Cheap CRT TV...or XRGB?

[ApolloBoy]

What about a CRT VGA monitor with an XRGB-2 or 3?

*ahem*

[cfx]

.

[tacoguy64]

What about a CRT VGA monitor with an XRGB-2 or 3?

*ahem*

I've tried a nicely calibrated SonyFW900 with a XRGB mini with good results.
Yes now you get the hassle of having to mess with settings on a crt but the picture quality is very comparable to a bvm monitor. Might be even better since the monitor has outstanding contrast. Both the Dreamcast and the Wii U look absolute best.

And I didn't notice much in the way of input lag but to be honest most of my gaming time on that monitor was with the DC and Wii U. I tried some Saturn and while it looks good too, it still has that 480i to 240p switching problem. I am kinda curious to try the OSSC with this monitor. Should yield excellent results.

[mvsfan]

i think the best and least expensive option is try to find a consumer crt with a higher TVL count.

thats what i did. I just bought a 36" jvc crt thats specd at 800 TVL.

its a shadow mask, but its comparable to my 25" arcade monitor for that reason.

the jvc also has nice geometery, compared to my sony - it shifts the picture to the right about 1", and curls the picture at the top. It also has a purple spot on the screen that i cant get rid of. very annoying.

im happy with the results i get out of the jvc.

ive given up looking for more professional crts because they arent readily available where i live and they are expensive.

ditto for the framemeister. and like i said, no lightgun on the framemeister. No duck hunt or area 51.

[chuckster]

Basically echoing what others have said, if lag is something you are sensitive to and it's possible in your space, go with CRT. You may not notice a difference right away going too a CRT, but once you get used to it, if you go back to a flat panel with bad lag, you'll definitely notice a big change in how games feel. I did anyway, and I'm really not able to tell much about lag in most cases.

Plus, as you and many others have said, the price difference is huge, and it sounds like you are really wanting to go that route anyway!

[Ikaruga11]

Basically echoing what others have said, if lag is something you are sensitive to and it's possible in your space, go with CRT. You may not notice a difference right away going too a CRT, but once you get used to it, if you go back to a flat panel with bad lag, you'll definitely notice a big change in how games feel. I did anyway, and I'm really not able to tell much about lag in most cases.

Plus, as you and many others have said, the price difference is huge, and it sounds like you are really wanting to go that route anyway!

Even if you don't notice the input lag, it can still mess with competitive gaming.

[Ed Oscuro]

To be completely honest, not even a CRT is practically free from input lag due to the after burning phosphor. An LCD monitor with 7ms of latency will, at least on paper, have less lag than a CRT. I don't care as long as I don't notice it, and I personally don't on most sets.

I can partly agree with this, but just to get the theory out of the way:

It depends on what time in the image display cycle you're talking about; transitions work differently on LCD versus CRT. LCDs have fast and slow transitions, but even in the best case the transition is still relatively slow.

On the other hand, with CRTs, the response to a signal is essentially instant. There's no latency from going from a dark image to a bright one. The decay of an old image can be very slow on a CRT, but it depends on the brightness of the old image - and of course if the new image is nearly as bright, it'll just draw over the old screen. The main time you're likely to notice latency on a CRT is when a very bright object moves and its old location takes time to decay - but usually players can naturally figure out where the current location of an object is and to disregard an afterimage, so even in this case it's not usually a problem.

In practice, LCDs can be much more responsive than consumer TVs, but if somebody has a 144Hz LCD monitor, they also might have a very fast CRT monitor. When comparing CRT to LCD...well, LCDs seem to smear to me, while 480i games on a CRT have that nasty sawtooth look, which I've argued does make it a bit harder to see what's going on, so you do lose some speed advantage there. You also can lose some speed advantage just due to using a lossy connection and a tube that's not as sharp as a LCD. It seems to me that 3D era consoles often look worst on CRTs, but on the other hand I can't think of 240p looking worse on consoles than on LCD, even fast ones, in terms of speed.

For the Saturn...I'd say that if you remember it looking good back in the day, it'll still look good there today, and I can't imagine LCDs would have any benefit there, besides the general ones about being lighter and so on.

Even if you don't notice the input lag, it can still mess with competitive gaming.

I've written too much already, but this is always worth repeating. Display lag is a baseline, and being boozed up, or sleepy, or having old people reflexes all just make you perform worse. So one way of looking at it is that this is just a way of clawing back a bit of speed.

I'm really over and done with flicker, though.

[Einzelherz]

I'm really over and done with flicker, though.

Super agree there. I wonder if I just never noticed it much back then? I didn't have any 480i consoles until much later (around the time I finally got an hdtv) though. Playing PS2 on my PVM, I notice the flicker a lot and it drives me nuts. Glad my hdtv does a decent job of deinterlacing and scaling.

[FinalBaton]

Ed, I'm Not sure I understand the point you're trying to make with your last bit in the post above(response to Generalite).
Is the point that "input lag from an lcd doesn't hinder competitive gameplay ever?" That's what I make out of it but I just want to make sure I understood right

[evil_ash_xero]

I would recommend a CRT, if you can find one with decent inputs, and isn't the size of a fishbowl.

I have an XRGB3, and have just never been happy with the way the edges show. Everything looks sharper, so it's more pixelated.
I can handle this, on sprite based games, but it does no favors to anything polygonal.

It wouldn't hurt to have a XRGB on hand, but I'm more interested in systems like NESHD, where you can add a bit of filtering, to the system.
A lot of people like that sharp look, for sprites (I don't), but if people like the jaggy polygon look....well, nothing surprises me now.