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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> It genuinely baffles me that people are nostalgic about CRTs.
I don't get nostalgic about any technologies - and certainly wouldn't get nostalgic about cathode ray tubes which were big, heavy and had innate limitations. However, I am serious about vintage game preservation and I care about seeing classic game art which was created on and for CRTs accurately presented as the original developers and artists saw it. These days that's as easy as playing games from the CRT era with a good CRT-emulation pixel shader.
What frustrates me is when I see classic 80s games on popular retro YouTube channels objectively looking far worse than they actually did in the 80s. That happens because some of that artwork was painstakingly hand-crafted to exploit the unique traits of both the analog video format and CRTs. When presented without a pixel shader, some of those titles simply look wrong - and in some cases, egregiously so. I know because I'm old enough to have been there, worked with and learned from some now-legendary 80s game developers and artists.
The hard-edged, square pixel blocks many young people (who've never seen a CRT) think a retro game like Pac-Man or Joust should have, is a strange historical anomaly. When I show them what the games actually looked like either via a good pixel shader or on my arcade emulation cabinet's 25-inch analog RGB, quad-sync CRT (which was made for high-end arcade cabinets), they're often shocked. I hear things like "Wow, I thought retro was cool because it looked so janky but it was actually softly beautiful." To me, the importance of CRTs (and CRT shaders) isn't about injecting analog degradation to recreate some childhood nostalgia for the crappy RCA TV your parents had in the living room (with rolling hum bars from the unshielded RF modulator), it's about making games like Pac-Man and Joust look as good as they really did on the industrial CRT in their arcade cabinet (which could be better than the best TV many consumers ever owned). Or alternatively, making console games look as good as they did to the original developers and artists, who usually used the highest-quality CRTs they could because they were after the best-possible image for the same reasons recording studios have always used reference-grade audio speakers.
So yeah, it's not honoring those historic games when retro YouTubers show them in a degraded form that looks far worse than they ever did in the day - especially when it's now so easy to present them accurately by turning on a CRT shader that's already built into many retro emulators. As others in this thread point out, even the best pixel shaders aren't completely perfect, but as a retro-purist (and video engineer whose career spanned the analog and digital video eras) I concede today's best pixel shaders are 'accurate enough' and certainly far better than hard-edged block pixels. It's weirdly tragic because what some people think 'retro' games looked like isn't worse than a bad consumer TV was - or better than a good analog RGB CRT was - it's just wrong on some bizarre third-axis of digital jank which never existed in the CRT era.
