Yeah that’s a good point - hmm. I suppose it’s not easy on an arcade monitor but playing about with the monitor settings and seeing how the effect behaves is the easiest way to investigate the mystery.
Possibly it’s low level burn in
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Guys, let me introduce you RetroBigini. He’s an Italian guy, he takes wonderful photographs of games on CRTs and sells them. So as we scan his works to take inspiration, we can also buy spectacular videogames moments.
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Amazing body of work - he’s certainly been busy! Really great, I wasn’t aware of his art so this is fantastic. Thanks for sharing!
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Hello,
Here’s a solo shot from my 27"Rodotron 666a using VGA. Have more to sure but since I’m a new user I’m limited to one photo per post. Tried to get a good shot of the mask, hopefully it comes out well.
Street fighter Alpha 3 @240p
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Very cool, nice shot 
There are those faint lines again, they are definitely colored like the phosphors, but they don’t show any breaks in them like the phosphors do. Hmm the plot thickens 
@Sgtsocko I made you a basic user so I think you should be able to post more images now.
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I think that’s normal. I believe those lines are caused by the metal alignment mask that sits behind the actual phosphors. You can see the same line-less effect in the upper-left and -right corners of this macro shot i took a million internet-years ago:
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Very nice. I think his photo shows how careful we should be with bloom, as it produces a color leak that real masks don’t have. And I still can’t find a nice solution to replicate that 3-2-3 pixels pattern.
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I think, there’s your “natural” analog “Anti-Aliasing” right there. Apparently slot mask phosphors don’t abruptly cut off at black but gradually fade to near black for each RGB component.
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Much appreciated. I took a couple more photos today of ghouls and ghosts at different distances. The one photo from yesterday had a light source in the room that might’ve been illuminating those lines. I’ve gone full dark and they seem less visible in these new shots.
Ghouls and ghosts @224p
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Amazing shots! I’ve never heard of the Rodotron as a brand name - I guess it wasn’t released over here in the UK possibly? Is it a rebadge of a more well known manufacturer? The image on it looks great.
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If you’re talking about software based blooms - don’t use them if your display is bright enough. They’re a complete faux effect that doesn’t behave like a proper CRT at all and light in general - in graphics it’s just been an effect that is cheap to do and mimicks some of what we see light do.
It also applies to video games and computer graphics more generally - if you watch any high end UE4/UE5 render tutorial the artist will always tell you to turn off bloom as a post effect for a more realistic image.
Btw when you say 3:2:3 pixel pattern what are you referring to?
Bloom: 27:50 (not that we’re doing anything like what this guy is doing but it’s a pointer)
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I believe it’s also called a makvision or wei-ya. The chassis is called a Rodotron 666a tri-sync, I believe the tube is RCA, but I can verify later. Here’s the listing for it on suzo happ
Unfortunately, like all things CRT, parts are becoming impossible to find. I try to keep my playtime limited on it because of this.
I just recently bought an OLED tv and was running Mega Bezel (which I’m a huge fan of btw) and thought I would fire up the CRT to see if I could find something close so I could put it aside for the most part.
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This. The problem is that my monitor is 300cd/m2, so not enough to avoid pumping bloom. But I have to say, some bloom is also visible in some real photos, like a -0,20 on guest’s shader (pardon my approximation).
Regarding the 3-2-3 pattern. Again, pardon my approximation. What I’m looking for is a more dense mask, like “more pixels per scanline” (I know, it sounds atrocious), so that would be “3-2-3 per scanline”. Tweaking pixel height in guest’s doesn’t do the trick, all I can achieve is like “2-1-2”, with 2 as pixel height.
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Ah so is this an arcade cabinet CRT? Excuse my ignorance.
Ah yeah switching on more subpixels is definitely a good way to get more brightness. I’d be careful of photos in this respect as a lot of what you see in white blooms is due to light clipping by camera’s sensor - it’s important to know the ISO, aperture and shutter speed for such images. Then you can also take into account the opposite problem: under exposure of the image.
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You would be correct, yes this would be used in an arcade cabinet. I believe these were produced as a replacement for ailing out of production monitors in arcades. They’re tri-sync meaning they can handle 15khz/24khz/31khz which is most arcade games up to about 2005ish.
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Dont we all on a CRT shader forum. Nice find - love to see some close up pics of those phosphors.
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How much does it weight? 
Jokes aside, flood us with photos!
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