I was a CRT engineer back in the 1960s. This video is a pretty good basic explanation. But, the stuff on the front glass is “phosphor,” not phosphorous. Warning, do not put your hands near a CRT while it is on, or you may be zapped. Also, don’t try opening a CRT that is under vacuum. The whole tube could implode, shooting glass everywhere. The dots or stripes were aligned with the shadow mask and electron guns. The inside front of the envelope was first coated with a phosphor of one color mixed with a light sensitive material. The mask was put in place and a light was shined from the position corresponding to the location of the electron gun for that color. The light caused the dots or lines to bind to the front glass. The mask was removed and the unbound phosphor was rinsed away. Repeat two more times for the other colors. Then remove the mask once more and flash a thin layer of aluminum on the gun side of the phosphors, to reflect emitted light forward and avoid static charges. Finally, seal the front panel to the rest of the envelope. Amazing for mass production of a $190-$200 CRT!!
I thought that it should be stated that this is not a light shock either. Heed this warning. This is a VERY massive and potentially lethal shock. The shock is 15,000 to 30,000 volts and what is more the major issue is the current. 1 amp is enough to stop the heart and this can happen even if the CRT is unpluged because the capacitors can hold a massive charge and that can discharge on to you. So do NOT service a CRT TV unless you are properly trained to do so.
@@InnocentSoul0283 It should further be noted that the capacitor in question is the tube itself. So disconnecting a tube's EHT cap doesn't mean you can't still get a shock.
I used to repair TVs until the early 80's... when he reached into the one that was turned on, I could feel the shock. Been there, done that. I salute his steady and unshocked (on camera at least) hands.
I always wondered how they "printed" the phosphor dots so accurately, with perfect alignment. They were doing it with light in the electron gun position! Thanks for answering this.
For those who want to know. The TL:DR of the Trinitron is they use an aperture grille instead of the shadow mask, as well as a single electron gun, with three separate cathodes.
Once you get the proportion right of the distance between shadow mask and screen, and the distance between electron gun and shadow mask, and you can get the holes in the shadow mask and the widths of the phosphor bands accurate enough, it's mostly a matter of putting a couple of permanent magnets in the right place on the outside of the tube, to let the electron beams hit their own phosphor correctly. Unfortunately especially in older CRT monitors and TV's it wasn't so easy to make the three beams hit the same spot at the same time, so you often see convergence errors especially around the edges and in the corners.
@@MatthewCenanceblack and white. Only needs white contrast for variation, but good question nonetheless. There was tons of lost data in old CRTs, but still some good detail for being the forerunner of moving images.
Honestly, the way CRTs work just sound so much more “advanced” in a way, like just the thought of getting an electron gun to shoot across the field that fast is incredible in hindsight, especially when you consider how some games were able to actually use that to creative effect- like how the waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog have a rainbow effect on a CRT.
@@foch3 I think that's what keeps my passion fixated on crts over modern displays, there's just so much more to learn about Sure, modern displays have their own limitations that take genius to overcome, but the end result has always been less interesting, at least to me personally
Just fyi the Sonic rainbow effect came from the Genesis/Megadrive's subpar composite output, not from CRTs. You'll get the same effect viewing it on any display through the composite out.
until you try using one i had 17" until mid 00s it's extremely slow at 75hz the whole picture is floaty and fuzzy, the corners are never aligned properly and it was 1280x1024
@@tsartomato I’ve used them plenty, grew up with a 13” mono color CRT that needed to be punched in its speaker if the sound went out(which was legit fun). I still love them, and the neat things you can do with them :3
There's a more recent technology called the "Laser Phosphor Display" where it's similar to a CRT but the beam of light is driven mechanically with a UV laser. This removes the need for a vaccuum seal and therefore a bulky weight, and also allows it to have very low power consumption on par with or better than today's OLED displays. I always thought this is a great way to preserve the look and feel of retro games, but no company seems to realize it.
No need for a phosphor screen. There are large projection systems that use separate R G B lasers deflected by spinning mirrors. Perfect convergence and focus no matter what the shape, angle or size of screen. Really expensive and hazardous to the eyes should one get in the way.
Thank you for the shadow mask demonstration. I've always understood the concept of "There's a metal sheet in here which magically somehow makes the guns only strike certain phosphors", but I never understood it was an alignment trick until your demonstration!
@@HankW yes I really appreciated this part too. I understood in principle, but actually seeing the way it works really made it clear in my head. Nice work!
There was a class action lawsuit about the misleading way CRT sizes were described. That's why, in later ads, you'll see the size listed with wording like "15" TV (14" viewable)"
Must have only applied to the US. Years ago I remember a comedian on TV bring out a TV box as part of his act, and mocked the " 14" size (15" Canada) " markings.
The set makers advertised the screen size by using the same diagonal dimension that the CRT maker used - overall. But sets are made with bezels to cover the edge resulting in a smaller viewable area. There is no image right to edge of a CRT because of the thickness of the side glass. And a small part of the outermost edge of the image is covered because it turns out blurry due to the curve in the glass on the inside corner.
I honestly never paid any attention to the "size" or "viewable area", with CRT's in the years past, or LCD's today. I look at the monitor in operation, and see if it's the size I want or not. Couldn't care less about the measurements.
I remember that! I owned a Compaq laptop back in the ‘90s and I got around $3 from a class-action lawsuit over the claimed size of the laptop’s screen.
This was the most illuminating "how CRTs work" video I've ever seen. Seeing the mask with the phosphor it, and suddenly it all made sense and CRT went from "magic" to "understandable".
4:45 - the little monitors attached to studio TV cameras were still B&W in the 90s when I operated them. It gave you the sharp image you needed to tell if you were in focus, and the control booth proc amps saw to the color calibration. I haven’t worked one in a long time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they still are.
This video is a masterpiece. First I thought: "I've seen Technology Connections already", but this video goes very deep and is more hands-on. I have never seen a CRT tube from the inside before :-) Thanks!
Yeah, if Alec explained what a shadow mask is and how it works, I clearly missed that part. As crude as it was, David's little animation explained it really well.
I never knew either that it could remove so easily. I thought it was some form of like metallic or plastic, whatever, film that's completely embedded phosphor.
There is a very specific feeling when playing on a CRT arcade. Games become more cartoonish I think. That I think is what us retro people actually remembers and miss the most of from those days, I think that feeling is stronger than what specific console or computer it was. The CRT feeling.
In terms of aspect ratio. I think the key reason why 16:9 got popular, was because it fit most movie and DVD videos better. Even though for computing one usually wants more horizontal space.
Yeah, and at that time lots of video games were coming out with FMV cut scenes, taking advantage of CD-ROMs and graphics. So there was a general appetite/expectation that soon everything would be a movie.
Good thing that you can rotate most screens around a pivot point nowadays. I used to have such a setup at work to have one screen only for the purpose of viewing documentation. Only downside is when they have a limited viewing angle.
You forgot another drawback of LCD displays: They require time to change the brightness of each pixel or subpixel, whereas the intensity of an electron gun can be changed instantly. And because the CRT rebuilds the entire image from scratch each time the screen is refreshed, pixels can change as fast as the CRT can refresh the screen. With an LCD, how fast pixels can change depends on many factors, including which color you want to change from to which color. For many years, response time was one of the most important limiting factors of any TFT. Thanks to tricks like overdrive, they have gotten better over the years, but even today, switching from black to white or vice versa is typically faster on a TFT than switching from one gray scale to another. And while TFTs may claim 9 ms switching times in their manuals (enough to display 111 frames per second), that's usually just their "best case" time. On average, the same monitor may have a switching time of only 14 ms (just enough for 71 frames per second), and if that is the average, you can estimate the worst case switching time. Keep in mind that there is little point in running a monitor at 120 Hz if it cannot actually display 120 frames per second, as some information will simply never make it to the screen. Worse, the image will become blurred as the information from two or more images is blended together to some degree. The result is unwanted motion blur, which gamers especially hate. None of these problems existed with CRT. The only limiting factor with CRT was the refresh rate, and if your CRT had a refresh rate of 120 Hz, it really did display 120 completely separate images per second.
How can the human eye still detect motion blur here? I cannot even full screen 80Hz flicker. 120 Hz is the GPU (and gameloop) making up for the lag of LCD and internet.
Even modern LCDs struggle to keep up with the refresh rates that are advertised. They all do overdrive, but usually for the higher refresh rates the overdrive has to be so aggressive that you end up with overshoot which creates inverse ghosting
Good point. I always wondered at how and why corrunt lcd screens could display 120kz content of a panel itself simply cannot even keep up with 60 or 80fps? Thus resulting in motion blur. Crt screen could keep up with 120fps content thus it will not view any motion blur. However so i have only seen 100hz tv’s wich even don’t process 100hz content at all, all what they do is doubling or creating new frames from 30fps or 60fps content (depending on it’s resolution and/or type cable) to generate 100fps on screen but it’s artificially created by a processor, so it’s not real 100hz content. And with such low response time of lcd screens in mind, i simply just don’t understand why and how on earth todays smartphones are 120hz, that’s just silly and power wasting to me.
I'm definitely old. I went to High School in the mid '70s and took a Radio/TV repair shop class and we learned how to repair TVs. My achievement was finding two different TVs that were both broken but the guts were the same even though they were different models. So I took the CRT from one and put it in the other and got myself a Free 25" color TV and I put it in my bedroom. The family TV was a 19" black and white one in the den. I have lots of experience with playing around with the yokes and such. Also I burned my finger once in the flyback cage. It actually just went in one side and out the other side of my finger. Otherwise I'd be dead now.
Reminds me of seeing screen content programmatically (!) fading from or to black in the VGA era for the first time, something that was only doable by adjusting the knobs on the screen before, as part of a personal adjustment, but not in software.
@@s4ndwichMakeR It's always wild seeing something which wasn't possible before. :D Now I understand why so many DOS games do it; it was one of the cool new things of the era. I hadn't made the conection before.
I was one of those who hung on to CRTs as long as I could. I simply did not like the "ghosting" that was so common on early LCDs -- that's one thing that CRTs definitely did not suffer from. Pixel response times were essentially zero on a CRT. Heck, my first high-definition television was a DLP, not an LCD, because I hated the "streaks" that would appear on early LCD televisions when the picture would pan left or right. (And I didn't suffer from the "rainbow effect" that bothered some people watching DLP TVs.) I was very much anti-LCD for a very long time. It was 2009 before I bought my first LCD monitor. And 2010 before I bought my first LCD TV. But I freely admit that *today's* LCDs are superb. The technology finally overcame the shortcomings that bothered me most -- pixel response time and contrast ratio.
It's pretty amazing how far LCDs have come. There were other techs that were well developed earlier like DLP, SXRD, and Plasma but the LCD kept progressing. LEDs are really what really changed things, especially when they become to use backlit arrays that could turn on and off lighting in areas. Mini-LEDs have progressed that further, although there is still some light bleed visible on black screens when other areas are lit, but they do give LCDs something closer to black than before. Quantum dots can further help here. But the CRT was and is an amazing technology. Ultimately I think the biggest thing that gave the LCD its victory was not merely price, it was also weight and ease of use. It is ridiculous how light a 60" LCD TV is compared to Plasma, Rear projection screens, and CRTs. The 40" Sony Trintron Wega weighed 304 lbs. A 65" Bravia X90L weights just 53.4 lbs without the stand. Price + ease of use + weight all make the LCD hard to beat. The LCD has also led the way in driving down TV costs. My family bought a front projection RCA television with three CRTs that folded open. Analog Tuner. Analog to fold it open. Cost over $10,000 in current dollars when adjusted for inflation and was 50". You can buy a good 50" TV nowadays (with a little less real estate, as was noted in the video) for less than 1/10 of that price. TV prices have fallen by over 90% in most cases when we adjust for inflation over the past 40-50 years.
Yeah my third monitor is an early 2000s LCD and the ghosting is BAD, everything has motion blur. I only use it for static things like discord though so its fine. Although I do have to say that it is still very usable and miles better than the passive matrix display on my 1994 IBM thinkpad 340 laptop, you can lose the mouse with that and it makes playing DOOM quite challenging!
You are so right. Upon buying my first 16:9 flat screen (had a 4:3 flat before), I was a bit shocked that my new monitor was way smaller than the old one.😂
My experience from selling TVs in the early 2000s was that people didn't like widescreen. If they were heavily invested in 4x3 video content, the picture was smaller.
because games haven't adopted the format yet. The moment people realized a properly done widescreen support gave them a whopping 30%+ edge over square-screen users in competitive games - square screens were on their way out.
@@wrmusic8736 i mean regardless of any competive advantage I still massively prefer a 4:3 or similar aspect ratio, i find the taller screens a lot better as i dont have good pherepheral vision especially to the sides and find taller more immersive
USA lagged behind Europe in widescreen. In the UK by 2000 all large screen sets were widescreen. Only portables would be 4:3. I was watching widescreen satellite transmissions from France in 1993.
A lot of people didn't understand that to properly use a widescreen TV you needed a wide screen video source. I remember hearing some woman in. a store saying how she would ever buy a wide screen TV because it made everyone look fat, not realising that it was just because she was watching a 4:3 tv broadcast that was being stretched to fill the screen. Personally i was an early adopter of wide screen tv, so much so that I actually had a wide screen CRT.
@@KonradZielinski and that was how the shops demonstrated them. I just checked and in the U.K. until at least 2002 the main channels with the most popular programmes like EastEnders were still broadcasting in 4:3.
Being the Owner of multiple CRT's (I mostly found on the side of the road) I easily named off every pro to CRT's you mentioned, however there was 1 more pro that you did not mention and that was how absolutely perfect the color represents on a CRT. For instance, plug in a N64 with a S-Video Muti-link cord and put in Goldeneye 64. Do this for both a CRT and a LCD or even OLED TV and you will immediately notice how bright and brilliant the Gold and the red is on the CRT, without completely washing out the color or losing sharpness around the Nintendo Logo when it flashes on the screen. Modern TVs simply do not have the color accuracy as even a old worn out CRT.
I was actually reading today about turning down the level of red on my JVC D series CRT because it’s way too bright compared to the other colors : ) I think it is an actual issue on JVCs
As someone born very late into the CRT era, around the turn of the millennium, this was quite interesting to me! I was especially surprised that the phosphor coating was just a powder barely attached to the glass like that!
If you've ever seen a CRT that has been "necked" (aka the back of the tube broke off from rough handling), you will see a light or dark circle in the center of the screen from the phosphor being partially blown away by rushing air. Easy way to spot a worthless tube from a distance and avoid picking it up and wasting time on it.
Man, this is _exactly_ my kind of video. 90's kid, so I grew up with these TVs. I knew how CRTs worked before this video, but there were multiple times that I exclaimed "huh!" when you showed me something I never considered (like the colored stripes going up vertically uninterrupted before the shadow mask.) EDIT: I just realized, I'm watching this video on a 49" 32:9 monitor that runs at 5,120x1440. We truly live in the future.
I appreciate your comment about new technology. Some in the retro community have the attitude that everything now is terrible and that it was so much better in the [80s/90s/2000s], that they had better childhoods than kids today, etc. There's a lot today that is both better and worse. It's just different and that is okay!
One CRT monitor we had back in the day (late 1980s-early 1990s) we called "the screamer," because it developed a loud scream-like noise as it aged. Amazingly enough, we were able to sell it in the auction at one of the early GenCon conventions we attended in Milwaukee (this was before GenCon moved to the Midwest Convention Center, so probably no later than 1997 or 1998).
I had a really high end 20" ViewSonic monitor back in the day and kept with that for a quite a few years, because it was a long time before any LCD with a reasonable price-tag could touch it in terms of quality.
I remember in the 1980s, monochrome displays almost seemed magical. They were SO CLEAR for text. I enjoyed Amber and Green screens on PCs, and of course black and white on the Atari ST for running the BBS. It’s very interesting that the dot pitch gap between color and monochrome didn’t really close until the late 1990s. This is a great video 8bit guy!
I think one important aspect about contrast ratio that wasn't discussed is that it's highly dependent on the environment you're in. If you're in a dark environment, CRTs are excellent, but when there's light, you get a lot of reflection of the grey phosphor coating, and the image will never, ever be darker than however bright that grey color is.
And that gray color is itself already due to the gray filter on the front CRT glass, which can either be a colorant in the front glass itself, or a plastic film laminated to the front. (TVs tend to be the former, computer displays the latter.) Without the gray filter, the phosphors appear nearly white. You could put a darker filter on it to improve contrast, but you’d have to increase the CRT brightness to compensate. (This is part of what made Triniton CRTs so successful: their thin wire aperture grille covered up far less of the phosphor than the shadow mask did, which had two effects: a) more of the phosphor lit up, and b) the wires didn’t heat up as much as a shadow mask, so you could run the electron guns at higher power without the shadow mask distorting. Both of those meant a much brighter image, which meant in turn that Sony could sacrifice more brightness towards contrast.)
Was trying to play some games on a consumer tube today, on my terrace, in a unusually sunny Finnish summer day. Playing Super Mario 64, I could indeed see a fat dude on the screen...
Exactly CRTs can only archive better contrast in a pitch black room any ambient light will raise the black level. Modern LCDs(especially VA) actually have better contrast than CRTs in typical viewing environment because the panels themself are much darker.
It's funny how easy it is to forget about quality of life issues like that when something is no longer an issue. You really did need to turn off any lights in the room or close the curtains/blinds all the way to watch anything, or there would be a reflection on the screen the whole time. It's amazing how LCDs normally mitigate that enough, if a light source isn't pointing directly at the screen.
And that wasn't that good. Being one of the first NES games the colour use in SMB was very crappy, and the NES suffered from rather bad quality RF/composite output. If you put in a game like Probotector or Power Blade, games from the 90's, the NES is looking way better, like a completely new generation console, often close to the SNES. Older computers like a CPC464 did way better in 1983 over RGB SCART and offered both lots of colours, and a crazy sharp no color bleed image.
@@lovemadeinjapan it does looks like the first SMB didn't utilise all NES graphic capabilities. SMB 2 is where it did utilise NES graphic capabilities to it's max
Great video! There is one more huge advantage I would hang to CRTs - motion clarity. The native motion clarity of a CRT is basically perfect. Sample and hold displays aren't able to achieve this without trickery (strobing, BFI etc) which has drawbacks and other requirements. If you load up something like Sonic on a CRT and an LCD at 60hz, it will appear blurry as it scrolls on even the latest LCDs. This is the primary reason I like to hang onto to CRTs.
Is this channel slowly dying now as well? It's already a shame your 8-Bit Keys channel's a 'ghosttown' now here on YT and as far as I'm concerned, there's still so much you'd do on/for it, so many toy keyboards to explore; etc and also there's a lot more to explore for this channel. Anyway, keep u the good work, even though it's at a (s)low pace, haha.
I believe the way the phospor stripes/dots were created is that they first coat one colour, then use a UV source at the position of that colour's electron gun to harden it. Then wash off the un-exposed phosphor and repeat for the other two colours.
I was JUST thinking about this the other day, and wondering how anyone managed that level of precision in commodity manufacturing as far back as the 60s. It seemed like there would be tons of alignment issues that would be like the "dead pixels" of the CRT industry. You must have 20% of your screen show the wrong color before you can claim the tube as defective. haha
I'm old enough to remember a lot of these especially the monitors. Around 1990 you started seeing high resolution, for the time, paper white displays. These were monochrome of course and designed for people who did a lot of word processing and the like. I always wanted one of those
Thank you! My parents couldn't figure out what I was talking about when I said their first 32 inch wide screen TV was the same size as their 27 inch 4:3 tv. It was the 27 inch TV with a little more room on the sides. The football Game my dad was watching wasn't any bigger, even though the screen technically had more inches. It was just wider.
the contrast bit reminds me of back in the day people seeing ads on tv for say a Magnavox tv and the voice over taking about how great the picture was and most folks didn't realize they were watching this amazing Magnavox picture on a RCA tv.
CRT is a holy grail of FPS games. I only gave up my CRT once gpu's stopped the support. Gdm-fw900 was a helluva monitor. Still got 420 euros out of it when I sold it couple years ago.
@@smiththers2 That GTX Titan doesn't hold a candle to the clarity that a Radeon can achieve on the same monitor and this is coming from a huge Nvidiot. Everything passed the GeForce 7000 series has shit clarity on a CRT, believe me I wish it wasn't so. I would much rather run a Titan X for my ultimate XP box.
My Dad used to be a TV repair engineer (1960s - 1990s) and he was the go to person when someone's TV had conked out before a game. Most of the time it was usually a valve/tube and cos I used to come along with him, I used to bag myself some treats. He passed away 2 years ago.
My uncle was one in the 1960s - 1980s before he changed career, and he also died in September 2022. The stories he would tell were funny and amazing about his TV repair days, both in the labs, production lines and in customers front rooms. They tended to ask for my uncle to come and fix their sets, rather than many of the other guys in the company as faults would just continue on for months or years, and then my uncle would show up and fix it permanently.
Zenith used vacuum tubes in TVs into the early '80s. My grandparents had a Zenith with both a digital channel display and pushbutton digital tuning but the actual image generation circuitry was still tube based and it had a decidedly warmer image output than the early all digital TVs. I have a Trinitron from 1977 in my collection and it is an entirely different animal. I didn't get my first LCD monitor until 2009, a 720p ViewSonic model.
CRTs exited my life around 2010 when my folks got the Sony Bravia tv we still use today. But once I found a new old stock CRT monitor it blew me away. The high refresh rate, perfect blacks and zero motion blur made it the best display I own. CRTs are such a cool technology, especially if you like playing older content, or want to gain some muscle.
I was always interested in the “de-gauzing” feature included in my old CRT monitor, I never understood how it worked until recently but I loved how it looked when I used it
Thanks a lot for these videos. Since I started learning computers as a teenager in the 90s - newer technology would come out and one thing would be replaced with another. Now I'm filling in the holes in my knowledge of how it all worked
One thing that a lot of people dont realize about modern LCD TVs is that over time the backilght will start to turn blue, since all white LEDs are just blue ones with a phosphorus coating on them to turn them white. It decomposes over time as the TV is left on. You will see blue TVs often in hotel rooms and other places they are left on all the time.
Very interesting video! Especially seeing the CRT picked apart! Close to 44 years of age and this is the first time I've seen it explained so clearly, thank you! =)
11:24 I still have my first DVD player: an Apex AD-1500 I bought from Circuit City back in late 1990s. I bought two more for my siblings for Christmas. They got rid of them after they were obsolete. 😂
Still have a few crts, specificaly use them for gaming, I grew up with them and still enjoy their picture quality for gaming and old laserdiscs. Love seeing videos like this, keeping the candle a live!
Despite Technology Connections doing the same idea years before you (actually there's a whole series), yours is still unique, and in my personal opinion, superior as no diagram can beat the simple act of breaking something apart and seeing the parts for yourself. Now I wanna know what happens if you activate the electron gun in open air, if you can safely look directly into it, and what that looks like if you can. Also would be cool to try to melt something with it.
I thought that you were going to talk more about the transition from B&W to color! The old B&W sets were actually 60hz, they had to lower the frequency somewhat to 59.94hz, and its legacy still continues on most monitors and TVs to this day!
@@gamecubeplayer Yep, almost every format is drop frame, there's very little that's actually the full, round framerate, and it's all thanks to the color TV transition.
I got my first LCD monitor in late 2008. Still watching this video on it today. I got rid of my last CRT widescreen TV in early 2020 (20 years in service), but managed to get some recordings in slow motion of the electron beam traversing the screen...
also, my LCD monitor still works great after 15 years, perhaps it has a slight color shift towards magenta? I don't know. My photos look great on it. But the monitor I replaced it with - a 17" Flatron LG CRT, really started behaving weird only after a few years. The brightness decreased, the screen size started shrinking erratically, I couldn't really do any graphics on it because of it. So I don't really miss CRTs that much...
David could read the phone book and it still would be interesting. I am that old, that CRT were explained at school. But David manages to get in some extra nerdy information which makes it fun to watch.
Wow one of the best explanations of how CRTs work! Funnily enough I've just recently acquired a number of Commodore 1084 monitors which I've been fixing up. I've always looked at LCDs as the superior technology, but have recently developed a new appreciation for CRTs especially for retro gaming. Thanks for the excellent video.
That Tandy VM-2 is in immaculate condition; I hope you restored it back! The ideal companion for a Color Computer 3 doing text-based work like TeleWriter 128 (or playing monochrome games like Dungeons of Daggorath or Caladuril: Flame of Light), or a Model 100/200/102 with a Disk/Video Interface.
Wow! Just wow. This was the best explanation of a CRT I’ve ever come across. I never fully understood how they worked, however after watching this video I feel a lot more confident in my knowledge. You truly have a gift for explaining things Mr. Guy! Never stop!
Back in 1983, my family got a Thomson TO7. One of the incredible thing was that you could raw on the huge TV using a light pen. With Pictor you could even make animation (given how limit memory there was it still blow my mind) of successive image. Many years later, on my Atari ST, I remember drawing three red, green, blue dot vertically on a black background in Neochrome. You could visually see that they formed a small "triangle" and were not on the same vertical line.
Very cool video - learned so much about this piece of tech that was present for so much of my life. Really enjoyed the color tube disassembly - it was interesting to see the phosphor stripes and metal shadow mask. I wonder how much modern manufacturing technologies could make a tighter stripe and finer shadow mask...
My dad (who grew up in 1960-70s England) said that even though you could get colour TVs fairly cheap it wasn’t worth buying them because most shows were still recorded in B&W until the mid 70s early 80s
I always wanted to see the inside of a tube and no one had ever demonstrated it in such a spectacular way, I have been following you since you were designing "Attack of the Petscii Robots" in your old blue room, and it is still one of my favorite channels, greetings from Argentina !
It’s so true about the aspect ratio. There were still few 4:3 with early days LCD but now just wide screen….: miss those days that bigger screen really has more displayable area.
It's funny how vacuum tube amplifiers are the still the sought-after best quality for musicians and audiophiles. The way the signal overdrives and creates harmonic distortions is considered more pleasing to the ear than digital. Similar nuance is seen in analog (actual tangible film) photos - there is a softness to it that looks great.
When you mention wide-screen TVs and the size shenanigans it reminded me of 4k being based on horizontal lines when all its predecessors used vertical lines hence by the old standard 4k is closer to 2k!
Thanks for showing all the parts! I've conceptually understood how CRTs worked, but getting to see the guts finally made it all "click." Still got my last gen 55" Samsung plasma TV I bought in 2015 when Best Buy was getting rid of their plasma stock. I love the picture on it more than all but the most expensive modern 4k oleds. I hope it lasts a long time, because I'm gonna be heartbroken when it croaks.
Another important benefit of CRT displays is the low persistence. If you are sensitive to that judder when watching panning scenes, that's what it's about
An old soldering gun works great as a degausser too. Had a tv when I was a kid I had to do this to a couple times. Got the tip from a friend who did tv repair.
Great video, very informative😊 Thanks for the hard work! As far as the 4:3 vs 16:9 aspect ratio preference goes, I'm a bit of two minds about it. I think we lost something when we moved away from 4:3, as it seems like a more "natural" adpect ratio to someone like me who was still born in the 70s. Whenever i think of past displays, i think 4:3, and displaying even old VHS tapes in an widescreen display means having to decide between a stretched image or black bars on the side, which always felt to me sub-optimal, no matter what you choose. On the other hand, a 16:9 display for laptops feels more natural. When i was a student i had a (rather expensive) XP laptop that stacked well with A4 sheets from my notes and assignments, so it felt easier to carry than a 4:3 one. In the end, there is room for everything, be it CRT or LCD, 4:3 or 16:9 😊
I remember almost 20 years ago going to like an out of town party for people on an internet message board thing. And some guy was there taking photos with his expensive SLR film camera. And someone asked him why he hasn't gone digital, and he said he'd never go digital. I bet he has by now. I had already switched to a digital camera by then. I got my first digital camera so I could take photos of items I was selling on eBay instead of stealing photos from other listings as eBay had started to crack down on that in the early 2000's.
Yup I was one that who fooled over the 4:3 and 16:9 screens. I was more SMRT than smart back in my younger years. One CRT I do miss a lot was the console version. A literal piece of furniture that was a beast to move, but fun to game/watch tv on.
0:49 Cue Cat barcodes spotted! 8:11 Jim “Trixter” Leonard! Now for my actual comment: I thought I wouldn’t learn anything from this but I learned a ton!
I love it! I’ve become known as the family’s CRT guy - whenever someone is clearing out closets and comes across one, they call! I’ve got a few setup in my classic arcade room, and 1 extra set aside in case one dies. We use them for light gun games and older systems that want rabbit ear connections.
Great video, fun to see inside a mostly intact CRT tube as you rarely get to see that. It was really a simple reason I didn't jump at LCDs when they first came out, the black/white level being VERY grey, took an eternity to fix that difference and even today it still comes up a bit with cheaper devices. I accepted that limitation for laptops because that was the only way to make them less bulky. As far as "proving" contrast ratio, you can't convince a person of that if they don't care ijs.😄 Living in the aftermath I still use both types for the various strengths and weaknesses you listed, LCDs sure can be made larger more easily than CRTs.😉 Largely it stems from having the content look the right way when displayed, where LCD CRT-filters and pixel interpolation-filters etc. are making headway in that department. Lag however would be fixable if screen manufacturers actually put some effort into the matter, but they won't so it will be around for a long time.☹
Your clear explanation style along with your simple visuals really inspires me to continue to learn, as corny as that may sound. Thanks for sharing your passion and knowlegde with us!!
Reminds me of the monitors of the mid-90s sporting .39mm or .28mm dot pitches, and those 17" Sony Trinitrons sporting fantastic dot resolution at our favorite 1152x864 resolution of the time!
Broadcast TV over the air and CRTs still feel like black magic to me, even after learning how it works. It seems crazy we figured that all out when we did.
In Europe, actually eveywhere except North America, tube size is advertised as the tube size itself, for instance, a 29" inch CRT is exactly the same size as a 27" TV in North America
I stayed with my CRT projector in my home theater for over 10 years. Eventually, I bought a DILA (JVC) projector, and I've never looked back. The sole area where the CRT was superior was in absolute black level. But since the JVC is much brighter than the CRT, the contrast ratio is superior. Also, I didn't have to mess with convergence as I did with the CRT. My desktop LCD monitor looks extreme sharp, and the contrast ratio is "good enough".
Another major benefit of CRTs for retro gaming is that they basically have no motion blur. I’m not super sensitive to blur, but it is something I notice. On the other hand, I love not having to worry about geometry on my oled, which often isn’t perfect on a lot of CRTs, particularly flat ones. The retrotink 4k looks fantastic on my oled, even if it’s only running at 60fps. At the end of the day, flat screen tech has come a long way in the last 10 years, and it’s only getting better, whereas crts have been stagnant since the early/mid aughts. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oled and Micro lcd (or whatever comes next) completely remove the need for crts within the next 10 years.
11:24 That is the exact model of RCA DVD player I had at the Sigma Nu house in college... I'm almost certain I still have it and that it worked when I last tried it.
I was a CRT engineer back in the 1960s. This video is a pretty good basic explanation. But, the stuff on the front glass is “phosphor,” not phosphorous.
Warning, do not put your hands near a CRT while it is on, or you may be zapped. Also, don’t try opening a CRT that is under vacuum. The whole tube could implode, shooting glass everywhere.
The dots or stripes were aligned with the shadow mask and electron guns. The inside front of the envelope was first coated with a phosphor of one color mixed with a light sensitive material. The mask was put in place and a light was shined from the position corresponding to the location of the electron gun for that color. The light caused the dots or lines to bind to the front glass. The mask was removed and the unbound phosphor was rinsed away. Repeat two more times for the other colors. Then remove the mask once more and flash a thin layer of aluminum on the gun side of the phosphors, to reflect emitted light forward and avoid static charges. Finally, seal the front panel to the rest of the envelope. Amazing for mass production of a $190-$200 CRT!!
I thought that it should be stated that this is not a light shock either. Heed this warning. This is a VERY massive and potentially lethal shock. The shock is 15,000 to 30,000 volts and what is more the major issue is the current. 1 amp is enough to stop the heart and this can happen even if the CRT is unpluged because the capacitors can hold a massive charge and that can discharge on to you. So do NOT service a CRT TV unless you are properly trained to do so.
@@InnocentSoul0283 It should further be noted that the capacitor in question is the tube itself. So disconnecting a tube's EHT cap doesn't mean you can't still get a shock.
I used to repair TVs until the early 80's... when he reached into the one that was turned on, I could feel the shock. Been there, done that.
I salute his steady and unshocked (on camera at least) hands.
Ah, that explains the tingling sensation! Now for some reason I wish I could do that again.
I always wondered how they "printed" the phosphor dots so accurately, with perfect alignment. They were doing it with light in the electron gun position! Thanks for answering this.
For those who want to know. The TL:DR of the Trinitron is they use an aperture grille instead of the shadow mask, as well as a single electron gun, with three separate cathodes.
I thought a Trinitron was more le one of those old projection screen TVs. Because you can adjust the convergence on a Trinitron.
Trinitron - where the 2 black horizontal lines let you know you had Quality, lol!
@@philojudaeusofalexandria9556 Depends on the screen size. 17" and under generally only had one brace wire, while 19" and larger had two.
@@philojudaeusofalexandria9556 The black horizontal lines were wires to stabilize the aperture grill on the screen.
@@philojudaeusofalexandria9556 But flatscreen technology sure looked impressive.
It’s impressive how they were able to line up the shadow mask and the phosphor so accurately.
Once you get the proportion right of the distance between shadow mask and screen, and the distance between electron gun and shadow mask, and you can get the holes in the shadow mask and the widths of the phosphor bands accurate enough, it's mostly a matter of putting a couple of permanent magnets in the right place on the outside of the tube, to let the electron beams hit their own phosphor correctly. Unfortunately especially in older CRT monitors and TV's it wasn't so easy to make the three beams hit the same spot at the same time, so you often see convergence errors especially around the edges and in the corners.
How did they do that back in the early 1900s?
@@MatthewCenance They didn't, black and white televisions don't have a shadow mask
@@MatthewCenance maybe turn it on, move it live and see what happens?
@@MatthewCenanceblack and white. Only needs white contrast for variation, but good question nonetheless. There was tons of lost data in old CRTs, but still some good detail for being the forerunner of moving images.
Honestly, the way CRTs work just sound so much more “advanced” in a way, like just the thought of getting an electron gun to shoot across the field that fast is incredible in hindsight, especially when you consider how some games were able to actually use that to creative effect- like how the waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog have a rainbow effect on a CRT.
Modern displays are boring by comparison, just a matrix of wires and pixels.
@@foch3 I think that's what keeps my passion fixated on crts over modern displays, there's just so much more to learn about
Sure, modern displays have their own limitations that take genius to overcome, but the end result has always been less interesting, at least to me personally
Just fyi the Sonic rainbow effect came from the Genesis/Megadrive's subpar composite output, not from CRTs. You'll get the same effect viewing it on any display through the composite out.
until you try using one
i had 17" until mid 00s
it's extremely slow at 75hz the whole picture is floaty and fuzzy, the corners are never aligned properly and it was 1280x1024
@@tsartomato I’ve used them plenty, grew up with a 13” mono color CRT that needed to be punched in its speaker if the sound went out(which was legit fun). I still love them, and the neat things you can do with them :3
There's a more recent technology called the "Laser Phosphor Display" where it's similar to a CRT but the beam of light is driven mechanically with a UV laser. This removes the need for a vaccuum seal and therefore a bulky weight, and also allows it to have very low power consumption on par with or better than today's OLED displays. I always thought this is a great way to preserve the look and feel of retro games, but no company seems to realize it.
They would need a larger market besides retro gamer's, plus I would think the mechanical nature would wear out quickly.
@@spencers4121 If that was true, mechanical jukeboxes would stop working within 1 month
mfw the company that has a patent on it hasn't made a consumer monitor with this tech and it doesn't expire for another 7½ years
A company called prysm is making them but they're only designed for business purposes.
No need for a phosphor screen. There are large projection systems that use separate R G B lasers deflected by spinning mirrors. Perfect convergence and focus no matter what the shape, angle or size of screen. Really expensive and hazardous to the eyes should one get in the way.
Thank you for the shadow mask demonstration. I've always understood the concept of "There's a metal sheet in here which magically somehow makes the guns only strike certain phosphors", but I never understood it was an alignment trick until your demonstration!
Same! This was a great demo!
@@HankW yes I really appreciated this part too. I understood in principle, but actually seeing the way it works really made it clear in my head. Nice work!
There was a class action lawsuit about the misleading way CRT sizes were described. That's why, in later ads, you'll see the size listed with wording like "15" TV (14" viewable)"
Must have only applied to the US. Years ago I remember a comedian on TV bring out a TV box as part of his act, and mocked the " 14" size (15" Canada) " markings.
The set makers advertised the screen size by using the same diagonal dimension that the CRT maker used - overall. But sets are made with bezels to cover the edge resulting in a smaller viewable area. There is no image right to edge of a CRT because of the thickness of the side glass. And a small part of the outermost edge of the image is covered because it turns out blurry due to the curve in the glass on the inside corner.
This also was only true for televisions. Monitors were generally still advertised with the total tube size until the very end.
I honestly never paid any attention to the "size" or "viewable area", with CRT's in the years past, or LCD's today. I look at the monitor in operation, and see if it's the size I want or not. Couldn't care less about the measurements.
I remember that! I owned a Compaq laptop back in the ‘90s and I got around $3 from a class-action lawsuit over the claimed size of the laptop’s screen.
This was the most illuminating "how CRTs work" video I've ever seen. Seeing the mask with the phosphor it, and suddenly it all made sense and CRT went from "magic" to "understandable".
Sitting here in my game room with 6 Sony PVMs and an HD CRT. CRTs still are alive and well for me.
Laughs in 4K noob. Cry and cope.
Cheater.
@@lovemadeinjapanWhat?
@@DanTDMJace Too much horizontal resolution, it ruins the games. Consumer CRT's FTW.
4:45 - the little monitors attached to studio TV cameras were still B&W in the 90s when I operated them. It gave you the sharp image you needed to tell if you were in focus, and the control booth proc amps saw to the color calibration. I haven’t worked one in a long time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they still are.
The control booth also had vector scopes and waveform monitors for calibration.
This video is a masterpiece. First I thought: "I've seen Technology Connections already", but this video goes very deep and is more hands-on. I have never seen a CRT tube from the inside before :-) Thanks!
Yeah, if Alec explained what a shadow mask is and how it works, I clearly missed that part. As crude as it was, David's little animation explained it really well.
I love when videos like this remind me of things. I remember when DVDs gave you the option of what format you wanted to watch it in.
Smearing away the phosphor with your finger like that was MIND BLOWING.
? It's just like a florescent lightbulb...
You're easily amused.
@@WinterInTheForestOh no, he’s not a dopamine zombie 🙄
you never smashed tvs when you were a kid.......
I never knew either that it could remove so easily. I thought it was some form of like metallic or plastic, whatever, film that's completely embedded phosphor.
There is a very specific feeling when playing on a CRT arcade. Games become more cartoonish I think. That I think is what us retro people actually remembers and miss the most of from those days, I think that feeling is stronger than what specific console or computer it was. The CRT feeling.
In terms of aspect ratio. I think the key reason why 16:9 got popular, was because it fit most movie and DVD videos better. Even though for computing one usually wants more horizontal space.
Yeah, and at that time lots of video games were coming out with FMV cut scenes, taking advantage of CD-ROMs and graphics. So there was a general appetite/expectation that soon everything would be a movie.
Good thing that you can rotate most screens around a pivot point nowadays. I used to have such a setup at work to have one screen only for the purpose of viewing documentation. Only downside is when they have a limited viewing angle.
And movies are widescreen because people have two eyes side by side. We see wider than tall
@@Tyneras 16:10 would still be the better choice for general computer use...
I’m still enjoying two 30” apple cinema displays in 16:10. Sure miss that extra height on 16:9.
You forgot another drawback of LCD displays: They require time to change the brightness of each pixel or subpixel, whereas the intensity of an electron gun can be changed instantly. And because the CRT rebuilds the entire image from scratch each time the screen is refreshed, pixels can change as fast as the CRT can refresh the screen. With an LCD, how fast pixels can change depends on many factors, including which color you want to change from to which color. For many years, response time was one of the most important limiting factors of any TFT. Thanks to tricks like overdrive, they have gotten better over the years, but even today, switching from black to white or vice versa is typically faster on a TFT than switching from one gray scale to another. And while TFTs may claim 9 ms switching times in their manuals (enough to display 111 frames per second), that's usually just their "best case" time. On average, the same monitor may have a switching time of only 14 ms (just enough for 71 frames per second), and if that is the average, you can estimate the worst case switching time. Keep in mind that there is little point in running a monitor at 120 Hz if it cannot actually display 120 frames per second, as some information will simply never make it to the screen. Worse, the image will become blurred as the information from two or more images is blended together to some degree. The result is unwanted motion blur, which gamers especially hate. None of these problems existed with CRT. The only limiting factor with CRT was the refresh rate, and if your CRT had a refresh rate of 120 Hz, it really did display 120 completely separate images per second.
How can the human eye still detect motion blur here? I cannot even full screen 80Hz flicker. 120 Hz is the GPU (and gameloop) making up for the lag of LCD and internet.
Even modern LCDs struggle to keep up with the refresh rates that are advertised. They all do overdrive, but usually for the higher refresh rates the overdrive has to be so aggressive that you end up with overshoot which creates inverse ghosting
Good point.
I always wondered at how and why corrunt lcd screens could display 120kz content of a panel itself simply cannot even keep up with 60 or 80fps? Thus resulting in motion blur.
Crt screen could keep up with 120fps content thus it will not view any motion blur.
However so i have only seen 100hz tv’s wich even don’t process 100hz content at all, all what they do is doubling or creating new frames from 30fps or 60fps content (depending on it’s resolution and/or type cable) to generate 100fps on screen but it’s artificially created by a processor, so it’s not real 100hz content.
And with such low response time of lcd screens in mind, i simply just don’t understand why and how on earth todays smartphones are 120hz, that’s just silly and power wasting to me.
Let's not forget the phosphors had a decay time yet it was very very low, about 100usec for blue and green typical phosphor, 1msec for red.
@@Bob-1802 this is slower than drawing a scanline, yet on high speed cameras you can see that only part of the line lights up at any time.
I'm definitely old. I went to High School in the mid '70s and took a Radio/TV repair shop class and we learned how to repair TVs. My achievement was finding two different TVs that were both broken but the guts were the same even though they were different models. So I took the CRT from one and put it in the other and got myself a Free 25" color TV and I put it in my bedroom. The family TV was a 19" black and white one in the den. I have lots of experience with playing around with the yokes and such. Also I burned my finger once in the flyback cage. It actually just went in one side and out the other side of my finger. Otherwise I'd be dead now.
There's something so absolutely wrong about seeing an old computer menu just cleanly and uniformly rotate like that. 3:50
I know, right? :D
Reminds me of seeing screen content programmatically (!) fading from or to black in the VGA era for the first time, something that was only doable by adjusting the knobs on the screen before, as part of a personal adjustment, but not in software.
it's oddly satisfying
I imagine a lot of zoomers' minds were blown.
@@s4ndwichMakeR It's always wild seeing something which wasn't possible before. :D Now I understand why so many DOS games do it; it was one of the cool new things of the era. I hadn't made the conection before.
I was one of those who hung on to CRTs as long as I could. I simply did not like the "ghosting" that was so common on early LCDs -- that's one thing that CRTs definitely did not suffer from. Pixel response times were essentially zero on a CRT. Heck, my first high-definition television was a DLP, not an LCD, because I hated the "streaks" that would appear on early LCD televisions when the picture would pan left or right. (And I didn't suffer from the "rainbow effect" that bothered some people watching DLP TVs.)
I was very much anti-LCD for a very long time. It was 2009 before I bought my first LCD monitor. And 2010 before I bought my first LCD TV. But I freely admit that *today's* LCDs are superb. The technology finally overcame the shortcomings that bothered me most -- pixel response time and contrast ratio.
I heard the PSP had ghosting issues on the old one, and the new PSP apparently had interlacing issues instead.
It's pretty amazing how far LCDs have come. There were other techs that were well developed earlier like DLP, SXRD, and Plasma but the LCD kept progressing. LEDs are really what really changed things, especially when they become to use backlit arrays that could turn on and off lighting in areas. Mini-LEDs have progressed that further, although there is still some light bleed visible on black screens when other areas are lit, but they do give LCDs something closer to black than before. Quantum dots can further help here.
But the CRT was and is an amazing technology. Ultimately I think the biggest thing that gave the LCD its victory was not merely price, it was also weight and ease of use. It is ridiculous how light a 60" LCD TV is compared to Plasma, Rear projection screens, and CRTs. The 40" Sony Trintron Wega weighed 304 lbs. A 65" Bravia X90L weights just 53.4 lbs without the stand. Price + ease of use + weight all make the LCD hard to beat.
The LCD has also led the way in driving down TV costs. My family bought a front projection RCA television with three CRTs that folded open. Analog Tuner. Analog to fold it open. Cost over $10,000 in current dollars when adjusted for inflation and was 50". You can buy a good 50" TV nowadays (with a little less real estate, as was noted in the video) for less than 1/10 of that price. TV prices have fallen by over 90% in most cases when we adjust for inflation over the past 40-50 years.
Yeah my third monitor is an early 2000s LCD and the ghosting is BAD, everything has motion blur. I only use it for static things like discord though so its fine. Although I do have to say that it is still very usable and miles better than the passive matrix display on my 1994 IBM thinkpad 340 laptop, you can lose the mouse with that and it makes playing DOOM quite challenging!
Indeed! I posted quite a long comment about this. The 500hz gaming screens are pretty nuts 🥜
On CRTs, you can still see a bright object leave a trail behind against a black background. So there is still "fade out" time, just not fade in time.
You are so right. Upon buying my first 16:9 flat screen (had a 4:3 flat before), I was a bit shocked that my new monitor was way smaller than the old one.😂
My experience from selling TVs in the early 2000s was that people didn't like widescreen. If they were heavily invested in 4x3 video content, the picture was smaller.
because games haven't adopted the format yet. The moment people realized a properly done widescreen support gave them a whopping 30%+ edge over square-screen users in competitive games - square screens were on their way out.
@@wrmusic8736 i mean regardless of any competive advantage I still massively prefer a 4:3 or similar aspect ratio, i find the taller screens a lot better as i dont have good pherepheral vision especially to the sides and find taller more immersive
USA lagged behind Europe in widescreen. In the UK by 2000 all large screen sets were widescreen. Only portables would be 4:3. I was watching widescreen satellite transmissions from France in 1993.
A lot of people didn't understand that to properly use a widescreen TV you needed a wide screen video source. I remember hearing some woman in. a store saying how she would ever buy a wide screen TV because it made everyone look fat, not realising that it was just because she was watching a 4:3 tv broadcast that was being stretched to fill the screen. Personally i was an early adopter of wide screen tv, so much so that I actually had a wide screen CRT.
@@KonradZielinski and that was how the shops demonstrated them. I just checked and in the U.K. until at least 2002 the main channels with the most popular programmes like EastEnders were still broadcasting in 4:3.
Our family CRT TV from the 80s still works while we have gone through several flat screen, lcd, led, and oled TVs.
Sunday night (for me in Germany), a 8-bit guy video drops and everything stops for 20 minutes! Hope to see your arcade when I visit TX this August.
Being the Owner of multiple CRT's (I mostly found on the side of the road) I easily named off every pro to CRT's you mentioned, however there was 1 more pro that you did not mention and that was how absolutely perfect the color represents on a CRT. For instance, plug in a N64 with a S-Video Muti-link cord and put in Goldeneye 64. Do this for both a CRT and a LCD or even OLED TV and you will immediately notice how bright and brilliant the Gold and the red is on the CRT, without completely washing out the color or losing sharpness around the Nintendo Logo when it flashes on the screen. Modern TVs simply do not have the color accuracy as even a old worn out CRT.
I was actually reading today about turning down the level of red on my JVC D series CRT because it’s way too bright compared to the other colors : ) I think it is an actual issue on JVCs
As someone born very late into the CRT era, around the turn of the millennium, this was quite interesting to me! I was especially surprised that the phosphor coating was just a powder barely attached to the glass like that!
In his VCF video, he broke neck of the tube to the space invaders clone cocktail table and you could see where the air blew the phosphor off the tube.
@@cooperschwartz318So the thing was launched very far?
@@MatthewCenance No, it's a vacuum so the air was rushing in.
If you've ever seen a CRT that has been "necked" (aka the back of the tube broke off from rough handling), you will see a light or dark circle in the center of the screen from the phosphor being partially blown away by rushing air.
Easy way to spot a worthless tube from a distance and avoid picking it up and wasting time on it.
Man, this is _exactly_ my kind of video. 90's kid, so I grew up with these TVs. I knew how CRTs worked before this video, but there were multiple times that I exclaimed "huh!" when you showed me something I never considered (like the colored stripes going up vertically uninterrupted before the shadow mask.)
EDIT: I just realized, I'm watching this video on a 49" 32:9 monitor that runs at 5,120x1440. We truly live in the future.
I appreciate your comment about new technology. Some in the retro community have the attitude that everything now is terrible and that it was so much better in the [80s/90s/2000s], that they had better childhoods than kids today, etc. There's a lot today that is both better and worse. It's just different and that is okay!
One CRT monitor we had back in the day (late 1980s-early 1990s) we called "the screamer," because it developed a loud scream-like noise as it aged. Amazingly enough, we were able to sell it in the auction at one of the early GenCon conventions we attended in Milwaukee (this was before GenCon moved to the Midwest Convention Center, so probably no later than 1997 or 1998).
I had a really high end 20" ViewSonic monitor back in the day and kept with that for a quite a few years, because it was a long time before any LCD with a reasonable price-tag could touch it in terms of quality.
I remember in the 1980s, monochrome displays almost seemed magical. They were SO CLEAR for text. I enjoyed Amber and Green screens on PCs, and of course black and white on the Atari ST for running the BBS. It’s very interesting that the dot pitch gap between color and monochrome didn’t really close until the late 1990s. This is a great video 8bit guy!
I think one important aspect about contrast ratio that wasn't discussed is that it's highly dependent on the environment you're in. If you're in a dark environment, CRTs are excellent, but when there's light, you get a lot of reflection of the grey phosphor coating, and the image will never, ever be darker than however bright that grey color is.
And that gray color is itself already due to the gray filter on the front CRT glass, which can either be a colorant in the front glass itself, or a plastic film laminated to the front. (TVs tend to be the former, computer displays the latter.) Without the gray filter, the phosphors appear nearly white.
You could put a darker filter on it to improve contrast, but you’d have to increase the CRT brightness to compensate. (This is part of what made Triniton CRTs so successful: their thin wire aperture grille covered up far less of the phosphor than the shadow mask did, which had two effects: a) more of the phosphor lit up, and b) the wires didn’t heat up as much as a shadow mask, so you could run the electron guns at higher power without the shadow mask distorting. Both of those meant a much brighter image, which meant in turn that Sony could sacrifice more brightness towards contrast.)
The light effect can easily be fixed with a filter on the glass that prevents sunlight from refracting
Was trying to play some games on a consumer tube today, on my terrace, in a unusually sunny Finnish summer day. Playing Super Mario 64, I could indeed see a fat dude on the screen...
Exactly CRTs can only archive better contrast in a pitch black room any ambient light will raise the black level. Modern LCDs(especially VA) actually have better contrast than CRTs in typical viewing environment because the panels themself are much darker.
It's funny how easy it is to forget about quality of life issues like that when something is no longer an issue. You really did need to turn off any lights in the room or close the curtains/blinds all the way to watch anything, or there would be a reflection on the screen the whole time. It's amazing how LCDs normally mitigate that enough, if a light source isn't pointing directly at the screen.
I played the original Super Mario Bros on an old CRT TV recently and the picture was amazing. It was a really, really good experience.
Old game consoles really do need to be played on the displays of the era.
Even the N64, and original Xbox look better on a CRT.
Even the Flat CRT look great on them. I am now officially an LCD hater that’s mean LED, Mini LED and QLED
And that wasn't that good. Being one of the first NES games the colour use in SMB was very crappy, and the NES suffered from rather bad quality RF/composite output. If you put in a game like Probotector or Power Blade, games from the 90's, the NES is looking way better, like a completely new generation console, often close to the SNES. Older computers like a CPC464 did way better in 1983 over RGB SCART and offered both lots of colours, and a crazy sharp no color bleed image.
@@lovemadeinjapan it does looks like the first SMB didn't utilise all NES graphic capabilities. SMB 2 is where it did utilise NES graphic capabilities to it's max
@@alpzepta Even SMB2 was warming up material. It is very simple compared to the titles I mentioned. After 1990 the NES got really mature.
Dude, this was really fascinating! Great job.
Great video! There is one more huge advantage I would hang to CRTs - motion clarity. The native motion clarity of a CRT is basically perfect. Sample and hold displays aren't able to achieve this without trickery (strobing, BFI etc) which has drawbacks and other requirements. If you load up something like Sonic on a CRT and an LCD at 60hz, it will appear blurry as it scrolls on even the latest LCDs. This is the primary reason I like to hang onto to CRTs.
Finally I understood how the shadow mask works and how it manages to only and exactly hit the right color. Great explanation, great video. Thanks!
Is this channel slowly dying now as well? It's already a shame your 8-Bit Keys channel's a 'ghosttown' now here on YT and as far as I'm concerned, there's still so much you'd do on/for it, so many toy keyboards to explore; etc and also there's a lot more to explore for this channel. Anyway, keep u the good work, even though it's at a (s)low pace, haha.
I believe the way the phospor stripes/dots were created is that they first coat one colour, then use a UV source at the position of that colour's electron gun to harden it. Then wash off the un-exposed phosphor and repeat for the other two colours.
I was JUST thinking about this the other day, and wondering how anyone managed that level of precision in commodity manufacturing as far back as the 60s. It seemed like there would be tons of alignment issues that would be like the "dead pixels" of the CRT industry. You must have 20% of your screen show the wrong color before you can claim the tube as defective. haha
I'm old enough to remember a lot of these especially the monitors. Around 1990 you started seeing high resolution, for the time, paper white displays. These were monochrome of course and designed for people who did a lot of word processing and the like. I always wanted one of those
I'm 24 and when he said that mostly only 'old' people keep CRTs, I turned around to look at my (growing) CRT collection.
Nothing like the glow of the electron beam
I am in hopes to buy a HD CRT at some point.
I wish they were cheap
They are only getting dimmer and pricier
@@gabrielvieira6529they arr if you dumpster dive
Thank you! My parents couldn't figure out what I was talking about when I said their first 32 inch wide screen TV was the same size as their 27 inch 4:3 tv. It was the 27 inch TV with a little more room on the sides. The football Game my dad was watching wasn't any bigger, even though the screen technically had more inches. It was just wider.
the contrast bit reminds me of back in the day people seeing ads on tv for say a Magnavox tv and the voice over taking about how great the picture was and most folks didn't realize they were watching this amazing Magnavox picture on a RCA tv.
CRT is a holy grail of FPS games. I only gave up my CRT once gpu's stopped the support. Gdm-fw900 was a helluva monitor. Still got 420 euros out of it when I sold it couple years ago.
i keep a GTX Titan card around for JUST that reason. its obviously not my daily driver anymore, but its the fastest vga capable gpu.
was
@@smiththers2 That GTX Titan doesn't hold a candle to the clarity that a Radeon can achieve on the same monitor and this is coming from a huge Nvidiot. Everything passed the GeForce 7000 series has shit clarity on a CRT, believe me I wish it wasn't so. I would much rather run a Titan X for my ultimate XP box.
My Dad used to be a TV repair engineer (1960s - 1990s) and he was the go to person when someone's TV had conked out before a game. Most of the time it was usually a valve/tube and cos I used to come along with him, I used to bag myself some treats.
He passed away 2 years ago.
My uncle was one in the 1960s - 1980s before he changed career, and he also died in September 2022. The stories he would tell were funny and amazing about his TV repair days, both in the labs, production lines and in customers front rooms. They tended to ask for my uncle to come and fix their sets, rather than many of the other guys in the company as faults would just continue on for months or years, and then my uncle would show up and fix it permanently.
If you imagine the dots on the phosphor as "bits" you have a form of random-access computer memory. Of course this was actually in use at one time.
Zenith used vacuum tubes in TVs into the early '80s. My grandparents had a Zenith with both a digital channel display and pushbutton digital tuning but the actual image generation circuitry was still tube based and it had a decidedly warmer image output than the early all digital TVs. I have a Trinitron from 1977 in my collection and it is an entirely different animal. I didn't get my first LCD monitor until 2009, a 720p ViewSonic model.
CRTs exited my life around 2010 when my folks got the Sony Bravia tv we still use today. But once I found a new old stock CRT monitor it blew me away. The high refresh rate, perfect blacks and zero motion blur made it the best display I own. CRTs are such a cool technology, especially if you like playing older content, or want to gain some muscle.
I was always interested in the “de-gauzing” feature included in my old CRT monitor, I never understood how it worked until recently but I loved how it looked when I used it
Thanks a lot for these videos. Since I started learning computers as a teenager in the 90s - newer technology would come out and one thing would be replaced with another. Now I'm filling in the holes in my knowledge of how it all worked
One thing that a lot of people dont realize about modern LCD TVs is that over time the backilght will start to turn blue, since all white LEDs are just blue ones with a phosphorus coating on them to turn them white. It decomposes over time as the TV is left on. You will see blue TVs often in hotel rooms and other places they are left on all the time.
Very interesting video! Especially seeing the CRT picked apart! Close to 44 years of age and this is the first time I've seen it explained so clearly, thank you! =)
Wait he hasn't done this before??????
no way, madeline celeste! he has in fact NOT which is very surprising
11:24 I still have my first DVD player: an Apex AD-1500 I bought from Circuit City back in late 1990s. I bought two more for my siblings for Christmas. They got rid of them after they were obsolete. 😂
Still have a few crts, specificaly use them for gaming, I grew up with them and still enjoy their picture quality for gaming and old laserdiscs. Love seeing videos like this, keeping the candle a live!
Despite Technology Connections doing the same idea years before you (actually there's a whole series), yours is still unique, and in my personal opinion, superior as no diagram can beat the simple act of breaking something apart and seeing the parts for yourself.
Now I wanna know what happens if you activate the electron gun in open air, if you can safely look directly into it, and what that looks like if you can. Also would be cool to try to melt something with it.
I thought that you were going to talk more about the transition from B&W to color! The old B&W sets were actually 60hz, they had to lower the frequency somewhat to 59.94hz, and its legacy still continues on most monitors and TVs to this day!
that also gave us the 23.976hz nonsense which is still used in modern digital cameras
@@gamecubeplayer Yep, almost every format is drop frame, there's very little that's actually the full, round framerate, and it's all thanks to the color TV transition.
I got my first LCD monitor in late 2008. Still watching this video on it today. I got rid of my last CRT widescreen TV in early 2020 (20 years in service), but managed to get some recordings in slow motion of the electron beam traversing the screen...
also, my LCD monitor still works great after 15 years, perhaps it has a slight color shift towards magenta? I don't know. My photos look great on it. But the monitor I replaced it with - a 17" Flatron LG CRT, really started behaving weird only after a few years. The brightness decreased, the screen size started shrinking erratically, I couldn't really do any graphics on it because of it. So I don't really miss CRTs that much...
David could read the phone book and it still would be interesting.
I am that old, that CRT were explained at school.
But David manages to get in some extra nerdy information which makes it fun to watch.
Wow one of the best explanations of how CRTs work! Funnily enough I've just recently acquired a number of Commodore 1084 monitors which I've been fixing up. I've always looked at LCDs as the superior technology, but have recently developed a new appreciation for CRTs especially for retro gaming. Thanks for the excellent video.
That Tandy VM-2 is in immaculate condition; I hope you restored it back! The ideal companion for a Color Computer 3 doing text-based work like TeleWriter 128 (or playing monochrome games like Dungeons of Daggorath or Caladuril: Flame of Light), or a Model 100/200/102 with a Disk/Video Interface.
The input lag thing is so true. I can only beat Mike Tyson’s punch out on a CRT because modern TV just isn’t fast enough.
Wow! Just wow. This was the best explanation of a CRT I’ve ever come across. I never fully understood how they worked, however after watching this video I feel a lot more confident in my knowledge. You truly have a gift for explaining things Mr. Guy! Never stop!
Back in 1983, my family got a Thomson TO7. One of the incredible thing was that you could raw on the huge TV using a light pen. With Pictor you could even make animation (given how limit memory there was it still blow my mind) of successive image.
Many years later, on my Atari ST, I remember drawing three red, green, blue dot vertically on a black background in Neochrome. You could visually see that they formed a small "triangle" and were not on the same vertical line.
RUclipsr explains Tubes on RUclips video to You via your Tube. Good stuff
Thank you for putting this together, crt's are fun and I've always wanted to take one apart
Very cool video - learned so much about this piece of tech that was present for so much of my life. Really enjoyed the color tube disassembly - it was interesting to see the phosphor stripes and metal shadow mask. I wonder how much modern manufacturing technologies could make a tighter stripe and finer shadow mask...
My dad (who grew up in 1960-70s England) said that even though you could get colour TVs fairly cheap it wasn’t worth buying them because most shows were still recorded in B&W until the mid 70s early 80s
I always wanted to see the inside of a tube and no one had ever demonstrated it in such a spectacular way, I have been following you since you were designing "Attack of the Petscii Robots" in your old blue room, and it is still one of my favorite channels, greetings from Argentina !
It’s so true about the aspect ratio. There were still few 4:3 with early days LCD but now just wide screen….: miss those days that bigger screen really has more displayable area.
Recipe of my perfect morning is: flavorful coffee + tasty dessert + new video from 8bit Guy
It's funny how vacuum tube amplifiers are the still the sought-after best quality for musicians and audiophiles.
The way the signal overdrives and creates harmonic distortions is considered more pleasing to the ear than digital.
Similar nuance is seen in analog (actual tangible film) photos - there is a softness to it that looks great.
3:46 - Now, kids don't try it at home!
At least wear some rubber gloves.
@@jacko101 don't give ideas about that! 😂
There was another video where the 8 bit guy brought up the ol' 16x9 vs 4x3 total viewing area debate. It's funny to see its return here 🤣
When you mention wide-screen TVs and the size shenanigans it reminded me of 4k being based on horizontal lines when all its predecessors used vertical lines hence by the old standard 4k is closer to 2k!
Thanks for showing all the parts! I've conceptually understood how CRTs worked, but getting to see the guts finally made it all "click."
Still got my last gen 55" Samsung plasma TV I bought in 2015 when Best Buy was getting rid of their plasma stock. I love the picture on it more than all but the most expensive modern 4k oleds. I hope it lasts a long time, because I'm gonna be heartbroken when it croaks.
Another important benefit of CRT displays is the low persistence. If you are sensitive to that judder when watching panning scenes, that's what it's about
An old soldering gun works great as a degausser too. Had a tv when I was a kid I had to do this to a couple times. Got the tip from a friend who did tv repair.
Great video, very informative😊 Thanks for the hard work!
As far as the 4:3 vs 16:9 aspect ratio preference goes, I'm a bit of two minds about it. I think we lost something when we moved away from 4:3, as it seems like a more "natural" adpect ratio to someone like me who was still born in the 70s. Whenever i think of past displays, i think 4:3, and displaying even old VHS tapes in an widescreen display means having to decide between a stretched image or black bars on the side, which always felt to me sub-optimal, no matter what you choose.
On the other hand, a 16:9 display for laptops feels more natural. When i was a student i had a (rather expensive) XP laptop that stacked well with A4 sheets from my notes and assignments, so it felt easier to carry than a 4:3 one.
In the end, there is room for everything, be it CRT or LCD, 4:3 or 16:9 😊
that's why we have OLED screens because they fully fix the issue with showing black
I remember almost 20 years ago going to like an out of town party for people on an internet message board thing. And some guy was there taking photos with his expensive SLR film camera. And someone asked him why he hasn't gone digital, and he said he'd never go digital. I bet he has by now. I had already switched to a digital camera by then. I got my first digital camera so I could take photos of items I was selling on eBay instead of stealing photos from other listings as eBay had started to crack down on that in the early 2000's.
I used to work in a computer service in the late 90s with monitors as largest part of reparable peripheral. I loved to use the degaussing circle! ☺️
Yup I was one that who fooled over the 4:3 and 16:9 screens. I was more SMRT than smart back in my younger years. One CRT I do miss a lot was the console version. A literal piece of furniture that was a beast to move, but fun to game/watch tv on.
YES
0:49 Cue Cat barcodes spotted! 8:11 Jim “Trixter” Leonard! Now for my actual comment: I thought I wouldn’t learn anything from this but I learned a ton!
I love it! I’ve become known as the family’s CRT guy - whenever someone is clearing out closets and comes across one, they call!
I’ve got a few setup in my classic arcade room, and 1 extra set aside in case one dies. We use them for light gun games and older systems that want rabbit ear connections.
Nice to watch another vid David. It's been a while. Keep them coming please.
Great video, fun to see inside a mostly intact CRT tube as you rarely get to see that.
It was really a simple reason I didn't jump at LCDs when they first came out, the black/white level being VERY grey, took an eternity to fix that difference and even today it still comes up a bit with cheaper devices. I accepted that limitation for laptops because that was the only way to make them less bulky. As far as "proving" contrast ratio, you can't convince a person of that if they don't care ijs.😄
Living in the aftermath I still use both types for the various strengths and weaknesses you listed, LCDs sure can be made larger more easily than CRTs.😉 Largely it stems from having the content look the right way when displayed, where LCD CRT-filters and pixel interpolation-filters etc. are making headway in that department. Lag however would be fixable if screen manufacturers actually put some effort into the matter, but they won't so it will be around for a long time.☹
12:21 caught me off guard 😂 that looks like the "chad" face, wonder if that was intentional 🤔
Seems like this channel is dead
Your clear explanation style along with your simple visuals really inspires me to continue to learn, as corny as that may sound. Thanks for sharing your passion and knowlegde with us!!
As an engineer myself, old engineering is so amazing and intimidating.
Shout out to the retro speedrunners still using the CRTs. The delay on LCDs just doesn't hack it when you need to rescue the princess under 5 minutes.
Reminds me of the monitors of the mid-90s sporting .39mm or .28mm dot pitches, and those 17" Sony Trinitrons sporting fantastic dot resolution at our favorite 1152x864 resolution of the time!
Broadcast TV over the air and CRTs still feel like black magic to me, even after learning how it works. It seems crazy we figured that all out when we did.
3:59 thought we wouldn’t notice the NX-01 Enterprise, but we did.
In Europe, actually eveywhere except North America, tube size is advertised as the tube size itself, for instance, a 29" inch CRT is exactly the same size as a 27" TV in North America
I first read "How Cathode Ray Dude works" and got mentally ready for a weird unexpected collab video.
Then reality hit me...
Yep, i think many of us have taken a magnet to a color crt. I seem to remember that it took a while for the picture to return to regular quality.
I stayed with my CRT projector in my home theater for over 10 years. Eventually, I bought a DILA (JVC) projector, and I've never looked back. The sole area where the CRT was superior was in absolute black level. But since the JVC is much brighter than the CRT, the contrast ratio is superior. Also, I didn't have to mess with convergence as I did with the CRT. My desktop LCD monitor looks extreme sharp, and the contrast ratio is "good enough".
Another major benefit of CRTs for retro gaming is that they basically have no motion blur. I’m not super sensitive to blur, but it is something I notice.
On the other hand, I love not having to worry about geometry on my oled, which often isn’t perfect on a lot of CRTs, particularly flat ones. The retrotink 4k looks fantastic on my oled, even if it’s only running at 60fps.
At the end of the day, flat screen tech has come a long way in the last 10 years, and it’s only getting better, whereas crts have been stagnant since the early/mid aughts. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oled and Micro lcd (or whatever comes next) completely remove the need for crts within the next 10 years.
11:24 That is the exact model of RCA DVD player I had at the Sigma Nu house in college... I'm almost certain I still have it and that it worked when I last tried it.