alt Hacker NewsI'm not disputing that CRTs have lower input lag than LCDs or OLED. I was disputing the specific 50ms of lag claim that the parent post made; modern LCDs aren't that bad, and OLEDs are getting to a point that it's getting close to undetectable to human eyes. Even with horizontal interrupts that could be done between scanlines, there's still a limit to how fast we can actually perceive it (and frankly I'd be skeptical of anyone that claims that the 8ms of input lag that an OLED is actually affecting your gameplay).
For light gun games, yeah, that timing might matter, but I'm not convinced it matters anywhere else.
LCDs have a further issue that CRTs do not have: transition time. When an LCD pixel is displaying black and it is driven to white, the voltage change across the driving transistor happens a lot faster than the change in brightness of the pixel (caused by the mechanical twisting of the crystal). This has opened the space for a lot of display marketers to play games with latency numbers. Often they will quote numbers for transitions between 2 similar grey levels rather than between full black and full white, which takes a lot longer.
CRTs don't have this issue at all. The phosphor lights up extremely quickly to maximum brightness, even from fully black. It's a bit slower for the phosphor to "cool back down" to black, but it's much faster than an LCD unless you're using a specific high-persistence phosphor. Typical consumer CRT monitors had a persistence in the low microseconds, except the IBM 5151 monochrome monitor which was much longer to give a stable, flicker-free image for heavy office work.