• bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    It makes sense you’d be able to get a much higher refresh rate on a tube if you reduce the resolution, since you would be reducing the beam’s travel.

    • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      Changing the resolution on a CRT normally doesn’t make the picture smaller. There is no native resolution, phosphors are not pixels. My Viewsonic would display 640x480 or 1600x1200 on the whole 21” regardless. You can also watch the video, it’s not using a smaller area.

      I believe the limitation is bandwidth, not the electron beam.

      • user134450@feddit.org
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        4 months ago

        There is a limit on the spacing of the colour bands though. If you want colours then you have to hit the spots where the correct phosphors are and this limits the usable resolution.

        • Morphit @feddit.uk
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          4 months ago

          What do you mean? The shadow mask ensures the gun for each colour can only hit the phosphors of that colour. How would a lower resolution change that?

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Yeah I didn’t think it would make the “pixels” smaller, but the beam would need to pulse less often and therefore could travel more. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what they did.

        • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          Electron beams scan insanely fast, that isn’t the limiting factor. Getting that much bandwidth across a VGA cable is tough. If you wanted super high refresh rates on old CRTs you’d have to drop the resolution. Same concept.

          • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            Ah. I see, so reducing the resolution was more about sending frames to the monitor faster, not about optimizing the tube hardware’s behaviour

            • Dave.@aussie.zone
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              4 months ago

              Yeah basically you can only signal “on-off” so many times a second in a vga cable before the ons and offs get blurry and unusable. So you can trade lower resolution for a higher frame rate as long as you keep the total number of on-offs below the limits.

      • Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        Is it really worth the cost after 144 Hz, though? Are there applications for a higher refresh rate than the human eye can even see?

          • Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 months ago

            Thanks for the answer!

            I know there’s no numbered fixed limit on the human eye, obviously, but it seems like beyond a certain screen refresh rate our eyes wouldn’t really notice a difference, yeah?

            • Dave.@aussie.zone
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              4 months ago

              Your rods and cones in your eye and the nerves that transmit the information to your brain have signalling limits, they can only fire so fast and they have a time to reset. It depends on lighting and what you’re focused on as well.

              Which is why film can get away with 24 frames per second because in a dark theatre and a bright screen 24 fps is enough to blur that signalling so that it looks like decent motion. Only thing cinematographers had to watch out for is large panning shots as our peripheral vision is tuned for more rapid response and we can see the juddering out of the corner of our eyes.

              I could see the 60Hz flicker of crt monitors back in the day if I had a larger monitor or was working next to someone with 60Hz. Not when I was directly looking at it, but when it was in my peripheral vision. The relatively tiny jump to 72Hz made things so much nicer for me.

        • Voyajer@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          For Joe Everyman with a reaction time of 250-300ms it would probably not be worth the additional cost, but for esports players who have a reaction time of half that already it starts to matter more, especially for games that run synchronously on a tick system.

  • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    I need newly made modern CRTs. The salvage ones I have tested all have degraded image, and none go that fast even with micro resolution