r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Inside-Size-8253 • 6h ago

Video PlayStation 5 with HDMI 2.1 to a 1949 black-and-white television

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16.2k Upvotes

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2.6k

u/ricebasedvodka 6h ago

I'm actually impressed with the frame rate on that tv

1.4k

u/Apprehensive-Seat845 6h 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 4h 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 4h 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 4h ago

Instagib UT man there’s a core memory unlock

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u/tomjone5 4h 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 3h 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 3h 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 2h 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/NickRick 1h ago

i dont think most people had 33" computer monitors.

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u/pimpledsimpleton 1h 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/mitchandre 3h ago

Q3A?

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u/tandpastatester 3h ago

Quake 3 arena

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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 1h ago

Flat panels were more expensive for a long time so it was easier to resist getting one.

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u/tandpastatester 1h 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 3h 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 2h 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 44m ago

Yup just last month I had to educate someone on Reddit about why their movies “lagged” because they were in 3:2 pulldown

•

u/yoweigh 5m ago

Hm, my TV is a 5 year old 60Hz Hisense, so you might be onto something. Would that problem also apply to blu-ray content? I don't notice it when I'm watching something like the new Dune on physical media.

I actually might be using the wrong term now that I've looked into it. It's more of a stutter, I guess. I notice it most when I'm watching sci-fi and there's a big ship moving slowly across the screen. Its motion is not smooth. It feels like the stream and not the display to me, but I could be wrong for sure.

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u/whooptheretis 3h 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!

3

u/oldsecondhand Interested 1h ago edited 1h 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/vishli84000 3h ago

Holy shit instagib. Haven't heard that from another person I think ever

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u/dBlock845 2h ago

As long as I didn't have to carry around a CRT to LAN parties anymore.

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u/OverHaze 2h 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 1h ago

You couldn't even play games on early laptop LCD screens because ghosting was that bad.

0

u/ThisSiteSucks8485 2h ago

Nah film has a really bad 24fps frame rate

•

u/Firewolf06 4m ago

film has whatever framerate you spin it at

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u/SeatBeeSate 4h 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 4h 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/Puzzleheaded-Flow724 3h ago

Lol, that brings back memories.

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u/T0biasCZE 41m ago

And then from composite to NTSC chanel 3.

that one is just analog modulation, so no delay from there

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u/wonkey_monkey Expert 3h 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 3h ago

Yep. That's why Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments are still played on CRTs. Every frame counts.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Flow724 4h ago

And perfect dark.

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u/bilbo388 3h ago

No, they cancelled it.

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u/sanYtheFox 4h 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.

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u/tandpastatester 4h 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 4h ago

I think running through two converters would add a decent amount of input lag.

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u/RedactedSpatula 3h ago

I literally just lugged one to a university to play a melee tourney on. They are soo good

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u/Huge_Gain9624 2h ago

I did not forget

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u/powerhammerarms 1h ago edited 1h 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 45m 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

•

u/SovereignKing 1m ago

Also why CRTs are ridicoulsy expensive to get hold of now, since so many have been discovering this fact in recent years.

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u/Available_Finger_513 4h 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 4h ago

r/PWM_Sensitive

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 3h 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 1h 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 4h 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 3h 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 2h 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 1h 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 3h 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/Roo_Rammin_Russell 3h ago

Why would they need to be 60 Hz if all TV broadcasted at 30 FPS?

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u/skafast 3h ago

Early TV was 60 fields per second (interlaced) to prevent flicker, and locking those 60 fields to the 60 Hz power grid stopped AC interference from creating rolling dark bars across the picture.

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u/V8-6-4 3h ago

Each frame consisted of 2 fields so it was actually 60 fields per second.

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u/BritishGolgo13 1h 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 5h 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/trainer_memo 4h ago

It's $650 now.

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u/Propellerrakete 4h 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 2h ago

Played css on an old CRT, could set it to 240Hz i believe.

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u/Propellerrakete 2h 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/raspberryharbour 2h ago

A lot of good men died in the Mario Wars

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u/TDYDave2 4h ago

On a CRT, it scans line by line rather than pixel by pixel.

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u/hiielo_friio 5h ago

Meanwhile the resolution is fighting for its life

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u/Active_Taste9341 5h ago

it went on fire at 19 secs for sure 

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u/CommandWest7471 4h ago

Old crts are incredibly good at increasing refresh rates

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u/V8-6-4 5h ago

Why?

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

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u/Gurbachen 4h ago

The person you responded to was not replying to the 19 seconds comment

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u/BedaHouse 3h ago edited 3h ago

I think there are times where the answer/motivation behind is: "because."

So in that regard: yup, he did it. Neat. Did the thing. Hope the process was fun for that individual.

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u/AgreeableAd8687 27m ago

why? they've always run at 60hz or above and have better motion clarity than lcds

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u/Disastrous_Song1309 4h ago

lol, you new?

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u/DrTommyNotMD 2h 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/VegetaFan1337 21m ago

Not how eyes work.

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u/DrTommyNotMD 18m ago

Human eyes are not like a digital framerate I fully understand that. Human eyes also have a point in which they perceive a flashing light as always on, and in most studies that’s solidly between 50 and 90 flashes per second.

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u/VegetaFan1337 6m ago

There's a difference between a flashing light and flashing pictures on a screen to give the illusion of motion. Going from 30fps to 60 is noticeable. And so is 60 to 120. And so is 120 to 240. Yes, there's diminishing returns as you have to keep doubling the fps to see the same difference, but you do notice a difference. What people perceive as smooth enough for them is personal preference. But it doesn't mean there's no difference visible.