CRT Tube TVs have been irrelevant for so long that I have people working for me who have never used one. But in a lot of ways they are still number one. I mean look at this little buddy right here. Zero latency. Stellar motion clarity and inky blacks. Not only that but look at the way its unique properties blend blocky, ugly, sprites into art. Take a mere 256 colors and turn them into a digital rainbow. Just sucks they come in such giant heavy packages- wait a minute. That's not a CRT! This is just an OLED in disguise. Really convincing though. What dark magic is this? RetroTINK 4K dark magic. Hey look it's that guy. This is admittedly a pretty niche product But I don't think I care if it gets views. It's really cool, or at least on paper it is. They claim it's the best and most versatile retro video game scaler to ever hit the market. And after using it for a few weeks, we're left wondering, is it finally time to stop hoarding these bad boys? And stop hoarding all these messages we could give you, from our sponsor! Build Redux. They make it a breeze to customize your own personalized build with support guides and a bunch of configuration options. Just throw stuff in there, put a power supply in there. Head to Build Redux dot com slash Linus and start your new build today. You may already know that a scaler scales one input resolution to a different usually higher output resolution. But like with anything not all scalers are created equal. And this is most apparent when you watch your modern TV struggle with older content. Like the approximately 240p that is coming out of this Sega Genesis. And I mean, I kind of get it. Why would TV manufacturers bother to invest in a feature that most people won't notice, but come on guys! To show you just how bad it is, let's have a look at how a $1,300 OLED TV fares using its internal scaler against a random CRT that we got for 50 bucks on Facebook marketplace. Hey, finally. Scouting report. Yeah. Yeah, okay, we're good Look at his face like that, looks like a picture. Almost like a TV feed from that era. Whereas that's just like a mess of reddishness. Why did we leave that one stretched? It's uh, you don’t have much options when you use little boxes like this. That's why you were going off on this when we saw this during Adam’s upgrade. This entire video is just a slam dunk on this. Something you wouldn't expect the scaler to affect based on its name is the color representation. But it is amazing knowing that these are accurate displays how far off they are. I mean the ice is green. Yeah, Brandon's even calibrated these two so we can trust that they're exactly right. I don't notice any issues with input latency on the CRT. Obviously, it's lightning fast. But there's definitely a bit of lag on this top left one. Oh, yeah. We're gonna swap the direct one to a RetroTINK. Oh wow, I didn't realize how bad the latency was on here because I just kind of compensated for it. Yeah, and then all of a sudden it's playable. Now the color is not matching our CRT at all. It's very hard to match the CRT on every game. We can mess with it, and that's one of the joys of the RetroTINK is that you can tink with it all day long. There is so many settings that we can get into, including color correction and stuff. Whatever deficiencies or even just differences that it might have in color though, there is no question in my mind that it is a super clean image and yet it still looks CRT. This is just a quick and dirty mask and filter that I've set up for this, the Genesis. This is also kind of the worst case scenario for the RetroTINK. Mike Chi the creator of RetroTINK likes composite image and there's kind of like a mystique to the blurriness of composite. But as a general rule, everything else is better. And so the fact that it can make this look as decent as it does is kind of incredible. You got to get a goal man. I don't think I can, I don't think I could score. I'm tying this game. Otherwise we riot. Oh Cut it, cut, cut! It's impossible to get everyone to agree on what looks best. But I think what we can all agree on, is that both of the larger OLEDs looked awful. And they feel awful. We measured about 45 milliseconds of added input latency when connecting a composite source directly to the TV or through that little piece of crap scaler. For context, the highest input latency that we measured from the rest of the scalers that we're gonna be talking about and showing today, is one fifth of that. There are a surprising number of options out there and many of them are excellent. But they have always had their compromises, like no support for 4K. So the RetroTINK 4K’s claim to fame is surprise surprise, it's the world's first 4K scaler for retro games. In our opinion, that's not even the best thing about it. Powered by a Cyclone 5 series FPGA the RetroTINK 4K has cutting-edge CRT phosphor emulation filters, imperceptible processing delay, and it has some of the most robust IO on a single consumer device that we have ever seen. It's powered by USB C, which is really nice. It's got SCART, RCA, and a brand new VGA port which was missing from the previous top dog RetroTINK 5x. And each of these can handle a variety of analog video standards with inexpensive adapters. Mike, the creator of RetroTINK, even added extra composite and s-video to the front. Which means you don't have to share your RCA jacks between your component and your composite anymore. It's got TOS link as well as a three and a half millimeter audio jack here, which can be assigned to any of your video inputs. It's got an HDMI output to go to your TV and what's this? An HDMI input? Now why you might ask would a retro gamer need an HDMI input? Well not to make you feel old or anything, but the PS3 with its HDMI output came out 17 years ago. Not only that, but we've also seen an increase in HDMI equipped older consoles. Some of these are coming in the form of mini re-releases. Some are third-party recreations, and some are just aftermarket mods to original consoles. The bottom line here is HDMI is the standard and it unlocks a lot of new possibilities. Like pairing up your RetroTINK with a Mister FPGA for the ultimate in retro gaming goodness. I'm about to try it. Probably cry a little bit, but first I actually want to show off our retro battle station here. It might not look like much from this side, but this monster is capable of playing any of our systems simultaneously across four TVs without any loss in image quality. And a big part of that is thanks to this guy. When we told AV Pro Edge what we were trying to do, they sent over this ludicrously overpowered 8K HDR, 8 input, 8 output, HDMI matrix switcher. Huge thank you to those guys. I'd love to talk about all the other little pieces that we have going on here, but it gets pretty in the weeds so instead we're gonna have a Floatplane exclusive where David is gonna walk you through the whole setup. LMG dot GG slash Floatplane. For now, let's game. This is the part of the video where if you're anything like me you're gonna fall deeply in love with the RetroTINK. When you have a chance to customize your mass and all the settings to your preference, you'll start to see how powerful this thing really is. This is how I set it for my own eyes and what I found with people kind of walking around and giving their perspective is people have very different preferences. To me, this looks so much better than the raw Mister, but some people like that pixel perfect look. But, no right? It looks so much better. This has that TV look. That looks awesome! It looks great. Why would I ever even look at these and you can really see the age of these CRTs and some of the just off just off highlights like the red hat. Yeah. I can't even see any of the detail in it, but this is clean but also still has that CRT look to it. It's a tragedy that CRTs are just gonna kind of fade away, and they're gonna get only get worse and worse every time they're used. And it's kind of nice to know that we're finally getting to the point with scalers where- We don't have to be sad. Yeah, we don't have to be sad. Well, I mean the fact that you just want to keep playing on this screen like you don't even look at the CRTs, no, is a good sign. No, there's no reason to look at them like this is just freaking awesome. And what I find is so nice with modern devices is just the consistency. I know when I turn it on it's gonna be good. With that cheap CRT, every time I came back to it, it would look different. Sometimes it would have like scan lines going up. Sometimes it would be like the capacitors are going. Right now it's a little flickery, it's actually doing pretty good. But it's like the temperature, you know the way I look at it it changes what that image is gonna look like whereas every time I turn on a RetroTINK in this OLED it's gonna look exactly how I set it. Holy s***, David. I have never gotten all five in my entire life. Oh No way! Am I supposed to- The script is just rolling. We're just, we're going completely off script here boys. Well, here's the 4K remote versus the 5x remote So they did a remote this time. They did a remote this time. It's actually so useful. I could just be like, nah dog how about 1080p? Well, it's actually- Well, that doesn't look great, but it's kind of a huge deal when I first got my RetroTINK 5x it was defaulting to 1440p, but I had a TV that didn't accept 1440p image. And so it like would come in one frame every like three seconds. So this would have saved you. Just one button press boom. That's just through the Mister without the FPGA? That's just the Mister Yeah, so it's got that super, super clean, sharp, I mean honestly, yeah sure I could play on that too. Yeah. But it doesn't look like a CRT. So we don't need to change the input, although we could look at it. The profile, right now it's my like Mister profile that I kind of quickly set. The ones where I would start, where it's the most fun, is the image processing. So there's a scanline and a mask. The scanline, it's emulating scanlines, but there's quite a bit of control within it. The masks are like that simulation of you know the aperture grill and the phosphor lights kind of interacting and then there's a horizontal blur. Which I think is actually kind of like the the little salt that you add at the end to make it all kind of come together. Oh, yeah Otherwise, it just looks too sharp. And this is why 4K is so important for this because you actually have the pixel density on this display to use pixels as individual phosphor colors. I mean if you look at certain diagrams of how shadow mask versus aperture grill worked this is basically it. It's either a grill of vertical lines like this or it was like a perforated plate. We've had shadow masks before like even the Mister has shadow masks but they've never been this detailed because like you said if we've never had 4K and you need that amount of pixel to be able to push that detail that you would see on a CRT. HDR is already on, we can turn it off just so you can get an idea how much the RetroTINK is designed for HDR displays. When you add the scanlines and the mass, it adds a lot of black to the image Yeah. And so it darkens it a ton. And so without HDR becomes really, really dark. But with HDR it pops. Yeah. Like a phosphor glowing at the front of a display, but without it, it's- But with the masks you get that, it really does look like a phosphor glow. I really liked on the 5x that it was kind of just plug-and-play I never really thought too much about it, I kind of set it once, you know, it worked. But the amount of fun I've had messing around with these settings is insane it's been so fun. One thing to mention before someone in the comments does, is the Mister can do direct video where you get the actual resolution of the game outputted natively. We could unplug and plug directly into a RetroTINK, but it won't work with our matrixes, it's just not gonna play nice. Direct video generally has bad compatibility. This looks like you’ve got smoothing on. Yeah, so that's basically what- you don't like it? That's a yikes. Oh I like it. I like, so there's a more sophisticated one you can get than this. It looks like one of those cheap AI filters that you can apply to graphics and make it look like a photo or a painting or whatever. It's a little more sophisticated than that, but I I definitely understand why people don't like it. There's no wrong options here except whatever- Except that. Except that. Now I noticed there's an SD card, but unlike the Mister FPGA this is not a console so, you're not keeping ROMs or anything on there. No, it's primarily for updating the firmware as well as putting profiles on it. You can create profiles on the RetroTINK, save them to the card, put them on a computer, modify them, but you can also download a ton online. The RetroTINK community is very active. There's already a ton of people working on getting kind of ideal per console, per game settings. And then you can let them do the work and enjoy the fruits of their labor. And I don't have to think about it. Yeah, exactly. Or I could think about it a lot. You like the RetroTINK more than even the CRT? Not even close. Yeah, yeah, no question. It's so bright, the colors are so right. Blur artifacting is a little bit annoying. I'm hoping that maybe there can be like some filter that's added on to it to prevent that. But most of the time when you're in a busy screen, you don't see it. I don't notice when I'm actually playing I only notice what I'm watching. A hundred percent. They carefully kept me away from this area for the last couple of weeks so I didn't get a chance to check this out before but now that I have, there's no question in my mind, I would rather play on a modern OLED with these filters than on a CRT even if it was in its prime and literally, none of them are anymore. Adding HDMI to the RetroTINK might be the most meaningful upgrade over the 5x. Resolution matters a lot though too, I don't know. They're both really great! But we haven't even seen its full capabilities. Let's test that port even further with an HDMI console that might not be retro, but also isn't really properly modern given it not only can't hit 4K, but can barely even do 1080p most of the time. The Nintendo Switch. Now, hold on a second. Is it doing some kind of SDR to HDR tone mapping here? It seems to be doing that because this is yeah raw out of the Switch. Uh-huh. But as it is now this looks that looks right, that looks bad. Markedly better. We can agree you probably don't want to put like scan lines or mass or anything on a game like this but what I was curious was, is the scaling of the RetroTINK better than what the Switch can do with, in conjunction with the TV? You can't really tell from this far back it looks basically the same but if you get up close and personal you can actually see that the RetroTINK one will be a little bit sharper. You know, I don't think I'm a fan. You get an increase in sharpness using the RetroTINK to scale, but you also get a bit more stairs, it depends what you're looking at. This is one of those ones where I really don't think there's a right or a wrong answer. I totally agree. It's gonna be a preference thing. Like this is a bit shimmerier in it's dealing with aliasing whereas this is a bit blurrier in it's dealing with aliasing and neither is desirable. Obviously, it'd be great if Nintendo just released a console that could run their flippin games at a decent resolution. But I find this less distracting. I wonder if part of it too is that we're sitting a little bit too close to these for how low-res this content is. That's totally fair. And the smaller display with that pleasing blurriness, the round pixels guys. It makes a big difference. Makes this look not sharper, obviously, but more natural. Yeah, like you can see that distant tower, see the aliasing as I'm moving back and forth. Oh yeah. It's still there. On the CRT it's there but it's- So much less. It's not bothersome. No. You know what? I can't say that I actually like the that kind of judder and that super, super high motion clarity at 30 FPS. It's not, yeah. It's a little distracting. That's totally fair. That was probably the one slight disappointment of my experience with the RetroTINK is that it doesn't save 720p gaming. I thought it was gonna maybe like bring it into the next generation Not quite, like obviously that's a little bit excessive, but- It’s more for under 720p. Yeah, I think 480p is a big use case and it does make 720p sharper but- I did try gaming on the PS5 through the RetroTINK. The RetroTINK can only handle 1080p so if you give it 4K, it just won't work and if you send HDR through it it'll strip the HDR even if it tries to put it back in after and it just loses all color, looks terrible. And so you want to send it 1080p SDR and then it can do its thing at the highest. It's almost like it was right in the name. It's the RetroTINK, plug a modern console into it, You're gonna have a pretty bad time One thing we noticed, regardless of the generation of console, is the input latency or rather the lack of it. We measured the RetroTINK in a variety of modes and we saw less than a millisecond in the 60 Hertz mode and about eight and a half milliseconds in the 120 Hertz mode which funnily enough ends up being almost identical end-to-end because 120 Hertz is about eight milliseconds faster than 60 Hertz per refresh. But wait a second. Did we just gloss over the RetroTINK 4K support for 120 Hertz in both 1080p and 1440p? Well we have it now. It even has support for variable refresh rate and support for black frame insertion for better motion clarity. So now there's questions that we have to answer. Do we maximize our resolution with our scaler or do we go for higher refresh rates but at lower resolutions? Oh, and that's why we're gonna do Dreamcast and Neo Geo now? Yes. That looks much better to me than the then the switch did at 120. No question. Yeah, like that looks totally great. That looks awesome. Honestly, I don't even like this on the HD CRT. Yeah. It doesn't look right. It looks smeary, it looks like an LCD. Yep. This looks great. It looks better than the CRT. Yeah. The real test honestly is just to put people in front of the four and then just see which one they're looking at because different games, it's not purely ergonomic, different games. I have 100% found myself looking at different displays. Yeah, I think we're both just always looking at this one. Just not interested in looking at anything else. Because it's still got that clean look like it doesn't look blurry at all, but it softens it and just just looks right. When my opponents go high I go low. Oh, no! No! Oh my goodness, oh my goodness rude. If your preference is absolute maximum motion clarity then 120 Hertz with black frame insertion might be a good option for you. But I think both David and I are aligned on that if you're planning to use CRT filters which hopefully you are because you just spent a lot of money on a device that is solely designed for that. Then you're probably better off sticking with 4K the mask details just look so much better at that higher resolution and there's no question. This is the closest we've seen an OLED get to the look of a CRT. Did it ever occur to us to try it on the 8K OLED? No. David I heard you have a challenge for me. Yes, I do. It's time to play CRT or wannabe! Oh okay. Basically, I got macro shots of different screens playing the same game. So this is OLED with a RetroTINK versus the CRT and honestly, I- Give me a sec, give me a sec, give me a sec. I've forgotten which one is which. I think that's the OLED. You are incorrect. I don't have a sense of the scale of these images, which makes it a little bit tougher. But the reason I chose that one was it seemed like the area in between the sub pixels was so black that it would have had to be like OLED black like a filter, but then that's one of the advantages of CRT is that anywhere where the phosphorous aren't glowing, it's black. OLED. Yeah, you're right. That's that's the OLED. That's the CRT. Does it say RT? RetroTINK. Oh. OLED. Crap! It’s CRT. Okay. Now there's an HD CRT in the mix. So there's one CRT, one RetroTINK, one HD CRT. Okay well, the HD CRT is the bottom middle. It looks so raw It looks so wrong. Obvious, right? So that would be using aperture grill. Yeah, and it just looks so sharp and yet so- So blurry. Delightfully blurry, you know, it's- I think the top right is the RetroTINK. No, shoot. No, no, wait, no! Follow your gut, follow your gut. No, no, no. It's the CRT. Yes, you're right. It's got to be the real CRT on the left. Yes, okay, but what did we do to the RetroTINK to make it look so weird here? I've maximized the filters. When I set it to like what looked best to my eye, it was too clear, it was a little too easy to tell, but then when I maximize everything then it's a little bit harder to tell. So that’s not representative of the best-case scenario for what a RetroTINK would look like if you dialed it in. He's more just making me choose what is an actual display versus what is playing around with filters on it. Got it. This one's tough. I think that's the RetroTINK top right, but it looks better. Yes, you're right. These pixels aren't real like the sub pixel layout is not real, it’s fake. But it looks like a macro of a display at all which is I guess half the point here. A hundred percent. If I hadn't already seen how good the RetroTINK can look, I would have been blown away even more by how close it got to emulating the look of a CRT. But one way that CRTs have maintained a lead over modern displays is how they handle interlaced resolution content. Now, you may already know that interlaced simply means alternating between the odd and even horizontal lines of an image on each frame, which is really difficult to do especially at non native resolutions on a modern display, but the RetroTINK should help us compensate. We've gone PS2 then? PS2 God of War. I chose it because you can turn on and off progressive or interlaced. That makes it a good test for how the D interlacing is on both RetroTINKs. Got it. There's no question in my mind right now that the HD CRT running through the RetroTINK 5x looks the best here and it again comes down to that pleasing blurriness, but this game in interlaced mode. Could it look better here? I definitely like the increased pop from being able to run that OLED in HDR mode. Yes. That looks better than the CRT. No question. Okay, so this is progressive. It looks pretty good on all these things considering how old of a game this is. You can almost tell though that it's not quite right. Okay, like the flames in the background though and like- You’re right the extra brightness on those. The extra pop. Yeah. I might take that over the softer looking lighting. Hmm. Like the sky I think is a perfect place to look. Where you get this vibrancy in the color on the OLED through the RetroTINK you get this reduced banding almost in the appearance on the old CRT. I think it's incredible that the RetroTINK is within shooting distance on something that the CRT has kicked ass at before and it makes it that like you really don't need a CRT anymore. Even text, dude. Even text. Like a lot of the time text just looks like a big, blocky, ugly mess and then all of a sudden, you know, you throw it on a CRT you're like, oh, yeah okay, I guess it was readable and they were just compensating for the display technology of the time. But it looks, it looks right, like that hit counter. It looks right! Even up close dude. It's really convincing. Yeah. But, these have their strengths too and I think the bottom line guys is that no one setup is always gonna be the best and there's gonna be some subjectivity based on a billion different factors even things like the environment you're gonna be sitting in. David made a really good point earlier, that this CRT is not at its blackest in the blacks because it's picking up some reflections off of our gray floor here and antiglare glass has come a long way in the last 25 years. The good news though, is that for anyone but the purist of purists, the RetroTINK 4K is gonna get you so close that you probably won't miss your giant 200 pound tube TV. There are still some challenges, the newest OLED displays for example, you might have been wondering why are we using a C1 and a C10? The new ones use a different black frame insertion method that is less CRT like. So you might have to go and find an older one if you care about that, which is gonna, dang it! Are we gonna create another bloody hoarding gold rush? But this time on older OLEDs? Or maybe not because you'll also be giving up some brightness compared to the very latest OLEDs. But then again for the purists so has your CRT that's been sitting for a quarter of a century or so. So maybe it's time to get with the times? Except it's gonna cost you more than just time. The good news is you don't need any of the other stuff like that fancy HDMI matrix. All you need is the RetroTINK 4K. The bad news is It’s 750 US dollars. That is so expensive that it makes the $325 for the old 5x sound like an absolute bargain. But, and yes, I'm doing that again, when you consider the costs associated with building this thing, it doesn't look that unreasonable anymore. The Cyclone 5 FPGA in here alone is listed for around $260 on Digikey and a full board with that processor is gonna cost you upwards of a thousand dollars which totally ignores the development costs of bringing something like this to life. So it's not some made-up scam number and besides the existence of a new high-end product doesn't make the more affordable or the older ones worse. If anything it might hopefully put some downward pricing pressure on them in the long term. And even now an OSSC or a GBSC is more than enough for most people and that last one can be had for around $50. Also the RetroTINK 5x still a phenomenal scaler if you don't need HDMI or that higher resolution. But, if you like what you saw, and a lot of you apparently do, and you want 4K along with the improved CRT filters, the extra IO and quality of life things like the better remote. We think this thing is super cool, and we're gonna have a link to where you can buy it down below. When it comes back in stock. 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To try out Grammarly for free sign up for an account at Grammarly.com slash LTT01. And if you want to get access to extra features you'll get 20% off Grammarly premium. If you like CRT and retro content, maybe the one to check out is the last time we asked the question, are CRTs finally dead? And that time I don't know what to tell you man the answer was a little different It was very different.
