Calling all CRT owners: photos please!

[ToD]

One of the pleasant things about shooting in RAW is that white balance has not yet been applied to the image. The camera will store what the white balance was set to at the time the picture was taken to the EXIF data. RAW editors will default to that value, but it can be changed to any value desired. If a neutral gray or white area is present in the source of the image, that can be used as the white point.

Finding a neutral gray is a little trickier with close up and in focus images taken from a CRT, since there’s really no white. Only the individual phosphors are visible. One way to go about it is to take a photo from a known gray or white screen, like test patterns from the 240p test suite, and ensure the camera is out of focus so no phosphors, moire or other lines are visible. Use that in the RAW editor as your white point for other pictures taken with the same camera and display settings.

I don’t mind setting my camera to 5000K if that is more useful for your purposes, however.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Just to note EXIF data is stripped out of images on this forum and a lot of upload sites (I’m pretty sure that happened last time I checked at least). That’s actually the main reason I say to note settings alongside the photo.

As for whether you should change settings I’m not sure - ideally it would be 5000K I suppose but because we can post edit the images to some common WB value for comparison/reference purposes as long as we know the original settings it’s not too much of a problem.

[RealNC]

If anymore with a CRT NTSC TV is reading this, I’d love some feedback on whether Super Castlevania IV looks like this:

Title screen

Health bar

Or like this:

What I’m trying to figure out is whether the NTSC Adaptive shader (as used by crt-guest-advanced in this case) should have its phase parameter set to 2 or 3.

[Cyber]

Based on my reading, I think SNES uses a 3 phase output.

The Guest-Advanced NTSC thread

There is a quick fix for this by using ordinary (positive parameter value) for 3-phase filtering. I mentioned earlier that 3-phase filtering can’t resolve dithering patterns in the first place, which produces a situation with maybe more viable options. More reading on this topic: The 256px presets use 3-phase NTSC output, which is what the NES, SNES, and N64 output, while the 320px presets reflect the more common NTSC output from the Mega Drive, PC-Engine, PlayStation, and most consumer video…

[Cyber]

@ToD

Looks like a small convergence adjustment is needed here. Not noticeable from normal viewing distance.

Just imagine you want to fix deconvergence while we actually start with perfect convergence then deliberately add deconvergence in our CRT Shader presets in order for them to look more authentic! Lol

[RealNC]

Found some really good, high res photos of a VGA monitor:

Credit: @PhilsComputerLab (I believe these are yours?)

[MajorPainTheCactus]

They’re fantastic pics of a dot mask - great colour - thanks!

[Tathan]

After months (I’m sorry), I’ve finally been able to go home and use my MX4200! Running Sega Megadrive and Master System games on an RGB Modified Wondermega RG-M1.

ISO 80 1/60 7550K

Once again, sorry for the delay!

[MajorPainTheCactus]

No, no, no! These are well worth the wait! Excellent close up shots! Really great reference material. Can you let me know what settings were used for your camera for this - indeed what camera you used?

EDIT: sorry missed the setting part on my first read. Brilliant stuff thanks for these!!!

[Tathan]

You’re welcome ahah, I also find them pretty cool! I would really have loved to give you pictures with a perfect screen calibration and also a Sony PVM but, the PVM I ordered on internet arrived completely smashed (400€ lost…) and the Screen Settings on my MX4200 seem to have been broken, half of the options just don’t do a thing and it’s quite difficult to have a perfect geometry.

(I may have lied a bit on the settings, those are the settings that were stored in my Phone, but maybe the camera settings had changed between the day I made the picture and the day I posted them)

NB: Oh, and, well, don’t know if it’s the right place to post this, but if you know someone near Belgium that might be able to repair a smashed 20" Sony PVM, let me know.

[PhilsComputerLab]

Yea With PC monitors, they developed quite a bit with the smaller dot pitch and higher refresh rates. This monitor is on the newer sign with OSD menu and digital controls.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Oh sorry to hear your PVM arrived smashed. When you say smashed do you mean the screen or the casing?

[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):

[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.