Technology

I'm a pretty avid old video game enjoyer and own multiple CRTs. Also had the pleasure of owning and maintaining a 19" Sony PVM until I traded it to a friend for a mountain of GBA games. Still keep a 13" hooked up for the occasional VHS or old game.

That said, I feel like a lot old sentiment toward emulation and modern display tech is rooted in internet opinions from 2010 or prior.

Yes, older and cheaper LCDs with a Bluetooth controller on old emulation tech pales in comparison to a Super Nintendo hooked up to the cheapest CRT ever. But both display tech and emulation tech have come a long way. High quality upscalers, ultra deep blacks, low latency game modes, insane refresh rates, FPGA, Retroarch run-ahead, cycle accurate emulators, and a dozen other breakthroughs have made retro gaming on modern panels extremely enjoyable.

No please. I want CRTs to stay in the past. The sound they make always gave me a headache, or just irritated me.

I wouldn't use my Amiga, ST, ZX Spectrum or Mega drive on anything other than my CRT. They were designed for that pixel blur and playing on a modern TV is just not the same. I hadn't realised the difference it made until i tried it and now I can never go back to using an LCD for any of my 80s/90s devices.

However, beyond that somewhat niche use, CRTs are otherwise entirely pointless and basically a worse display experience in every concievable way when your source is anything produced after the advent of HDMI/Display Port.

Dear god, no.

HOWEVER!!!

What I'd like to see are CRT-esque LCDs with the proper lenses, and blur, to emulate a CRT display.

Just what we need - more power inefficient products pulling on the grid.

Im still annoyed we didn't get these.

Everyone in the comments is forgetting about light gun games. They don't work on LCD screens

What might be useful is high quality, low latency 720p displays. A console that outputs 240p can have everything tripled to get 720p. Some of the effects applied by things like the OSSC, like scanlines, look pretty good when they do a 3x scaling.

Most old consoles output something close enough to 240p (which was never a real standard, anyway). For the ones that aren't quite on, upscaling can be done cleanly with only minimal blank space around the frame.

1440p is 2x 720p, so that works, too. You don't need your upscaling processor to be as powerful if you stick to 720p, though.

It will not. The article is nostalgia and hopium-baiting.

Restarting a mass-manufacturing production line for something like once super-common CRT TVs would require a major investment that so far nobody is willing to front.

Meanwhile LCD and OLED technology have hit some serious technological dead-ends, while potential non-organic LED alternatives such as microLED have trouble scaling down to practical pixel densities and yields.

There’s a chance that Sony and others can open some drawers with old ‘thin CRT’ plans, dust off some prototypes and work through the remaining R&D issues with SED and FED for potentially a pittance of what alternative, brand-new technologies like MicroLED or quantum dot displays would cost.

Will it happen? Maybe not. It’s quite possible that we’ll still be trying to fix OLED and LCDs for the next decade and beyond, while waxing nostalgically about how much more beautiful the past was, and the future could have been, if only we hadn’t bothered with those goshdarn twisting liquid crystals.

Look I miss CRTs too but no, don't bring those things back.

I used to go LAN Parties at the local university and...man no. in the middle of winter? yeah very nice and toasty but in the humidity filled Canadian summers? eff off buddy.

The only thing I miss about them is the degauss button.

impending

As in "will never ever happen"