Old Tube TV... Can You Use It As A Monitor From a PC?

Rotgut

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Old Tube TV... Can You Use It As A Monitor From a PC?

n00b here. Quick one for anyone willing to answer... If I have a really old 80's RCA cathode ray tube TV with only an "RF in", is there a way to get a video signal into it from a PC? I imagine someone makes a converter box or something...? Would it be expensive to do?
 
An old television tube would not be able to handle the resolution from a PC. The image would be very blurry. Why not just use a PC monitor? You can get them for free on CL a lot of times. You can even buy LCD monitors for about the same price as you would pay for an adapter to use a PC on a TV.

Is this for a special project? Might want to post what it is you're trying to do and see if someone can offer some cheaper more feasable options for you.
 
If you have the model number of the TUBE for examples (19VLUP22 or 19VLTP22) you can list it for sale here as people are always looking for replacment tubes for the old school arcade monitors.

I can tell you from first hand experience that CRT TV's and PC's look like crap. It's one of the main reasons for a Front End software to be used in MAME cabinets with TV's. Craigslist yourself a different TV with S-Video inputs assuming your video card has an S-Video output.
 
You can do it, yes. Wether you would want to is another thing. A TV set can't display high resolution images, so you're very limited as to what you can do with it. Things like Atari and Nintendo games on an emulator would look OK, but the menus in the emulator might be too fuzzy to read.

To use a set with RF input only on a PC, you need a PC video card that can output composite video (like an old GeForce or something), and an RF modulator box. I've done this before with my homemade PC based DVR setup. It works great - but again, you're limited by resolution. In my case, I'm recording/playing back TV shows, so the resolution is perfect for a television. But you can't use it as a general purpose computer monitor - your practical resolution is too low for it to be useful.

-Ian
 
there are a bunch of VGA to composite (the single yellow "video" plug) converters on the market now for VJ's (video DJ's.) they aren't very expensive, but yeah, the cost of one of those is still going to be higher than picking up a free or nearly 19" or 21" VGA computer monitor, and it's going to look rather like crap.
 
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