EmmaStone
Member
What Hi-Fi turns 50 this year and ran a piece with some of its long-serving reviewers on what actually changed. John Archer's section is the one worth reading, and there is an admission in it that we have all quietly agreed to forget. The early flat sets of the late 1990s were worse than the best CRTs they replaced, and the flat generation did not really come good until plasma hit its stride in the early 2000s and gave us self-emissive pixels and contrast worth having.
We bought the LCDs regardless. Because a 90kg Trinitron up two flights of stairs is its own argument, and because a set that hangs on a wall changes what a living room is for. Picture quality lost to furniture, and it took most of a decade to claw it back.
That pattern never stopped. Plasma died with better motion and better near-black than the LCDs that killed it, and everyone moved anyway because LED was brighter under shop lighting. We are running a softer version of it right now with mini LED against OLED, where the panel that measures better in a dark room keeps losing to the one that survives a sunlit lounge.
The CRT era ran from the 1930s to the early 2000s. A seventy year format. Nothing since has lasted fifteen, and part of that is simply that there was nothing to sell you when the tube was the tube.
The bit I cannot settle: are we converging on something, or is the next one already queued up to be brighter, thinner and slightly worse in the ways that actually matter?
We bought the LCDs regardless. Because a 90kg Trinitron up two flights of stairs is its own argument, and because a set that hangs on a wall changes what a living room is for. Picture quality lost to furniture, and it took most of a decade to claw it back.
That pattern never stopped. Plasma died with better motion and better near-black than the LCDs that killed it, and everyone moved anyway because LED was brighter under shop lighting. We are running a softer version of it right now with mini LED against OLED, where the panel that measures better in a dark room keeps losing to the one that survives a sunlit lounge.
The CRT era ran from the 1930s to the early 2000s. A seventy year format. Nothing since has lasted fifteen, and part of that is simply that there was nothing to sell you when the tube was the tube.
The bit I cannot settle: are we converging on something, or is the next one already queued up to be brighter, thinner and slightly worse in the ways that actually matter?
