"Correct" Color: Some Evidence Related to the NES

you’re adorable :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Open YouTube and type in “Nintendo documentary.”

looooooool

I don’t think you’re doing yourself any favors, here. By all means, please continue.

If anyone else can find this obscure documentary @alexb3d is referring to, let me know

You’re saying something so absurd that it seems like you’re mocking people or perhaps you’re showing off your ignorance.

The temperature is adjusted by the white point, and is WHITE.

The Japanese don’t see the screen as blue 9300K, the Americans don’t see it as orange 6500K, and the Europeans don’t see it as red 3100K.

The only screen that appears blue is the Trinitron; this is a characteristic of its technology.

It’s that it answers you and you don’t pay attention. If you connect a Japanese Famicom in America, you’ll see a blue screen, if you connect the NES in Japan, you’ll see a reddish screen.

Developers don’t care, because that’s a pre-established standard. The temperature is managed by the TV output module.

All this came up because the image you are showing is over-edited and cannot be taken as a reference. Is it very difficult to understand?

I can’t do it, I literally have like 200 on the scoreboards. I have these images, but it’s Mario 3 from SNES.

Captura desde 2025-10-15 17-09-31

Captura desde 2025-10-15 17-16-58

And as I was saying, it’s not a documentary, but it’s up to you to find it. :slight_smile:
Captura desde 2025-10-15 17-18-19

All evidence i’ve seen suggests that:

a) Japanese Color TVs used D93 as their default white point until 1996-1997ish, when D65 seems to have started to take over as the standard for game modes.

Ranmori shared their relevant contemporary experience with the 1997 NTSC-J Sony KV-14GP3’s game mode lowering the color temperature here. The earliest mention i have found of this “game” mode button on a Trinitron is the 1996 KV-24FW2/KV-24SW2 manual, which presumably behaved in the same way.

It can also be observed that the screenshots on the back of Japanese game cases started to shift from D93 to D65 around the same general 1996-1998 time period.

b) Sony included an option called Trinitone starting no later than 1985 (probably starting with the XBR line in 1984 if i had to make an informed guess), which adjusted the color temperature.

Here is a 1989 newspaper article which touches on that setting, and specifically mentions that “Apparently different countries have different tastes.”, in reference to people from Japan and other Asian countries tending to prefer higher/bluer color temperatures.

The 1990 “W0006311M.pdf” manual specifies that the bluer (presumably D93) setting was the factory default at that time, even in the US.

c) Nintendo literally made official NTSC-J TVs with built in consoles in collaboration with Sharp (the Sharp C1 for the Famicom, and the Sharp SF1 for the SFC), and as far as i have seen, both were D93, at least by default.

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Let’s keep it cordial in here guys.

ideally, we would have a calibration card in the periphery of the shot (to isolate room/camera effects), and also another shot of the display showing its own calibration pattern (smpte color bars or whatever; to isolate CRT/white point effects) with the same calibration card in the shot (to isolate camera+CRT effects).

So, keep that in mind when you post pictures of your CRTs, gang :stuck_out_tongue:

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This is good, useful information. Thanks!

Shifting tastes and later universal adoption of D65 may offer an indication as to which one is objectively superior :wink:

related to this: https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2135743

I still can’t find the obscure documentary Alex was talking about, or the quote from Yamauchi explaining why anything but 9300k is wrong, but I’ll keep looking- I’m about 45 minutes into a documentary about Nintendo in the 1980s, looks promising

Ah, here we go, the 1984 XBR Trinitrons did, indeed, have the Trinitone setting:

https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/res/manuals/W000/W0006213M.pdf

While at least this non-XBR 1984 model did not: https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/res/manuals/W000/W0006164M.pdf

I think it would be a mistake to think of it that way. D65 “won” because it was part of Rec. 709, which was adopted as the global compromise standard color gamut, displacing all of Rec. 601-525, NTSC-J, and Rec. 601-625.

As would this. It would be more accurate to suggest that anything but D93 is (generally) revisionist for (most) Japanese games made prior to the 1996-1998ish.

I am personally strongly of the opinion that the grand majority of Japanese Famicom games look their best when using the CXA2025AS palette with a D93 white point, but i’m sure there were some Japanese folk who immediately hit that Trinitone button for D65 back in the 80s and 90s when they set up their new TV. (Just as there were countless USians who stuck with D93 despite D65 being the more correct option for most media made outside Japan.)

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This combo actually does look good, yes, because it pushes the reds harder than most palettes. And you’re touching on another important factor, the variance in TV decoders - which definitely makes it difficult (impossible?) to pin down any single, intended look. (the sky isn’t purple with that combo, though! :hushed:)

I’ll grant that 9300k may be “generally correct” for Japanese games pre 1998, but it’s difficult to say that other temperatures are “wrong” when the games were being marketed globally.

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Well the documentary I was watching ended without the quote from Yamauchi that I was expecting, oh well. “The Story of Super Mario Bros 3” if anyone is curious. Still pretty good.

I think the colors shown here are absolutely definitive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYlm_9i5Dgc

That’s the thing, it isn’t that it is supposed to be purple, it’s that it uses the Famicom’s “purpleish blue”, as opposed to the other available options, which is distinct from actually being purple.

But it is quite easy to say that D93 is more likely to reflect the creative intent, and color temperatures other than D93 are less likely to reflect the creative intent.

Keep in mind that video was itself created for Japanese broadcast in 1986, and thus would have also been intended for viewing at D93. (It has also been through who knows how many generations of copying and who knows what processing along the way before it was finally uploaded to Youtube.)

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I know, it’s that ambiguously purple blue. The video actually shows it pretty well, I think, even if it’s not reference material.

Ok, I’ll grant you that. It’s more likely to reflect the creative intent if such intent actually exists- I guess that’s the part I’m questioning. We don’t really have a smoking gun in the form of a developer quote establishing that 9300k is essential. If it was, I think such a quote would be easy to be find. Besides color temperature, different tv decoders can lead to wildly varying colors, they knew it would be displayed on millions of different TVs, etc.

I know man, I was just having fun with that one.

No one ever bothered to create an actual standard for display gamma until BT.1886 in 2011 because literally all CRTs could be presumed to physically have functionally identical gamma.

We don’t tend to talk about or create standards for things that just Are, and that is one of the ways we end up with these sorts of gaps in understanding.

I think there’s still a leap being made here from a standard that was being used at the time to an essential part of an intended look, if it exists. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that IF they cared about color temperature, they probably wanted it to be 9300k. But then if you throw in the TV decoder it gets more complicated. “Only Sony 9300k is acceptable” seems less likely than “the games were designed to look acceptable on a range of displays, with a variety of color temperatures” How is a single intended look even possible when TV decoders vary so much?

The first shots are 6500K the second ones 9300K (also using sRGB to NTSC correction), notice how much more “correct” it looks at 9300K. That teal gradient in intro image at 6500K makes no sense, if not ugly.

At the second picture it looks completely flat at 6500K, notice how balanced it looks at 9300K.

I’ve drawn some pixels myself in the past, the artist probably wanted to use a gray-ish blue to simulate distance (objects appear less saturated in distance) and 6500K bumps up green, messing the original. That is some state of the art pixels there, i wouldn’t drop that teal there and ruining it, not even with a gun in my head lol.

Ok, I will concede. 9300k is the only correct color temperature! Everyone else is doing it wrong and completely butchering the artist’s work, spread the gospel!

I think if you showed those two images to a group of random people about half would select image A and half would select image B- that teal color could be ambient light from the monitors, that’s how I always interpreted that. Honestly I do prefer the colors in the first images :slight_smile: It’s sick and wrong, I know. Second image in particular looks just dim and dull and desaturated, that’s usually how 9300k feels to me. I feel like it just sucks all the color out of everything. I know 9300k is correct and I’m wrong, it’s a serious personal problem I need to work on.

What is this even doing?

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It tries to project colors as they would look like on an NTSC TV.

Right, I get that part, but I’m not sure how it’s actually accomplishing this- is this the “NTSC colors” shader you’re referring to?

I think part of the confusion in the 9300k vs 6500k debate is that it doesn’t work the same on digital displays, the difference is really dramatic on LCD because the backlight has a bias. I guess the CRT phosphors have a bias, too, but it seems a lot more flexible because you can fine tune the electron beams.

Also- white is white and not tinted in the 6500k shots… but that’s my problem, the tinted white is correct.

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I think it’s worthwile to mention that arround 1987 SMPTE-C standard superseded the old 1953 NTSC standard in official reccomendations.

Some consoles outputed colors, optimized for the old standard, and this could be an explanation why there is a discrepancy if viewed on an older ntsc 1953 or later smpte-c tvs.

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