3 ms·

The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused

by cubefox 14d ago

The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused by RF or composite connectors. Which would produce similarly fuzzy results on LCDs or OLED screens. As the article points out, CRTs connected via S-Video or SCART did look quite sharp. The same is true for PC CRTs connected via VGA or similar.

miladyincontrol 13d ago
That does relate some to my issue with a lot of CRT evangelism. Retroactively its easy to say "oh well you just needed the right input, avoid all these CRT brands, and other pitfalls. Maybe mod your console to have cleaner video output, and so on". The reality is most people had far less than ideal setups, yet most will try to hold CRTs to a standard near impossible to most of the era.
- cubefox 13d ago
  The real advantage of CRTs was the fact that they strobed the frames, unlike sample-and-hold screens (LCD and OLED). The latter cause a blurry image during eye movement ("smooth pursuit"). Games which ran at a frame rate which was equal to the CRT Hz did have basically zero persistence blur. The UFO would appear perfectly sharp: https://testufo.com/ https://testufo.com/
- opan 13d ago
  If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.
  - ThatPlayer 13d ago
    The N64 goes back to requiring mods for RGB SCART though. The later SNES models removed RGB support too. Similarly later GameCube models removed support for component cables.

3 ms·

The article contradicts itself for some reason. First it repeats the popular myth that CRTs made the image fuzzy, then it clarifies that this was mostly caused

by cubefox 14d ago

miladyincontrol 13d ago
That does relate some to my issue with a lot of CRT evangelism. Retroactively its easy to say "oh well you just needed the right input, avoid all these CRT brands, and other pitfalls. Maybe mod your console to have cleaner video output, and so on". The reality is most people had far less than ideal setups, yet most will try to hold CRTs to a standard near impossible to most of the era.
- cubefox 13d ago
  The real advantage of CRTs was the fact that they strobed the frames, unlike sample-and-hold screens (LCD and OLED). The latter cause a blurry image during eye movement ("smooth pursuit"). Games which ran at a frame rate which was equal to the CRT Hz did have basically zero persistence blur. The UFO would appear perfectly sharp: https://testufo.com/ https://testufo.com/
- opan 13d ago
  If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.
  - ThatPlayer 13d ago
    The N64 goes back to requiring mods for RGB SCART though. The later SNES models removed RGB support too. Similarly later GameCube models removed support for component cables.