Calling all CRT owners: photos please!

Cyber · 7 May 2025 09:15

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.

Cyber · 5 May 2025 09:20

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/cCtMYLGzYz

Not bad at all.

beans · 7 May 2025 01:40

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.

RetroGames4K · 7 May 2025 08:23

Thank you, I really appreciate it, I will try and see how close I get to yours.

Jamirus · 7 May 2025 14:00

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.

Cyber · 9 May 2025 10:30

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/lmlQUWj5jO

Some RF + JVC love!

Bonus: Don’t throw out that old VGA CRT yet! (like I did about a year ago. smh…facepalm)

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/fOpVo4NMCx

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/RzS4egxzrU

RetroGames4K · 16 May 2025 18:32

Thanks to @Cyber, I’m trying to calibrate my CRT Screen, he could see by a photo I’ve of my screen on the game Super Mario All stars that colours was a bit off on my CRT, something I’m a bit lost also in that respect and I didn’t notice since I start messing about, there’s settings I haven’t touched before like raising colour, on this Philips CRT TV is different than the Sanyo one in that respect, colours raise in a different way and is a bit confusing because on the Sanyo, raising colours is stronger than the Philips one and also on Sanyo is more obvious that I’m raising colours than the Philips. On the philips brightness and contrast raise normal like on the Sanyo one, but not the colour, the colour on the Philips seems that only raises colour to the masks but in a slighly way and if I raise it too much it’s starts looking blurry instead of saturated, instead, on the Sanyo looks strongly saturated and not blurry when I raise colours… Here is an example for the Philips:

This was my previous settings on the Philips:

And this my “current” settings with raised colour, not sure if it’s correct though, but I’m working on it.

Edit: I also noticed that there’s an option called “tint” and I don’t know what is that for, also only comes out on windows desktop and cores like MAME, but doesn’t show when I play on Amiga or Snes cores per example… Does anyone know?

Jamirus · 16 May 2025 19:08

Normally, “tint” is only relevant for NTSC content and composite/S-video connections. With RGB it shouldn’t have any effect. Again, that’s the typical case, I wouldn’t know why it appears only with certain cores. Perhaps it’s related to refresh rate.

As for colors, sometimes you have more advanced options in service mode where you manipulate dedicated settings for Red, Green and Blue. I don’t know what you aim for though. Most Amiga content for instance will likely have been developed with the Commodore 1084 monitor in mind I assume (unless ported from e.g. PC), there are no true “correct colors” for every type of content.

RetroGames4K · 17 May 2025 01:41

I tried to do the best photos I could, but I think I’ve improved calibrating the CRT.

Cyber · 21 May 2025 22:06

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/8Ekcc9Szwq

petran791 · 10 June 2025 15:12

Vga monitor at 320x240 resolution using Biginstinct emulator on Linux (Mint) Not much difference with the crt shader on HD Monitor on Windows

petran791 · 26 June 2025 13:56

Another stark contrast between modern monitors and VGA in Bad Mojo Redux. I played Bad Mojo in the 90s and I remember default colors were closer to the VGA image than on LCD display, despite the latter being more vibrant. Also lower resolution look much better on the VGA. LCD 640x480 smaller details looked smudged

petran791 · 13 August 2025 16:29

Policenauts PC 98 640x400, VGA.

Jamirus · 25 September 2025 16:50

Did a quick test using PS2 composite and Retroscaler into Eizo Multisync monitor (composite->HDMI->VGA) and then comparing to AEG TV because they are in the same room currently. Software used: Retroarch PS2 set to 240p. Picodrive and FCEUmm cores (Digital Magnum palette).

Monitor looks great that way, and still blends. No adjustments other than contrast and brightness of the monitor possible though.

Plugging composite into the TV makes my eyes melt at first, since it gets a good deal more saturated with my default settings, so I turned it down and set sharpness also to zero.

Sonic pic 2 here is with sharpness set to 31 from 63. I guess this is still bearable, at max it looks wacky.

Super Mario Bros pic 2 is with Tint Control from default set to max. The sky turns purple and Mario gets sick (green). Pic 3 is Tint Control set to min. Sky becomes greener and Mario seems angry (red).