There has been talk of some other alternatives like SED but they are all some years away.

Btw are you +5 or +6? :o

+5 - duh!

:-)

What didn't play Throne of Bhaal? :o

Yes, but items were so damn overpowered.

True - my bro and I coopd BG2 several times.
I didn't like all the Superpowered stuff in the other expansion packs ..
I'm still waiting for something that matches BG2 :/

Cross your fingers for Dragon Age. ;-)

Fucking MTG nerd

Nice try.

In joke mate :(

Well I don't get it!

Wait I just got it.

p.s. Hnns is going down.

"CRT monitors are better for gaming"
fixed

For me, personally, that is true, but most people either don't care, can't tell the difference, or think LCD is better. Ufortunately.

I think it's more of people "moving on" from gaming and needing something more from their displays. Higher hz doesn't really apply anymore when you're looking for more space on your desk, bigger real estate for other applications, or just plain screen size for watching movies.

I for one don't know how I'll ever go back to CRT after experiencing everything I can do on a 22" @ 1680x1050 LCD that isn't pro-gaming related. And in certain games, it even becomes an advantage, like WoW or Guild Wars that can run windowed at maximum native resolution.

Ì went to a huge LCD for everything else and it sux so hard for gaming (even with 2ms responsetime and what not) that I stopped playing FPS alltogether.

I dont really regret it, I gained a lot of deskspace, a higher resolution and a bigger screen with it.

If you are taking FPS seriously though, CRT is the only way to roll till a decent 120hz 0ms alternative comes around (SED or OLED or sth, but it's years away..)

"..I gained a lot of deskspace.."

desks must really be expensive where you live.

They're pricey m8, but hopefully he will fill that infinite room space when prices drop

i went for 2ms asus 19" (not ws) and don't regret it at all..adapted quite easily and don't see a problem..and i played fps quite seriously

seriously, I doubt you would be able to tell the difference in an A/B test.

people who still cling to CRTs are imho powered by religion, and not facts.

they are powered by the ms of the lcds.

Liez .. If I watch a demo on a 60hz LCD it doesn't look as smooth as 125 on a CRT with 125 rate

people prefering LCDs for gaming are imho powered by religion ("I bought this, I'm no wrong, can't be :'( " kind of shit), and not facts.

depends of the games you play though ; rts like supcom, slow ass console fps or the sims are playable on 60-75Hz lcd and their "slow" response rates

They just won't to admit they got an inferior product -- even to themselves.

Unless they play games which aren't demanding enough to benefit (and they probably will lie to themselves that "oh well this screen might be a disadvantage in something fast like CS but no way for me in America's Army.) If you show them the two back to back it's stupendously obvious. Average people who are not even gamers that use my computer will mention something about how responsive my mouse or keyboard feels.

In both cases it's from using an older but superior technology that got phased out for something cheaper, more profitable and less suitable for gaming.

IBM clicky keyboard, high refresh rate CRT monitor, optical mouse at 1000hz.

If even non-gamers notice, then surely any gamer that claims the above first two are not better is probably delusional.

Another example I had a non-gamer friend who I taught to play o2jam. And we were playing the same songs and he was on a laptop this time and complained how on that screen he couldn't see the moving notes as easily. Anyways these are multiple good examples of completely unbiased testers.
And I've used 2ms TFT's before and they made me want to throw up.

I don't understand this. Suppose you have an LCD monitor with a 2ms response time and 100fps. Why would that monitor be any worse than a CRT?

Because it's not really 2 ms, 2 ms is the most ideal time possible for grey to grey and doesn't reflect the actual time when in use for a game.

because of the low refresh rate

Firstly, because 100fps can feel a little choppy in extremely fast games, I'm thinking like trying to play o2jam/o2mania with notespeed 6. At 100fps you can't tell where the notes are, but with a higher refresh CRT (160+) the gaps between them are alot smaller and they can be hit better.

Secondly, because response time is a delay, not a frequency like refresh rate. By that logic a 16.ms (1/60 s) delay panel in the most ideal conditions would perform better than a CRT at 60hz. This is simply not true. The LCD is doing it's 60hz the CRT it's 60hz and pretending there is no other input lag that LCD would always be about an entire frame behind or 16.ms since CRT's have negligible delay.

Third, those ideal conditions above never happen, the delay is virtually always higher than advertised. And not only is there the response time many panels especially overdriven ones have input lag on top of that. Overdrive improves the max speed the colors of the screen can change (response time) at the expense of lag since everything is "buffered" to achieve it.

Other issues, are like how others touched on like low refresh rates make for a choppier experience than CRT.

An often overlooked one is the lack of blanking between frames doesn't take advantage of persistence of vision (where the previous image fades away into the new one) that helps make CRTs capable of feeling so smooth.

Even a 100hz LCD would with instant response time wouldn't look as good in motion as a 100hz CRT because when LCD's are fast their colors just abruptly change which can make each frame to frame difference more noticeable than had your brain blended the images together. (early LCDs took so long to change colors the pixels just kinda blurred things on their own but this looked horrible because it resulted in smearing and ghosting. So it'd take an LCD of double the refresh rate (to go black every other frame) and nearly instant response time to equal get the same motion quality of CRTs.

CRT's have better contrast ratios meaning if you set their black point properly and play in a dark room. You can have good image quality and spot people in shadows because of the greater range of black. Without the need to wash things out with gamma. (LCD's already look washed out because their blacks are dark greys. Doom 3 is better looking on CRT vs LCD)

Finally, flexible resolutions are pretty important for gamers that aren't interested in buying a new fucking computer or graphics card every time they can no longer play at 1280x1024 which is way higher than you really need anyways. When GPU power is limited single player games usually look better on lower resolutions with antialasing on, but not so on LCDs because of rescaling.

Sure there's tons of advantages to LCDs and they use less power, but if you're really like gaming alot, especially online and competitively, and are hardcore about it you shouldn't use one.

The only significance having a response time that is faster than 1/(refresh rate) is that if the screen actually obtains that response time then when you're watching something at 60fps there should be no colors left over from the previous frame in each frame you are looking at now. In other words no ghosting, blurring, smearing, afterglows ect. It can still be horrid for playing as 60hz sucks as does 60fps for fast multiplayer and on top of that you're seeing everything (in this example) 16ms after someone on the CRT would.

Anyways those are all theoretical examples I can just say many 2ms panels can have as much as 10-16ms of delay. Never mind the fact that you cant see a complete 100fps anyways on any LCD because they update too slowly (refresh rates). Anyhow they're just not a technology for fast games and never will be.

If you put LCD and CRT side-by-side the difference is pretty staggering.

to me it's so staggering i stopped gaming after getting an LCD. It's such a step back that you just feel handicapped

Bullshit lmao.. I own and use a LCD for gaming, but I went to icelores house and it drastically made every game look smoother. Downside to CRT is space.. weight.. and crappy image quality. Refresh rate is sexy for gaming.

Use a 17" CRT then for gaming they're nice light and compact. If you want space add a second LCD that's 1600x1200 and run two desktops.

I felt physically nauseous using my friends 5ms 22" for an hour. Plus the fact everything on the screen doubles in pixels when you try and aim is quite lol

SED Displays!

Honestly, yes LCDs suck but you get used to it in no time =P

Yeah, I agree. Still that doesn't mean CRTs aren't miles better and all these morons who claim it's impossible to see the difference because our eyes can only see 30 fps!!!! are... well... morons.

You definitely can see the difference, and I use an LCD so I am not being biased at all =x.

It's 62fps rumor has it.

Yeah i just got my old crt back out after trying to play on a lcd for a month..

What about plasma TVs - are they any good for gaming?

There are some new 100Hz TVs out - has anyone tried playing with these?

Viewsonic 17" with 150hz at 800x600

<3 my 21 inch crt

Why compromise? I own both!

Theres any place in earth where they still sell new CRT material?

Nope. You 're either going to buy a hand-me-down or an LCD.

Fucking hell. Ebay time.

eBay is a POS. Sellers need to stop tricking me with their low price/high S&H combo into reading their stupid listings. hard to believe that it'd really cost $100 for standard shipping of a mere 30-pound, 400 sq in. box. Although I'm not an expert on shipping rates, that just sounds ridiculous to me.

Uhh what CRT are you talking about that only weighs 30 pounds?

If you're going to Ebay a CRT get a gem since who knows how long we're going to have to wait for decent alternatives to come.

My 21" guy weighed 65lbs out of the box and over 70 fully wrapped up in it's box with the foam padding and more peanuts than I've ever seen in my life. It still got slightly damaged in shipping as the stand doesn't hold the screen perfectly level. (I ignore it or sometimes prop it up using a spacer. it's only a couple mm difference.)

I stand corrected, heh.

Still though, for a guy like me, three-figure shipping rates definitely isn't appealling at all.

Sorry to hear that.

My shipping was for free. But most of the monitors were shipping for around 60 dollars.

My grand total was 80 bucks. That was back a year ago when gasoline and presumably shipping costed less.

Sony G520p.

Yeah, I have seen deals like that while window shoppin, but those seem pretty damn rare considering everyone who sells on eBay thinks it's ingenious to just lower the sale price and make the listed shipping rate like double what the real quote is.

Certainly no question about it since E-bay deducts their cut from the real price but not shipping.

But it's naive to think for a second it's cheap to ship these things. I'm no weak person and it took something of an 80% max strength effort and a couple trys just to rotate the box over 90 degrees it was so bulky and heavy. Honestly taking it out of the box was a 25 minute ordeal since I didn't feel like spilling mountains of packing peanuts. Anyhow your outrageous shipping costs include the labor for the poor seller of packing it up as well as somehow getting that to a UPS store and then imagine them poor fuckers having to handle it.

craigslist and pick it up, i bet theres 20 people within 15 min of you selling crt's

surprisingly, despite Vancouver being pretty into their technology, I didn't have much luck with this the last time I looked.

stock up. always have two CRT's in reserve :)

Its funny, crts are better, but no way in hell am I going to buy a new one, they are just ugly as fuck. Maybe a used one for 20 dollars to free.

I care so deeply about the attractiveness of my computer hardware that I'm ready to sacrifice their usability and performance..

Oh also I guess since shipping was running 60 dollars on most ebay 21" CRT screens, and I got my g520p for 80 dollars total my monitor "cost" 20. I wouldn't call her ugly: http://ded.zenblue.net/g520p_2001fp.jpg

Ah, compared to my samsung 226bw.. yeah.. but.. then again I don't see 80 dollars difference and my response time is 2ms and its pretty good as is. When I compare CRT to a LCD its mainly just smoother, but not enough to want to spend more than 20.

"my response time is 2ms"

rofl

Someone link me to the best non-widescreen LCD that is readily available for me to buy? (ie. not VX922 or some rly old stuff thats hard to get)