The end of the CRT era...

Doh, I had a $10,000 Sony G70 CRT for 10 years, and it was great from 1999-2009. Not so great today. But I have to say, you can buy a much better projector today for half the money, and it'll use 1/4 the electricity and put out 1/10th the heat and noise.

CRT is just for crap today, and the real issue is all these tubes go real soft over time. You can make an argument that they cover up the noise of laserdiscs much better, but the problem with that is that the sets are lying to you and not showing you all the inherent noise that's actually there.

 

The consumer CRT era was a form of torture if you were a videophile. They had great contrast, but the rest of the problems with NTSC and consumer TVs were never ending. Never Twice the Same Color was the reputation of NTSC, but the fault was mostly the TV manufacturers who didn't give a damn about the specs. Color? Total disaster with color temps pushed hot into blue and things like Sony's "Sony Red" tint compensating for the resulting sickly flesh tones. And then there was the whole thing with registration of the three guns drifting over time.

I'm only aware of one consumer CRT set that could fully meet the NTSC spec and that was the RCA Pro Scan, way out of my budget at the time. That set was made because the engineers were approaching retirement with Rec 709 on the horizon. They decided to go out with a stealthy fling and give the marketers all their bs bullet points on the front end while making a set that could be adjusted by a calibrator to actually meet the color NTSC standard. I could go on, but I guess you know where I stand.

Having said that, I prefer retro gaming on a CRT. Standard def has its own color temperature separate from Rec 709, and to get that right, your flat panel would have to be calibrated specifically for it. So, not only is color off, but blowing up low res to high res means you have to take quite a few steps back from the screen, and sometimes controllers don't allow that without setting the console on the floor.

 

I still have a CRT TV (a late model Toshiba 27".) I keep it around because to my eyes diginets like Antenna TV look better on it than on a LCD.

 

The Best Buy close to us just took in 2 vintage Apple macintosh se with built-in monitors, none of the employees had the "Heart" to dump them into Recycling bins @ Geek Squad. It looks like a shrine to better days long ago!

 

Actually, several of the higher-end Sony XBRs could be calibrated in the ballpark of Rec 601, provided you turned all the automatic controls off and went inside for the individual RGB guns. But again, we're talking about a very dead technology. It's kind of like debating the best horse & buggy whips for 1870 transportation.

 

I've always found the The Essential Balance Whip to be one of the best. It's available with brass or nickel ferrules. Grip diameter is approx. 3/4". Whip it good.

 

One CRT left in the bedroom hooked up to the VCR.

Darryl

 

I have several of the original Macs that I picked up from the Salvation Army 15 years ago. The last I checked they still worked. I even took the fastest one, put a network card in it, and used to to browse the Internet..... slowly.

 

Yeah, it's dead for a good reason. I'm just surprised that anyone still digs it other than watching VHS tapes or old games.

Speaking of retro-gaming, I misspoke during my anti-CRT fatwa. Standard def and high def have the same color temp, it's the color gamut, the depth of color, that's different. So it still looks weird.

Consult you local calibrator if you show any signs of eyestrain, high blood pressure, divorce, or insanity.

 

Eh, it's about the same. There's not a gigantic amount of difference between Rec601 and Rec709. The Europeans went a step further and established a gamma standard for HD, BTU 1886, so for some time there's been a gamma setting of 2.4. Old TV basically was around 2.2, but it's not vastly different.

I have seen well-adjusted standard-def and HD screens in the same room look almost identical, except the HD screens are much sharper and reveal much more noise. When it comes to consumer sets, all bets are off -- they could look like anything, especially with factory settings, right out of the box.

 

Well, professional standard-def monitors were a whole other animal. And as you mentioned earlier in the thread, same thing applies to pro high def monitors used in editing suites, etc. And now with HDR, they're using water-cooled monitors!

One criticism I have for Rec. 709 is how they kept the same bit depth for color. It looks horrible in many underwater scenes, and I strongly suspect that's one of the reasons Disney hasn't release 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on blu-ray. That's also another classic example of how standard def CRTs hid flaws.

 

I still have my 2006 era HDish CRT in the basement. At the time rear project was still to cumbersome and plasma/lcd was espensive. When I found the Magnavox 27" CRT monitor that could do 480p or 1080i over component or HD-15 I though it would be a compromise. The worst part of that set was how much of a tease it was. I know the geometry was goofy but when I saw a HD 1080i Phillies game on Verizon Fios the monitor detected a HD source and vertically compressed the scan lines into a small but jewel like picture. Even the Verizon installer was surprised. He said he had never seen a 4:3 HD ready CRT.

I hate to curb it since it is a HDish TV.

 

I still have and use 4 CRT TVs.
The only flat screens in my house are my computer monitors.
My wife and I agree: we are a little cheap, so we won't buy a new TV until we have to replace one.

Plus, I'm not in a rush to go to HD because of U-verse. Long story short, every SD channel you are watching or recording counts as one stream. We get 4 streams in. Once all 4 streams are in use, you either have to watch something that is recording or a channel that some one else is watching already. On rare occasions, you can't watch anything at all.
HD channels/recordings count as 2 streams, so if someone was watching something in HD, then one TV will not be available to watch. If one person is watching HD while recording something else in HD on the DVR, too bad for you.

 

My 'keeping up with the Jones's' doesn't just mean keeping up with say...a neighbor or someone else....it means feeling the need to acquire the newest technology whether you need it or not. It's like the term Jonesin. You're (not you in particular, but you're in a broader mass) seeming need to buy into the newest/latest fashion with all the new bells and whistles. Folks like that are the bread and butter of the MAD men.

That's nice that you need or just want what you'd consider a better screen. I don't need it. I've seen High Def etc..and yes, it's nice, but my old CRT looks fine to me as I don't have bluray nor do I want to spend the money for something I personally don't need, nor do I have the desire to 'keep up with the Jones's nor am I Jonesin' for a new TV.

Good for you ! I don't have those elements in my life to have a need for more. No wife, no kids, I don't stream video. I dare say MY LIFE is a lot easier because of not bringing others into my decisions. I don't like the compromise in life that it would entail.

 

The last one (kept it for nostaligia's sake). 1983 RCA 13"

 

It's not a huge difference, but reds are definitely a bit more saturated in Rec709. I use both, and unfortunately mastering was kind of all over the place early on, but there are times with older material especially that Rec709 makes people a little too sunburnt looking.

A lot of new material is so teal-orange, it really doesn't matter what you use, it's going to look like s**t.

 

My 34" flatscreen CRT Sony still has a beautiful picture (I always felt it bettered my 50" Plasma!). It's my bedroom TV, rarely used but I'll still watch football games and news broadcasts. I'm still impressed with the old girls HD video quality! As far as it being 'ancient' tech, I also own a tube amp and a turntable, it's all good!

 

My last CRT was a 29" 4:3 Grundig 100Hz Gigatron Digital Reference TV. Had huge speakers in it and all sorts of digital noise reduction and other tricks. Even had a VGA input. Was a great picture for CRT.

It was part of a £20000 video conferencing unit that was retired. They cost a small fortune new. I had it for about two years before it went bang. At least it was free.

 

It does help to get the set calibrated. Once you dig into the advanced controls, it's possible in some cases to eliminate or at least reduce those problems.

Orange/Teal is a separate situation, and that boils down to bad creative decisions made by the director and DP, not necessarily the mastering people. There's almost a limitless number of ugly things they can do in mastering; one I particularly hate is jacking the black levels up and making the picture look very "thin and milky" (for lack of a better term). I'm more of a natural contrast guy. I'd say 75% of most shows on TV look fine to me, but once in awhile, they just drive right off the road in a desperate quest for a weird, unusual look. My thinking is always, "just tell the F'in' story and stop screwing up the picture."

 

Same here. In fact, this has been a bit of a trend of late and I sigh every time I see it. Specifically, what I mean is when they show indoor scenes, everything looks normal - good contrast, good gama, well saturated. But all that goes out the window when they show outdoor scenes where almost all color is leached out of peoples' faces, giving them a pasty/ghostly appearance (for fair skinned people) and the highlights are also blown out leaving little contrast and saturation, while the near blacks look like black holes! Why??!

 

10-bit color is pretty good (and that's actually 10-bits per channel, so it would equate to 30-bit for RGB). Don't forget there's bit rate vs. bit depth... not the same thing. Once they go up to 25mbps+, Blu-ray compression is almost imperceptible. Disney is pretty demanding on bit rate, and they tend to be pretty careful on how their discs are authored.

There's been tons of Blu-rays out with lots of water scenes without any real issues. I would point to Life of Pi and Titanic as being two fairly huge ones. My bet is that Disney hasn't released 20,000 Leagues on Blu-ray simply because the people running the reissue department either don't care or don't think the film will sell well. They've gone back and forth on developing a new "reimagined" version of 20,000 Leagues over the past 15 years, but it keeps getting cancelled.

On bit depth, there is a move afoot to create 4K HDR releases in Rec2020, with about 20% greater color bandwidth than the old standard, but I'm not convinced any modern set can even reproduce Rec709 very well. The newer standards are a lot more difficult; there are already reports that if you watch an HDR movie and leave a bright white title up for more than :30 seconds, you'll be staring at this title burned-in to the display for the next hour. CRTs had this problem, plasma had this problem, quite a bit of display technology suffers from image retention. But it gets worse when the picture is 10-20 times brighter than it used to be.

 

You would think if they already have a 4k resto of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea done the major cost is already behind them.

But it seems Disney has always been goofy with releasing for short times and then keeping things unavailable.

 

You mean this guy?

I think he's currently in charge of the Disney Home Video reissues on Blu-ray...

 

20,000 Leagues certainly would not sell well today. Heck, it was cheesy even in its day!

 

Please, let's keep comments like that within the family. I'd hate for the neighbors to hear.

Still, it doesn't make sense. 2014 was the 60th anniversary and it rolled by without a peep.