to manufacture a few thousand high-end CRT’s? Probably not. Could there be new features or new technologies invented to try to sate this demand? Maybe. Projector glasses, retro gaming handhelds, TV’s and monitors with higher refresh rates, “gaming modes”. I wonder if some other new tech is going to come along to try to capture the benefits of good CRT’s in a modern package.
Pro tip: Never connect your TV to the internet, just use it as a screen. Its easier to buy a new cromecast or Kodi Box when you need support for the latest streaming.
My wife and I bought a DVD/blueray player a few weeks ago, because we have just found it easier to buy physical copies of movies/tv shows than try to figure out what service it’s on.
I had a friend call me crazy for ripping all of my old DVDs and Blu-ray Discs to a hard drive around 2009.
“Why not just stream from Netflix?”
Now he’s complaining about being subscribed to a half dozen services just so he can watch what he used to stream from Netflix. I kinda want to shake my Plex library with him for personal vindication, but I’m not sure he’d appreciate the irony in a way that would satisfy me.
I’ve been buying second hand dvds for awhile, and I also got a brand new Xbox finally. I threw a DVD in it, and it needed to download software to play it. I was a little irked, consoles used to be something that you could buy brand new and it just worked but everything needs a day one patch anymore. The smart TV is never going on the internet, but that doesn’t stop it from trying to talk to any smart phones that come into the house.
I don’t buy smart tvs. I have this ugly sceptre tv with a beautiful 4k picture.
I mean, I’m sure there’s something better, but I plug what I want into it and watch it. The volume goes up and down sometimes if my router isn’t facing away from it, oh and there’s a line going across it now, but for less than 200 bucks I feel like it was a win.
Eh, I have been running a pi-hole on my network for many years now. When I did it was purely because I find ads annoying, these days I’d consider it a basic necessity.
also, I have a hard time complaining about privacy and recommending anything google, especially at the price point they sell Chromecast’s for. If you’re buying a consumer set top box, Apple TV is basically the only one that’s anywhere near privacy conscious. Kodi box or self-built PC though if you really care, and even then I’d still want a pi-hole or similar even if you run it on Linux instead of Windows because the services themselves are doing all kinds of shady shit.
The tech of CRTs seems almost futuristic to me. Bending electron beams with magnets to travel through a vacuum so they hit exotic materials at precisely the right locations seems much cooler than just miniaturizing LED arrays.
I find this about a lot of old tech. Like precisely etching a piece of vinyl in such a way that it vibrates just right to get the music you want vs bouncing a laser off a reflective disc to read a bunch of 0s and 1s.
We went from the end-product achieving something through great complexity, to the end-product being made with great complexity so it could active something simply.
That’s nothing. Look into how vacuum tubes work to achieve logic gates, rectify AC-to-DC, and more. Compared to solid-state electronics, the fundamentals aren’t even the same sport, let alone the same game. People really were living in a different world 80 years ago.
Yup. A lot of survivor bias going on with the remaining crop of CRTs out there. Granted, there were probably a lot of perfectly good tubes that got thrown out back in the 2000’s. But the ones we have left still need repair now and then.
And a lot of them don’t have the brightness they did back then. These aren’t going to last forever, which is why good upscaling solutions for modern TVs are important.
I am still rocking my old Apple color monitor and it has never needed a repair. It does need a slap on the top to get the picture right from time to time though.
That thing was my primary tv from the time I was 10 until I bought an hdtv in 2008 (so 13 years), and it was a monitor in a school for an Apple IIe before that. I had two badass old pc speakers I hooked into my ps2 for dvds and gaming back in the day. Now I have my classic consoles plugged into it. It hasn’t seen much use in the last 3 years, but it was constantly being used before that.
I know we threw some out from time to time when I was a kid, but we also had some in the family that lasted forever. We had this really pretty black and white floor model from the early 60s that we finally threw out in the early 2000s, but it worked just fine. No one wanted it any more I guess. I still have dreams about that tv for some reason.
Get separate speakers (which you should anyway because TV speaker quality is 💩) and use a computer monitor. They’re available in larger sizes than you’d expect (e.g. Newegg has one at 55") and then you just plug in an HDMI cable and you’re good to go.
Nah, the speakers that can physically fit in a TV of any type aren’t that big, aren’t put in enclosures tuned to the speaker, don’t have multiple speakers with a crossover to handle different frequency ranges, and don’t have quality amplifier components. They were always built cheap to what could fit in the box. I’m not talking audiphile shit here, but just the basics of a good sound system.
“Oh we couldn’t possibly put decent speakers in our TVs because they would be to thick. You’ll have to buy this additional sound bar, that we also make, that’s the same thickness as the TV.” 🙄🙄🙄
I’m still using my 40" flat screen from 2009, and I’ve never been dissatisfied with the sound from it, either. However, it’s also 4 inches thick, compared to what, maybe 1 inch for the new TVs?
Sure, my 2008 flat screen, I think it’s a Samsung, sounds decent enough too but it’s also 4" thick. The newer ones that are 2" or less simply don’t have enough depth in the body for decent speakers.
I would prefer a thicker TV with better sound than having to buy a sound bar or theatre system to go with it. My 2014 Samsung with shit sound is about 4” thick. That’s not the reason.
After 32” you’re going to want to have a friend help you move it anyway, so who cares how thick it is? It’s all a scam to get you to buy more stuff.
Their categories are kinda confusing. I remember buying TV over a monitor was a way to save money a decade ago, for they had lower DPI, refresh rates, panel types etc but a bigger size-to-dollar ratio. But with all these annoying ‘smart’ features and being able to buy them separately as a thumb-drive micro pc, well, they are out of their niche. It’s just a worse monitor or an oversized, underpowered stationary tablet. Besides bigger sizes and some premium features like ambilight on expensive models they aren’t competitive as a product, just a tired marketing gimmick.
CRT sets weighed about 40 pounds, blurry picture, and cost as much as a mid range PC. Modern TVs are 5 pounds, cheaper than most phones, and have nice crisp picture. Smart TVs suck but so did the past. Nostalgia is a lie. Things are always bad, they don’t get worse they just stay bad
A lot of it was covering up mistakes. Watching TNG on a modern display, you get to notice how they didn’t match the colors on the uniforms very well. It’s particularly noticeable with the extras uniforms compared to the main cast, though even the main cast uniforms aren’t all matched, either. Mostly happens with the remade uniforms from season 3 onward.
For one example, look at Geordi and Data. I don’t think this is just a matter of lighting.
It probably didn’t get noticed much on shitty broadcast quality TV back then, but once stuff got remastered for the digital age, it all popped out.
I’ve actually been working on similar patterns for the Strange New Worlds uniforms. It looked like it might be 3d printed directly on the fabric. I tried a transparent TPU, but it’s hard to get consistent results out of it. The transparent PLA I tried didn’t stick to the fabric.
They might have used a mask of some kind, or they tuned the hell out of a TPU printer setup and had an intern clean it up afterwords.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed so, so much more intentional stuff that you just couldn’t see that the old resolutions. It’s one of the reasons it’s a damn shame that Boy/DS9 haven’t gotten a remaster (though, I think in this case the way it was filmed basically means this will never happen.)
And old video games. They were designed for CRT and look better than on a new TV. Plus CRT has basically no latency. New tvs cause input lag because they have to process the picture. It makes many old games unplayable or very hard to play unless you have a very expensive screen made for gaming.
If you’re measuring latency using the same methods as everything else, CRT has latency, and more of it than you might think.
The standard is to measure at the point where the picture is drawn halfway down the screen. On NTSC with ~30fps, this is about 17ms of latency ( ((1 / 30) / 2) * 100 ). If you hit the button slightly before the screen is drawn, and the game processes it immediately and draws the frame accounting for it, then it will take about 17ms before we stop the clock on the standard method of measurement for latency.
“But”, you might say, “the flatpanel can’t go any faster than it’s fed that NTSC signal, so its latency will be at least that much plus the upscaler plus its pixel response time”.
Fair. A good gaming panel has around 2ms pixel response time. Upscalers can never be zero lag, but good ones like the OSSC and RetroTink are pretty damn close these days.
This is already less than human ability to even notice the difference, but consider doing the same equation for PAL signals at 25fps. It comes out to about 20ms, which is 3ms slower than NTSC. The difference in latency between NTSC and PAL CRTs is about about the same as the difference between NTSC fed to CRTs or low latency flatpanels. It’s possible for flatpanels to be even less than PAL CRTs, and we’ll probably get there at some point.
I have a few PVM, I just recapped my pvm2030 and even then the electron gun is slowly dying which will require a brand new tube at this point. This is without even considering the amount of custom cables and modchip required to use an RGB signal on those.monitors.
While I agree it’s great specifically for old content, it’s far from perfect and most people would get better enjoyment from something like an ossc plugged into a modern TV for the convenience alone.
And most of them would not last 50 years without repairs. Maybe the 2000s single-chip ones could but not enough time has elapsed. TV repair shops used to be extremely common for a reason.
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