Why Old CRT Is 100x Better Than MODERN 4K Monitor

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]You spent $800 on a gaming monitor. The box says it's the fastest display you can buy, and in a garage somewhere, a $20 television from 1997 is beating it.

[00:00:09]Not a little bit, by a factor of 1,000.

[00:00:12]Yes, you heard right, 1,000 times faster response time. And the craziest part is, when you actually dig into the physics of how these screens work, it's not even close. It's a completely different category. But, here's the thing that's going to bother you. If that CRT is so insanely faster, why did we ever stop using them? Why does every pro gamer, every studio, every broadcast setup in the world use flat panels today? There's a reason, and it's a big one. We'll get there. But first, let's talk about what's actually happening inside that old, ugly, heavy TV that your $800 monitor simply cannot do. To understand why your new monitor has a problem, you need to understand what a pixel actually does when it changes. Right now, your 4K display is made of liquid crystals, tiny molecules sandwiched between two sheets of glass. When electricity hits them, they twist.

[00:00:59]>> [music] >> That twist either blocks or lets through the backlight behind them. That's your pixel, on, off, color, done. Here's the problem, those molecules don't snap, they flow, they're liquid. Getting them to twist from one position to another takes time, real, measurable time. Even on a monitor advertised at one response time, what they're actually measuring is the absolute fastest possible transition in the absolute best conditions. Now, open up that $20 CRT. Inside, there's a gun, literally, an electron gun. It fires a beam of electrons from the back of the tube toward the front. At [music] the front, coating the glass is a layer of phosphor. When an electron hits a phosphor dot, it glows, red, green, or blue. That's your pixel. Here's where it gets interesting, the beam doesn't hold the image, it draws it, line by line, left to right, top to bottom, 60 times per second. It's scanning across the entire screen constantly. No pixel is on for more than a fraction of a millisecond. It lights up, glows briefly, and the beam has already moved on. By the time it comes back around, a new frame's data is ready. That phosphor afterglow lasts roughly 1 to 3 microseconds, not milliseconds, microseconds. 1 microsecond is 0.001 milliseconds. Your LCD pixel is sitting at 5 to 10 ms minimum. The math, the CRT is responding somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times faster at the raw pixel level. And because of that scan pattern, that constant moving beam, there's no sample and hold. The image is never frozen, it's always being redrawn. Your eye tracking a moving object on a CRT sees motion the way you see motion in real life, continuously updated. Even at only 60 Hz, a CRT often looked and felt sharper in motion than a 144 Hz LCD. Not because of the refresh rate, because of the physics of how the image was being built. This isn't just theory anymore.

[00:02:43]Blurbusters, a research organization that specifically tests display motion clarity, has published measurement data directly comparing CRT phosphor response to modern LCD response times. Their best-case measured LCD transitions come in at 1 ms and above, and that's with strobing backlight tricks applied.

[00:03:00]They've also published something called the pursuit camera test, a standardized way to measure how much smear a display produces during motion. CRTs score near zero. Top-end gaming monitors with every motion setting maxed out still show measurable smear by comparison. At Evo, the largest fighting game tournament in the world, held every year in Las Vegas, players at the highest levels were still requesting CRT setups as recently as 2018.

[00:03:25]For Street Fighter, for Tekken, not because the monitors looked better, because the input response and motion clarity were genuinely faster.

[00:03:33]Tournament organizers had to track down and maintain old CRT stock because no LCD on the market fully replaced what that old hardware was doing. That's not nostalgia, that's performance. If this is already blowing your mind, hit subscribe and let's uncover more interesting things left. So, if CRTs are so dramatically faster, why is every screen around you an LCD? Resolution, size, and one very physical reality. A CRT works by bending an electron beam with magnetic fields. The bigger the screen, the deeper the tube has to be to maintain that beam angle accurately. A 29-in CRT is roughly 20 in deep and weighs over 100 lb. A 40-in CRT becomes physically impractical to build. Then there's resolution. CRTs scan at fixed frequency, but they weren't natively locked to pixel grids the way LCDs are.

[00:04:18]Scaling up to 4K resolution on a CRT electron beam isn't impossible, but the engineering cost and size required make it commercially unviable. Nobody's building a 4K 40-in CRT in 2024 for a consumer price point. LCD won because it's flat, light, power efficient, and scalable, not because it was faster. It was always slower. It just won everything else. But before we call LCDs completely finished, there is a massive elephant in the room. That electron beam inside the CRT. It's painting with radiation. Nothing crazy. It's low level. It's not going to melt your face off, but it was real energy coming off that screen, whether you liked it or not. Now imagine sitting 18 in from that thing every single day for 8 hours straight. That was just a normal office job in the '90s. And after a while, people started asking questions. Health researchers started looking at workers who did exactly that, and the data they kept finding wasn't great. It was consistent enough that the Swedish government actually had to step in and write an official rule called MPR II.

[00:05:18]Basically, a limit on how much radiation these monitors were legally allowed to produce. Not because someone was guessing it might be a problem, because the evidence from actual workers was already showing it was. CRT convergence drift is another one. So inside a CRT, there are three electron guns, >> [music] >> red, green, and blue. And for the picture to look right, all three have to hit their tiny little targets on the screen perfectly. But heat, age, and nearby magnetic fields slowly knock them off. When that happens, you start seeing weird color fringes around sharp edges, like objects on screen have a little colored shadow around them. And the frustrating part? You couldn't really fix it at home.

[00:05:57]Here's where the story gets genuinely interesting. Display engineers know the sample and hold problem. They've known it for 20 years, and the current solutions are essentially hacks.

[00:06:06]Backlight strobing, black frame insertion, overdrive voltage. These work by briefly flashing the backlight off between frames, mimicking the CRT's natural dark period between beam scans.

[00:06:16]It helps. [music] It doesn't solve it.

[00:06:19]The real solution is OLED, and more specifically the next generation of OLED called microLED. OLED pixels are a completely different animal. Instead of using liquid crystals that need a backlight shining through them, each individual pixel in an OLED screen just >> [music] >> makes its own light.

[00:06:34]Directly. And because of that, they can switch on and off almost instantly.

[00:06:38]We're talking 0.1 milliseconds. Still not quite as fast as old CRT phosphor, but somewhere between 50 to 100 times faster than your typical LCD. Then there's microLED, which takes that idea even further. Imagine individual LED elements smaller than a human hair, each one firing completely on its own. No backlight, no liquid crystals, no twisting or flowing of anything. Just tiny little lights doing exactly what they're told, instantly. Samsung, LG, Sony, they're all working on it. Small microLED screens already exist in some really high-end stuff. But here's the problem. Manufacturing millions of LEDs that small, and placing every single one of them perfectly, is incredibly difficult and expensive right now. So consumer microLED screens, the kind normal people can actually buy, aren't really here yet at any real scale. But they're close, and when they arrive at mainstream prices, the sample and hold problem effectively dies. If microLED hits consumer pricing in the next 3 to 5 years, and the current manufacturing data suggests it will, then for the first time since the CRT disappeared, we'll have displays that don't motion clarity for size and resolution.

[00:07:45]>> [music] >> That $20 CRT in someone's garage won't be the fastest screen in the room anymore. But until that day, if you play competitive games and motion clarity actually matters to you, the old, ugly, heavy, radiation-emitting television from 1997 is still measurably faster than what you bought last month. That's a strange world to live in, but it's the one we're in. If you want more videos like this, where we actually get into why technology works the way it does, subscribe. It takes 2 seconds and it helps a lot.