Video: Gather 'Round Kids, Sakurai Talks About CRT Displays

I'm a proud owner of a JVC AV-20f476 I'Art model. Found it out on the streets of the neighborhood I was living at formerly for free.

Gave it a quick clean-up & boy...did it worked like it should. Gotta love CRT's. If only they were still being made...I'm fine it's just only the small ones...

This article is an archeological dig and I am the dusty old bones.

The CRTs certainly had their pros (loved the fast response time and how SD material looks on them). I loathe the loading times that new TVs are so often subject to, especially when they default to a "menu" loaded with unsolicited ads instead of the last-watched input.

But on the plus side, we have super high quality footage at our disposal, and I'll take Blus/UHD discs over quaint VHSes any day of the week.

Strange how scarce CRTs are now. At one point you couldn't give em away.

Retro games look great on my CRT tv. And they feel faster.

@Twilite9 Any one with the color AV I suppose. When it comes to gaming, they are all kinda the same, it's just about size, maybe display, and making sure it's not the type to burn your eyes (which was why your parents probably told you to not watch too much TV).

Last CRT I owned was a flat Sony KV-24FS120 in the mid 2000’s and it was the best with my Wii and my SEGA ‘light gun’ games (House of the Dead 2&3 Returns, mainly). Sadly I had to give it up when I moved. Now, I’d take just about anything in the 20”-27” just to have one, but the pickings are slim to none in my immediate area. I’ll keep my eyes open in the local yard sales.

@Twilite9 Anything with up to S-Video, or even component, input is a decent choice. Early 2000 model Sony (like the series I mentioned), Toshiba, Panasonic, or JVC, all just before they got discontinued should have the necessary inputs to cover up to PS3/360 without HDMI. There are HD CRTs that have HDMI, all very expensive, and may not be as responsive due to extra picture processing, IIRC. That said, I’ve also heard that it may be better to match the CRT with the era of consoles that were available at the same time because various game developers would work with the professional CRTs for the sprite graphics, but they’ll have a regular old round tube TV to check their work on next to them.

I love my CRTs! I got a 11" and a 20" for a lot last year for $15. I love not having the black bars on my screen for retro gaming. Also the pictures look better and sometimes brighter? It's the weirdest thing. You can just tell these games we're built to play on those monitors.

A few months ago, during a rainstorm, I found a 1993 21" Zenith CRT on the side of the road. I let it dry out for 3 weeks! When I finally plugged it in and turned it on, I found it to be in perfect working condition. I hooked my Atari 5200 to it. And now, my quest continues to buy more games for the 5200. Currently at 7/69...

I found my BVM to be a befitting display for The Thousand Year Door remake, God it looked so crisp and vibrant I couldn't go back to my OLED.

The death of CRTs resulted in the death of light guns ...... However, new tech is coming through (Sinden, Gun4IR etc) so fingers crossed that the genre returns.

If you have the space for a CRT I'd recommend them, particularly for the SNES, Megadrive, Arcade era but be prepared, they are pretty expensive these days and careful with your back lifting one 🙂

If original lightguns are your aim, avoid HDTV CRTs as most won't be compatible. SDTV best option. 👍

@HugoGED What model do you have?

I love CRT tv's. No lag at all, instant response due to how they work. The picture is amazing, even when using new games and media (you can convert to HDMI input), giving a clean crisp and bright picture. And, that glow. Nothing like that warm glow when playing or watching something in the evening. They kinda get a bad rep due to VHS and the quality of older media filming, but its so underserved, they can handle with ease the finest picture quality.

@andykara2003 a BVM-D24E1WJ, can't get enough of it.

@Djreisat They'll eventually break at some point. I'm just surprised mine (a pretty late one, a 2003 Samsung that was a fairly cheap one when it was new) it has survived despite being hit in a thunderstorm a few years after.
It had some pretty messed up colors afterwards but it seems a year or so unplugged discharged it and it was working again good as new.

I’ve enjoyed CRTs over the years. I have a flatscreen RCA with S-Video that is pretty great, though I kick myself for giving away a similar model that had component input - but no s-video. It’s so hard to find a set with all the thing that isn’t too big. 20 inches is my personal sweet spot.
I do have a good little Sharp 20 inch LCD with S-video and Component, and it actually does really well. In some ways I prefer it because the geometry is perfect. Geometry is the one thing that drives me crazy about CRTs.
CRTs/Displays are a pretty fun and frustrating rabbit hole.

@Duncanballs This! I don’t miss CRTs, but I do miss light gun games. We need more things like Shooting Range on Wii Play and Link’s Crossbow Training. 😊

Also , Nintendo should bring that shooting game in the Nintendo Museum to the Theme Parks.

I wish my parents hadn’t tossed my crt (plus it was a vcr!!!). I’ve been trying to find a decent 13 inch crt online.

Might've just hauled a 27" Magnavox home lol. Got the NES and Saturn hooked up.

@masterLEON
Ya, no other consumer grade CRT can top a 2006 Sony WEGA Trinitron CRT, paired with Component cables. I had a 32", hooked up with my Wii & a DVD player during the Wii + Virtual Console era, and I absolutely loved the thing. Perfect blur-free motion clarity, zero input lag, great black levels, colours and Brightness.

But that was like, 15 years ago, and finding them now off Market place at lets say 27" is becoming very hard. 32 inchers are more common, but very heavy and bulky. And i highly doubt any of them will have as good picture quality compared to getting one brand new out of the box back in the mid 2000's. Simply because the internal guts are 18 years old now, and also due to how many hours have been poured into them.

Over time, they lose brightness, colour saturation, blacks lighten and the clarity may look even softer. The best alternative to a CRT, will be the new smaller 42" Samsung QD-OLED's coming next year, and pairing it with a RetroTINK4K scaler. You'll best a WEGA crt in black levels, brightness, Whites and form factor, but the CRT will still win strictly in terms of input lag and it's incredible blur-free motion clarity. TINK4K will remove 50% of OLED motion blur at least, which makes it a great match for 8-16 bit video games.

Still got my old 21 inch Trinitron.
But after I got a scaler, connected to an Oled TV, I keep it in storage. My old eyes, just can't take the 50hz flicker, in PAL or interlaced games anymore. The Oled is just easier on my eyes.
And it's just so damn bulky. Lol.

@DwaynesGames I went down the Sinden route a few years ago. Lightguns are one of my favourite genres. So hope they come back

@KingMike
a 2025 42" Samsung 'QD'-OLED, paired with a RetroTINK4K scaler will be the best alternative to something like a Sony Wega Trinitron(2006) 27-32" SDTV. And that combination will even best a WEGA CRT in terms of black levels, brightness, whites, QD-colours can edge out an aged CRT's. Plus aesthetically, you've got the black thin bezel, it's light weight, new, readily available & Slim.

CRT's lose brightness, colour saturation, blacks lighten and the clarity can even get soft, decades later due to the internal tech-guts aging and based on the amount of hours thrown in. They'll all break at some point, and those Sony WEGA Trinitrons at 27" are becoming a pain in the butt to find these days. I'd love to have a 32" again, but i dread lugging that thing back home, and having to move it around. It aint' a 1 man job that's for sure. Plus, the image won't look as good as it once did all those years when it was brand new.

For now, if i were forced to get an alternative to a wega crt, based on what's currently available, I'd go for a 42" Samsung S90D WOLED, and combine that with a RetroTINk4K with older 8-16 bit consoles. Then replace the WOLED, with a 42" QD-OLED once they arrive next year.

@Duncanballs Clubhouse Games 51 also has a Shooting Gallery game similar to the one on Wii play.

@DennyCrane
The blur-free motion clarity of a CRT will give any top tier samsung 'QD'-OLED a run for it's money, unless you use OLED black frame insertion, which cuts down 50% of OLED motion blur. The end result is night and day, giving you plasma-tier motion clarity, but that's still 50% more motion blur than a blur-free CRT.

Plus, BFI doubles latency, where as CRT's are flawless.

@NeonMullet
Absolutely. Honestly, the amount of people that have looked at me like I'm insane when trying to state the benefits of CRT, "how on earth can old tech even compare to modern?". I would love to see them come back, with modern improvements. You have to wonder how good they would be now if the tech continued to develop instead of dying out for LCD etc. The only issue with them is electric usage, but I'm sure that can be reduced somehow.

Im keeping my crt only for a couple n64 games. At least until my N64 switch controller arrives next week, so I can play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark properly

I swear everything looked better on our 29" Sony TV back in the mid 2000s. Playing on an LCD screen after that felt like a downgrade.

@Twilite9 The one you could find relatively cheap.

I've got a 13" RCA with S-Video as my retro gaming display. It's just gorgeous. Bright screen and colors pop.

When the Paris Olympics were on I recorded them on a 21st century VCR that has a digital signal tuner onto a VHS tape at the SLP (super long play so I coukd get 6 hours of programming). Playing it on the LCD TV over composite gave a kinda washed out but serviceable picture like any VCR on a modern TV. On the RCA (which was built in 2003) the footage was incredible!

I'm currently trying what some would see as unthinkable: hooking my mini consoles to an HDMI to composite video converter. The menus on these systems are kinda tiny but once you fire up a game, it's like a time warp. I played "Altered Beast" on my Genny Mini with full screen (no CRT filter obviously) transported me back to 1989. TurboGrafx-16 mini looked equally great. The Nintendo minis I need to mess with as the SNES would just display 4:3 with bars, which created a shimmer when scrolling. scrolling.

Bruh I've literally never been without a CRT TV for long. When my last one kicked the bucket I got another. That's what a TV 'is' to me. A flat screen is something fancy and for the ultra modern stuff, of which I have a lot less of.

as much as i love my crt, they get a sort of...nostalgic fetishism nowadays that's a little hard to overlook

Personally, I don't miss CRTs. They were unwieldy above a certain size. I had some really mixed luck with various monitors only lasting a handful of years. The very last CRT I had was an early HDTV, so it was garbage from a retro-gaming perspective anyway. It was also over 200 pounds. The only thing I'd like to temporarily have a good CRT for is to compare it to an emulation setup and get the scanlines and everything as close as possible. I'm curious how close it can get, but it would also be nice to have the reference. If it's not possible to match the CRT, I'd be okay with that since it would still look very good. As for lag, with quality emulation and enough CPU power(typically not all that much), you can subtract the lag the emulator adds and it works really well. You can get virtually lag free gaming, at least for the 8-bit and 16-bit systems. I haven't tested where the limit is with that.

@DennyCrane
Haha. Well, SED was going to be the next flat screen CRT-like technology, but it eventually got dropped, and TV manufactures ended up mostly rolling with LED's, and plasmas until they eventually stopped making them in 2013, or 2014, was it?

Plasma kicked LED's butt in terms of black levels, motion persistence(Closest thing to CRT), viewing angles, Color(etc), but 95% of them were awful for gaming simply because of the high input lag. 'QD'-LED's, specifically samsung's flag ship model, have improved a lot over the years, but their motion response time is still slower than OLED.

People always thought i was crazy for holding on to my 32" sony wega CRT(2006) up until the early 2010's. But what can I say, the motion & latency were flawless, no plasma or LED could claim that at the time. I had a super frustrating time trying to figure out which plasma to get when the Wii U launched in 2012. What a mess. Should of just stuck with the CRT. lol

These days, a Samsung QD-OLED(S90D - 2024) paired with a RetroTINK4K(Cuts down 50% of motion blur for 60fps content, and almost 60% for 24-30fps content ala' movies & TV).

If anyone wants a CRT, just find out the days your bulk trash pickup happens in your area or an area close to you. Preferably an older, more established neighborhood that's been around from at least the early 2000s. Just drive around the day before the bulk trash service comes, and before you know it, you'll find one just sitting on the curb. Edit: You most likely will not get the remote with it, but just enter the tv model number into ebay to find the corresponding remote.

@NeonMullet I used to have my Sony hooked up to a big switchbox. GC, Wii, and PS2 on component, XBox and DC on S-Video and It was great 😀 Right now I have a 48” LGC1 OLED. I got it on clearance in 2022 which has also been great so far. I do have a RetroTink 5x but I want to get my older consoles checked out first before hooking them back up (cleaned, recapped, etc.). No rush, except for my TurboDuo and original XBox.

Before getting my LG I was using a 2006 Panasonic 42” plasma that I bought in 2016 for $98. It was a little scratched, had some light burn-in (I worked it out over time but I’m ok with it never clearing up 100%), but it’s color and contrast was still fantastic for being on for 6000+ hours. I’ve spent my entire Splatoon 2 career with it and I’ve not noticed the input lag. I even fired up Splatoon 2 on my OLED and it felt pretty much the same. I also used it playing Arcade Archives caravans and Samurai Shodown on XBox One. It's not hooked up at the moment but I see myself using it as a streaming content TV. Comparing side by side with the OLED, I still feel the reds and people look more true to life on the plasma.

@masterLEON
I had the LG C1, and always felt mixed on it. It was a total downgrade compared to my 2013 Panasonic S60 Plasma, in terms of colour, Shadow detail, motion clarity, colour gradient and film judder. But it clearly had the big advantage when it came to it's perfect blacks, much higher brightness(Plasmas are generally kind of dim), 'white' whites, A crisper cleaner image, 4K and 120fps support.

And you know what a fantastic OLED reference is that you may already own? The Switch OLED's OLED display. I don't know what kind of sorcery Nintendo is working with, but the colours on that thing are QD-like, they're amazing compared to my LG C1's, which are awful unless I use 'native' colour, while belting back the high greens to -30 and then increasing the colour depth past 50, but even the colour can't compete.

Plus Switch OLED's display doesn't have any black crush, it's noticeably brighter(C1's game mode is a little dim, you need to nearly belt the contrast to 100 to compensate), Colour white balance settings look like they're dialed in to perfection and it's very crisp/sharp. The LG C1 also looses sharpness/clarity in game mode too, probably as a means to get latency lower aka less picture processing, including the brightness drop.

QD-OLED(Samsung S90D) is the best TV you can game on right now. Once you correct it's out of box shadow detail/black crushing, which can easily be done without a professional calibration, and by partially disabling it's ABL in the service menu, and then pairing it with a RetroTink4K using it's internal black frame insertion to cut down 50% of motion blur. With the following combination above you're basically left with a plasma killer. lol

Tink4K is capped at 1080p though, and it's BFI causes mild flicker on whites. Latency will jump from 10ms without it, to 20-21ms. So it's not a great solution, but it may be worth while depending on the game you're playing. For movies and TV though, it's Triple Strobe BFI can reduce motion blur by almost 60% on 144hz QD-OLED TV's like the S90D, and it cuts down more film judder than both plasma & CRT. That's THE reason to own the thing imo.

@NeonMullet

Does Nintendo source Switch OLED screens from Japan Display or JOLED? Rather than LG.Display
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Display

@NeonMullet Sadly, my Switch OLED rarely gets taken out of the dock as recording is my priority. It is a fantastic screen, though. I stuck with the C1 rather than looking at the C2 that was already out as I learned from Try from My Life in Gaming and his discovery that the C2 adds upwards of 2 frames of latency in Boost mode for any 4:3 content displayed on it, almost 3 frames with BFI turned on. Not good. When I finally get back into my old consoles again, I need that latency to be as low as possible to reduce to total amount of milliseconds lost in the hardware chain from controller to console to scaler and finally to TV. It also should be noted that the C1 offers a 4-way zoom option to stretch content to the edges of the screen but as of the C2, the 4-way zoom option has been removed.

That video analysis is an interesting and eye-opening watch, especially for those of us wanting to use our legacy hardware on modern TVs

https://youtu.be/7K2tSrnxqVk?si=WfuNQcFifYgGTiUG

(or search “mylifeingaming oled”, the first result should be it)

You know, I actually kind of regret buying my Switch OLED, just because I rarely ever use it in handheld. 99% of the time I play docked, because lets face it, nothing beats the big screen. Handheld gaming also lacks that social element too. It's more personal, yet it has a far less greater impact and wow factor simply because it's just a small screen.

Switch OLED's screen is beautiful and definitely topples the LG C1, but it's still just 7", and feels like nothing compared to my 65" QD-OLED, a 55", or even just a 42", paired with a high end surround sytem or great pair of headphones(+ DAC)

But ya, funny, I've actually seen that video with Try from MyRetroLife testing every single mode, aspect ratio(etc) with his Time Sleuth/Latency Measuring device. lol I wonder if the higher latency from the C2 has actually carried on over to the C3 & C4. I want a secondary 4K TV, aka a 2025 Samsung 42" QD-OLED, to one day replace my 27" WEGA Trintiron CRT for retro gaming, but latency has to be no more than 10ms in 4:3.

I mean, can't you bypass the high latency coming from the C2's 4:3 Mode by just selecting 'Just Scan' instead, which you'd think would just automatically stick any retro games aspect ratio to 4:3 by default?

Try also said that Boost mode on the C1 gives you an outstanding 2.5ms of lag...But then RTINGS, among others have said that it actually gives you 10ms, and without boost mode you get 13ms. Which is it? Unfortunately, the C1's boost mode over brightens shadow detail, and messes with near black, and there's no solution to perfectly correct this.

You're going to want to use RetroTINK4K's Internal BFI rather than the internal TV BFI. TV BFI from the likes of LG and especially Samsung, are just lazy. Latency typically doubles, or triples in the case with Samsung, it causes shadow detail crushing and you lose half of the TV's brightness. Tink4K's BFI reinforces HDR brightness into SDR to compensate for 50% brightness loss, so you get a big brightness boost in return, there's also no shadow detail crushing and there's less lag.

2-2.5ms by just using TINK4K, 8.3ms from it's BFI and then 10ms from you TV's Game Mode mode. so 20-21ms total, capped at 1080p with mild flicker on Whites just to get a 50% reduction in OLED motion blur. But my god does it make a huge different. It's integral for nearly everything. Mario Wonder's motion clarity is an eye soar without BFI. Mario's Body cascades and blurs when he jumps and lands to the ground, ect etc. But with BFI he looks nearly intact. It's plasma-good. And would appease CRT lovers for most genres.

These TV manufactures keep throwing motion under the rug, because most people don't seem to care. RetroTInk is finally tackling this issue properly and doing a solid job at mitigating the issues that always come along with internal TV BFI. It's only going to get better with future Tink products, and when OLED TV's get brighter and brighter. High SDR brightness matters, since you trade brightness for greater motion clarity with BFI. If you combine Tink4K with a 240hz OLED monitor, it will remove 75% of OLED motion blur, which is better than even the greatest plasmas from Pioneer.

I was born in 1983, you couldn’t pay me to use a crt, good riddance. The people who think it’s the way to go are either too young to know how bad they were in comparison to new TVs or just delusional. That’s my take. It be like pc gamer saying playing on an abacus is the way to go.