The CRT Hype Train Might Be Out of Control... - CRT vs OLED

retro gaming is really taking off and as good as modern displays have become there's something about the big boy crt that has enthusiasts paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to game like it's 1999. i would know i just bought one and made a video about it but that's stupid what you heard me right people are out there like him paying top dollar for displays like this one that you probably didn't even know existed check this thing out this is an hd crt tv straight out of 2003. this boy is 16x9 runs at 1080i resolution and has input legs so low that david says he doesn't even bother with his lg c10 oled anymore and that sir is where you lost me it can't be that good can it i am here to convince you otherwise just like i'm here to convince you of our sponsor segs i wonder what's my line is that [Laughter] amd if you're looking to upgrade or build a new gaming pc the game on amd sales event is on right now until august 5th where you can get their best deals on amd ryzen and radeon products learn more today at the link down below [Music] there are a few key factors that drive enthusiasts to seek out the best crts they can find they have next to nowhere input lag their pixel response times are instantaneous and they have high contrast ratios since like an oled display the pixels if you could even call them that simply do not emit light when they are off that's right guys before oled took center stage crts were actually the technology with the outstanding contrast ratio something that average consumers gave up for thinner lighter lcds but even as someone who recently blew 3gs on a top tier gaming crt monitor i'm still not even a little convinced that i should go back to daily driving one of these monstrosities i mean lcd sucks it was an inferior technology from the get-go fair enough but oled is here now and some of the recent ones are amazing i mean we are now getting most of the brightness of mini led with the inky blacks and the response times of crt we actually measured this thing at what like eight milliseconds that's incredible on top of that i would actually argue that the blacks of an oled are black er simply because of the way that the display absorbs surrounding light sure in a completely darkened room the crt might get close but definitely not under these conditions i mean how can you possibly want a game on this when you can game on this the thing is it's not about the input lag more than response time there's nothing that looks like a crt crt is its own thing there's something that happens some kind of magic i don't know what it is actually i do know what it is that when you play an old game on a crt it just looks so much better than on an oled for now we need to play some games i have so many things i want to show you but i want to start with the reason i got into this tv which is 7th generation gaming so ps3 xbox 360. those games look absolutely horde on modern displays and this is the best display for that we're gonna have some tests where we're upscaling from 240 and 40i going up and we're gonna have some stuff where we're going down from 1080p down and what i want to convince you is that there is definitely a place in your living room for this bad boy in my living room i mean i can tell you right now i don't miss the flicker i don't miss the wine yeah i get that people are all like crt blacks crt black perfect blacks in a light controlled environment maybe but we actually saw that with samsung's qdo led versus lg's w oled in a lit room certain display panel technologies reflect more light back than others and lg's w oled really is black one of the nightmares of crt gaming is getting different devices to display properly on it yeah we're gonna have a full float plane exclusive about david's octopus of scalars and adapters and you can kind of walk the float plane peeps through it but that's beyond the scope of this video i think wild tell me what you're experiencing looking at these two displays i strongly prefer the more contrasty look of the blacks on the oled however the motion is definitely better on the crt is this an interlaced signal this should be yes unless something changed wait the oled's more responsive well that's the thing about hdcrts they have the best tubes but they actually have the dumbest brains so as it comes there's a processing a scaling that happens on pretty much every resolution so i wanted you to experience it as it would be out of the box luckily you can turn that off but then you just want to give your your display only 1080i signals and so that's why i have that scalar i can get all kinds of of different resolutions different uh refresh rates but then it all lands on what something this tv can look good at it's noticeable though we measured about 40 milliseconds of delay in our testing but when i turned off the processing it went down to eight milliseconds which is pretty much exactly the same as the oled yeah that's perfect then yeah oh should we turn that off then yes we should were you testing me did you want to see if i would notice i wanted to give you the absolute best experience i wanted to walk you through and blow your mind but i think it was good to show you that you kind of have to do little fan dangling yourself to get the best experience got it i'm so sorry but the contrasty look the more modern anti-glare reflective coatings i think it looks better i'm sorry i wouldn't check this well why don't we try a different game let's try something 1080p on the ps3 something that's sprite based sure and uh let's see what you'll like there okay sprites are going to be disadvantage modern panels this was actually the first game that blew me away so it's a 1080p game but it's based on a 40i game so it's scaled internally it's got smooth smoothing on but there's something about sprite-based games that i think just look better on crts like they're not even close yeah there's a magic that happens with sprites in particular because it looks great on the oled like this looks fantastic uh no i disagree actually okay it looks like absolute ass like ew like look how bad wolverine's face looks on there yeah you can see the individual pixels well not even you can't it's all kind of smoothed and blurred together yeah that is nasty now the background mr clown face or whatever back here looks all right and obviously text is way better on the oled but particularly uh i don't know i don't know my marvel super heroes yeah colossus here look at his look at his face you know what it reminds me of those photo to painting filters that you can apply that's what it reminds me of it looks awful okay that's a win for the crt whoa tell me something though i noticed you're not applying any scan line filters or anything like that to the oled could we get it closer we definitely can and we can play around with that there's a few issues that happen with like the upscaling and down scaling when i add scan lines i can get scan lines to look good on the hdcrt so additional ones to kind of emulate more of an older look and i can get them to look good on the oled i can't get skylines to look good on both at the same time got it okay so we're not necessarily putting its best foot forward yeah but there's no question natively that the crt looks much better all right what am i looking at here this is a fun comparison because now we're getting 40i out of the dreamcast we're going to a retro tinker upscaling to 1080p on these two displays but this is getting its original 480i output so this is it's best put forward this is probably it's best put forward and that's pretty damn close to its best foot forward something about yellows just doesn't look as good on the oled i can't tell if it's a calibration issue or if it's something else i frankly don't perceive much difference between the 480i native image and the upscaled 1080i image which i think is a good thing yeah if what they're going for is true to the original resolution of the game fidelity then i think they've actually done an outstanding job here as for the oled somehow it lacks the color punch is that possibly lost in the conversion it's possible but it's going through the same chain pretty much until the scaler but the scaler shouldn't be adding any color pluth described it as kind of washed out looking and it is that looks like ass on the crt compared to the better blacks on the outlet so which one would you give it to of the three i'd say this is just a straight oh huh interesting you're over skin yeah off yeah in that case i'd give it to the hdcrt i hate overscan overscan sucks no should never have existed this game to me is kind of the best case scenario of the dreamcast it looks sharper on the hdcrt than the 4x3 one barely barely but i think that like the clarity is really there the color is great and the oled just looks yeah just kind of blurry it looks upscaled to me whereas on the hdcrt it looks good it looks tight all right let's give you a different dreamcast game that you might have a different experience with this one in my quick testing is the one dreamcast game that i think looks way better on the 4x3 than the hdcrt oh 100 you need the scan you need the scan lines it immediately makes this image much more attractive it's particularly noticeable for me in the depth of field bokeh effect backgrounds yeah this just looks like a blurry crappy low resolution texture totally that looks like bokeh i find the trees too like there's the illusion of the details on the tree feels real the foliage whereas in this you can just see it's like paper yes it does not look right these have more depth totally well here's a fun comparison that you might want to try we could keep the dreamcast playing it in 4di on this tv and we could pull up the hd remaster on the ps3 and compare those two playing that versus this that's an interesting dynamic that i find really appealing on the hdcrt is hd remasters of old games because you can get the widescreen you can get the upscale the sharper image but you get the crt effect sonic adventure 2. the black is so much better yeah this it really is not an ideal situation for this it's not but it looks a lot better 100 i mean that's the thing about the real world it's messy and you're often not in the ideal situation sometimes the sun is up and you want a game sorry this one's pretty close to me i might even give it to the oled i think this one's pretty darn close again close is pretty impressive for 20 year old tv i know you like final fantasy 10 quite a bit i think it's your last final dance you like the final fantasy hd remaster is good but it has that weird too sharp effect i forgot my copy of final fantasy 10. i got excited we have a copy of final fantasy 10 do you want to see what conditions remember those kits to uh to polish the bot you ain't polishing this one i don't know my buff out just put a little tape you know it's fine what do you think of the graphics though there's no question in my mind that i would play it on this really not even close this is a cut scene let's get to somewhere where you can see more textures the textures on this there the muddiness is is just like exaggerated or something because the display is so sharp i like the softness of this image and i find it again there's a uniformity to the image that this does better you know what man i uh i'm sorry but i gotta take the i gotta take the clean digital look here fair enough the facial hair there it looks like a smear on his face whereas here i can see discrete hairs for better or for worse for better or for worse and like his chain looks like links okay that's pretty linky too but that's linkier i hear what you're saying and it's definitely a preference thing yeah but like i like that the hair is soft like hair doesn't look like that that looks weird and paper like there's paper freaking things that are coming out of his head that looks like a blurry mess that looks like hair the foliage looks better here yeah on the crt okay toss up i'll take it as a tie let's go back one more generation oh we're going back another generation to my day we're going back to my childhood what you're currently playing on is an analog super nt so it's an fpga device designed to play super nintendo on a modern display i actually think this is one of the best use cases for the hdcrt let's compare oh it looks so bad on the oled oh it looks so bad it looks just right on the hccrt it's not even an actual super nintendo we can compare to an actual super nintendo i think this is one of the most fun use cases is these modern revised consoles playing on an hdcrt they look really good i don't know if i can deny it that's what i'm saying walk me through what you're feeling and the difference between all three tvs linus i can't even look at the oled [Laughter] i'm honestly shocked i thought this was gonna be you were gonna pull choose the oled more often than you did i like to think that i'm capable of being objective and i can tell when something is not as good and there's no question that the higher resolution upscaling works really well in this game not in certain situations not in text yeah one thing we would be remiss not to mention is the fact that modern emulation has solved a lot of these problems yeah shout out emulation community phenomenal you guys are amazing like bringing people's childhoods back one bug at a time and better than it was like in a lot of consoles emulation is so much better than the actual hardware is like i'm pretty yeah like super mario world widescreen you've seen that stuff right yeah 100 you can change the render resolution on a lot of ps1 stuff but then actually fix the geometry issues so that's an interesting one too i kind of want to show you the ps5 just got some ps1 games so it has emu like backwards compatibility now and so i want to show you what an actual ps1 game looks on all of these versus the ps5 emulation on these recently playstation has offered their plays plus pro gold plus three who cares what it's called service where you can now play ps1 and ps2 games not just like ripped they're an uh higher rendered or they're they're rendered at a higher resolution so that they're rendered at 1440p the problem is at actual 1450p it kind of looks like crap the geometry looks really weird you can see like the way it pops yeah the way that objects kind of shift around a little bit it's not that noticeable on the htc rt yeah that looks bad it looks horrible i mean it's it's not great but it is definitely that effect is reduced when it's sharper a line moving like this is absolutely more noticeable and it's interesting because again i might choose the 4x3 crt but i like the extra clarity that the 1440p offers yeah so like miley cyrus told us this is the best of both worlds really a miley reference what year is it she's still cool is she tell me what you're feeling wow look at his skin looks it's like mottled yeah and that i guess that was just how they shaded yeah and it just it looks awful so bad but on the hdcrt it doesn't look how smooth that gradient on her hair looks it looks it looks almost like correct you know what it reminds me of is it reminds me of like a vector image versus a scaled jpeg clearly that's vector based that is mathematically shaded yeah whereas here it doesn't look mathematically shaded it looks like blown up low resolution texture totally 100 based on this 30 second gameplay snippet which one do you think you'd want to play i would play the hdcrt no question that's what i'm saying absolutely no question heck yes i think we're going to stick to one final one and it's a game you know and love cross code okay and i think the htcrt has a strong case for hd 2d games what's interesting about this game is that i first played it on pretty much that display okay on an lgo led 65 inch in my living room the color does look better immediately to me on the oled ooh wow and you really notice as you pan from side to side the geometry issues and the warping of the image on the hdcrt so it's not really a matter of the style of the art it's more a matter of what kind of display the developer was working with when they mastered the content i would play this on oled every time you would yeah oh no not me this is definitely an hccrt game for me no question just that you lose so much detail in the sprites compared to the oled i actually think the sprites look better on this one i think that's fair that kind of looks like it has that integer scaling it's clean clean pixels i think though i like the softening look again i i'm i'm now pretty accustomed to that when i play retro games is the crt look where everything's a little blended and in some games i liked the additional warmth of the image on the crt but here it just looks yellow it does not look correct it's so interesting i love that you like the oled better because it's no contest to me like i much prefer the overall impression this gives me but i just think that goes to show you that like there is no one display for all games like like you said it's the whatever the game was designed for is what you probably should play it on we're at the end of the experience linus what uh what has been your takeaway from using an hdcrt on a multitude of different consoles that i think it's super cool that you have this collection that i can borrow when i need to make a video i will not be making my own collection and i will not have one of these in the living room i do not think so it's just oh man i just i can't justify the space and we didn't even talk about the power consumption i just can't justify it no i think for most people it does not make sense but if you play a lot of retro games and you play a lot of widescreen retro stuff it's pretty freaking sweet it has its moments and this is definitely one of them and this is the moment to tell you about our sponsor pulseway imagine having the power to remotely 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our battery screen on the gba but then uh new vita stuff too that's right and i put a new screen into a game gear with some help i needed help

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,328,974

Keywords: CRT, HD, HD CRT, OLED, LCD, Retro Gaming, Sonic Adventure 2, Super Mario World, Power Stone 2, Ape Escape, TV, Display

Id: C_-9Rw5CJNE

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/DangerousCousin]

Ugh, I really appreciate this guy's passion, but he's clearly still learning.

Like with the fact he chose to show Linus upscaled 480i from a Dreamcast, when the Dreamcast supports 480p.

[u/Telaneo]

Even if things weren't done prefectly, Linus's final opinion wouldn't have changed much if it was done perfectly: it's neat, and sometimes undeniably better than an OLED, but it can be really hard to justify to get one.

You pretty much have to have this as a hobby, since a good OLED and emulation gets you 80-90% there, especially after a modicum of tweaking. And if you really want that last 10-20%, you're not gonna be looking at just getting an HD set (unless you only play a limited subset of games where that set can shine). You'll probably also want an SD set, you might prefer a VGA monitor, and you're probably gonna have an OLED anyway if you're deep into this, and even if you get get a lot of stuff for cheap, just setting it all up perfectly will take time, and depening on how deep you go, it's gonna get expensive anyway.

It really only makes sense if you really care, have the space and don't need to justify it to anyone. And even if you do care, emulating on an OLED or so simple it's a hard sell unless you care a lot.

The best argument I could contruct for getting a CRT would be getting a 20" SD component or RGB SCART set and a Mister. With that you've got a battlestation which can laglessly everything 4th gen and back, and then some, but it's probably also small enough that it doesn't take up a lot of space and can be hidden away if needed. So if you want something like a gaming corner where it's always 1995, but better, and you can play all the Zelda and Super Mario RPG you want, that sounds great.

The problem with that is that the nostalgia-window is moving away from the SNES and Mega Drive era over to PS1, N64, early 3D and maybe even 6th gen stuff, and a Mister isn't gonna do that. You could get a Raspberry Pi instead, but that doesn't cover as much as I'd like. You could get a PC and set that up properly, but now we're probably too deep into this and people are gonna bounce of and say 'screw that, I'll just emulate on an OLED, I don't care that much'.

[u/R2NC]

Be prepare to have trash crts priced in 100s on ebay people. Linus’s stuff is good but with that he has more wide of an audience that might put it to more limelight. He did similar stuff not recall but soon as his video up whatever stuff he put got huge jump on price on second hand.

[u/dewman45]

I'm glad to be seeing more content on CRT displays on YouTube. While a lot of people hate on Linus, I'm glad to see content like this bringing more people to the community. Their FW900 video is actually how I found this subreddit.

[u/bowlingdoughnuts]

Linus tech tips jumps on any fad and doesn't know anything about it. It's like watching an introduction video online and less of an actual informative piece. I almost wish they'd stop all type of technical charade and just let the personality speak and have fun. I grew to hate their videos in the last four years because of how often they simply don't put any effort into anything they do. They just read Wikipedia for two seconds and then write script from memory.

[u/iwantapvm]

they didn't even try a proper 240p. hd crts are mostly shit as well as flickery 480i.

[u/FillingTheWorkDay]

Perhaps unpopular opinion but you may as well go with an oled over a hdcrt. Nothing beats a regular crt for ps2 back though.

[u/Apprehensive_Toe6736]

The crts he has there dont look great. And also we all know crts dont look all that good under light. So with all the studio lighting hes got there? I hope he has checked out this subreddit. This is where youll found actual good looking crts

[u/brispower]

why are they putting smoothing on on the OLED? gross.