I lift black for exactly the same reason, I always remember it being an off-black, definitely not grey but clearly not pure black.
I have a Trinitron-style (Silver, Flat-Glass Style) Sanyo CRT that I use as reference.
I had one of those too, a 20”. I remember it was surprisingly good for a crappy TV, lol. Decent digital comb filter. Nice grungy slotmask.
The other thing that gets me with all this color stuff is that TVs all had different filters/decoders and would display very different colors given the same signal. So… I guess we should just go with whatever looks good to us 
2 Likes
I have a 30" with an apeture grille (at least it seems like an apeture grille, when the TV is off I can clearly see the RGB strips going down the TV without any horizontal lines splitting the strips, I’m not sure if you can see a slot-with the TV off, 🤷.)
It’s not too bad, though I don’t really use it much, as I only have a PS2 to hook up to it currently, it does have a component connection though so that’s nice, lol.
At least I think it’s 30" I know for sure it isn’t a 16" lol.
Oh, nice. Should have some nice scanlines on a set that size. Component cables can be a bit pricey but I think they’re worth it. RGB modding is more trouble than its worth IMO, and less authentic. I always just try to use the best connection that’s available without mods. However, it’s worth pointing out that composite video is almost indistinguishable from S-video on some Wegas due to the high quality comb filter.
Edit: if it’s a Sony, it’s an aperture grille 
AFAIK only Sony made aperture grille TVs and all their TVs were aperture grille, but there were some aperture grille PC monitors made by other companies.
Sanyo exclusively made slotmask tubes (99% sure).
1 Like
I’m lucky as I bought a component cable for my PS3 years ago when I had bought a surround sound as I thought I needed it for it, I did not lol.
The component cable works on my PS2 wonderfully though, gotta love those old Sony consoles and them sharing cables, though I can’t use the component cable on a PS1.
I kinda want to get a raspberry pi to hook up too, but money is tight lol.
So I decided to power it on, it’s an unaligned slot-mask, appearantly you cannot see the slot section of the mask without the TV powered on, lol.
1 Like
I updated grade with a new reverse CRT transfer function, using smpte-c coefficients. It confirms my suspects that everything looked too dark forcing me to switch to sRGB. It also increases dynamic range in the low range with better shade separation.
I also included crt-guest-dr-venom’s P22 phosphor gamut, since also a toggle was added and it topped the max available slots for shader settings, I had to remove hotspot fix. Now we are doing the phosphor gamut within the shader so it would be advisable to use BW pattern masks like the ones from @ProfessorBraun , here.
By the way if @guest.r knows what color system is used for the transformation matrices in color-profiles I would be very grateful, I would like to test converting to my display profile instead of srgb.
Here before and after with the changes.
5 Likes
Did you fix the hotspot issue or just drop the setting because too many settings?
Also the update looks interesting, the main color difference I see on mobile is the blues, I can see the changes to the reds from this as well, but the blues stick out more, sonic himself is the the most noticeable.
1 Like
I dropped it, it had issues anyway so when I get to it again I will think on something better.
Yes, for me the first thing that I noticed is the mountains, they were brown not black. Also great shade separation on sonic’s head spike and better transition on the dark parts of the flag. I must say that this SMPTE-C is fine for 16-bit and earlier, but as I found out, some later games lilke medievil uses a power function. On PSX I think it’s kind of a mixed bag so one has to test which one looks better.
The shades of blues I think it’s because I reverted wlb back to 1.0. I think I can get it back with a negative “rb”
1 Like
It works in a way that color profiles transform to XYZ and color space matrices (DCI-P3…) transform back to RGB. So color manipulations can be combined. Default to XYZ is sRGB, default ‘from XYZ’ is sRGB.
2 Likes
I couldn’t find references for your XYZ_to_sRGB coefficients. AFAIK the transformation matrix is:
3.2404542, -1.5371385, -0.4985314,
-0.9692660, 1.8760108, 0.0415560,
0.0556434, -0.2040259, 1.0572252
2 Likes
You must consider that GLSL/SLANG matrices have to be transposed. Rows become columns or vice versa.
2 Likes
Ah yes, I recall having to do that before. Didn’t notice it was transposed. 
2 Likes
Is the latest update available for download yet?
I noticed that disabling hotspot fix and lowering contrast by .05 seemed to give better results but I’m maxing out my display backlight so it’s kind of a unique situation; not sure how applicable my results are to the typical use-case. Personally, I think the backlight should always be maxed out when attempting any kind of CRT emulation, but not everyone agrees.
1 Like
Yeah, it’s in his GitHub.
1 Like
Yes, I updated yesterday you can check the commits. The problem with hotspot fix was the transition, it wasn’t smooth so sometimes a line could be seen. I need to design something better but all in all the whole reason was to fix something that shouldn’t be there to start with, so I need to study the case further. I think that for some reason with my latest changes the situation is better but have to do more tests.
For the LED backlight I don’t know, you have done more research on that. I just wonder CRTs were like 100nits, and current LDR LEDs are between 200 and 300 nits. What am I missing? The important thing to note is that the signal wasn’t normalized, all pure white created was on the CRT side.
1 Like
oops, didn’t realize I had two copies of grade and I replaced the one that my preset wasn’t pointing to.
Yeah 300 nits is about right for most LCDs unless they’re really old. CRTs were 100 nits with masks and scanlines, though- once you add that stuff to an LCD it causes a substantial drop in luminance
Trying to correct this in software tends to introduce clipping but if you just crank up the backlight then you can increase the luminance while leaving the color values unaltered… That’s about all there is to it.
1 Like
SMPTE-C seems way too bright and washed out to me… what am I doing wrong?
POW and sRGB gamma seem fine. Also, should LCD gamma be 2.00 or 2.20?
You need to refactor your current settings. I don’t know how your display is calibrated but if it approximates a gamma curve of 2.2 it should be fine, otherwise you might have a very lifted knee.
TV settings wise, brightness at default 50, contrast to 100, and backlight 10 for 120 cd/m2 (nits), raise for higher nits. Then there’s a gamma curve option, when calibrating I found a -1 or -2 is appropiate. Set to -2 if raising back light. With this LCD gamma should be 2.2.
1 Like
Does the SMPTE-C setting need a wide color gamut monitor to look right? I seem to get clipping or crushed blacks no matter what I do.
Just enabling POW gamma seems to result in the most accurate black level and contrast. Even sRGB looks a bit bright, but this display is pretty wacky.
1 Like