ViewSonic G220fb: An Awesome 21" CRT Monitor from 2003 for Retro Gaming

I was working in IT close support back in the 2005-2010 and cant even count how many fully working CRT's we threw to trash. Nobody wanted them back then. LOL

Would love to have some analog tech make a comeback. There are actually so many advantages to analog for single purpose applications.

oled and crt is the gamers dream lately. man its getting real hard to find a crt monitor local to me

Definetly my Syncmaster 955DF looks sharper than this viewsonic.

i had a viewsonic monitor growing up. it was the first monitor i bought with my money from myy first job. loved that thing!!!!!

Que lindo monitor

I hate that I never really appreciated crt. I came into pc gaming a few years before the move to lcd and as a younger kid I thought it was a huge upgrade and so cool how thin it was....in reality it was a huge step down and we are just now getting to a point where tech is amazing again in screens with oleds. Still how smooth and crisp it looked on a good crt is just something special. Was watching ps5 gameplay on an older sony crt and it was just amazing. I sitll remember it being a treat and staying up late on the weekend when my parents would let me hook a console up to the big living room rear projection tv.......looking back those tvs were so damn bad especially in bright rooms but damn when you were so use to small tvs being the norm that behemoth was amazing in a kids eyes.

First thing I wanted to know is how much this beast weighed, so I looked it up. ~58lbs lol. Good thing you were able to get this in person because I can't even imagine having to ship this thing.

I only clicled because i saw Midtown Madness.. damn what a game

old games look SO much better on CRT

I remember it cost a fortune, it weighed a ton, and it looked better than any other monitor I had ever seen!
And my Matrox G400 pushed it along very nicely, with a PS775 17" next-door. MMM. Dualhead! :)

How sharp is the image on this? I have the Diamondtron 2070SB and I'm not quite impressed due to it's rather softer image that doesn't seem to change even at higher resolutions

Hello, many thanks for your work, I really need your advice and professional opinion, I recently saw a monitor from the Phillips MC15601 HD11 ultrasound equipment at a flea market, it is about 14", has BNC connectors on the back with the inscription "B", "GV", "R", "SYNC" and also VGA. On eBay such a one costs about $ 400-800. And at the flea market such a one costs 2000 rubles, tell me is this a good option for a mister, and should I expect that this monitor has a higher quality tube than in ordinary monitors.
With respect, Maxim.

Yes! CRT Magic! Great video as always. Loving every second of this as I watch on my 17 inch AOC CRT. I'm experiencing the blurryness in certain areas of my monitor like you discussed here. Though it was just my eyes. Glad to know I'm not alone.

Games used to look SO GOOD back in CRT times because the pixel design was based off of CRT! More color and resolution compared to modern nano led. the coding doesn't show off as nicely with those retro games

it does come across video if you're using a crt monitor to watch it

If I can get the 2048x1536 resolution on a 19" CRT monitor, does it mean that it's gonna be even sharper?

I had this very monitor, viewsonic made some excellent CRT's mine lasted 8+ years.

At last I got my first 21" CRT, LaCie Electron 22 Blue II (I think it's rebadged Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2040u). Some tinkering with service menu and now the brightness and colors are back. I'm loving it!

Saw a video of a dude using way lower res und pushing hz up to 700 on a CRT. You might wanna blurp this nugget up to like 300+ hz and try some modern gaming :>

This monitor this particular monitor the view sonic one it does take an H. DMI cable does it not? I hope the answers yes, they Sting. Looks like he could be perfect especially how it changes the color pallet that's great😊

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Holy shit this is actually higher verical resolution and refresh than my LG ips i got a few years ago!

Whats wrong with modern display manufacturers?

bro, youre cold at unreal 🥶

Your XP desktop reminded me that the DNF 2001 leak happened 2 years ago from the day I wrote this comment

I had this exact monitor back in the day. It was the reason I was relatively late in getting into the flat panel LCD displays. Was hard to give it up. Looking back, I should have kept it. It was just so big, and so heavy.

Это же какая пропускная способность у этого монитора?

I had one of these and a GeForce 4 Ti 4600. Man those were the days

For your eyes you should play at least at 85hz at a lower resolution

BRING BACK CRTs!!!!!

if youre hearing loud squeaking sounds or strange sounds or noticing artifacts that dont degauss or obviously have something to do with the coils/gun/phosphor screen see if you can get someone to recap the electroyltic capacitors. they can bulge and pop over time and from an electronics maintenance perspective theyre relatively easy to fix/replace and can make a big difference in protecting other electronic components. These are some of the first components that can degrade over time and thermal cycles and can make a big difference in longevity.

I would get one of these but I don’t have the room for it in my house :(

I had that monitor! My Dad's friend gave it to me after upgrading to a flat monitor. I miss it. 😢

Praying to god this isn't lost from the hurricane.

your viewsonic monitor is the clone of the samsung syncmaster 1100mb which I have one here, idem tube and similar firmware is a shadow mask monitor but not perfect flat as the aperture grille monitors diamontrons or trinitrons, all of these monitors don't last long,so don't use it everyday to browse the web or so

Can you connect a ps2 to this?

ReaDickelous?

Still have mine and it's a bit fuzzy in the right lower corner but seems to be a common problem, it's still very nice ^__^

digital panel are crap crap crap, if you can't stand it, it's even more true, crt are best of the best beast if you laugh by reading it, it' even more true.
Isn't there anybody to ask musk or other billion man building them again instead of wasting their money in things whose will never really works!!! (election lottery, optimus, X, electric car, quantum, 4K, 8K, 16K, HDR, WCG, 500W graphic card, 300W Cpu, AI, VW, etc...)

Why TF would you waste your time playing retro games this shit can make games from 2020 to look unrealistic with its 0 ms 180hz and such resolution like a candy for the eyes im on a crt hunting here fucking damn country ppls toss them in trash or recycle shame on them to be fair ppls here were too poor to buy such monitor in greece that even if some ppls have they kept them just saw a guy saying he kept his to use with an old gpu cause modern gpu doesnt work on it no wonder sherlock you need a convertor dumbf** it just makes my heart to cry every night that i cant have the rolls royce monitor from that age the only ones i see everyday is 14 or 15 inch which is trash

I had the same one! Found it thrown away in the e-waste, stole a shoppingcart to drag it home and used it for years untill it broke when moving it. Best CRT

I had one of these and played Battlefield 2 at 1600 x 1200. So beautiful!

LCDs where shit, are shit, and will only be shit! .... Now don't get me wrong, i like flat screens .. BUT.... LCD sucks! even IPS ones... with that IPS glow.. viewing angles... eeeh! fucxxx...that... The only way forward is OLED technology! That is in my opinion worthy successor to CRT! LCD era must die!

I used to have a 21” NEC flat CRT monitor (in the early 2000’s), similar to the Sony Trinitron monitors of the time and to the ViewSonic you reviewed. The NEC was the best CRT I’ve ever owned. It weighed in at a hefty 70+ lbs. The max resolution went well above 1024x768 pixels. I would venture to say near HD quality. Although, it had two hairline artifacts stretching the width of the display. Supposedly it was apparent on every monitor of this model. I never got an explanation. I believe the rumor was that the artifacts were purposely placed to discourage counterfeiters.

I had a sony 21" cpd-g520. No kidding about the weight of these things mine put a bow in cheaper desks 😂

I know is 2024 but my brain says... Its 2005... Weird weird

Bro has higher refresh rate than my LCD monitor ☠️

I randomly came across some Philips branded CRT's made circa 2005/06 when an office was moving. I grabbed a 21 inch Philips 107p, couldn't find much documentation or coverage on the monitor online but it seems to be a really decent quality monitor. Doesn't have any of the shortcomings Clint mentioned here in the video. Resolution goes up to 1920x1440 @ 60Hz, although everything looks tiny at that mode, so I usually switch between 1024x768 and 1600x1200. At lower resolutions like 640x480 the refresh rate can go up to 144 Hz.

The monitor also supports a very interesting feature called Lightframe 2. From what I understand, there is a circuitry inside the monitor that detects and intelligently sharpens and adjusts the contrast of the signal before drawing the image. The result is a very surprising approximation of what you get when you use Reshade with Lumasharpen and Adaptive Contrast shaders on video games. It doesn't look amazing mind you, but it can help get rid of some blur and very dark images on the fly very fast. Philips later used the Lightframe name on their LCD displays but with a completely different technology.

The only issue I have is with plugging it into modern graphics cards, I tried both an active HDMI to VGA and DP to VGA converters and they all cap at 1080p @Hz and will not allow for 1440x1080 :( The max I was able to do is 1600x1200 @60Hz, although the monitor can do 70Hz at that resolution. However on a native VGA port using a GT 730 of all things, it performs beautifully.

its crazy that some god gamer was playing UT on something like this when the rest of us didn't even know what resolution we were playing on at all.