from Hacker News

The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)

by phaser on 10/13/25, 2:13 PM with 25 comments

• by D13Fd on 10/13/25, 3:53 PM

  I don’t know. I grew up on CRTs and have never missed them one bit. I have to disagree with the idea that CRT images were somehow better overall. A high-DPI LCD or OLED screen with decent color range runs circles around any CRT, IMO.

  People also forget that most video game CRTs ran at a headache-inducing 60hz, which had an unpleasant strobe effect.

• by naet on 10/13/25, 4:39 PM

  We still have a large toshiba CRT as our primary tv. I always use composite cables for the old Nintendos but use component cables for hooking up a computer to watch something modern. It also has S video but I've never used it.

  An old video game just looks and feels right on a CRT in a way that it doesn't on a modern hd tv, to me at least. That doesn't necessarily mean it looks "better", however you might define it.

  It's like listening to a record. Records are lower quality than CDs or other digital options due to limitations of the analog technology, but they can still be a real joy to listen to on an older stereo system. There is a certain warmth, a little bit of crackle or pop, maybe a different dynamic range and other things that make a record sometimes more enjoyable, even though the "quality" is technically far lower. I think sometimes we can get lost in the technical specifications of pixel density or color range or audio bitrate and end up missing out on things that can prove the human experience.

  A couple other random things about CRTs: there are so many that are 4:3 or standard aspect ratio instead of the widescreen that dominates today. Watching something 4:3 that fills the whole screen (without the black letterboxing of a widescreen) feels so good and makes me miss the aspect ratio. On the flip side, I also want to find one of the HD CRTs that is widescreen to run some of my more modern devices through.

• by superfamicom on 10/13/25, 5:05 PM

  I grew up with CRTs and bought one at a retro game conference to put on my desk for some gaming. I had all but forgotten the deafening noise they make. The sound is hard to describe if you have not heard it. The sound hits different than an arcade with a bunch of noises and music and everything going on, but in my generally quiet office you can hear it from 2 rooms away when it is on. I tend to prefer how the SNES looks on the CRT compared to any modern screen with super sharp pixels, but that is easily (expensively?) fixed with a RetroTINK 4K to get the CRT style filters. The noise is just something to consider I don't see discussed often. My cats had never heard that noise and it freaked them out the first time they heard it.

  https://www.retrotink.com/shop/retrotink-4k

• by leakycap on 10/13/25, 3:18 PM

  I still have two CRT displays and it's a joy to use them when playing an old game or typing something up.

  It is insane how much space they take up. Landfills must be full of these huge things.

• by tuna74 on 10/13/25, 4:11 PM

  The most interesting part of the article is the difference between different connection types/signals and the discussion around artistic intent and how the artwork is supposed to be viewed.

  Also, with 4K+ high refresh displays we are getting closer and closer to emulate the look of CRTs!

• by cout on 10/14/25, 10:18 AM

  The best argument made against comparing lcd and crt technologies comes at the end of the article. The author points out the absurdity of discussing what it's like to read a book using a zoomed-in image of one of the book's pages.

  I almost find this argument compelling, but I'm still as fascinated as when I was a kid with what makes an image on a crt look different from the pixels in my head.

• by kelseyfrog on 10/13/25, 8:27 PM

  I can't wait for someone to just make a data-derived CRT filter and just be done with it. We can literally pipe whatever data we want into a CRT monitor/tv as input and then capture the response and just build a model trained on ground truth. It's like a weekends worth of work and instead of doing it we have years of people trying to derive CRT emulation from first principles.

• by fleabitdev on 10/13/25, 4:53 PM

  I'd like to see a fantasy console which comes with built-in CRT emulation. Some of the features of CRT displays seem artistically interesting, especially the steeper gamma, soft pixel edges, and lightness-dependent bloom; it would be great to see modern pixel artists explore these old techniques again.