And the fans of '80s and '90s video games who adore CRTs say it's the way those games were meant to be played. With fuzzy pixels, and graphics that have darkness and depth.
If shaders aren't enough anymore.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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Slightly off topic from crt nostalgia:
I do miss the older 'dumb' flat screens. Feels like all devices, but specially tvs, are spying on us by default. It’s an exhausting privacy arms race with my home network against ads or tracking.
I once got myself a small projector. It ran on Android. I didn't want to connect it to my network. Unfortunately, an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot would sometimes pop up nearby, which the damn thing would connect to in order to download ads and bother me with nonsense.
The workaround was to give it Wi-Fi, but block the internet connection in the router. The solution was to throw it away. Malicious little fuck.
They can have them. Heavy, bulky, blurry, high voltage, pain in the ass to repair nonsense. I do not miss CRTs at all.
Can't beat them for games that require low latency input though. Just playing retro games on them is worth owning one.
Plasmas also looked pretty ass compared to OLEDs today.
No thanks. I absolutely do not miss CRT’s. One of my favorite innovations over the last 20 to 30 years is civilizations shifting to flat panel displays instead.
In most respects, CRTs were technically worse, but a lot of video game art was designed around their characteristics, optimized for them, and thus can appear better on a CRT. We can
and do
try to emulate CRT quirks on LCDs/LEDs to varying degrees, but we're always going to be just approaching what a CRT looked like.
https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-are-better-for-gaming/
Final Fantasy 6:
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night:
Final Fantasy 7:
Things like blurriness are a limitation in the fidelity of the display, true enough, but in the context of material optimized for that display, it can be a positive rather than a negative.
On the other hand, if you have a much better resolution on an LCD, you have ample space to emulate the CRT looks.
Case in point: literally what we've just been looking ar
_
Most TV programs are broadcast in HD format. Especially sports. That was the main reason we got rid of our last CRT. The scoreboards were getting cut off at the edges. That, and the fact that the bottom right corner of the display had permanently faded to black.