Field report · 13 min read
CRT vs flat-panel — the field report.
Six light-gun games, three CRT TVs, one calibrated 4K panel, an IR sweep timer and a basement in Hackney. The flat panel lost — and not for the reason most arguments online suggest.
I owe this piece to a long-running argument between Marcus and Eden, which started in March when a customer asked whether we'd ever sell a Super Scope to someone running a modern flat panel. Eden said yes-with-caveats. Marcus said absolutely not. I said let's measure it.
We borrowed a Hackney basement (cheers, Saul) for a Saturday and set up three CRT TVs alongside a calibrated LG OLED flat panel via component-to-HDMI. Six light-gun games on offer: Time Crisis, Point Blank, Lethal Enforcers II, Police 911, Vampire Night, Crisis Zone. Hardware: two Namco GunCons, one Lethal Enforcers gun, the SNES Super Scope.
What we actually measured
Three things. First, IR sweep latency — the time between the trigger pull and the on-screen hit register, measured with a Raspberry Pi capture rig sat between the gun and the console. Second, geometric accuracy — how often a shot dead-centre on the cross-hair actually registered as dead-centre. Third, edge-of-screen drift — the same test, but in the four corners of the screen.
The Trinitron Wega — baseline
On the Sony Trinitron Wega from 1998, IR sweep latency averaged 8 ms across 200 trigger pulls per game. Geometric accuracy in the centre quadrant was 99.4 %; edge drift in the corners brought average down to 97.6 %. The Wega was, predictably, the baseline.
The PVM — broadcast reference
On the broadcast monitor Sony PVM-14M2U, IR sweep dropped to 5 ms — the PVM has a faster electron-beam scan. Geometric accuracy was a flat 99.8 % across the entire screen. We have one of these in the calibration corner at the lockup and we will not ever sell it.
The OLED flat panel
The LG OLED at native 4K, fed via the Retrotink 5X scaler from the original consoles — sweep latency 34 ms. Geometric accuracy in the centre was 91 %, edge drift dropped it to 62 %. The light gun missed nearly half the corner shots.
This isn't an OLED problem in the strict sense — it's that light guns of the GunCon and Super Scope class work by detecting the CRT's electron-beam scan-line passing the screen, not by image recognition. A flat panel has no scan-line in that sense; the scaler is faking one. The fake is convincing in the middle of the screen and falls apart at the edges.
The verdict
If you're running a Super Scope, a GunCon, a Lethal Enforcers gun or a Sega Light Phaser — you need a CRT. The good news is they're still cheap, plentiful in classified ads, and our refurb floor restocks them every couple of months when a Camden flat-clear comes through. If you're running a Wii Remote with the sensor bar, none of this applies — that's IR camera tracking, not scan-line detection, and it works perfectly on a flat panel.
We're going to keep selling Super Scopes — to people who tell us, by email, that they have access to a CRT. We'll continue to not sell them to anyone who tells us they're running a flat panel. Marcus wins this one.
— Theo Lascelles, pad bay · Friday 02 May 2026 · with thanks to Saul for the basement and the kettle.