r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Inside-Size-8253 • 5h ago
Video PlayStation 5 with HDMI 2.1 to a 1949 black-and-white television
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u/ricebasedvodka 5h ago
I'm actually impressed with the frame rate on that tv
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u/Apprehensive-Seat845 5h ago
The old cathode ray tube tvs effectively display 60fps as they (assuming American) operate at 60Hz
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u/Leaf_Petal 4h ago
And practically zero input lag too. People forget that old CRTs had instant pixel response times that put even high-end modern monitors to shame.
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u/chubbyurma 3h ago
Film and CRT are overall so good that in the process of going digital we basically went backwards for a LONG time presentation wise
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u/tandpastatester 3h ago
Yeah I remember sticking with my CRT for years while everyone around me switched to LCD’s. I just hated the lag and refresh rates on those early LCD monitors. I played a lot of Q3A and instagib UT, counter strike, etc. These games were terrible on early flat screens. I happily kept my big chungus monitor for a long time.
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u/iamemperor86 3h ago
Instagib UT man there’s a core memory unlock
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u/tomjone5 3h ago
Zooming around facing worlds with the shock rifle is the last time I had the reflexes and reaction times to be properly good at online FPS games.
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u/Mundane_Crazy60 2h ago
CoD world at war multiplayer was the best of all time, and I will fight and die on that hill…with a type 100, artillery and dogs.
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u/1HappyIsland 2h ago
Those huge old CRTs were SO heavy it was a 2 person job to set up workstations. I still have a scar on my foot where one dropped on it.
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u/Bozee3 1h ago edited 1h ago
I'm surprised you still have a foot. CRTs would reach hundreds of pounds and the bottom of them could be quite sharp. At least my old Sony 32" flat front Trinitron met all that criteria.
Correction I had a 32", that's what get for typing before my become unblurred in the morning.
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u/El_Giganto 1h ago
I guess we're both speaking anecdotally but my CRTs were nowhere near that heavy. Still heavy, but damn, in the hundreds? That's crazy. I guess they do exist, though, but most of the ones I've seen were a lot smaller.
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u/pimpledsimpleton 24m ago
i only got rid of my 19" CRT when it popped. 1600x1200@100hz was unachievable on anything but a CRT until wellll after most people swapped to LCD, and the latency is still unmatched.
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u/Salty-Pack-4165 1h ago
Ditto. I kept my ancient 32 inch Panasonic monster until it died 10 years ago. I didn't have cable so I used it for over the air antenna, VHS and DVD movies.
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u/Averse_to_Liars 51m ago
Flat panels were more expensive for a long time so it was easier to resist getting one.
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u/tandpastatester 41m ago
Also, with so many people switching to flat panels and trying to get rid of their crt displays, it was easy to find decent ones for cheap, or even for free. Making it a great time to upgrade to a better one and waiting it out until the latencies on lcd got better.
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u/yoweigh 3h ago
Streaming still looks like ass a lot of the time, especially in scenes with gentle color gradients that turn into giant compression artifacts. I also notice a lot of frame jitter even though I've got gigabit fiber.
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u/mekamoari 2h ago
In many regions you can't even get more than 1080p streams, not to mention that most streams just don't output it
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u/pulley999 1h ago
Frame jitter/judder might be a 60hz pulldown problem, especially on 24fps content like movies and animation. You need a 120hz TV in order to evenly display the frames, and then make sure everything is configured correctly for the TV to be doing 5:5 pulldown with that sort of content.
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u/scalyblue 3m ago
Yup just last month I had to educate someone on Reddit about why their movies “lagged” because they were in 3:2 pulldown
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u/whooptheretis 2h ago
I always find it funny when people don’t believe old photos are real because the resolution is too good!
Bitch, it was analogue, it was infinite DPI!2
u/oldsecondhand Interested 31m ago edited 28m ago
There's film grain though. But that was kind of random.
High quality 35mm film's resolution is somewhere between 4k and 8k.
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u/OverHaze 1h ago
Yep, I was playing FF12 when I moved from CRT to LCD and was shocked by how much worse it looked on my new flat panel.
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u/oldsecondhand Interested 32m ago
You couldn't even play games on early laptop LCD screens because ghosting was that bad.
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u/SeatBeeSate 3h ago
Except in this case there's definitely going to be input lag from converting HDMI to composite
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u/Puzzleheaded-Flow724 3h ago
And then from composite to NTSC chanel 3.
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u/joey_joe_jo_shabadoo 3h ago
And then converting NTSC chanel 3 to two tin cans connected by string
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u/wonkey_monkey Expert 2h ago
I happened to plug my PS3 into a computer monitor once, when previously I'd been playing on an LCD TV, and the responsiveness was immediately noticeable (this was before TVs had good game modes).
Funny thing about human senses though, the brain tends to adjust your perception to match your expectations. Like you tend not to notice the speed-of-sound delay when something happens a distance away (until the distance gets quite large, as with lightning and thunder).
There was an experiment when they flashed a light every time someone pushed a button. They slowly increased the delay between push and flash, but none of the subjects noticed. Then, after increasing the delay quite substantially (something like 200ms), they reduced it straight back to 0ms. The participants then swore that on the next push, the light came on before they pushed the button.
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u/JohnnyNapkins 2h ago
Yep. That's why Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments are still played on CRTs. Every frame counts.
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u/sanYtheFox 3h ago
That's a common misconception, it takes a couple of milliseconds to draw the frame which is enough to give you about 8ms input delay.
These monitors draw the frame top to bottom and not in an instance like modern LCD or OLED.13
u/tandpastatester 3h ago
LCD and OLED do not draw "instantly." Modern displays also scan frames top-to-bottom over the refresh interval. And where a crt monitor draw by an electron beam that has zero processing time, modern displays add pixel transition delay (GtG) and digital processing/scaler latency on top of that.
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u/crushcastles23 3h ago
I think running through two converters would add a decent amount of input lag.
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u/RedactedSpatula 2h ago
I literally just lugged one to a university to play a melee tourney on. They are soo good
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u/powerhammerarms 48m ago edited 44m ago
But is that response time really noticeable by human beings? Cuz it seems like if it was so much better they would just produce CRT monitors. At least for high end applications.
My thoughts would be that a game developer has the purest form that a game can function. I'm only guessing that though.
Maybe they have underperforming machines and they say hey it looks good enough here. So once it gets out to the consumer if they have a better setup it will look even better.
I guess maybe I'm not thinking about other limitations of a CRT.
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u/maxiligamer 4m ago
With modern LCDs there shouldn't be that much of a difference if what they are stating is correct. Compared to early LCDs the difference was probably huge
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u/Available_Finger_513 3h ago
When I get migraines, I can sense the 60 hz flickering on LEDs (which makes my migraines worse)
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u/GrabbenD 3h ago
Nano IPS works great for me, 12h+ at the desk and got no headaches. OLEDs are a different story
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u/iamasatellite 2h ago
I could see the flashing of 60Hz CRT monitors (luckily you could usually override them to higher refresh rates like 72 or 85), but not CRT TVs, maybe the interlacing helped.
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u/Heimerdahl 55m ago
I'm also sensitive to flickering lights and know the pain :/
What worries me even more than my own issues, though, is how this might affect our pets (or wildlife, in regards to light pollution). Because we know that the frequency threshold at which flickering lights are perceived as continuous (the critical flicker fusion threshold) ranges from a bit to much higher in dogs, cats, and other critters, than for us humans.
But obviously, all of our lightbulbs, screens, etc. are designed, built, and tested for human perception.
Imagine having to live in a room with constantly flickering lights. What absolute horror! What if that's how Mr Snuggles and Major Barks feel about the ceiling lights or the desk lamp?
Similar story with electrical noise. My father and I have always had annoyingly good hearing and would often find ourselves hunting for whatever newly purchased or crapped out old device was making noises. Usually at frequencies at the upper limit of human hearing. Animals once again have hearing beyond ours. Smart plug A might be perfectly fine for my flatmate but driving me nuts, while smart plug B might be fine for me, but stressful for the cat.
I've long wanted to spend some time and effort into building a little testing device (to see if any of one's existing devices might be problematic for certain pets, or to check before purchasing new ones), but haven't managed to get past some initial testing and playing with sensors.
Sidenote: Whether we notice or get annoyed/stressed by flickering lights is actually quite a bit more complex than just frequency, but that is the biggest and most directly controllable part.
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u/SkorpioSound 3h ago
Yep, this is why 60 FPS was the standard for gaming so long. The older screens operated at the same frequency the electrical grid is on, so games were made to match that.
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u/Kaleidoscope-360 2h ago
Also 60 FPS is a great standard. I certainly enjoy higher frame rates, but 60 FPS is "enough" to not be painful.
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u/Tandy2000 1h ago
I mean it was the standard in that it was the maximum games would go for/divisions of it, but in the 5th generation it was rare for games to hit 60fps. For example FF7 ran at 60fps in menus, 30fps when moving around and 15fps for battles/animations. Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.
Typically most 3D games ran at 20-30 FPS at the time. PS1 had a lot of simpler 2D games that would run better but they were also brought down by awful load times.
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u/gibbersganfa 51m ago
You're 100% right and it's funny that I'm sitting here reading all this remembering all the slowdown on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, even on first party games. People really have revisionist memories of retro games sometimes.
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u/turnipofficer 2h ago
I remember 60hz on CRT made my eyes tired so I always had like them running at like at least double that. Those CRT could manage really high resolution and high refresh rates.
Man they were chunky and heavy though.
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u/BritishGolgo13 23m ago
They prob equipped with VRR and all the other buzzword nonsense too because OG CRTs are just that good
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u/vitrum_analytika 4h ago
CRT monitors are smooth af, if you have one of those old but not too old large screen CRT tv, try playing any game on it and you'll see the difference, these are cathode rays firing at a chemical screen so when something moves on screen it moves continuously as opposed to pixel by pixel in LED monitors. That's why mario veterans prefer CRT to this day
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u/Leaf_Petal 4h ago
Spent $500 on a PS5 just to give it the authentic Fallout terminal experience with 60hz scanlines. Beautiful.
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u/Propellerrakete 3h ago
Not if it runs at 50Hz, those things flickered like hell and were replaced by 100Hz models for a reason. PC CRTs however usually had the option to run at higher frequencies and produced better images than LCDs for quite a long time.
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u/knutix 1h ago
Played css on an old CRT, could set it to 240Hz i believe.
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u/Propellerrakete 1h ago
Not impossible, usually the frequency was depending on the resolution. If you lowered the resolution, you could set a higher frequency. Still, 240Hz would have required either a very high end CRT or you could only set the output settings of your graphics card and would have been stuck with a lower frequency of the CRT anyways. My 19" CRT was stuck at 75Hz at anything higher than VGA and could only do 100Hz at VGA.
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u/V8-6-4 5h ago
Why?
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Gurbachen 3h ago
The person you responded to was not replying to the 19 seconds comment
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u/DrTommyNotMD 1h ago
60fps is on the upper end of what most people can see anyway. Beyond that smooth is smooth for almost everyone.
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u/Unhappy-Spot4980 5h ago
This is dumb. I like it.
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u/tryyeezus 2h ago
I like to think he got dropped at great grandma's for the week not knowing this was her setup
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u/ikkiyikki 5h ago
How in the hell did they hook that up??
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u/wafflestep 5h ago
It looks like HDMI to RCA, then RCA to an old RF Switch box. It's plugged in with VHF I think it's called, but that's quite before my time.
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u/al3phz3r0 3h ago
I remember having an RCA to RF modulator for my N64 and old 1980s Philips TV and it was only... 30 years ago... Jesus.
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u/pitman-87 2h ago
I had the same setup running until GameCube era, because I had an old-ass TV in my room. The type where you hat to press buttons on the TV to switch channels and rotate some disc to search for frequencies. Fun times and this was only... 20 years ago... Dang it.
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u/Lanky-Football857 5h ago
If I had to take and educated guess, I’d say they made televisions back then thinking of compatibility with the PS5, since evidently such a thing would come up eventually
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u/Rattlecruiser 5h ago
Nazi plans for the PS5 fell into their hands in 1945
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u/JamesFromToronto 5h ago
"And zen ve vill tell zem zat zey don't own ze games!"
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u/LeoBannister 5h ago
We'll take your word for it. Surely nobody that speaks German could try to deceive people.
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u/Kqyxzoj 5h ago
This is indeed most likely what happened.
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u/Lanky-Football857 5h ago
Yeah, I mean. Those guys invented the television already. We just invented more things we can do with it and get all the credits
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u/Meelis_Tegevus 5h ago
PS5 gameplay early releases inspired many world wars back then. Locations for actual battles were chosen by games.
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u/baithammer 3h ago
More they needed to downgrade to digital from analog to allow for more interesting devices to be hooked up ...
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u/Clark-Kent 2h ago
That doesn't even make sense
Sony is a Japanese company and this is an America TV, you must be thinking about the Xbox
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u/LaurieJacksonJackson 4h ago
Quite easily. HDMI to composite video converter. Feed that to an analog RF modulator. The output of that goes to the antenna input on the TV. Signal looks the same as a broadcasted TV signal from ye olde times.
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u/agbishop 6m ago
People may remember they were very commonly included with old VCRs and old video game systems
People would connect that to the TV’s antennae screws and “broadcast” a analog signal to channel 3 or 4. Tune the TV to channel 3 and there’s the image
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u/ShiraCheshire 5h ago
There are a lot of adapters for hooking things up to slightly older tech. String enough together and you've got it.
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u/mooselantern 2h ago
Do people really not know about AV cables? Everything is convertible to everything else with enough adapters.
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u/immamarius 5h ago
I think screen is just regular screen, if I’m right this game is Ghost of Tsushima it has non coloured mode which look like old samurai movies.
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u/MeNoCanRead 5h ago
It's just a regular screen with ghost of Tsushima's black and white filter mode on.
Not interesting. Just clickbait.
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u/samusmaster64 55m ago
You can see the HDMI to RCA to RF converters plugged in and turned on in the video. That's easier and cheaper to do than swapping out a panel for something like this.
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u/Vectorman1989 41m ago
You can see when the scan lines go a little bit out of sync and all the vacuum tube gubbins in the back. It's a real TV
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u/DecabyteData 1h ago
Not necessarily sure. When he turns the corner around the set, you can see the slight curvature and circular shape of the screen where the CRT meets the wood. I looked up other videos of similar General Electric TVs from that era, and that detail seems to be consistent.
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u/MeNoCanRead 1h ago
If that's the case, why use a video game known to have a black and white mode?
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u/knutix 1h ago
Maybe it looks better on a black and white screen, when it has a native black and white mode? I guess the color levels are fine tuned to look better in black and white. And if thats the only proof you have that its a normal LCD/OLED screen, then how can you be so fucking certain that its fake?
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u/DecabyteData 1h ago
If im to guess, hes probably just a hobbiest and playing that game with that mode gave him the idea for the little project. Also, ive not done it with a TV quite this old, but speaking from experience shoving a modern screen in that set would be 5 times harder and more complicated than just using converters to get any picture you want on the screen.
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u/Sonikku_a 5h ago
I mean it’s just daisy chained video converters.
Once you get it to antenna you could plug anything into it.
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u/AboveAverage1988 5h ago
Just google "rf modulator". Cheap simple tech that's been around for decades.
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u/NissEhkiin 5h ago
Looks like there's a modern screen in there. Nice try though
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u/Propellerrakete 3h ago
Quite possible, think it should flicker like hell with a screen from back then or can modern phones deal with that? It also looks a little too crisp for a screen from 80 years ago.
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u/DecabyteData 1h ago
The flicker is only a recording framerate problem, synchronize that and you shouldn't see any at all. And as for the crispness, televisions from this era are a LOT more clear than we give then credit for. Its so crisp because its black and white. You can have a higher "resolution" in a CRT if you're not trying to shove red, green, and blue phosphors (the CRT version of pixels) into one spot.
Also, I think when he turns the corner around the TV you can actually see the slight curve of the CRT where the screen meets the wood casing.
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u/Propellerrakete 1h ago
Got points, I can also see the curved screen as you piinted out. Might actually be legit and I was wrong.
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u/GodAImighty 2h ago
I mean you can see the HDMI to RCA to RF modulator cables in the video. You can also see the CRT from the opening in the back. Kurosawa mode is just used for dramatic effect, but this is how consoles worked on old TVs in the 80s and 90s.
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u/Tubular_Code 1h ago
I turned 40 this year and bought a small 40yo B&W tv off ebay that was still new in box. Hooked a chromecast up to it and put in my kitchen to have old tv shows and cartoons on in the background. CRT just has something nice about it.
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u/Charming_Dealer3849 5h ago
How it's inventors wanted it experienced
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u/ImMakinTrees 2h ago
its
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u/Charming_Dealer3849 2h ago
Take it up with Google I don't correct their autocorrect unless they pay me
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u/Jimmy-Mac-471 5h ago
I kind of think something like Cuphead would be a vibe on this. Or any other of those retro cartoon style games
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u/ShiraCheshire 5h ago
This reminds me of when I had my (new at the time) PS3 trying to play cutting edge graphics games on my half dead CRT from 1996. I remember not being able to read any of the text in Alice Madness Returns because the display was too fuzzy to render the text at any readable clarity. I got by on the fact that 98% of the game is fully voice acted.
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u/SolarOrigami 5h ago
I used to play my game cube on a black and white TV in the basement until we upgraded to a color TV with a built in VCR!
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u/NovaHorizon 3h ago
Did they ever fix the liquid metal issue with a revision to the fat PS5? If not don't use it vertically. The liquid metal pools at the bottom of the containment barricade leaving a badly conducted hot spot. At best the PS5 just shuts down due to overheating at worst it completely breaks.
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u/fourfourthreethree 3h ago
Oh they NEVER would've imagined anything like this on their little television boxes 😂
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u/SmarmySmurf 1h ago
I unironically enjoy stuff like Fallout, RDR, LA Noire, and Mafia in B&W. I think samurai stuff can fit the aesthetic too. Neat.
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u/LoreMasterJack 1h ago
That cape is still so beautiful and captivating even on a display like that.
Rendering truly is art.
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u/marlotrot 58m ago
Oh Shit, If it is from 1949, then step away a bit unless you want a third brest man. Don't use it like an PC monitor, thats what I am saying. There should be some Bremsstrahlung as the old masks wheren't that good iirc
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u/DowntownResident993 51m ago
This is actually amazing. I can't believe how clear it still looks. I can think of so many games I'd want to try on this set up.. particularly spooky ones, and during a thunderstorm.
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u/Plenty-Meeting-2081 7m ago
Fake? Looks like ghost of Tsushima which gives the black and white option
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u/Shaushage_Shandwich 5h ago
You have to get the premium HDMI cables. They're expensive but you can really tell the difference.
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u/BridgeDuck45 4h ago
no way that tv could produce this amount of fps?
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u/CMDR_Agony_Aunt 1h ago
Old TVs were effectively locked to 60 or 50 fps (2x30 or 2x25). Analogue has no problems with frames.
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u/_Steven_Seagal_ 5h ago
This would be perfect for Fallout.