I picked up some old CRTs from an ewaste find and had real trouble getting them to work around 2022.
I found a guy in southern California that can fix them but he was 2+ hours away and the monitors weighted around 100 pounds.
Just a few weeks ago I finally made the drive and got the first one repaired. It needed a few small parts and a service, but had a new picture tube installed.
It was a Sony BVM-D24E1WU.
The other monitor takes about 10 minutes to warm up. Pat the repair guy told me it would only support sd resolutions (480i) I didn’t take it for repair since I didn’t know what I would hook up to a SD only monitor. That one was a Sony BVM-20F1U.
Doing some quick searches it seems I got super lucky in the model both displays they were, as well as finding someone who knows how to fix them.
It seems that I should do some retro gaming. My retro system is a PS3 . Is there anything that just wows on these displays?
Does anyone have an HDMI to sdi recommendation? How do I de-embed the audio?
The biggest difference you’re going to see for fidelity on CRT displays will be improvements for 2d and early 3d games. There are some SNES games with some great art styles that are better suited to CRT. If you like RPGs, I’d check out Shadowrun, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG. For 3D games, FFVII is one that particularly stands out for me as looking pretty bad on modern monitors but pretty good on CRT. Even something like Goldeneye for N64, which looks comically bad on modern screens, was a lot nicer looking at the time.
Admittedly, especially in the case of Goldeneye, some of this may just be that the games looked comparatively better before later 3D gave it us a better basis for comparison, but CRT is at least a factor. SNES games really shine with CRT, though. The art styles had really come into their own in that final 2D console generation, and a lot of them look much better than what followed on the first 3D consoles.
And that’s not a coincidence. Not all, but the best pixel artists took the limitations and quirks of the tech from that era into account when designing. Not only the CRT technology with scanlines and other properties, also the cable connection you got plays a huge role. Not only on SNES, but also very apparent on the Mega Drive / Genesis. Nowadays I play old systems on emulators only and don’t want to miss a good Shader which simulates old CRT effects. They get pretty close to the original thing (depending on the shader and depending on to what monitor you compare).
Would the nintwndo switch remakes of the Square game through HDMI also carry the improved look?