[HN Gopher] The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (...
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The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)
Author : zdw
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-10-13 04:33 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datagubbe.se)
| rendaw wrote:
| The peach on the author's CRT looks pretty awful, as does the
| photo. I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image.
| Maybe it can't be done by a real CRT, but the author's CRT
| doesn't look anything like the example from the CRT database they
| have below.
|
| They also said the impression is different since it's so close up
| - what does it look like at the size you'd really see it in game?
| dmonitor wrote:
| He seemed to test it on a bunch of computer monitors, and not a
| standard 480i consumer television set? The different shadow
| masks phosphor patterns change how things look
| drougge wrote:
| The C= 1084S he uses is a more a (very good) PAL TV than a
| computer monitor, even if it was sold as a monitor. So "576i"
| in your terminology. (It was also sometimes sold with a TV
| tuner, or at least the earlier 1084 (same picture tube AFAIK)
| was.)
| CrossVR wrote:
| > I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image.
|
| The article mentions later that it's a PVM-20L2MD [1]. This is
| a professional CRT monitor for medical devices. It uses the
| same signals as a consumer TV, but comes with a higher quality
| tube that has a sharper picture.
|
| [1] https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-pvm-20l2md
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I have a Retrotink 4k. I mostly use it for VHS transfer these
| days, but it's original purpose is upscaling retro game images
| and applying various masks and filters to make the game look like
| it's using a CRT on a modern display.
|
| It works beautifully, and you no longer need a clunky, heavy,
| dying CRT. I'm sure the purists will say it's not the same, but
| I've done sides by side comparisons IRL and it's good enough for
| me even when pixel peeping. I prefer the emulated CRT look on a
| modern OLED to the real thing these days.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| An OLED with a great filter is good enough for most gamers
| other than archivists and hardcore collectors, yeah.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Apologies for the off-topic question, but I'm so curious: How
| is this useful for VHS transfer?
| kowbell wrote:
| Not OP but I assume "VHS Transfer" meant "transfer to a
| digital format" i.e. digitize. The Retrotink is a fancy
| "composite/component/vga-to-hdmi" box, so you can do: VCR
| playing a VHS -> Retrotink -> HDMI capture card -> computer
| saving that to a file.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| To properly capture VHS you need something called a TBC.
| Most have died over the years and the ones that are left
| are either very expensive or dying as caps fail. A TBC that
| was once considered low end commonly sells for $1k+ today.
|
| The retrotink can do most of what a TBC does and it's a
| modern device you can actually buy for a reasonable price.
| It can also upscale and deinterlace for you in the process
| saving a ton of work later. The serious archivist would
| scoff, but it's good enough for home movies, and I would
| argue that it introduces less noise than 30 year old
| professional equipment with dying caps.
| amlib wrote:
| I do something like this for my old game consoles, except that
| I pipe them trough an old analog video capture card that
| supports 240p60 and use the video processing module in
| Retroarch to do the capture with minimal lag. After adding some
| fancy CRT shaders and other image adjustment carefully tailored
| for this, the image comes out looking great! I sometimes toggle
| the shaders off and wince at the "raw" digital capture. I
| actually bought this capture card back in 2008 for this purpose
| but detested using it until around 2018 when I started using it
| in conjunction with retroarch and CRT shaders.
|
| For that period it even shaped my perception that analog video
| and specially n64 graphics were always bad, but all that was
| vindicated by those shaders, it really does make a big
| difference, and made me find a new appreciation for n64
| graphics in particular.
|
| There is some internet misconception that the inherently
| "blurry" output of an n64 is bad (And sure, some games are just
| ugly/bad from an artistic standpoint), but it's actually the
| smoothest image any analog console will ever produce when
| hooked up to a proper CRT or CRT shader, and it's consistent
| across all games because of "forced" high quality AA in all
| games. Even the next generation of consoles seldomly used AA.
| hbn wrote:
| I started playing Policenauts recently, and when I first booted
| the game I was straining my eyes trying to read the blocky
| pixelated text. I only recently started using RetroArch, but I
| did some digging and figured out how to enable a CRT filter and
| immediately it was 1000% easier on my eyes.
|
| The anime art and FMV sequences looked way better too.
| karmakaze wrote:
| This reminds me of my favorite way of watching movies at home was
| on a 1365x768 plasma TV at 24fps. I really didn't like 1080p,
| 120Hz, and 4k that came after it. Great for sports and news, not
| so much for fiction.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Maybe you should turn off the motion smoothing and show the
| movies in their proper 24 fps?
|
| Playing something like The Dark Knight Rises from an UHD Blu-
| ray on a good OLED looks incredible!
| astrange wrote:
| You want either motion smoothing (of the 60->120fps kind) or
| black frame insertion on an OLED for good motion, otherwise
| the lack of decay between frames will make it look
| unnaturally juddery.
| LennyHenrysNuts wrote:
| I still have three working CRTs. A monochrome monitor for the
| Atari ST, a Sony Multiscan VGA and some random Phillips thing I
| saved from the skip.
|
| I still play Diablo I on the Sony to this day. Wonderful monitor.
| I will cry when it finally dies.
| christkv wrote:
| Reminds me about https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass it's
| pretty fun to use with emulators.
| aquova wrote:
| I really wish ShaderGlass supported Linux. If there's a
| good(ish) alternative that anyone knows about, I'd love to try
| it out.
| luciferin wrote:
| This is fun to see right now. I've been playing around with CRT
| shaders in retroarch for the last few days. My main goal is to
| use the [CRT-Beam-simulator](https://github.com/blurbusters/crt-
| beam-simulator) at 120hz and get some sort of CRT slot or shadow
| mask at the same time. I've landed on some settings I enjoy for
| N64 games, and it really has improved the experience for me.
|
| On the post's notes on the Sonic waterfall effect, the [Blargg
| NTSC Video Filter](https://github.com/CyberLabSystems/CyberLab-
| Custom-Blargg-NT...) is intended to recreate that signal
| artifact, but similar processing is included in a lot of the CRT
| shaders that are available. I found that RGB had a visual
| artifact when moving that made the waterfall flicker, but
| composite didn't, so I played on that setting. Running it with
| the beam simulator is probably causing some of that.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Using an OLED display? I've found that's the only type of
| display that can even come close to reproducing the CRT look
| willis936 wrote:
| The blacks are there, but the brightness is not. I just
| played some smash 64 on a CRT last weekend and using an OLED
| for my desktop.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| When I played NES and SNES as a kid, the resolution was so low
| that I only saw pixels. (Edit: I saw whole pixels when using the
| RF switch.) To this day, when I go back and play those games on
| modern consoles I just can't use CRT emulation.
|
| Maybe I just didn't play games that used tricks to get around the
| pixels?
|
| ---
|
| That being said, I remember that "New Super Mario Brothers" on
| Wii appeared to use a CRT trick to try and make the background
| flash in a boss room. I always played my Wii in 480p, so it just
| looked like there were vertical lines in the boss room.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and PS1 games on old TVs
| most of the time, sometimes not the best quality. I also
| remember that often in 80's arcades, it was guaranteed for at
| least one or two machines to have CRT issues; colors not
| aligned, skew at the top/bottom, burn-in (common), screen too
| bright, etc. All part of the experience and quite nostalgic for
| me.
|
| The NES had a particular quirk with its NTSC output that I
| always thought was very characteristic of NES. I found this
| article a few years ago, and was fascinated that work was done
| to really figure it out -
| https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NTSC_video - and it's awesome at at
| least some emulators (FCEUX) seem to use this info to generate
| an experience quite similar to what I remember the NES being
| when I grew up. But I don't think any NES game graphics really
| depended on this for any visual output. All NES games had
| jagged vertical lines, for example.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > The video timing in the NES is non-standard - it both
| generates 341 pixels, making 227 1/3 subcarrier cycles per
| scanline, and always generates 262 scanlines. This causes the
| TV to draw the fields on top of each other, resulting in a
| non-standard low-definition "progressive" or "double struck"
| video mode sometimes called 240p
|
| Ahh: I always wondered why I never saw interlacing artifacts
| on the NES! (I'm going to assume the same thing for the SNES
| too.)
| Lerc wrote:
| I wonder if anyone has employed the services of a hyperrealistic
| artist to depict the image they see on a CRT.
|
| Given their ability to generate a painting that appears identical
| to a photo, could they depict how the image appears to them,
| eliminating any loss from mechanical capture.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Sometimes, all we want to do is shout "CRTs were magic, bro,
| just trust me!"
|
| I certainly feel that way when watching interlaced video. There's
| far too much _bad deinterlacing_ out there. One of the biggest
| problems that I encounter is that deinterlacers tend to reduce
| the frame rate. (IE, 60i - > 30p instead of 60p, or 50i -> 25p
| instead of 50p)
|
| (That being said, when I would watch interlaced live TV on a 30"
| or more TV, I'd see all kinds of interlacing artifacts.)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| With enough lines, enough brightness, and a high-enough refresh
| rate, it may become possible have a display that can
| artificially emulate the features of a CRT -- including
| phosphor persistence and blooming and focus issues and power
| supply sag and everything else, with interlacing. AFAICT, we
| aren't there yet.
|
| If/when this happens, we may be able to again view things as
| close as they were in broadcast, but with a modern display
| instead of an an old CRT.
|
| If we can find any content to play that way, anyhow. A lot of
| it is cheerfully being ruined.
|
| Aside from the dozens of us who are interested in that, most of
| the rest of the folks seems convinced that television looked
| just as terrible as a blurry SLP VHS tape does after being
| played through a $12 composite-to-USB frame grabber, using a
| 3.5mm "aux cable" jammed in between the RCA jacks of the VCR
| and the converter, and ultimately delivered by an awful 360p30
| codec on YouTube, before being scaled in the blurriest way
| possible...and draw from this the conclusion that there's no
| details that have any value worth preserving.
|
| Even though television was never actually like that. It had
| limits, but things could be quite a lot better than that awful
| mess I just described.
|
| (For those here who don't know: Towards the end of the run, the
| quality of a good broadcast with a good receiver would often be
| in the same ballpark as the composite output of a DVD player is
| today (but with zero data compression artifacts instead of >0),
| including the presentation of 50 or 60 independent display
| updates per second.)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > With enough lines, enough brightness, and a high-enough
| refresh rate, it may become possible have a display that can
| artificially emulate the features of a CRT -- including
| phosphor persistence and blooming and focus issues and power
| supply sag and everything else, with interlacing. AFAICT, we
| aren't there yet.
|
| To _truly_ do that, you need to display over 20 million
| frames a second.
|
| Why?
|
| True analog video didn't capture frames, but instead each
| pixel was transmitted / recorded as it was captured. This
| becomes clear when watching shows like Mr. Rogers on an LCD.
| When the camera pans, the walls look all slanted. (This never
| happened when viewing on a CRT) This is because the top part
| of the image was captured before the bottom part. I wouldn't
| even expect a 60i -> 60p deinterlacer to correct it.
|
| That being said, I don't want to emulate a CRT:
|
| - I want a deinterlacer that can figure out how to make the
| (cough) best image possible so deinterlacing artifacts aren't
| noticeable. (Unless I slow down the video / look at stills.)
|
| - I want some kind of machine-learning algorithm that can
| handle the fact that the top of the picture was captured
| slightly before the bottom of the picture; then generate a
| 120p or a 240p video.
|
| CRTs had a look that wasn't completely natural; it was
| pleasant, like old tube amplifiers and tube-based mixers, but
| it isn't something that I care to reproduce.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I definitely understand you very well, and I agree.
|
| Please allow me to restate my intent: With enough angular
| resolution (our eyes have limits), and enough brightness
| and refresh rate, we can maybe get close to what the
| _perception_ of watching television once was.
|
| And to clarify: I don't propose completely chasing the beam
| with OLED, but instead emulation of the CRT that includes
| the appearance of interlaced video (which itself can be
| completely full of fields of uncorrelated as-it-happens
| scans of the continuously-changing reality in front of the
| analog camera that captured it), and the scan lines that
| resulted, and the persistence and softness that allowed it
| to be perceived as well as it once was.
|
| In this way, panning in an unmodified Mr Rogers video works
| with a [future] modern display, sports games and rocket
| launches are perceived largely as they were instead of a
| series of frames, and so on. This process doesn't have to
| be perfect; it just needs to be close enough that it is
| looks the ~same (largely no better, nor any worse) as it
| once did.
|
| My completely hypothetical method may differ rather
| drastically in approach from what you wish to accomplish,
| and that difference is something that I think is perfectly
| OK.
|
| These approaches aren't exclusive of eachother. There can
| be more than one.
|
| And it seems that both of our approaches rely on the rote
| preservation of existing (interlaced, analog, real-time!)
| video, for once that information is discarded in favor of
| something that seems good today, future improvements
| (whether in display technology or in deinterlacing/scaler
| technology, or both) for any particular video become
| largely impossible.
|
| In order to reach either desired result, we really need the
| interlaced analog source (as close as possible), and not
| the dodgy transfers that are so common today.
| seanhunter wrote:
| It genuinely baffles me that people are nostalgic about CRTs.
| CRTs were universally god-awful and I paid top dollar to have the
| best that money could buy for myself since I worked from home and
| it was still terrible. Modern monitors are better in every
| possible way.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| People are nostalgic for the pixel art made specifically to
| look good on CRTs.
|
| It's like sometimes preferring 24 fps cinema or oil paints over
| photography.
|
| It depends on what's being displayed.
| rafabulsing wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think anyone is nostalgic for doing
| spreadsheets/word processing/etc on CRTs.
|
| The utilitarian POV will always look for the best (less
| noisy/most accurate/most reproducible) medium possible. But
| when it comes to art, many other aspects factor in, and a
| little bit of noise can very well add something to a piece.
| Not always, but often enough.
| hbn wrote:
| Your answer is right in the article, it shouldn't be that
| baffling.
|
| No one is campaigning to get rid of the beautiful modern 4k
| OLED displays and return to CRTs for everything. But for low
| resolution content (retro games and computers) it looks better
| on a CRT.
|
| There's pretty good modern emulation of the look, but at the
| end of the day it's a different technology and they do look
| different.
|
| Not to mention the feel of playing through a near-zero latency
| analogue signal is noticeable if you've played enough of
| certain games. There's a reason speedrunners of retro games all
| play on console with a CRT.
| Aloha wrote:
| CRT's were better for a long time, LCD's did eventually catch
| up.
|
| I held on to my 21" Trinitron for a long time into the LCD era,
| because it had better contrast, resolution and sharpness.
| Eventually affordable LCD's did catch up.
| cubefox wrote:
| No, CRTs are still much better than sample-and-hold screens
| (OLED or LCD) with regards to motion clarity.
|
| Short version: Our eyes are constantly tracking objects on
| screen ("smooth pursuit"), which leads to visible smearing on
| OLED and LCD screens, because they hold their frame for the
| entire frame time rather than just flashing them for a short
| fraction of that time. Especially fast paced and side scrolling
| games like Sonic look much better on CRT screens. (But CRTs
| have much lower brightness and hence contrast than modern
| screens.)
|
| Full explanation here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42604613
| Tarball10 wrote:
| There was a long period (15-20 years) where LCDs were quite a
| downgrade from CRTs. Poor contrast ratio (gray blacks),
| backlight bleed, low resolution, poor color gamut (they're
| still putting 45% NTSC screens in budget laptops!), stuck at
| 60Hz refresh rates.
|
| Those gaps have finally started closing in the last few years,
| now that 4K 240Hz 99% DCI-P3 OLED monitors are readily
| available and relatively affordable.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| In my opinion: CRT has problems including distortion; however,
| LCD can be bad if the picture is the wrong resolution that does
| not match the display, while CRT can handle this problem better.
| LCD is good if the source of the picture is made for the LCD at
| its resolution.
| flobosg wrote:
| I'll take the chance to link to Derek Yu's (of Spelunky fame)
| pixel art tutorial, where he explains techniques such as anti-
| aliasing and sel-out:
| https://www.derekyu.com/makegames/pixelart.html
| briandw wrote:
| Perfect example of the expert fallacy. Also how safetyism can
| cause harm.
| fleabitdev wrote:
| Emulators also struggle to faithfully reproduce artwork for the
| Game Boy Color and the original Game Boy Advance. Those consoles
| used non-backlit LCD displays with a low contrast ratio, a small
| colour gamut, and some ghosting between frames. Many emulators
| just scale the console's RGB colour values to the full range of
| the user's monitor, which produces far too much saturation and
| contrast.
|
| It's a shame, because I really like the original, muted colour
| palette. Some artists produced great results within the
| limitations of the LCD screen. Similar to the CRT spritework in
| this article, it feels like a lost art.
|
| However, there's an interesting complication: quite a lot of Game
| Boy Color and Game Boy Advance developers seem to have created
| their game art on sRGB monitors, and then shipped those graphics
| without properly considering how they would appear on the LCD.
| Those games appear muddy and colourless on a real console - they
| actually look much better when emulated "incorrectly", because
| the two errors exactly cancel out!
| BearOso wrote:
| One of the best examples of this are the first two GBA
| Castlevania games, Circle of the Moon and Harmony of
| Dissonance. The former was developed without consideration of
| the actual screen and was extremely dark and hard to see. The
| latter did consider the GBA screen and is far too colorful and
| bright on anything else.
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