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How does a screen work?

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573 points chkhd | 3 comments | 13 Jul 25 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.569s | source
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retrac ◴[13 Jul 25 16:39 UTC] No.44551618[source]▶
CRTs are still slightly magical to me. The image doesn't really exist. It's an illusion. If your eyes operated at electronic speeds, you would see a single incredibly bright dot-point drawing the raster pattern over and over. This YouTube video by "The Slow Mo Guys" shows this in action: https://youtu.be/3BJU2drrtCM?t=190
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hinterlands ◴[13 Jul 25 16:59 UTC] No.44551773[source]▶
That slo-mo video is somewhat misleading, though. The phosphor glows for a good while, so there is a reasonable chunk of the image that's visible at any given time.

The problem in that video is that the exact location the beam is hitting is momentarily very bright, so they calibrated the exposure to that and everything else looks really dark.

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layer8 ◴[13 Jul 25 18:31 UTC] No.44552411[source]▶
The phosphor still drops off very quickly [0][1][2], roughly within a millisecond. That’s why you would need a 1000 Hz LCD/OLED screen with really high brightness (and strobing logic) to approximate CRT motion clarity. On a traditional NTSC/PAL CRT, 1 ms is just under 16 lines, but the latest line is already much brighter than the rest. The slow-motion recording showing roughly one line at a time therefore seems accurate.

[0] https://blurbusters.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/crt-phosp...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phosphor-persistence-of-...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Stimulus-succession-on-C...

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1. hinterlands ◴[13 Jul 25 19:01 UTC] No.44552619[source]▶
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. My assertion is that a visible image persists on the screen longer than it appears in the slo-mo clip. You can just point a camera with an adjustable shutter speed at a CRT and see it for yourself. Here's an example (might need to copy the URL and open in a new tab, they don't like hotlinking):

https://i.sstatic.net/5K61i.png

The brightly-lit band is the part of the frame scanned by the beam while the shutter was open. The part above is the afterimage, which, while not as bright, is definitely there.

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2. layer8 ◴[13 Jul 25 20:18 UTC] No.44553344[source]▶
That link shows an error with Access Denied to me. I didn’t deny that an afterimage is there. I meant to point out that the brightest part by far, which what is most prominently perceived by the eye, isn’t much more than one scanline, in SD.
3. cubefox ◴[14 Jul 25 10:52 UTC] No.44558567[source]▶
> The part above is the afterimage, which, while not as bright, is definitely there.

Yes it's there, but it's much less bright than the the scanned area, so it will be hardly perceptible relative to the bright part. The receptors in the eye will hardly respond to it after being excited so strongly by the bright part.