DF Direct: Modern Games look amazing on CRT!

The video was interesting because it hinted at where graphics could have gone if the pitfalls of the pixel matrix hadn’t led the industry down a path where resolution became a major focus.

it’s a shame CRT’s thinner cousin, the SED TV (https://www.anandtech.com/show/1918/8 ) never took off, though early impressions (see the Anandtech piece) were apparently underwhelming.

I’ve been playing on my Virtual Boy this week and its oscillating mirror setup where the display is scanned from left to right from a 1 dimensional array of red LEDs really reminded me of how good motion resolution is on a CRT. The crazy expensive OLED on my iPhone is a beautiful display, high res, well calibrated, but whenever you scroll you see everything break up through sample-and-hold ghosting. Scrolling graphics on Virtual Boy look so crisp while even low framerate wireframe games like Red Alarm look smoother than they would on an LCD.

In a way Nintendo launching the Wii without HD support made some sense given CRTs were still widespread at the time, and GC games like the late Resident Evil 4 and launch title Star Wars Rogue Squadron looked filmlike on CRTs in some instances.

I still keep 3 CRTs in my place, though one isn’t hooked up right now. Chief among them, is my Sony WEGA Trinitron. It’s a 32" widescreen CRT that has one HDMI input, and can do 720P. The picture is absolutely gorgeous, and having used it for my Xbox 360 in the past, I can say that games look amazing on there, and watching Netflix is always a very clean and vibrant experience. I’m hoping to incorporate it into my setup more completely in the coming months. Right now, I don’t have anything hooked up to it, but once I have the ability to split out my consoles so I can send analog signals to it, and digital signals to my capture card, I’ll be able to play on CRT, while still streaming via HDMI. That will be awesome.


New vid. Again, it’s fun seeing them trying to describe the experience of a Monitor CRT. I particularly like the bit about viewing through a glass lens into an analogue world.
1 Like