Calling all CRT owners: photos please!

[Cyber]

@RealNC

Can someone tell if Ahoy’s closeups of the Commodore 1084S CRT monitor are real or fake in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

Examples I extracted directly from the raw AV1 4K encode of the video using MPV (so actual video frames, not screenshots of the video while playing):

That monitor footage looks pretty real to me. You can see the artifacts created when the camera shutter and sensor is out of sync with the screen scanning. I’m talking about the black bar rolling up and sometimes down the screen. Then there’s the moire pattern. The specific combination might be hard to simulate without looking like a simulation. Even the text and graphics on screen look pretty even and well aligned with no brightness, blurriness or other anomalies.

Those screenshots you posted reminded me of my Computer Monitor and Slot Mask Presets that I posted recently.

Please show off what crt shaders can do!

Do all “monitors” look the same? Remember this is Libretro Forums mind you. How is the mask on a “monitor” supposed to look? Note: You have to load full resolution, then open in new tab or window, zoom in or view fullscreen in order for these to look correct because of the mask and scanline settings. CyberLab__Ultimate_Virtual_Slot_Mask_CRT-1P2RTA__ADV [image] CyberLab__Computer-Monitor-Raw__ADV [image] CyberLab__Computer-Monitor-Smooth__ADV [image] CyberLab__Slot_Mask_II__ADV [image]

[Wilch]

Hi, here’s a shot of a PVM 2053MD (1953MD). Taken on an iPhone with ISO 100, W/B 5000, shutter 1/60. Hope it’s useful

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Absolutely fantastic! Beautiful display and we can clearly see what’s going on at the phosphor level.

[Lovelime]

Here is photos from two of my monitors, I do have two other worse crt’s too, but they are in the storage room, so won’t probably bother with those to, and one of them is bleeding colors allot.

Anyway here are photos of my two good ones.

First up is my 29" Nanao MS9 in my Egret II arcade cabinet. Unfortunately I don’t have the means right now to check the brand of the tube, so I don’t know if its made by Toshiba, Hitachi or Matsushita right now. The geometry is really good on it, but not perfect, and is tilted a few millimeters to the right. But nothing you are going to notice with a few mm over scan. Otherwise, except adjusting the height and width and placement, I have not done any kind of calibration on it.

29" Nanao MS9 - Neo Geo MVS using MV-1 PCB board over JAMMA. Marco Rossi - Metal Slug X (Neo Geo)

iPhone 12 Pro Max, 3x zoom, Camera+: ISO 100, WB 5000K, Shutter speed 1/60, about 50 cm from the screen.

iPhone 12 Pro Max, 6x zoom, Camera+: ISO 100, WB 5000K, Shutter speed 1/60, about 50 cm from the screen.

Next up is my 20" PVM-20M2MDE, The geometry is good on this one two except a few millimeters of a shift in the upper left edge of the screen. I have never calibrated this one either and i’m sure i could fix the geometry using the monitors OSD menu. However my knobs on the front panel does not work at all except the brighness knob which is set to the middle. But I think the settings is at a superb level anyway, so I haven’t bothered change anything in the OSD.

20" Sony PVM-20M2MDE, Super Famicom (have not checked if it’s a 2chip or 1chip) connected over a non-shielded RGB scart cable then converted to seperate BNC connectors. Not using CSYNC.

Link - Legend of Zelda (SNES/SFC)

iPhone 12 Pro Max, 3x zoom, Camera+: ISO 100, WB 5000K, Shutter speed 1/60, about 35 cm from the screen.

iPhone 12 Pro Max, 6x zoom, Camera+: ISO 100, WB 5000K, Shutter speed 1/60, about 35 cm from the screen.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Really fantastic CRTs thanks for sharing they look really great.

Please don’t take the next comment as criticism - I’d just love to see a little more accuracy but is there any way to turn off the iPhones post processing? The phosphors in Links shield should not be white - you should be able to see distinct red/green/blue phosphors. Also the iPhone in it’svever wisdom is adding a bloom effect to the highlights.

Thank you for your hard work putting this together - I know how much fiddling and reading this can take, this is a fantastic post.

[Jamirus]

Dunno if this is useful for this project, but I thought it’s at the very least interesting to see some closeups from something rare like this: over at the shmups.system11 forum, Josh128 acquired a whole lot of dual-scan 27" inch TVs last year, mostly Hitachi 27MM20Bs. These are 600 line resolution CRTs featuring slot masks and VGA + S-Video. This page shows a picture from the manual and links to two galleries.

https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=68932&start=30

First gallery showing 15 Khz Genesis RGB by using a GBS-C line doubler:

https://imgur.com/gallery/CXol5dD

Second gallery showing Gamecube 31Khz 480p

https://imgur.com/a/APMPcNY

That closeup from Link is from Soul Calibur 2.

[hunterk]

It’s pretty amazing how close we were to photo-realism with CRTs and 480p.

[Cyber]

Recently posted some random arcade CRT pics. Don’t know if anyone here will find them useful or not.

CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack

Here are some pictures of some real arcade CRTs. Feel free to use them for reference. Be sure to download and do lots of zooming in! Camera settings used - ISO 100, 1/60, WB6500K. [Screenshot_20221028-232852_Gallery] [Screenshot_20221028-233115_Gallery] @guest.r, @MajorPainTheCactus, @HyperspaceMadness, @RetroGames4K, @Nesguy

[Drybonz]

@UnixRoot

Nevertheless, here are some shots of my calibrated Bang & Olufsen MX 8000 TV.

That B&O looks really nice and crisp. Has anyone done a preset based on this?

[HyperspaceMadness]

@MajorPainTheCactus has one for the Megatron shader

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Hi @Jamirus these shots are amazing - you can really see the close up slot mask in them - especially the close up one above. I’ve been wondering whether my masks are right with respect to the slot masks and I’m starting to think I might change them. Hold this thought!

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Yup - just to add it’s in the ‘HDR’ folder of the slang shaders.

[Wilch]

Speaking of slot masks, I recently picked up a Philips 21pt4457. Photo taken on iphone with iso 100 and wb 5000.

[rafan]

Nice pics @Wilch.

Just a question: do you see scanlines on this tv? In the screenshots I can hardly distinguish any scanlines.

Maybe there’s some slight overexposure happening as you can clearly see the deposited phosphor stripes on the glass in the black areas and quite a bit of greensubpixels show white in the shots.

Nonetheless very nice shots

[Wilch]

Scanlines are barely visible in the darkest areas only which I just put down to a low TVL count. Quite a nice change from my pvm actually, but whites are very bloomy on this set. I had to lower the contrast to around 40 (50 is default). The photos are possibly overexposed. I’ll take more later including a darker area to show scanlines

[Jamirus]

It was the same on my set (similar size) until I adjusted focus. Here’s a pic from another Philips TV, 17" (17PT1565):

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Great close-up shots @Wilch. Over on the Sony Megatron thread I tried to replicate and failed quite miserably in the colours. Are the red and green phosphors really that yellowey by eye or do you think the camera is playing tricks? It’s just I’m never going to get that colour with my LCD phosphors - also my camera is playing tricks as the overall image doesn’t look like my photo. I’ve just also realized your TV is super bright isn’t it!

[Wilch]

Interesting, how did you adjust the focus? That image looks great

[Jamirus]

Just to clarify, this isn’t mine, I got this particular photo from the web, I have a folder where I occasionally save stuff like that.

I did make focus adjustments on two of my sets though, some pics are here:

Crt monitor, what can I expect?

Going to get rid of my 17" VGA monitor. Instead, I got a CRT TV of about the same size, one I indirectly mentioned in the composite thread: Blaupunkt PM45-15 VT (Grundig chassis, Philips tube, from around 1995). Big portables seem to went out of fashion as time went on (at least in Europe), the 14" inch ones are all over the place. Somebody was giving this unit away for free but still was willing to ship it, so I only had to pay for that. Testing the composite input I was kinda shocked, contr…

For adjusting the focus you need to open the CRT up and turn a knob. There should be two there , I believe they’re usually also labeled (FOCUS and SCREEN). You can turn them by hand, but something like a screwdriver can help. Watch some videos first if you want to do it, because technically it’s dangerous to work with the inside of CRTs, you don’t want to touch anything else when you don’t know what you’re doing.

[RealNC]

@Jamirus

For adjusting the focus you need to open the CRT up and turn a knob.

Keep in mind that due to the age of CRTs, the components controlled by that knob (usually rubber) might have deteriorated due to heat and any movement might kill them. In my case (many years ago) it broke because the rubber ring inside simply turned to dust when I turned it and the image was permanently blurry after that.