- Thanks, Lenovo and AMD for sponsoring a portion of today's video. Lenovo's slim 7 laptop
offers excellent performance and fantastic battery life. All powered by AMD Ryzen 9
5,000 series mobile processors. Click the link in the description or watch till the end to learn more. I just treated myself to the greatest monitor
that money can buy. 20 years ago. Whoo ow Oh, wow. - [David] Wow. - But even today, this absolute unit of a desktop display goes for more than $3000. Why, what could a CRT from 2002 do better than a state of the art
gaming display from 2022? Did I just waste my freaking money? (upbeat music) When LCD panels arrived on the scene they had some big pants to fill. The development of the CRT display had a 60 year head start. And what's crazy is that modern displays are still playing catch up to your grandma's old TV in some ways. Especially when you compare to one of the best consumer CRTs ever. The Sony GDM FW 900. But why is this thing so big? Well it's because of the actual CRT the cathode-ray tube. In the back of this big box is a heavy glass vacuum tube with electron guns inside it. The electrons are shot at a layer of phosphorus on the
glass screen at the front. Now phosphorus are
materials that emit light when they're hit with
electromagnetic radiation. Remember those glow in the dark stars you had on your ceiling as a kid. Well, it's the same fundamental principle but to create a color image, we've got three electron guns one for red, one for
blue, and one for green and each has their beams aimed by magnets to hit the corresponding section of your screen. Illuminating the phosphor. This whole process happens very fast at full resolution on this display. It redraws the entire
screen, 80 times a second but that's not even close to 240 Hertz let alone 360 Hertz like the fastest displays today. Why pay over three grand for a monitor that looks like it belongs on the back of an
underfunded public library. Why do people want this? This is where we get to my
first experience with it because I haven't actually gotten to play with it yet. Ooh, it's on. There are two basic camps. There's retro gamers like Anthony and sweaty gamers like David, sorry, David. - [David] I'm a retro game. - David's also a retro game. You're more sweaty than sweaty - [Adam] Sweaty retro. - [David] That's not true. Take it back. - [Adam] Your a sweatro gamer. - Sweatro. - [Adam] 92 lbs. - 92 Pounds. Let's talk about what
makes this CRT so special. It was sorry. No is a top of the line product with rare for the time features like a 16 by 10 aspect ratio and a nearly undrivable rated resolution of 2304 * 1440. Add in that it's equipped
with an SRGB mode for super accurate colors and a high vertical refresh rate. And there is pretty much
nothing that this thing couldn't do better than early LCDs and even many modern ones. Like how about zero pixel response time or wait how can pixel
response time be zero? In an LCD light shines through crystals that physically shift and turn to a allow the light through that process takes time. But in a CRT, when an
electron hits the phosphor it instantly produces a photon and then stops once the electron gun is no longer blasting it. What actually makes the image stay on the screen is a limitation of our own human monkey vision. When you point a high speed camera at a CRT you'll actually see that the entire screen
is drawn line by a line by a single point. But when we scale time back to the human perception level it appears that the
whole screen is lit up. And that's actually why this video is gonna look a little bit funky because we have to play around with our shutter speed in order to make the screen stop flickering and looking weird. It's so crisp. I haven't seen a CRT of
anywhere near this grade in man, I had LCD in 2004. You see that slow moving line, going down the screen. That's due to the desynchronization between the frame rate of our camera and the refresh rate of this display. Let's put it back to 80. That better David. - [David] That's so much better. - Wonderful. Oh, (beep) I forgot to explain why
we're using a GTX Titan X, because that's the last Nvidia card that still included analog outputs. That's why you chose it right. Is there anything after that? - [Adam] No, that's the best card. - Crazy. This is the best CRT
gaming setup you can have. Can you do DP to VGA active conversion? Probably. Right. - Okay. That was interesting. Is that I looked for like a good way to
try to switch to analog. I'm not sure if there really is one that actually allows you to access all of the settings in here. Cause if you're just do
like a plug and adapter. You can only do 60 Hertz. You're limited by like the HDMI spec or whatever. - Pooh. - [David] Hey that's a good tech tip. - I love it. Well, if it's on the wrong monitor windows shift arrow key, and you could, whoops you can move it around
between the monitors. Amazing. Adam just tech tipped me. We have to kind of fool around with all displays connected because if this one turns off it takes 45 minutes to warm up. - We were gonna check
the refresh rate you. - Yes. - Currently it's running. - 300 Hz, is that like a G sync
limitation or something? What is that? Oh, you know what it probably is. This is a Titan X we're running DP. 1.2. - [Adam] Yeah. - Can't have the best of all worlds. That's okay. We'll settle for 300. Really? What we're gonna be looking at here is brightness which is obviously into completely different leagues. And of course, image persistence. Now here's something I didn't miss. The phosphor layer is actually like this far behind
the front pane of glass. So you kind of have this perception that you're looking through
a window at your monitor as opposed to just at your monitor. It's like your monitor
sitting in a shadow box. the slight blur of having round phosphor, light emission rather than square pixels you really don't need any aliasing at all. It looks so clean - [Adam] Flick around (beep) - This thing is crazy. Why do they not still make these things? Does it ever look good? I mean, we probably had to
reduce our shutter speed so much that you're not even getting
- The sharpness The sense of how sharp and crisp it is. The motion is just flawless though. Another thing that's really cool is subtle gradients. Like this cloudy sky to
the clear blue sky up here you don't get any of that blocking or banding that you would
potentially see on an LCD. - There's a Twitter
account that has like side by side comparisons of 2D sprites from the 16 bit era. And it'll show them on
a like crisp LCD display as well as on like a cheaper CRT. And it makes a huge difference in how things look. Like they have a one shot of Dracula from Castlevania on an LCD. He has these tiny little
beardie, little red eyes but when you put it on a CRT, they are like natural kind of blur makes it fit up the
whole space in his eyes. And it looks so much more painterly and like it's crazy. - [Adam] Windows shift arrow key over to the other monitor. - Yeah is that gonna work? - [Adam] Yeah. - Was I just imagining how much better it looked going back to 10
ADP definitely sucks. Although fun fact actually
driving that thing at the rated resolution back when it came out basically impossible. And it's still doesn't look as clean. The additional brightness is definitely a plus though. And guys LCDs have improved a lot to the point where under
normal circumstances, I would be whipping the
mouse around on this thing going man LCDs have gotten great for image persistence, but even this is not quite there. I would choose the LCD. - [Adam] What? why - I've grown very accustomed to this level of smoothness of animation and the response time difference at my level of play is
just not enough to matter. - [Adam] Do you think
you can feel a difference between this and the monitor or is that all just
that's you wouldn't know? - I doubt most humans
would feel a difference. There is win. I didn't even see an opponent. (Adam chuckles) And immediately upon
switching to the QD OLED this is using Samsung's
latest panel technology in this alien wear monitor. The last thing I said was a big fat lie because no I would definitely go with this man that brightness that contrast that pop. OLED is a super cool technology because it marries some of the biggest advantages
of both CRT and LCD. One of the big problems with early LCDs in particular
was awful black levels. While with OLED, you can
turn the pixels off entirely just like a CRT where you just
don't eliminate that section. No. How I miss crap. That sucked. Another big advantage is that due to the nature of OLED displays the pixel response time
is near instantaneous. So you get that excellent
persistence of the image even when you're moving
around rapidly like this. Although I do have to note that without black frame insertion, it's not quite the same, is it? Of course that's not to say OLED
doesn't have its advantages. You probably noticed
it's quite a lot brighter than our CRT. Well, that's for a couple of reasons. One is that this used to be rated for 125 nits of peak luminance. And it has aged down to mare 69, which is not as nice as it might sound, but turn off the lights. - [Adam] Uh. Well, how do I do that? - So now's all gross
because the blue phosphorus have probably worn out a little bit more. So after calibration. - Wooh. The thing about luminance
is that it's all relative to the dilation of your pupil. That's why the standard
for theater level HDR is what like 80 nits
or something like that. - [Adam] It's not a lot. - In a light controlled environment. You don't need a ton of luminance. Wow. Has that never been more clear? How am I supposed to decide? See, I could never
afford this kind of thing back when I was a gamer teenager, this is what.. - [David] I have something. If you're still struggling
to make a decision. - Oh, see, that's the thing. All right. OLED and CRTs share a lot
of the same advantages but an OLED will never draw in scan lines. It is absolutely mind
blowing how immediately better a retro game that was designed for a display with scan lines looks when you fire it up how did this lose to the PlayStation? Oh, look at that grinding maybe But it's been so long since I've seen retro
content on a proper display. I forgot how good it looked. There is no way that I would guess 4ADI. 4 ADI is half the vertical resolution of 4 ADP theoretically. Right? Cause they're interlaced. I mean, there's some trickery so that it doesn't look like it. And that's exactly what we're seeing here. - [Adam] Look at the cobblestone. Like look at how good that texture looks. - I know, right? Like this brick obviously
by modern standards, right? This brick is not that amazing. But with proper scan lines in your display which is something that you can't really replicate on modern hardware, fake scan lines are a thing. You can buy adapters that will sit in between your retro console
and a modern display and will kind of mostly add
the effect of scan lines or what you can do is you can run it in emulator and many emulator support fake scan lines to get
more of that retro look. But boy, is it ever not quite
the same men in a dark room? And here's another thing
that's really incredible. The dreamcast outputs at 4 ADI, like I mentioned but this isn't a 4 ADI display. It runs at 2304 by 1440, 80 Hertz. CRTs don't have a native resolution. You see LCDs and OLEDs
have physical pixels that cannot be relocated. So when you run them at anything other than the resolution, the number of actual pixels, it's more of a pixel count than a resolution really. They look blurry or they have artifacts. CRTs you can put in any input
within their supported range and they will run it natively. So there's no drawback to using a console versus a computer with this thing. It'll just look flip and awesome. No matter what. Oh, and another cool thing
is that the limitation of what resolution or what refresh rate you can run comes down to the speed with which the gun can go back and forth. So you could lower your resolution and up your refresh rate or lower your refresh rate and increase serve resolution. The choice is yours. Within reason. To compare our native
image quality with an LCD. We actually had to go find an older one that still has a VGA input. And it should be noted that depending on the scaler built into the panel, that VGA input could behave
very very differently. This particular BenQ was
a fair high end display. Wow does that ever look like dog crap? The craziest part of how much worse this looks to the eye is that this CRT for low res games like this actually isn't necessarily
your best case scenario. Having your pixel points and not quite a pixel, more of a dot having your dot. So pinpoint accurate
actually takes away some of the softness that low
resolution consoles benefited from. It was kind of a natural anti aliasing. So if we had a CRT TV, we might even be having
a better experience. Look at what this brick
looks like in comparison. It looks like trash. Okay, let's go back. Let's go back to the CRT way better. Like it even looks more 3D. Do you guys see how,
like, it just has more of a 3D pot. The color, it doesn't shift at all. I forgot. - [David] Wow. - It's absolutely perfect. One of the things that
makes this particular set so accurate is that it uses the technology that Sony developed in the sixties that they called Trinitron to improve the video
quality of the televisions. When electron guns were developed they weren't entirely accurate. And often electrons would stray from their intended path causing them to activate other unintended phosphorus. It wasn't a big issue with
black and white televisions but once colors got involved stray electrons hitting nearby phosphorus would unacceptably distort the image with unintended colors and fuzziness. To solve this RCA
developed the shadow mask a metal sheet full of tiny holes that would block stray electrons from hitting the wrong phosphorus. But the downside to this was it greatly reduced display brightness because the metal panel blocked a lot of the energy. The Trinitron though
uses an aperture grill which is instead made
up of vertical slits. This was accompanied by a
change in the arrangement of electron guns from a triangle to a straight line. And it allows much more of the energy to make it to the screen. And thus, a brighter display. Sony actually won an
Emmy for this technology. So apple isn't the only Emmy
award winning tech company the disadvantage of aperture grill. So my old view Sonic P 95F plus was an aperture grill display. Are we connected to the computer still? (indistinct) Okay let's switch over. (bright upbeat music) And there's one up here as well, right there. Those lines there are a visible element of the aperture grill and they're noticeable enough that Adam, when this thing arrived, came to me, he is like Linus I think you spent $3,000 on a monitor with visible defects on it. Actually they're completely normal. And I can tell you from experience daily driving and aperture grill monitor that you completely forget about them. After the first couple of hours. The LTT store screwdriver
has a super strong magnet in it and a magnetic bit. And the funny thing about electrons is they interact with
magnetic fields, right? So woo. What's going on here? It's about actually all you're doing is just taking the electron beams and deflecting them. So I'm supposed to talk to you guys about why
people don't buy these. One obvious one is price. Although you can find TVs, especially if they're not in great condition for significantly cheaper than what we paid for this. The issue is that finding one in good shape is getting more and more challenging. And as that becomes more and more true the cost are only gonna go up. Even this one, which we paid a lot for suffers from degraded phosphorus and some nicks in the anti glare coating. Another big one is cost. Even if the price isn't high, transporting these things
can be a nightmare. How much does it cost
to ship one of these? Especially without the original packaging, it was cheaper for me to
pay an employee for 10 hours of driving and reimburse their mileage than to ship it via mail. And then there's voluminous. CRTs just don't get as bright and as they're used, it only gets worse. And so unlike a projector there's no way to change out the lamp. It's not a lamp. It's an electron gun. After years of service this thing just ain't gonna look the way that it used to. So what's the answer in my opinion modern TVs between OLED and particularly QD OLED which is in TV's now and on the horizon for monitors. We no longer have to deal
with the shortcomings of LCDs. And while they do have
some drawbacks themselves the biggest one which is burning is actually shared with CRTs. There's also the fact that they run at a fixed resolution but from my personal experience as we've gone to 4k and beyond, it's become far less of an issue because the pixel density is so high that especially from couch distance. It doesn't make that much of a difference. But if you want the ultimate tracking down a high quality CRT might be worth it for you. For the rest of you. Maybe you should just stick to checking out our sponsor. Thank you for sponsoring
this section of the video. The Lenovo Legion, slim 7 is thin lightweight. And one of the most portable laptops in the Lenovo Legion lineup you can experience excellent performance and fantastic battery life powered by its AMD Ryzen 9, 5,000
series mobile processor. And it's thoughtfully created to ensure the maximum
audio visual experience while getting the most game time out of its battery life. Making it an ultimate
mobile gaming machine. The Legion slim 7 allows for a professional
level gaming performance no matter who you are and where you are. And you can click the link
in the description to learn. Thanks again, to Lenovo and AMD for sponsoring that section of the video. Guys enjoyed this video and you like watching me
spend way too much money on stupid stuff. Go subscribe, cause that's a major part of our content strategy. Also you can check out this video where I bought a gigantic the first ultra wide display which was actually a
rear projection display. We still have it. It still works. A shoot out, this versus that. The king of the ancient Kings. - [Adam] Oh my God, we have to.
