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CRT based Apple Silicon Mac?
- Thread starter wellander1
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CRTs were best for games for a long time due to the high refresh rates you could achieve. Played a lot of HLDM at high refresh rate, 85Hz or higher. One of my last ones was 2048 x 1536 @ 79 Hz iirc. Excellent res and refresh rate, loved that monitor.
I’ve got a 21” Apple Studio display, it was awesome. Problem is I think the caps are failing because it flickers a lot and won’t stay “awake” very long anymore.
A bit of Googling reveals conflicting information about the demise of cathode-ray CRT tubes.* It seems that Sony stopped making them in 2006, an Indian company called Videocon stopped selling refurbished units in 2016, but apparently Toshiba continues to make them for the aviation market, because some aircraft still use CRTs.
This PDF has a fascinating list of airliners that still use CRTs, or at least airliners that might possibly still use them:
Surprisingly not the 747-400. It's a little snapshop of a period in the 1980s and early 1990s when display panels took over from conventional instruments but liquid-crystal LCD displays* weren't available yet. It seems that it's easier to upgrade Boeing airliners because the display is just a drop-in component whereas Airbus units require a certain amount of integrated logic. Thales charges $40,000 to replace an A320's CRTs.
My hunch is that if small-run CRTs were feasible there would be at least one boutique manufacturer selling reproductions of retro arcade cabinets for people who want to play Defender as God intended, but there isn't. Apple obviously has far more resources than the boutique market but even so.
The transparent, graphite-era 17" ADC CRT is of course a design classic, but even as a novelty you'd have to really, really want one to own it. Postage is basically impossible because it's larger and heavier than a car. Putting one inside a house is impossible because it's larger than a house. It's so heavy that Apple had to fill the case with helium, otherwise it would immediately smash through the floor and drill down to the Earth's core, with disastrous results.
* I deliberately wrote it that way to annoy you. Specifically you. Not him - you. - Ashley
This PDF has a fascinating list of airliners that still use CRTs, or at least airliners that might possibly still use them:
Surprisingly not the 747-400. It's a little snapshop of a period in the 1980s and early 1990s when display panels took over from conventional instruments but liquid-crystal LCD displays* weren't available yet. It seems that it's easier to upgrade Boeing airliners because the display is just a drop-in component whereas Airbus units require a certain amount of integrated logic. Thales charges $40,000 to replace an A320's CRTs.
My hunch is that if small-run CRTs were feasible there would be at least one boutique manufacturer selling reproductions of retro arcade cabinets for people who want to play Defender as God intended, but there isn't. Apple obviously has far more resources than the boutique market but even so.
The transparent, graphite-era 17" ADC CRT is of course a design classic, but even as a novelty you'd have to really, really want one to own it. Postage is basically impossible because it's larger and heavier than a car. Putting one inside a house is impossible because it's larger than a house. It's so heavy that Apple had to fill the case with helium, otherwise it would immediately smash through the floor and drill down to the Earth's core, with disastrous results.
* I deliberately wrote it that way to annoy you. Specifically you. Not him - you. - Ashley
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It’s a thing in the PC gaming scene. CRTs have almost no input lag, high refresh rate and make some raytraced games look more photorealistic because the anti-aliasing looks more natural due to the slight softness of the image.
Obviously needs GPU and monitor with DVI. Sony Trinitrons are their favorite. Plenty of examples on YouTube.