> even arcades preferred to use high-quality CRTs instead of exploiting its side effects because you would look at them up close, like we use monitors now.
But even high-quality CRT's had gaussian blur. In no case when using CRT's would a pixel be represented as a tiny square, which is what you see in a lot of modern "retro" art. The "pixel" of native CRT displays is always a smoothly blurred point sample.
> The "pixel" of native CRT displays is always a smoothly blurred point sample.
And that's why CRTs were capable of displaying different resolutions in a way that was appealing.
When I bought my first LCD monitor for my computer I was hit with instant regret. The early LCDs were :
Horrible at anything other than native resolution. If your computer hardware wasn't good enough to run a new game at the highest resolution of your monitor, the game would look terrible. The scaling used to bring lower resolution pixels to fit the screen's native pixels was just terrible, terrible and terrible.
I have no words that can describe just how bad the experience of playing games at a lower resolution than native was in that era.
CRT bluriness smoothed things around in a way that didn't actually look excessively blurry. LCDs running lower resolution games looked like you threw vaseline on them.
And they were also terrible in motion. Ghosting! Ghosting! Ghosting! Playing games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament didn't feel good on that stuff..
But even high-quality CRT's had gaussian blur. In no case when using CRT's would a pixel be represented as a tiny square, which is what you see in a lot of modern "retro" art. The "pixel" of native CRT displays is always a smoothly blurred point sample.