• @deranger
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    2 months ago

    Changing the resolution on a CRT normally doesn’t make the picture smaller. There is no native resolution, phosphors are not pixels. My Viewsonic would display 640x480 or 1600x1200 on the whole 21” regardless. You can also watch the video, it’s not using a smaller area.

    I believe the limitation is bandwidth, not the electron beam.

    • @[email protected]
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      102 months ago

      There is a limit on the spacing of the colour bands though. If you want colours then you have to hit the spots where the correct phosphors are and this limits the usable resolution.

      • Morphit
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        2 months ago

        What do you mean? The shadow mask ensures the gun for each colour can only hit the phosphors of that colour. How would a lower resolution change that?

    • @[email protected]
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      32 months ago

      Yeah I didn’t think it would make the “pixels” smaller, but the beam would need to pulse less often and therefore could travel more. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what they did.

      • @deranger
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        112 months ago

        Electron beams scan insanely fast, that isn’t the limiting factor. Getting that much bandwidth across a VGA cable is tough. If you wanted super high refresh rates on old CRTs you’d have to drop the resolution. Same concept.

        • @[email protected]
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          82 months ago

          Ah. I see, so reducing the resolution was more about sending frames to the monitor faster, not about optimizing the tube hardware’s behaviour

          • Dave.
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            2 months ago

            Yeah basically you can only signal “on-off” so many times a second in a vga cable before the ons and offs get blurry and unusable. So you can trade lower resolution for a higher frame rate as long as you keep the total number of on-offs below the limits.