Gaming on CRT Televisions, PVMs and BVMs :: RGB104 / MY LIFE IN GAMING

I bought a PVM in California for $100 at a thrift store. I had to take it home on the plane. TSA stopped me and were like "lol what's this." So I opened my bag and they were like "oh neat."

Stellar video, guys! Mmm, CRTs.

Just getting around to watching this now since I'm likely picking up a PVM or equivalent soon. As a game artist from back in the SNES and Genesis days I wanted to comment on the part about whether we took certain advantages of CRT displays. Yes. Absolutely. I worked for EA back then and we had a consumer level CRT in the office to test our work on. There were certain tricks we could do (especially on Genesis if my memory serves correctly) as far as blending pixels and using artifacting colors, in order to get the look we were after. Modern TVs just don't display things in the way artists intended. I can only speak for myself here but add my vote to the "artists from back then prefer CRT" column. Love your show btw. :)

You know what NTSC stands for? It's Never The Same Color. Still remember this joke told to us by my video programming professor.

This makes me so thankful for my 36 inch toshiba.
Since I bought it, all the thrift stores around me stopped selling crts and only throws them away...

i never thought i would be going out to buy a crt in 2017.

No modern TV or any workaround will ever beat the feeling of playing on a real CRT TV.

Thanks. You guys make feel grateful to have grown up in the 90s, and remind me what a beautiful time of my life it was

Dang, that's a serious course on video engineering. And that's coming from a working Hollywood video engineer. :) They're pretty much spot on on all this stuff. There's a reason they're called "reference monitors" - something had to be the reference by which to judge all TV's - and this is what content creators (=TV studios) used for decades to gauge their own work.
For professional users, the point wasn't how "awesome", "vivid" or even sharp they look. It was all about color accuracy and consistency. They actually need to be calibrated, like any monitor, but their starting point and drift are considerably better than any consumer display.

You guys have achieved some outlandishly high production values with these videos.

Thanks to this video my quest for a BVM began. Needless to say I'm beyond words how lucky I've been to encounter a BVM F24 a little over a year ago. It's capabilities are stunning with it's 1080p picture. Everything I throw at it looks absolutely amazing , I'm not going back to flat panels in a very long while. This is all thanks to you guys and your recommendation of Phonedork's channel. So thank you and keep up the good work.

I feel as though at some point, someone will start making crts again for the retro gaming community.

This video is so perfectly presented. I love this.

Found a PVM at my local thrift store for 15 dollars 😬

The intro alone had me hitting that sub button. Great quality sound and editing. Good job m8

Safe to say this video is almost single handedly responsible for the surge in popularity of professional monitors in the last couple of years. Love my BVM <3

Great video! Glad to see someone else caring about aspect ratios and frame rates and all of that :D

Just discovered this channel. I really like how you adopted the 22 minutes "half hour" TV show format for a internet video. Great work.

Another big benefit that no one ever talks about relates to how an image blurs when the eye is tracking. Modern displays almost always show a frame until the next refresh, meaning that the image might be there for like 16ms. Your brain is expecting continuous motion, as it would appear in real life, but what you're looking at isn't actually continuously moving! It's only moving in 16ms or 33ms increments, usually. As a result, the image will blur because you're smearing it across your retinas! CRTs don't use this sample and hold approach, instead spitting out the image as it scans across and down. Since the light hardly persists, blur is considerably reduced. Backlight strobing in modern displays aims to behave similarly, flashing the screen briefly for each refresh, but it has it's own problems.

9:43

The best clip you have ever produced. It actually brings a tear to my eye.