Are CRT monitors 100% dead ?

[El Greco]

I notice that most stores here have completely discontinued CRT monitors (last time I looked they still carried a couple of models). Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

New LCD screens are less bulky and have a larger display area; as of mid-2006, LCDs have become directly comparable in price to CRTs of the same display area. In general, rear-projection displays and LCDs require less power per display area, but plasma displays consume as much as or more than CRTs. However, color CRTs still find adherents in computer gaming due to their high refresh rates and higher resolution per initial cost. CRT's are also still popular in the printing and broadcasting industries as well as in the professional video, photography, and graphics fields due to their greater color fidelity and contrast, better resolution when displaying moving images, and better view from angles, although improvements in LCD technology increasingly alleviate these concerns. The demand for CRT screens is falling rapidly, and producers are responding to this trend. For example, in 2005 Sony announced that they would stop the production of CRT computer displays. Similarly, German manufacturer Loewe ceased production of CRT TVs in December 2005. Considering the shelf life of a typical user's CRT-based unit is 5-6 years.

What I wonder is, doesn't anyone still need the ability to retain display quality in different resolutions ? Have LCDs (or monitors that use other digital technologies) improved in that area, or are they going to ? Are we soon going to reach a point where digital monitors will be better than CRTs in every aspect ?

 

[Corpse Cruncher]

I brought 1 LCD monitor, just because it took up less space. That said, I had 4 replacements of the same item, 1 and 3, blew up, 2 had huge pixel holes and number 4 is just fine. It does take getting use to. I found it odd compared to my old monitor. The picture does seem to better quality on the CRT but then I comment that it had an odd picture when I first got it.

These days size appears to matter, less is more or at least slimline is more beneficial.

I never played around with the settings of my old CRT monitor, what it was set to it stayed at. I suppose those with bad or weak eyesight might appreciate the CRT over LCD.

I tried to sell my old 14 inch Digital CRT but nobody wanted it. How silly is this, I put a £5.00 price tag on it- nobody wanted it. Surely it was worth that? My CRT is about 8+years old, I don't think my LCD will last that long, they seem flimsy and not built to last. I would keep my CRT but space is a premium and it has no place living with me any longer.

I do believe that the LCD market has effectively killed the CRT.

 

[MRC_Hans]

No, they just smell that way .

OK, seriously: Apart from some marginal advantages in certain graphic appliations, the only advantage that CRT monitors still hold (but are rapidly loosing) is that of price. Oh, and viewing angle.

Yes, I think the CRT is finally in its death throes, but since some of the manufacturers are not producing flat displays, and numerous high-capacity facilities exist to produce picture tubes, we can expect them to hang on for dear life for quite some time. What will happen, however, is that nobody will invest in new designs or new production facilites, so eventually, they will disappear. I predict that 10 years from now you will be unable to purchase a CRT display from new.

.... That is, of course, unless some picturephile cult pops up, claiming that the only way to watch is with CTR monitors. Like the tube audiophools. Then you will be able to buy insanely expensive "high-end" CRT monitors.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

I tried to sell my old 14 inch Digital CRT but nobody wanted it. How silly is this, I put a £5.00 price tag on it- nobody wanted it. Surely it was worth that?

Hehe, where I work, we recently migrated to flat displays (mine works just fine), so my glorious 24" flat-face CRT monitor got redundant. I had the opportunity to take it home for the price of carrying it, but although it would certainly have trumphed my old 16" CRT at home, I decided against it. It was simply too monstrously large and heavy. Everybody else seemed to feel the same way, so we ended up scrapping dozens of perfectly functioning CRT hulks.

Our landscape office has surely benefited from it. No more lumbering monsters on the desks, producing heat, high-pitch whines and, and ionized air.


Hans

 

[El Greco]

Apart from some marginal advantages in certain graphic appliations, the only advantage that CRT monitors still hold (but are rapidly loosing) is that of price. Oh, and viewing angle.

What about the ability to perform equally well in various resolutions ?

 

[MRC_Hans]

What about the ability to perform equally well in various resolutions ?

Or equally poorly? Seriously, though, how many resolutions do you need? I just checked, mine works in three resolution settings and two color settings. What more do I need?

Hans

 

[Corpse Cruncher]

Hehe, where I work, we recently migrated to flat displays (mine works just fine), so my glorious 24" flat-face CRT monitor got redundant. I had the opportunity to take it home for the price of carrying it, but although it would certainly have trumphed my old 16" CRT at home, I decided against it. It was simply too monstrously large and heavy. Everybody else seemed to feel the same way, so we ended up scrapping dozens of perfectly functioning CRT hulks.

Our landscape office has surely benefited from it. No more lumbering monsters on the desks, producing heat, high-pitch whines and, and ionized air.


Hans

I'll add mine to the destroy with hammer list. What a shame we have become such a wasteful society.

Mine didn't make a noise, my computer makes that. Heat I agree with, but on a cold morning when I used to work in a freezing office the old CRT monitor I had there was a welcome heat source.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Or equally poorly? Seriously, though, how many resolutions do you need? I just checked, mine works in three resolution settings and two color settings. What more do I need?

Hans

If you play a lot of old timey computer games, more.

 

[MortFurd]

Or equally poorly? Seriously, though, how many resolutions do you need? I just checked, mine works in three resolution settings and two color settings. What more do I need?

Hans

How about the ability to switch to a very low resolution? 800x600? Folks with really poor eyesight need for the text and icons to be large. Windows doesn't offer much in the way of scalable icons, and changing the default font size for Windows can really mess things up if you get a program that depends on the default font size. They shouldn't, but some do.


I like CRTs better than LCDs. The previously mentioned view angle problem drives me batty, and I do change screen resolutions relatively often.

LCDs aren't all that great for gamers, either. The "Overdrive" tricks the LCD monitor manufacturers use get the picture clear for rapidly moving objects come at the cost of delaying the video signal by a few frames. Only critical for high-end game freaks, I'll admit.

For office work on a DVI port, LCD is OK. If you go to doing graphics, they aren't so great. The colors depend somewhat on you being dead smack in front of the monitor, so color calibration is difficult and you have to be careful where you sit.

 

[baron]

If you go to doing graphics, they aren't so great. The colors depend somewhat on you being dead smack in front of the monitor, so color calibration is difficult and you have to be careful where you sit.

Not so. I'm a digital artist and swapped over from CRT to LCD a couple of years back. Proving you're looking at mid- to high-range models, LCD excels in practically every area. Base LCDs are horrific, admittedly, but so are base CRTs.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I have a 21" ViewSonic P815 that I purchased for $2,200 in March, 1997. I'd love to replace it with a 30" flat panel, but how can I toss it out? It's still beautiful. The current price is about $250.

~~ Paul

 

[Corpse Cruncher]

Not so. I'm a digital artist and swapped over from CRT to LCD a couple of years back. Proving you're looking at mid- to high-range models, LCD excels in practically every area. Base LCDs are horrific, admittedly, but so are base CRTs.

Digital artist, excuse my shameless ignorance what is one of those?

 

[Ripley Twenty-Nine]

What about the ability to perform equally well in various resolutions ?

The idea of having to run in 'various resolutions' is going to be outdated fairly soon.

New (and upcoming) Operating Systems, including Windows Vista and Apple OS X Leopard are essentially 'resolution independent'. The idea is that all bitmaps, controls and fonts will scale based on your resolution.

So on an 800x600 display, everything on screen will be the same size as with a 1280x1024 display; though obviously it will be much sharper on a higher resolution.

 

[GregC]

At work I have a 20" Sony Trinitron CRT, at home a 18" LCD. The Sony is far superior in quality to the LCD. Working with graphics most of the day I appreciate having the CRT. Some of the more recent purchases of LCD monitors are showing the progress being made in their design but they are still not as good as a quality CRT. I am anxiously waiting for the quality to equal so that I can gain back some desktop space.

 

[bruto]

I do a lot of photography, but I haven't gone digital yet. I scan a lot of negs and slides, and I've found that recent LCD monitors are not bad. I just got a new computer and a relatively cheap but decent 17 inch LCD monitor with it, and it's much better at resolving zoomed images than my old one, which produced choppy results. It's also much better off axis. The previous one was very difficult to use for photography because the image varied so much with viewing angle. I had to be really careful. I'm not a real color geek and have not spent huge amounts of time calibrating and fussing with color spaces, because my printer is also far from state of the art, and I usually find it's easier and more effective to compare a print with the slide and say "that is/is not close enough." Of course digital photographers do not have that option.

There are still some people holding out for CRT because it's possible to calibrate the color very precisely, and because of the CRT's ability to change resolution smoothly, but my guess is that they're on their way out as LCD's continue to improve. I'll never go back, in part because as displays get bigger, we get spoiled. I used to think a 14 inch monitor was fine, but now 17 seems none too big, and a CRT that size would not fit on my small computer desk!

 

[MRC_Hans]

How about the ability to switch to a very low resolution? 800x600? Folks with really poor eyesight need for the text and icons to be large.

Well, thats one of the resolutions that mine offers. All a flat really requires is that the resolution is a direct multiple of the max resolution. But then, CRTs also work best if you comply with that.

Hans

 

[Learning Phase]

I'm currently using CRT monitors on all my computers (Except laptops) and I'm considering changing them all soon to LCD.

A few days ago, my father (age 81) purchased a low priced 17 inch LCD for my mother (she's 76). With her poor eyesight, she's always used a CRT set at 800*600, which avoids the problems with changing fonts/icons to get them large enough with higher resolutions. The 17 inch LCD, however, gave constant warnings about using it at anything other than the 1280x1024 resolution recommended by the manufacturer. They wanted to set it up without my help, but finally ended up calling me to assist.

I spent a while attempting to make Windoze look good for her with the higher resolution, but she was never satisfied, as many of her favorite websites were set up for 800x600. Those websites and others didn't fill the screen, and often came out with tiny fonts that were impossible for her to read without squinting.

I finally set the thing to 800x600, and was surprised to find that the scaling caused vertical bands of fuzziness, about every two inches, 1/4 inch wide. While you could call it readable, it was very uncomfortable to read. Doing a quick search, I found out that I could make the thing readable and clear by changing the refresh rate to 72. I'd often changed refresh rates, but never thought it would clear up fuzziness in an LCD.

I then changed the monitor settings to eliminate the whining warnings about resolution.

She's thrilled.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

For a while CRT monitors really held the ground when it came to quality of image and contrast, as well as the ability to sync natively to multiple scan rates and resolutions.

However, I think those days (for me) are past. While CRT's still may have more accurate color generation (it doesn't change based on the angle), the scaling and conversion of good high res LCD's has just about killed the whole multi-resolution argument.

But when it comes down to it, I find LCD's to be a lot easier on my eyes. Despite the contrast of a good CRT, the constant flickering of it, although not explicitly visible definitely does a number on my eyes after a while. Since LCD monitors don't "scan" in the same way a CRT does, the light is relatively constant. I find it much less straining.

But then again... that's just me.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I'm still looking for a way to run XP in greyscale. Can it be done on a CRT?
I can find no way to do it on an LCD.

 

[a_unique_person]

I brought 1 LCD monitor, just because it took up less space. That said, I had 4 replacements of the same item, 1 and 3, blew up, 2 had huge pixel holes and number 4 is just fine. It does take getting use to. I found it odd compared to my old monitor. The picture does seem to better quality on the CRT but then I comment that it had an odd picture when I first got it.

These days size appears to matter, less is more or at least slimline is more beneficial.

I never played around with the settings of my old CRT monitor, what it was set to it stayed at. I suppose those with bad or weak eyesight might appreciate the CRT over LCD.

I tried to sell my old 14 inch Digital CRT but nobody wanted it. How silly is this, I put a £5.00 price tag on it- nobody wanted it. Surely it was worth that? My CRT is about 8+years old, I don't think my LCD will last that long, they seem flimsy and not built to last. I would keep my CRT but space is a premium and it has no place living with me any longer.

I do believe that the LCD market has effectively killed the CRT.

People just leave them out the front of their homes around here, hoping someone will take it away.