Blur Busters Forums

Yo guys,
Do you think it's possible to create a 1080 crt monitor with high refresh rate?
And how much it can cost?

Why would you limit a CRT to 1080p? Most CRT monitors could do better than 1080p.

Anyway, not gonna happen anymore. Nobody manufactures CRT monitors now.

In about 25 years when tubes are hard to find and can no longer be easily purchased cheaply on the used market -- there will probably be speciality small tube manufacturers that do it for literally $5K-$10K per tube, for speciallized purposes. Improved technology such as 0.1mm pitch and AI-compensating electron gun aiming may be rolled in.

Much like how vintage bulbs restarted being manufactured again (carbon filament) at a 10x cost premium. And some of them use LED filaments!

Or those vintage LP discs being restarted pressed with new modern songs, but sold at a 10x cost premium. And those LP players with Bluetooth!

But do not expect to pay $500. Expect to pay $5000 for a vintage-modern CRT tube manufactured in year ~2040-2045 when a small factory reopens due to nostalgia demand (after scarcity of working tubes on used market)

Now since Blur Busters is THE definitive "retina refresh rate" website: There's an alternative eventually. There's a slow refresh rate race well under way. By around year 2040+ or thereabouts, a 1000Hz+ OLED can emulate the look of a CRT pretty well: An ultra-high-Hz display can emulate an electron gun at a coarse level (blended-fuzzy-edge rolling window scan). Playing-back a retina-resolution full-dynamic range full-shutter-open(full exposure per frame) 1000fps high speed video of a CRT back onto a 1000Hz OLED, will visually "mimic" the look of the original CRT scanning, even down to the phosphor-dot look (given a theoretical sufficiently retina resolution camera sensor combined with a retina-resolution full-dynamic-range display such as an ultra-high-Hz OLED). Basically the preservation of a superior retina resolution version of the "MAME HLSL CRT filter" look, combined with a superior retina refresh rate that manages to capture all human-visible nuances of CRT phosphor feel. TL;DR: All the human-noticed temporal behaviour of a CRT is preservable with a "retina refresh rate" non-CRT display.

I think 5k is a very low estimate, even if we're talking about today's money. Maybe if we're talking about a small monochromatic tube, but recreating large, high quality, color monitors would have enormous engineering and tooling costs. Hell, you'd probably need to have a foundry custom blend the alloy for your shadow mask, and get a custom formula for the glass as well, to match the thermal expansion ratio.

I don't think you could find enough buyers to pay for all of it. It would have to be a pet project of someone independently wealthy.

Then there are regulations on the use of lead in electronics, which might just kill the whole thing, even if you find the money to pay for it.

Sparky wrote:I don't think you could find enough buyers to pay for all of it. It would have to be a pet project of someone independently wealthy.

You never know.

Amazon riches and PayPal riches ending up paying for some space aspirations (e.g. Bezo's Blue Origin and Musk's SpaceX respectively) or simply saving millions of lives (e.g. Bill Gates Foundation on infant mortality initiatives).

There are other options than lead. Technology modifications is capable of increasing the "phoshor dot brightness versus X-ray radiation" ratio. Get things done with less side radiation. To the point where lead may not be needed, and using a different glass additive instead. Also add some active technological self-monitoring to stop/modify function of the tube if it falls out of spec and just about start emitting X-rays. There are things that tubes can theoretically/safe themselves today that just wasn't possible 25 years ago.

Economically practical? Probably not. I'm not sure I'd want to pay $5000-$10,000 for even a 4K-capable descendant of a Sony FW900 tube or Nokia 445pro tube (or the other storied tubes of lore) if there already exists OLED or microLED displays that has enough "retina refresh rate" to successfully temporally emulate CRT phosphor & CRT clarity to majority of human vision limits (there'd even be the the flicker-skew effect that occurs when rolling eyes around in front of CRT too).

If the venn diagram of retina dynamic-range, retina resolution AND retina refresh rate already super-sets the CRT tube, the visual look of CRT is perfectly enough (to human vision error margins) emulatable.

But I know some people would pay that mint for a true original "new-manufacture" CRT if it was compelling!

By the time CRTs truly become extinct, I suspect something like micro LED or OLED will have advanced enough as to be true replacements and cheaply mass-producible. It seems the industry in general agrees that the future of displays are self-iluminating pixels rather than backlights behind LCDs. Once we have that, it is much, much cheaper to produce rolling-scan models of those compared to producing new CRTs. And by the time that happens, 8K will have fully gone mainstream, bringing CRT-like resolution independence back.