6 ms·

I think CRTs let your brain do some antialiasing so free details. I have some old 600mb divx rips that still look pretty damn good when viewed on a CRT.

agumonkey 4y ago
I had the exact same realization when testing my beloved diamondpro, the image was just nicer, warmer .. it was shocking.
- hulitu 4y ago
  It's also because LCDs cannot display collours as good as CRTs. Only the latest HDRs come close.
system2 4y ago
It is simply adding a tiny bit of blur to the entire image.
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  I don't think it's that simple. Old videogames look really ass on modern displays, even with ostensibly remastered releases that should be doing that tiny bit of blurring.
- rtwok 4y ago
  If you do that the image just looks blurry. The magic is that it looks soft on a CRT. soft != blurry In my experience a simple scanline filter surprisingly helps in softening upscaled low res. The draw back is that the overall brightness is reduced. You can't win with LCD.
jrm4 4y ago
I just had this idea and I cant be the only one though, what about just a slightly blurry physical glass/plastic overlay?
- paulannesley 4y ago
  Apple's Studio Display has a “nano‑texture glass” option, which is designed to reduce reflection/glare, but also subtly-but-noticeably blurs the image. Looking at them side by side, I somewhat preferred the blur/bloom of the nano‑texture glass, perhaps due to retro CRT nostalgia. At 5K it's still incredibly crisp compared to 1x pixels (e.g. 27" 1440p). (But… for looking at code/text all day in a room without ambient lighting problems, I chose the crisp image of the plain (antireflective-coated) glass instead)
LocalH 4y ago
Not your brain so much, but the combination of the non-mapping of phosphors to pixels, and the fact that the electron beam ramps up and down, rather than instantly turning on or off, causes the pixels to be softened, moreso across a scanline than between them. Your brain helps too, but in the same way that it helps with every color display device that uses RGB or some variant. Get close enough and you can perceive the individual phosphors or subpixels in either case.
Theodores 4y ago
Did you know that the JPEG image format is 'designed for CRTs'? You can use different look up tables in a JPEG image and Mozilla did this to make JPEGs work for digital screens where there isn't that blurring for free. The Mozilla encoder went way over most people's heads and the default JPEGturbo algorithm most operating systems and applications use is from the CRT era when compute cycles cost thousands more than they do today. CRTs also smoothed out details on screen, it was a shock for TV world going from standard resolution 4:3 CRT to 16:9 Digital Full HD because analog TV had this wonderful way of magically hiding scratches in a set so long as you threw tens of kilowatts of light at everything in the studio. With digital the sets had to be rebuilt because everything looked shabby.

agumonkey 4y ago

I had the exact same realization when testing my beloved diamondpro, the image was just nicer, warmer .. it was shocking.

hulitu 4y ago
It's also because LCDs cannot display collours as good as CRTs. Only the latest HDRs come close.

system2 4y ago

It is simply adding a tiny bit of blur to the entire image.

Blackthorn 4y ago
I don't think it's that simple. Old videogames look really ass on modern displays, even with ostensibly remastered releases that should be doing that tiny bit of blurring.
rtwok 4y ago
If you do that the image just looks blurry. The magic is that it looks soft on a CRT. soft != blurry In my experience a simple scanline filter surprisingly helps in softening upscaled low res. The draw back is that the overall brightness is reduced. You can't win with LCD.

jrm4 4y ago

I just had this idea and I cant be the only one though, what about just a slightly blurry physical glass/plastic overlay?

paulannesley 4y ago
Apple's Studio Display has a “nano‑texture glass” option, which is designed to reduce reflection/glare, but also subtly-but-noticeably blurs the image. Looking at them side by side, I somewhat preferred the blur/bloom of the nano‑texture glass, perhaps due to retro CRT nostalgia. At 5K it's still incredibly crisp compared to 1x pixels (e.g. 27" 1440p). (But… for looking at code/text all day in a room without ambient lighting problems, I chose the crisp image of the plain (antireflective-coated) glass instead)

LocalH 4y ago

Not your brain so much, but the combination of the non-mapping of phosphors to pixels, and the fact that the electron beam ramps up and down, rather than instantly turning on or off, causes the pixels to be softened, moreso across a scanline than between them. Your brain helps too, but in the same way that it helps with every color display device that uses RGB or some variant. Get close enough and you can perceive the individual phosphors or subpixels in either case.

Theodores 4y ago

Did you know that the JPEG image format is 'designed for CRTs'? You can use different look up tables in a JPEG image and Mozilla did this to make JPEGs work for digital screens where there isn't that blurring for free. The Mozilla encoder went way over most people's heads and the default JPEGturbo algorithm most operating systems and applications use is from the CRT era when compute cycles cost thousands more than they do today. CRTs also smoothed out details on screen, it was a shock for TV world going from standard resolution 4:3 CRT to 16:9 Digital Full HD because analog TV had this wonderful way of magically hiding scratches in a set so long as you threw tens of kilowatts of light at everything in the studio. With digital the sets had to be rebuilt because everything looked shabby.