I recall that 60Hz was the bare minimum for comfortable CRT viewing, so it is possible that LCDs adopted that same rate as the 'universally good enough' value? Given that my own interest is for relatively static computer displays (I don't watch serious video on computer screens), there seems no reason to want more. That text ain't going anywhere in a hurry.

@another-dave Sure, but game consoles decided that 30 Hz ought to be enough for anyone. While PC gamers complained about 60 right away. I'd expect a variety of refresh rates, like we had with TVs.

I just checked the refresh rate on the monitor I use for about 8 hours every workday. 30Hz. It's perfectly fine. The text is crisp and as solid as a rock. I think you're focusing on what was a minority use case at the time (PC + LCD + gamer) and thinking that was a big deal.

@another-dave Is this monitor a CRT or flat panel? CRTs had to rely on phosphor persistence, which is not the case for panels. Though I wonder if there is some kind of equivalent for panels. Their light comes from the backlight with only the colours coming from the panel, so what happens for refreshing is surely different, and different for every panel technology. Long persistance phosphors are good for eliminating flicker but cause ghost trails when things are moving so there's a tradeoff there too.

I think marketing plays a big role here because CRTs need 85fps to be comfortable so LCDs tried to match that as close as possible. It took a decade or so to fully educate the user base that LCDs don't flicker so 50fps is actually quite OK.

@Therac When you are talking about 30 Hz vs 60 Hz as in consoles vs PC, are you talking about actual screen refresh rate or how many FPS the game can achieve? Please understand it took many years for flat panel TVs to allow video formats with 24 or 30 Hz refresh rate, so a 30 FPS game console can show each frame twice on 60 Hz video format when 30 Hz formats were not available yet.

I don't think the premise of this question is even correct. There were already LCD monitors in the 90s that supported refresh rates higher than 60Hz. The first Apple LCD, the original Studio Display, supported 75Hz. And I can see old listings that show other LCDs that supported higher refresh rates too

LCDs aren't 60 Hz, at least on Windows. Windows sets them to 59.94 Hz when you ask for 60 Hz, and it does indeed show 59.94 on my current PC in Windows 11 Settings. That explains a lot: it allows display of 29.97 and 59.94 Hz NTSC content without dropping frames.

"Game consoles picked a 30 fps framerate as standard" - that's not accurate. (Approximately) 60 and (approximately) 50 were far more common than 30. Off the top of my head, I can't actually think of any consoles that ran at 30. NES, SNES, PS1, Genesis, Saturn... before modern high-refresh-rate stuff, everything I can think of ran at very close to 60 for NTSC, and very close to 50 for PAL.

While I don't understand the (electrical) physics behind it, I know it had everything to do with the AC power refresh rate from your regular power outlet. Nowadays LCD displays have electronics to overcome flicker issues, where the old CRTs did not.

@hippietrail - flat panel, of course (4K). But my point is, for LCDs, refresh rate is not always a concern, unlike with CRTs.

@user71659 So what if is not exactly 60, with modern TV-based resolutions such as 1080p both 59.94 and 60.00 Hz are considered equivalent 60Hz formats. Back in the day, computer video formats were not exactly 60.000 or 75.000 or 85.000 Hz either, but close enough for rounding. Original VGA used 59.94 and 70.09, not 60 and 70.

@RenevanderLende What you speak applies to early TVs made with electron tubes (thermionic valves). But that's the reason TV signals were at mains frequency and when color was added the broadcast NTSC TV was not locked to mains frequency any more, but fixed to exactly 60/1.001 from atomic clock timebase.

@user2357112 You are correct - no game console can output 30 Hz signal because TVs are not able to understand 30 Hz signals. The signal must be 60 Hz even if the console draws each frame twice or any number of times so that is FPS, not vertical sync rate.

@another-dave "30Hz. It's perfectly fine. The text is crisp and as solid as a rock." Why shouldn't it be? A lower frequency is bad for motion in the displayed image, but for text which doesn't change (or only as fast as you type), that's perfectly fine.

"Why shouldn't it be?" - you should ask the OP, he's the one that seems to think 60 Hz is inadequately low. For PC gamers, maybe. Not for the rest of us, which was the majority market back in the late 1990s.

The need to match line frequency didn't stem from flicker, but rather geometry. If one connects a typical home computer to an old television set, the image shape will "breathe" at a rate proportional to the difference between the frame rate and 60Hz. Having the part of the screen squished by 2% or so wouldn't be noticeable if the shape stayed constant, and wouldn't be noticeable when viewing most kinds of content if it shifted slowly, but would be very distracting if it happened a few times per second.

@supercat What you say does apply for early TVs but not any CRT built in the last 30-40 years any more. MDA monitors used 50 Hz and VGA modes except 640x480 were 70 Hz, so in both cases, US customers should have been unhappy if there had been 10 Hz breathing.

@Justme: Nowadays it's cheaper and easier to regulate the voltage used for horizontal and vertical sweep than it is to use a filter cap that's adequate to keep the image acceptably steady when using an unregulated supply. I've observed the aforementioned "breathing" effect when using my VIC-20 with one of my grandmother's tube-type blank and white televisions which probably dated to the 1960s (though not with my parent's tube-type color set from the early 1970s).

There were 30Hz LCDs (and even slower -- I think there was one running at 12Hz), but instead of dropping refresh rate to save costs, they did it to boost resolution. A computer can only draw a certain number of pixels per second, so by dropping the number of times each pixel is drawn, a greater number of pixels can be drawn.

In the 90s it was pretty expensive to build or buy a system that could handle frame rates much beyond 30 unless you really lowered the image quality settings on the game.