This is what I’m seeing on my display. It’s extremely washed out and dim. Seems like something is very wrong.
This is with “crt-sony-megatron-sony-pvm-2730-sdr” on a 400 Nit SDR display with the backlight maxed out.
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That looks about right to me from the video at least - at least that’s what my PVM’s look like as reference (set to ‘NORM’ settings).
So you can turn down brightness, contrast, saturation and gamma down to zero. This will get you back to more ‘correct’ values but won’t be as bright. See what that does.
The other thing to remember is that my PVMs all have a default white point of 9300K and you may not be use to that - just turn the white point down to zero to get it to 6500.
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The camera is correcting the colors and brightness but I can assure you that it’s way outside of spec for any CRT, I’ll get some screenshots up today at some point.
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Certainly try changing those values and let me know. I have seen that videos can be misleading colour wise compared to what you’re seeing locally so it’s not that I don’t believe you.
What I will say is that video pretty much perfectly matches what I see on my PVMs - certainly if you look at the HUD elements but also Link and the main game area.
See if you can match the above video with what you see locally by changing those four values ( leave white temp alone for the time being)
I’ll try and get a video of my PVMs in action at that point so we can compare and contrast.
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Something is very off. These are extremely dim and washed out.
“crt-sony-megatron-sony-pvm-2730-sdr”
default settings
brightness, gamma, contrast set to 0.
Here’s the 1910 preset. I’m not sure what happened here but it looks like 150 TVL or something in addition to being extremely dim and washed out.
Is there just a 360 TVL preset at 1080p? (3 pixel mask)?
Here’s guest-dr-venom at 100% mask strength. Still pretty dim but at least the colors are well-saturated.
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Keep in mind the stated TVL assumes you’re outputting at 4K, so whatever value you see, divide it by two and that’s the TVL you’ll actually get for 1080p. So if you want 360 TVL, you have to use the mask labeled 800 TVL.
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I just updated my shaders and things are …different, but still way off.
crt-sony-megatron-sony-pvm-20L4-sdr, default settings. @MajorPainTheCactus is this looking as expected?
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Yeah, something’s off for sure. I don’t recall the shader looking like this in SDR. Here’s the 20L4 preset with default everything:
Switching the color space to DCI-P3 looks better, but washed out:
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Righty ho so first of all, that last picture looks like your using the SDR shader with a HDR pipeline - I saw this happen locally and posted that all the colours were broken in SDR in the thread above. I then set my monitor to sRGB, reset a few settings to neutral reinstalled RA and rebooted and everything was fine again. That hue shift to red is the tell tale sign that HDR is on (in some way) and a SDR shader is being used with it - or rather sRGB colour space is being used for the shader but the monitor is using a HDR10 colour space.
With regards to your post with comparison to guest shader I thought I’d just do a side by side comparison with my laptop (Dell XPS 4K 400nits) running the Sony Megatron in SDR with those controls I mentioned set to 0.0 and my Sony PVM 2730QM to show you whats going on my end.
Here are the two side by side comparison videos, lets start with these and see what you think. As always try to play back fullscreen in 4K (I think 4K is still processing so it may take an hour before that version is up).
My opinion is that the colours are certainly different - you can see that in person. However is that just due to the brightness differential? I’m on the fence. However I dont see the colours being ‘washed out’ in anyway - if anything I think the CRT is more washed out vs the laptop. The laptop is certainly much darker but thats to be expected right - its 400nits ish I think (I’ll try and confirm that).
So where does that leave us? The one big difference is resolution and that could well be playing a part here. As you change the size and dynamics of the beam and scanlines you do to change the overall image colours. Think if you set the red beam width to a tenth of the other two you’re going to see a colour shift.
Certainly the difference between the Megatron and the Guest pictures is that the Megatron has deconvergence and more variation between the three different beams (I know Guest can do this as well so it might be worth experimenting).
Also other factors are how the screens are calibrated - is my laptop screen way out in some respect and I’m just tuning to that? I’m not sure.
Do I think there’s a bug there? Not at the moment but as always I could be wrong - we need to do some more work to verify this I think.
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Yeah everything you’ve posted looks good to me.
I think I need to start with a fresh install of RA and the shaders. There shouldn’t be any HDR stuff going on because I have neither an HDR display nor an HDR graphics card. Then I’ll take a look at adjusting the scanlines (would 1/2 the value be correct going from 4K to 1080p?)
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I definitely saw this bug locally - I tried reproing it on my other PC and couldn’t and then went back to my laptop updated to the latest version of RA, updated the slang shaders and reset my monitor as best I could for SDR as in putting it into sRGB colour space and putting all the settings to neutral (except brightness) and the red issue went away. I was also seeing the washed out look and this was fixed also by doing the above. I’m not sure what caused it.
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So what is the difference between all the different presets?
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This is all a bit odd - I did see the exact problem @GPDP1 just posted and I’m thinking this may be what you’re seeing. However I tried reproing it after it went away and haven’t been able to. For test purposes I’d fake 4k by using a custom aspect ratio - I’ve been doing that for 8K myself - I just sit back a bit. 
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So that’s a question - the short answer is each preset represents a different CRT make and model as they all look quite different.
Then for each of those there’s a SDR option and a HDR option. HDR is generally brighter but you need a display that is capable of HDR.
Just did a fresh install, everything from scratch, updated everything, and I still get the issue. It definitely wasn’t doing this before. Version 2.7 was working A-OK as far as I could tell. And just so we’re clear, I don’t have any HDR capabilities on this machine whatsoever, neither on my GPU or my monitor.
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Are there any you would recommend in particular?
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Thanks for trying that. So my laptop does have a wierd HDR mode in that it can playback streamed HDR content but it doesn’t allow me to have a HDR desktop or play games in HDR. My monitor does have HDR mode but it only goes up to 270nits so its not really HDR. Not sure why I’m saying this but I think my issue was due to wrong monitor settings.
However I barely use this setup so I can’t really be sure of anything other than the problems I saw were identical to yours and I think happened in version 2.7 of the Sony Megatron. I’ve got to go to sleep now but I’ll try and investigate this more tomorrow.
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Yes definitely start with the 2730QM HDR first as it’s the one that got me into this mess! It’s the one that I have the PVMs physically in my house that I’ve been able to closely control all the settings for the photos and comparisons for.
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@Nesguy and @GPDP1 can you let me know what RA video driver you are using? My best guess at the moment is that this is driver specific. I’ve also noticed RetroArch being unstable for me now as in it pops up and dies and I need to restart my laptop to get it working again - I suspect this is related.
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Re-uploaded Super Mario World side-by-side as it got stuck encoding the high res versions:
As always best view in fullscreen at 4K quality playback.
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