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[methylatedspirit]

Wait, are CRTs more color-accurate than even the best LCDs? Then again, "color fidelity" is somewhat ambiguous. I'm torn between whether that term means "color accuracy" or "color resolution".

It is basically the case that color resolution is lower than luminance resolution, but that applies for both analog and digital systems. Both the NTSC and PAL formats, they never transmitted color at the same bandwidth as luminance anyway. NTSC, for instance, assigns 4.2 MHz for Y (luminance), 1.6 MHz for I, and 0.6 MHz for Q (I and Q are the color components encoded in some way that I don't know). I suspect PAL's roughly the same; it's mostly just NTSC, but with that phase-alternating line that prevents the hue from shifting with a bad signal. That's for composite; I'm not certain if S-Video is under those same bandwidth constraints.

Or is it similar to vinyl, in that there's a certain aesthetic to CRTs that's hard to replicate with an LCD? A calibrated, color-accurate, high-quality LCD (combined with an excellent upscaler + converter) can absolutely reproduce each and every pixel exactly as the underlying specifications say it should, but would there just be something missing from the experience? I ain't knocking anyone for that. It's boring to follow exacting specifications.

[Vector]

I'm not sure what it is, but my anime DVDs had this incredible warm glow on the CRT that they just don't on LCD stuff. The sound quality was often better, too.

Is it because I'm not willing to drop a bunch of money on a nice LCD? Yeah, perhaps. But also, the CRT was a low-quality inexpensive TV. And it looked way better than what we have now without significant added time and effort. Also, it lasted us like 20 years: we got it when we finally transitioned from a B&W set in the early 90s, lost it when TV signal went from analog to digital in ... I think the '10s.

[Arx]

Wait, are CRTs more color-accurate than even the best LCDs? Then again, "color fidelity" is somewhat ambiguous. I'm torn between whether that term means "color accuracy" or "color resolution".

Colour gamut is a complicated topic because there are so many different things it can involve.

The most common colour space is sRGB which was designed some time around '98 to reflect the capabilities of most CRT displays. The snag is that basically no two technologies display exactly the same colours. In LCD displays it depends mainly on the backlight, AFAIK, which can vary between manufacturers, but crucially very few LCD displays I'm aware of have perfect sRGB coverage. You end up with a situation where your display covers most of sRGB and then a few extra bits, but any video originally encoded for sRGB is going to look a little off as the missing parts are replaced with the nearest available.

Here's a neat graphic from EIZO, a high-quality monitor company:



The wonky shape is a projection into 2D of the approximate colours most people can discern. The polygons on top represent some standard colour spaces.

You can see if you were to make something using a really strong green in the Adobe RGB space and then display it using the sRGB colour space you'd be a little sad as the green would be squished to fit in. The same thing happens in the other direction with most monitors as they don't overlap sRGB completely.

Stealing another image from EIZO, here's the normal situation:



Yellow is Adobe RGB (but it could be anything for the sake of example) and red is some hypothetical monitor. You can see there's a ton of colour the monitor can show that no ARGB image is going to include, but more crucially a lot of the very saturated colours are going to be just a bit off because they have to be crushed into that funky polygon on the right.

Trying to make colours work nicely is an unending game of trying to make more, bigger, triangles (or sometimes quads! especially in printing) and write software that correctly translates colours between them. You can read the whole EIZO article here, I don't know if it talks about everything I did because I'm a massive colour theory nerd but it covers a lot: https://www.eizo.be/en/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understanding-color-gamut/

I also made a quick example of my personal hell with colour gamuts, converting between sRGB and CMYK for printing:



See how the green at the bottom on the right one is darker? That's because CMYK doesn't go as far into the saturated green corner as sRGB. All the old films and stuff are suffering from a similar problem, just... all digital.



TL;DR a limited number of colours are stored and a limited number can be reproduced and most LCD monitors don't have exactly the same colours as used to be standard on CRTs so a lossy conversion has to be made.

[Frumple]

CRTs... were so freaking heavy. I've never cared about color fidelity to notice a difference, but I can damn sure remember noticing the difference in having the move the bloody things

[McTraveller]

Websites that claim that cookies are "required" for their website to function.  What a bunch of BS....

EDIT:

Spoiler: devmode to the rescue (click to show/hide)

Can't stop the display:none override!     Too bad I have to do it manually...

[Caz]

CRTs... were so freaking heavy. I've never cared about color fidelity to notice a difference, but I can damn sure remember noticing the difference in having the move the bloody things

Imagine trying to mount a 50 inch CRT on the wall by yourself.

[methylatedspirit]

TL;DR a limited number of colours are stored and a limited number can be reproduced and most LCD monitors don't have exactly the same colours as used to be standard on CRTs so a lossy conversion has to be made.

What about monitors designed specifically for color-accurate work? Those have to comply with at least sRGB, and people pay big money to have those, both for the monitor and its calibration. Then again, I'd imagine that finding one that's both color-accurate and has low response time would be prohibitively expensive, as if looking for just one of those features isn't already expensive enough.

Also, I gotta say this: I hate CRTs. The 15 KHz hum is the absolute worst. It could be perfect in every other way, but that goddamned 15 KHz hum... you better implant a 15 KHz notch filter into my ears so that my head doesn't explode.

[Vector]

Heh. I'm so used to that drone that I might as well have an ear filter for it.

I probably should knuckle down and buy a monitor designed for color-accurate work with a reasonable response time too, though. Last time I bought a monitor my then-partner said "OK veckle, good color or souped up for twitchy games," and I, veckle, of course said "rainbow me!"

[hops]

I have a "gaming" monitor that I always keep on like 20% brightness and very muted colors because apparently the teens these days love to have their eyeballs explode?

[Mathel]

Most CRT computer screens that I saw did not whine, at least on a frequency I could hear.

All CRT TVs did and 1 computer screen started to as it got older. What was weird was, that apparently, people around me could not hear it.

[methylatedspirit]

I have a "gaming" monitor that I always keep on like 20% brightness and very muted colors because apparently the teens these days love to have their eyeballs explode?

I don't follow monitor-related news very well myself, but I'd like to hazard a guess that it's one of those HDR monitors. Part of the HDR certification (not too clear on which standard is which, so I'm generalizing heavily) requires that they hit something like 400+ lux at pure white, which translates to "MY EYES!" in darker environments. HDR really only cares about full-brightness viewing conditions, so I think that's why it's so bad at low brightness. That, or the teens really love playing their games outside in broad daylight.

At least you have brightness controls. The monitor I'm using seems to be very confused on whether it's supposed to be driving an OLED or an LCD panel. The "brightness" control doesn't change the backlight intensity at all. It's like if you went into your system settings and changed the brightness there.

[Rolan7]

Most CRT computer screens that I saw did not whine, at least on a frequency I could hear.

All CRT TVs did and 1 computer screen started to as it got older. What was weird was, that apparently, people around me could not hear it.

Oh yeah, that was a well known phenomenon.  Teens can hear higher pitches than older people can, and those CRTs tended to emit near that range.  I seem to remember it being kinda but not entirely like tinnitus.  It can be annoying, which supposedly led to some British shopowners placing high pitched noise generators outside their shops to annoy away young loiterers.

I always found it kind of cool to be able to hear something that adults couldn't.  I'm just glad I probably got that from The Polar Express (a Christmas storybook which came with a sleighbell supposedly inaudible to adults), and not the sort of thing dog-whistles evoke nowadays.

[MonkeyHead]

I miss the static electricity from a CRT screen. I do so very much enjoy mild electrical shocks.

[hops]

I miss the static electricity from a CRT screen. I do so very much enjoy mild electrical shocks.

🤔

[Lord Shonus]

I seem to remember it being kinda but not entirely like tinnitus.  It can be annoying, which supposedly led to some British shopowners placing high pitched noise generators outside their shops to annoy away young loiterers.

Nothing "supposed" about it, and it wasn't just a British thing. The guy who invented the device has sold thousands of the things,