this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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It's not wrong. You can feel it.
My wife is not a gamer and even she can feel it. She hated playing on our living room TV. Said she felt like she got really bad at Mario Bros over the years or something and was disappointed.
Bought a CRT; she loves the game again and is still quite good at it actually.
Reacting to stimulus is completely different than timing inputs in a video game. A few ms of delay isn't really going to register in a reaction test, but if you're using constant time sensitive information on screen to accurately time your movements in a game, you can easily feel lag in the sub 5ms range.
As a guitarist, I can feel latency down to 2ms if I'm playing through a modeling amp on my PC, especially if I'm playing at high tempos. The faster you play, the greater the percentage of time between notes that latency becomes. The effect is the same in high speed video games.
It is wrong. I have a comment elsewhere in the thread breaking it down, but the short of it is that you have to include the time it takes to stream the frame to the beam, or else you're giving CRTs an unfair advantage in measurements.
A good gaming monitor with something like the Framemeister, RetroTINK, or OSSC can give properly unnoticeable amounts of input lag.
Ok, so wait a second here. You're suggesting that buying a "good" gaming monitor (hundreds to thousands of dollars) and an upscaler (the cheapest of the options you mentioned I found for $369 USD is a better option than buying a CRT?
I found a perfectly good 28" Panasonic CRT on Kijiji for $200 CAD.
It makes the retro noises, it displays the games the way they were meant to be displayed, and there's no perceptible input lag. It also just fits the visual aesthetic if you have a retro gaming area/room in your house. There's no way I'm paying anywhere near 5-600 USD (up to 1k CAD, basically) to play retro games on a modern monitor when I can have a setup faithful to the experiences I had as a kid in the 90s for $200 CAD.
Good gaming monitors are not expensive. Anything that supports G-sync should be fine. I picked one up off Craigslist for like $100. New isn't much more.
CRTs are not going to stay cheap for long. They're slowly dying to attrition. If nothing else, the phosphors are dimming over time. In fact, we might be getting towards the end of cheap garage sale pickups already. Especially ones that can be easily RGB converted.