ah I think it's gonna go way better this time
now before we have a look at the latest CRT acquisition which was very kindly lent to me
by a friend thank you very much I'm excited to check it out but I do think we first need to
discuss the previous video with this little guy now in my CRT Gary friend saw that video they
said it was impressive how I got every detail wrong which it's quite flattering I feel like
that's one of my few skills at this point now aside from a whole bunch of issues with this
little TV and yes I know it's a TV and not a monitor I misspoke in that video and it
enraged a whole bunch of people did that piece of human garbage just say that TV is a monitor
aside from a bunch of issues with it I think one of the big problems
with it is that the incessant wine that it makes
is apparently a sign that something's about to explode in it so not only is it not a very good
CRT TV that was not correct for the use case I was using it for it's also kind of dying
although despite it being an example of pretty much everything that can go wrong when acquiring
an old CRT I did kind of like the little dying monitor mother but this time around I got a CRT
monitor instead which also says Trinitron on it very exciting now the TV in question is a
17-inch Dell p780 which not only is quite a bit bigger than the Sony but also much higher
resolution the Dell's max resolution gives it a pixel density that's competitive even
by today's standards so it's going to be sharper with more legible text making it much more usable
for desktop application now in terms of inputs we're very limited because it's soldered to the
back and there's just one but it is Mesozoic period inputs which apparently is what you want
for this kind of thing but with that let's hook a system up to this bad boy and do some gaming on it
oh I really don't miss having to screw down my display cable
oh they really knew how to make buttons back in the day it feels like turning on The Matrix
wow it takes real long to turn on
sign in whoa it's so bright it's a bit flickery though oh wow you can really feel it searing your
retinas this is not as comfortable to look at as a Modern Display quick editor's note while I set
the resolution to the windows recommended one you can normally eliminate that streak slowly
going down the CRT with the correct shutter speed settings on your camera although because
of the frequency that this specific monitor is refreshing at there isn't a shutter speed
setting in my camera that completely eliminates it so it may be semi-present for most of the
video sorry about that and after spending quite some time playing around with various settings
trying to eliminate that artifact I found the best setting ever in the monitors menu
oh now apparently at this resolution we can set this monitor to 85 Hertz
for some high refresh rate gaming so let me quickly make a custom resolution for that
yes oh there we go look at that you can actually kind of tell as well oh this weird flickering
happening now okay so that's a bit of a problem 85 Hertz films even worse unfortunately every
frame rate I tried flickered just in a different way so with that in mind let's do some gaming
hey there we go Battlefield 5 oh oh okay that was a bit weird but we're in
and damn yo you can't feel the display at all my louder that is a bit annoying every time the game
changes the resolution or whatever you have to go through this process of like realigning
everything over which is kind of annoying I'm not gonna lie in terms of things like geometry
it's actually looking pretty good because the like telephone poles and stuff are straight
uh the image is so much better than the little TV because we have actual resolution right so we can
like see things which is a very positive change the actual color Fidelity is way better as well
um and it feels a lot more responsive although I will say if anything it does feel like the little
TV had slightly better motion rendering but this was with the monitor running at 60 hertz
so despite mad flicker for you I decided to try out 85. 85 Hertz on a CRT looks like 240
hertz on an LCD like this wait what while I was marveling at the detail and motion
rendering while playing battle bit I did notice things were quite dark which caused memories of
the CRT gamma tightrope to come flooding back where with every game you have to find that
sweet spot of having actual detail in the dark areas without having the image too blown out
okay it looks a bit more washed out now but you can actually see the darkness I was also
becoming a bit worried about the monitor's health which occasionally would flicker off and on oh
oh there we go it keeps doing that but aside from the signs of dementia the modern FPS gaming
experience on this monitor is really impressive but it also gave me a hankering for something a
bit older uh We've even got things like gamma settings very exciting oh the black levels are
so dark we're gonna have to push the gamma up wow is this what games look like back in the day
games looked so much better back in the day than I remember them looking and with a bit
more driver brightness it looked even better like there is obviously like a lot about it that looks
like low graphic games but it's so sharp and the colors are so nice and the movement is so good
there's so much about it that's really pleasing what's cool about this CRT is that it makes all
gaming feel like Retro Gaming because of just what it does to the way things look
oh yo but it's been doing that a lot I don't know I think the CRT
is not long for this world at some point they're just all gonna die and we're never gonna see CRTs
again but this is that this is like way too bright I'm gonna have to turn it down more
and after finally settling on a gamma compromise for Half-Life 2. I had a great idea playing Quake
2 RTX on a CRT is pretty cool because it's like very retro gaming but then you have it infused
with modern technology with the like Ray tracings they're actually taking advantage of the Modern
Hardware you know a black Mesa that looks so just like it's supposed to be on a CRT whoa
they've really changed a lot since the last time I played it whoa it's all so different
oh I feel like it's happening more frequently I do not think this CRT is very long for this
world and after spending ages indulging my trip down augmented Memory Lane I decided to
compare this much better CRT to some of the best display technology available today OLED
oh no I think the little PCS died because I I lost video output to the Monitor and I thought
maybe the CRT died but then I plugged the laptop into it which is working and I've now plugged that
into another monitor look I can't get a signal out of it it's not the point of this video but
it's just tragic that the little Japan piece is already acting up okay so I've set up the 42 inch
OLED here to compare to the little CRT that we have here and um they actually look surprisingly
similar now getting the obvious differences out of the way the OLED is 500 times the size it's
much higher resolution but having them side by side I'll say that the CRT has a lot more
in common with the OLED than it does with it with an LCD like I I think their image quality is very
comparable especially when it comes to stuff like the really deep black levels in this area
an LCD can't do that although with the CRT it does have that very CRT issue of you can tell the color
of the actual display in the black levels like a beige haziness to to the Deep blacks whereas you
can tell that the screen surface of the OLED is a lot better because the Black is Black it doesn't
have that display surface color tinge to it in terms of motion rendering and input lag they
trade blows but I'd say that the CRT inches ahead now the camera doesn't do this justice
but I think the OLED wins hands down in terms of dynamic range it's better at giving you detail in
dark scenes without blowing out the highlights something the CRT really struggles with but in
person the image quality between these two is remarkably similar wait was the last 20 years
of technological development a complete waste of time well obviously not there are huge practical
advantages to an OLED it's not like you can have a CRT display in a phone how am I gonna fit this in
my pocket and the whole crushed black level thing makes some games unplayable on the CRT I did my
first raid of the new wipe and escape from tarkov on the CRT and I couldn't see a thing even with
the sun blinding I couldn't see anything in the shadows CRTs really do not like escape from tarkov
but at the end of the day it was awesome to see how well the crt's image quality held up compared
to a high-end Modern Display Nostalgia clearly isn't the only thing making them desirable again
which brings me to the end of the video thank you for watching and until the next one bye thank you