CRTs Didn't Make Pixel Art Look Better — Artists Did
The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art
The popular claim that CRTs smoothed out blocky pixel art is only half the story. Through side-by-side comparisons of C64 and Amiga games, the author shows that dithering and anti-aliasing were deliberate techniques that improve pixel art on any display. A CRT's fuzziness enhances them, but it can't fix poor graphics. The real magic came from artists mastering hardware limits, not from the screen itself.
Dithering and anti-aliasing are both techniques that will improve a pixel art image regardless of what type of screen they're viewed on. They're designed to counteract the low graphics resolution of old hardware - it just so happens that a CRT will make them look even better.
- fasterik
I like to think of modern pixel art as its own aesthetic and art form. It's designed to be viewed on high DPI LED screens, and that's fine. I don't think it should be judged by how it looks on a CRT.
There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.
- nayuki
> Modern flatscreens all have fixed resolutions
True by design.
> and purely digital interfaces,
True but not relevant. Even if you connected an LCD monitor over an analog interface like VGA or composite video, it would have to re-digitize the signal. The fact that a screen uses a digital interface can be designed independently of whether a screen has fixed pixels (LCD, OLED) or not (monochrome CRT with continuous phosphor, without shadow mask or aperture grille).
> ensuring a fixed aspect (width-to-height) ratio
True by definition because the pixels are pieces of physical hardware in the screens.
> and completely square pixels.
This is a design choice. Nothing prevents someone from designing an LCD or OLED matrix with non-square pixels. But there's also no good reason to do so. (Side note: Due to RGB striping, single-color subpixels have an aspect ratio of 1:3, so those are non-square.)
Potentially useful trivia: Some image/video formats support declaring the pixel aspect ratio. Examples include PNG ( https://w3c.github.io/png/#11pHYs ) and Matroska.
- TulliusCicero
Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.
- etaioinshrdlu
I thought the Macbook Pro LCDs were bright enough, high-res-enough, and fast enough to make a very accurate CRT simulation. Here it is: https://github.com/baragona/crt-xdr
It looks so much like a CRT to me. It looks like pressing your face up to a TV to see the individual phosphors. Try setting "signal" to dropped image and viewing some images. It looks like an old TV.
Bottom line, whatever you think a CRT is doing, you can probably simulate it quite accurately.
- gryson
I appreciate the author calling out the point that dithering etc. was definitely visible on better-quality CRT monitors via RGB/VGA signals.
So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.