Without disagreeing with you, the diagrams from the linked page are pretty much reproductions of the ones from an official VT100 technical manual, https://vt100

Without disagreeing with you, the diagrams from the linked page are pretty much reproductions of the ones from an official VT100 technical manual, https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-tm/ https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-tm/ It appears to me that the rise/fall graphs are just graphs of ideal RC networks, while the whole true CRT system will have lots of other factors such as inductance going on. When it comes to comparing what you might recall of CRT TVs and 80s micros to what a dedicated monochrome CRT would show, well, the dedicated CRT was much better and sharper, particularly if your color display technology involved a "composite" system like NTSC or PAL, where horizontal luminance (Y) bandwidth was SEVERELY limited to "make room for" the color information (I/Q). To get an idea of how much Composite video encoding degraded picture information, take a look at modern videos of "RGB-modded" classic consoles such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpdpAxzjmA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpdpAxzjmA8 -- As far as I understand from the video explanation, both signals are video-captured, so this is not a "CRT effect", it's a "composite video effect" that makes the right-side image so smeared. There's also the palette difference, but that's more a matter of preference.