Another cool find @Cyber
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Atari ST Gameplay emulated on My new CRT with CRT Emudrivers. 
And this is offtopic, but I want to show you my new Christmas toy, the Anbernic RG-40XX-H
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I received a Sync Stripper sometime ago, which was necessary for my multisync monitor (Eizo Flexscan 8060s) to be able to receive signals from my consoles over RGB SCART (background on Sync). I also got a MX4sio for the PS2, testing games now. Here’s a few shots.
The monitor shows a scanlined look with 480i/576i. Depending on the game, this can look better than 480p/576p imho, the monitor image is quite soft in highres progressive. However, I find fonts somewhat strange looking sometimes with interlace. 240p/288p looks as I would expect.
480i
480p
576i
576p
240p
288p
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I managed to set Sonic Mania on 240p
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Very nice for that kind of game.
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I found on the internet the code to enter the service Test mode from the remote control of my Philips CRT so I could calibrate the colours and brightness better, I found that the brightness was a bit low at max settings and I couldn’t raise it more, so the SMPTE setting on the 240p test suite wasn’t showing the black and white bars, but now it’s ok, also the instructions of the service Test mode says that the the temp color has to be set at 8500k. I’ve improved the overall image quality quite a bit thanks to this.
EDIT: If you are interested, maybe you can find your CRT model here if you need to calibrate it too:
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Pretty stuff. Congrats.
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Here are a couple of photos of my D-Series. I had to turn the exposure way down to avoid clipping in the bright areas, so they are pretty dark. I’m not sure what others are doing to avoid this. Maybe I should just let it clip?
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Hey lucky you! D-Series is probably my favourite CRT family.
You did a great job on the photos too! More please?
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Which CRT is the D Series?
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It’s JVC man. I grew up playing on a Commodore 1702 monitor and that monitor was made by JVC.
I’ve been a fan from ever since.
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I believe that D-Series were North American exclusive TVs, (or generally NTSC?), though it would be odd if the European models from JVC during the late CRT era were significantly inferior. I think JVC TVs were relatively obscure in Europe though. I mostly associate them with audio stuff.
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@beans I’m wondering, how did you make that perfect photo? So I can do the same with my CRT, is it a professional camera? I’m doing my photos from a mobile phone, but if I can know the “ISO, time of exposure, light etc”, so I can make better comparisons, thanks.
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To get a shot like the second one, where the mask is fully intact and visible, you might have to use a low ISO to prevent overexposure and excessive blooming, which sadly (in my opinion) is something that we see folks actually try to mimic when they make CRT shader presets instead of just trying to recreate the mask and scanlines and allow the light and physics to do their thing.
So you start with a completely dark room.
Be sure to have proper stabilization of the camera/phone. So that means no floating with the camera/phone in your hands. Either a tripod or elbows or some solution must be employed to ensure that the camera remains completely still.
Once that is done, you can set manual focus and adjust the focus till everything is sharp but there’s no moiré. Sometimes you have to slightly defocus to avoid that maybe by moving the lens closer or slightly further away if using a phone camera.
Set the white balance to between 4300K and 5000K or to whatever looks closest to how things look in real life. Warmer (lower) white balance values tend to be more saturated than cooler (higher) values.
Set your shutter speed to match the refresh rate of the TV so 1/60 for 60Hz NTSC or 1/50 for 50Hz PAL.
Lastly, set the ISO to the point where the brightness you see in the camera screen matches the brightness you see on the TV in real life. From experience that might be between 250 and 350.
This will result in a photo similar to what you see in the first pic.
Be sure to frame your shot so that the CRT’s screen takes up as much of the camera sensor as possible.
For the second shot, you need to go very close to the screen. You would have to readjust focus and ISO (and white balance if necessary).
You’ll have to now lower the ISO until you can see the scanlines, mask and phosphor details clearly.
From experience that might be as low as 50 to 150.
You can also try to get those close up shots using your phone’s macro camera lens/mode if it has one.
That’s basically it. Don’t leave out any of the steps.
If you take a close look at this pic by @mas you’ll see that the scanline gaps are behind the unlit phosphor stripes and thus have no effect on them.
In some of your recent presets, I noticed that sometimes you set the base (black) mask to look like how it does in the photo and at other times, I can see the scanlines and horizontal phosphor slots over the unlit phosphor stripes. I always prefer the former look to the latter.
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That was with an Olympus E-M10 (quite an old camera now, and relatively inexpensive at the time) with the bundled kit lens.
- ISO 200 (the base ISO for this camera)
- f/5.6 aperture
- 1/30s shutter speed
- 42.5mm focal length (85mm full frame equivalent)
- The first photo is from about 5-6 feet away. The closeup is probably 1 foot or less.
You can probably get a similar picture with a modern cell phone camera if you have one with a telephoto lens (or at least a less wide-angle lens) and manual camera control. The process is more important the equipment.
Some random comments:
- I first took a photo of a gray screen (from the 240p test suite) so I could get the white balance and use it on the other photos. It is arguable whether this is a better approach than manually setting a white balance. I think someone further up the thread did the same thing.
- I used a tripod, which makes it easier to set up and I don’t need to hold the camera steady myself.
- My TV is in the basement and I took the photo at night with the lights off so that there were no reflections.
- If you use a wide angle lens and take a photo from very close, it accentuates the curvature of the display. I tried to take the photo from a normal seating distance.
- Focusing correctly is difficult. You can see that I got the left side of the screen in better focus than the right.
- You should use a shutter speed at 1/60s (1/50s for PAL regions) or some slower multiple (1/30s, 1/15s, etc). Just keep in mind that if you go slower you’ll be capturing two or more frames, so the image on the screen should be static. A static image is easier anyway, because even at 1/60s you might capture half each of two different frames. Or your camera might actually take more than 1/60s to capture an image at 1/60s shutter speed (camera shutters and sensor readout are complicated).
- Most importantly, make sure you don’t clip the highlights in the image. Even when the mask is visible, the center of the scanline is often overexposed. I took a RAW image and edited it in RawTherapee so that I could verify it wasn’t overexposed. I still had to bring down the exposure by 1-2 stops (there was no clipping in the actual raw data).
And finally, for shader and preset developers, I keep in mind that the camera or the editing software applies a tone curve to the image. Usually this compresses the highlights and often it crushes the dark areas a bit. There might also be sharpening and colors might be shifted, and camera phones often do more processing. So the tonality of the photo is going to be different than on the actual CRT screen. This can also make the scanline shape look different (more like a higher order gaussian with a flatter top, especially in bright areas). Basically, if we match exactly to a photo, we’re probably not matching to the actual CRT.
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Thank you, I really appreciate it, I will try and see how close I get to yours.
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Bunch of pics over at the CRT Database illustrate neatly the range of how big progressive CRT slot masks can look like when they’re fed 480 lines, though unfortunately the database lacks captions that make the used input signals for the pics clear. There’s also the occasional mistake in the data, with no direct way to sent a correction (that I know of).
But anyway, the Eternal Graphics Pd 2968 monitor only has VGA input, so we can assume this pic is 480p:
The Panasonic DT-2700MS monitor here as a variety of inputs. Was searching for the source of the pics, apparently this is also taken from the progressive input. I’m curious if some of these progressive displays make 480/576i look like they do on my own dot multisync, where fat scanlines appear.
Quite the difference with the Hitachi 36UDX10S HD CRT here , distinct lack of scanlines.
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