List of recommended TVs for emulation

Always! It’s a 24/7 party around here. :smiley:

There are QLED TVs that are matching the color accuracy of OLED, and with excellent black levels that surpass a CRT’s. I think emissive displays do tend to look better in general, though, for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint. OLED clearly has the upper hand when it comes to viewing angle; there’s no loss of image quality at all when viewed at an angle.

From what I’ve seen, the frame-hold time at 60fps is much lower on QLED vs. OLED, so the stutter shouldn’t be as bad. I’ve also noticed that hardware-based strobing methods tend to make this problem worse, while software-based BFI tends to make it better, but I’m not sure why.

In a side by side comparison with my actual CRT monitor vs my LCD with BFI enabled, the LCD actually looks like it has greater motion clarity, but that might be down to screen size and the phosphor persistence on the CRT. I use “soft eyes” a lot when playing retro games (particularly shoot em ups), and motion blur reduction is most beneficial when eye-tracking an individual object, so individual play style tactics and the type of game also come into play, here. Someone who plays a lot of FPS games as a sniper, for example, will see greater benefit in reducing motion blur even more than what 120Hz + BFI is capable of.

The ideal would be 240Hz with ON:OFF:OFF:OFF cadence for 60fps content, but that’s a 75% reduction in brightness, and I’m not sure there are any 240Hz displays that have sufficient brightness to compensate for this and CRT emulation.

That’s a fair summary.

I have a CRT on my desk and 3 more in my closet; they’re fantastic displays but they’re getting old and all of them need a bit of work. It’s actually getting hard to find a good CRT monitor these days that doesn’t need a bit of work. Craigslist has pretty much completely dried up where I live. I can clean and recap the monitors, but eventually one of the components is just going to fail entirely, and sourcing a replacement could be difficult and expensive, if not impossible. I’m encouraged by the progress being made by modern displays, and I’m optimistic that with a few more years of R&D into quantum dots, we’ll have displays that do everything we need for a true CRT replacement. We’re getting very close with current displays, though!

Update:

Added the LG SM9500 to the list, making it the only non-QLED display to make the cut.

Update:

It’s worth pointing out that there is still not a SINGLE TV available on the market that is bright enough to do scanlines, black frame insertion, AND mask emulation. You’d need about 2,000 cd/m2 sustained SDR brightness (full-screen).

It’s looking increasingly doubtful that there will ever be a modern TV capable of fully replacing the CRT in all areas of performance. There are a few displays intended for outdoor use that might be able to get bright enough, but none of them have the low input lag needed for next-frame response at 60fps.

So, hang out to those CRTs and learn how to repair them.

EDIT: I should clarify that when I’m talking about mask emulation, I mean setting the mask strength to 100%. If you’re willing to compromise on the mask strength a bit, it’s possible to get a very acceptable result when using mask + scanlines + BFI.

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100 nits is a specification of SDR TV’s so I doubt you will see one get into HDR luminance territory. In my opinion, the best course of action is to use a HDR TV specced at 2000 nits and use a fitting inverse function to preserve tonality.

Can you elaborate on this a bit?

What we’re interested in is the sustained SDR brightness of an HDR TV since an emulator running in RA is SDR content. I’ve seen several that reach 2000 nits with HDR content, but 500-600 nits seems to be the max for SDR content, even among the new ultra-bright QLED TVs.

Also, what does this mean? “a fitting inverse function to preserve tonality”

I don’t own an HDR TV, you say that SDR plays on HDR TVs at 600 nits max? Couldn’t you just fake SDR content as HDR by applying an inverse function transform (and matching color space transforms) ?

If the TV applies a constant tonemapper (PQ, HLG), use the inverse of the tonemapper, this is usually an exponential function. I just don’t know by what terms an HDR TV says what is HDR and what is SDR content, or if retroarch glsl/slang has HDR support.

It depends on the TV, but yeah that’s about as bright as they get with SDR content, and it’s only the QLED TVs that get that bright (OLED has ABL that prevents you from doing this).

It’s my understanding that it doesn’t, sadly :frowning:

This is way over my head; can you run this by someone who knows about this stuff? @hunterk

If we can fake SDR content as HDR, that would be a godsend for CRT emulation.

I’m speculating, first and foremost I don’t know if the HDR transfer functions can be reverted, PQ is non linear but I recall reading on pages about converting SDR content to HDR.

Then the inverse function has to overshoot so not to cancel perfectly and reach display max nits (2000), that means a parametric inverse function and not a LUT.

And third, I guess retroarch should be HDR aware and signal that to the display.

All speculation and far fetched, but just wanted to let you know in case I might also learn something out of it.

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Take a look at this TV and see if it warrants your attention and consideration.

You can take a look at this one as well:

Here’s one more to check out:

This is a nice review for comparisons:

And here’s one of the newer brighter OLED TVs

Take a look at this thread @Digitech. It might help you to make a more informed decision when it comes to purchasing a new TV.

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Thanks a lot!, going to check em all and see if they are available in mexico.

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