… Dracula’s eyes still look like two red pixels. I guess my crt isn’t crt enough. Maybe if I smear some Vaseline all over it.
But in all seriousness, still not sure how I feel. Something seems different about the visuals, and it is nostalgic. I might try to change up my setup to use it as a second display, but I think if I had fallen for the hype and spent $100+ on one of these, I would have been very disappointed.
Today’s crt filters on modern displays is more than enough for fun effects, but I would never characterize any of this as objective improvements.
A lot of the artifacts on old CRTs were actually from the connection. There’s supposedly a big difference between the looks of Composite vs S-Video vs VGA, so that’s something you could play around with.
Early PC video cards had a composite video output, and clever programmers have learned to control the artifacts to produce more colors than intended. 8088 MPH by Hornet, CRTC, and DESiRE gets 1024 colors out of a 1981 IBM Color Graphics Adapter… that the 16-color CGA standard was named after. 😂
PAL consoles can often output RGB just because SCART existed, with NTSC versions of the same consoles only having S-video as the best connection without modification.
Edit: S-video has fewer artifacts than composite, but that ruins some effects like turning the “transparency” of water in Sonic the Hedgehog into a checkerboard. The checkerboard was always there, but the blurring of composite made it appear to just be darker shades of the colors behind it (dithering). The illusion of more colors was important for Sega’s 512-color Mega Drive when Nintendo’s SNES had a full 16-bit palette of over 32,000 colors and “real transparency” (selectively replacing pixels with a lighter/darker shade).