Straying?
The dark side?
Hmmmph…I wonder what folks who think like that might be saying about CRT Shaders in the next 15 to 20 years when CRTs stop working, become harder to repair or start to rise exponentially in price?
Some of them have truly never seen what a good CRT Shader can look like and have written off the technology based on some old bad impressions.
That’s one of the main reasons I am fully on board with shaders, and also what people like you have been able to do when it comes to emulation is pretty amazing
I’m still on the fence about a shader’s ability to replicate a good CRT. Certainly, we have the shaders for it, but it’s the display technology that’s lacking. OLED and its variants have the characteristics of a CRT but funky subpixels which interfere with mask accuracy. What we need is a display with self-lift pixels and a standard RGB structure, a glossy screen, low input lag and high refresh rates. Then we’ll be in business. Unfortunately it seems like manufacturers are moving away from standard RGB structures.
One of the reasons I’ll never get a OLED, I’m good with my standard 4k for now. I refuse to have to revert to BGR to get pixels to look “right” on my presets even though those aren’t accurate themselves. I’m not sure what the current situation is on recent oleds but if they still haven’t released a oled with just “rgb” structures then this whole generation of new tvs will just fly right on by me.
You don’t actually have to use BGR to get the pixels to look right, only the subpixels/“phosphors” when viewed from right up to the screen. At any other viewing distance everything looks normal.
@MajorPainTheCactus has a newer QD-OLED display and despite the horror we were predicting when we initially saw the subpixel structure, he seems to be having a pretty good experience using his extremely subpixel accurate and reliant CRT Shader.
@thephonypope is also using a newer QD-OLED display.
So that view in my humble opinion is a bit limited and fueled by hype, FUD and theory while in practice, things may not really be as bad.
In my not so humble opinion if you look at the sum total picture as well as the experience, OLED blows everything currently available away for the old school emulation experience despite their disadvantages. Remember all current display tech has pros and cons.
So better to experience in person first before finalizing conclusions.
I won’t deny that his presets have some pretty convincing results I’ll give you that.
Na I’ll pass. Certain things I’m stuck in my ways and strict about and RGB is one of them even if the new tech blows everything else out of the water when it comes to the rest of the picture quality, call me old fashioned I guess. If those new qd-oleds have RGB I’m all for it.
Can confirm with my qd oled It’s just RGB, no white subpixel and it creates good square CRT phosphers in the proper RGB order, at least when dealing with aperture grille which is what I’ve been testing with. I remember hearing slotte mask or shadow mask ends up looking slightly funky but still better than using WOLED, probably is mentioned somewhere in this thread.
For those who are particular though 100% suggest finding a way to test to see if it’s suitable for you before shelling out $1000+. Have a friend who became a convert after seeing these shaders on my screen, though he probably would be sticking with CRT if the one he owns isn’t starting to die much like the others out there, and if space wasn’t an issue at all.
Most of that was before I fixed my OLED TV earlier last year (or was it the year before) and we’ve all learned a lot more and things have advanced quite a bit since then. Once you use the proper BGR layout WOLED works really well with all mask types.
Unfortunately, the subpixel problems are evident in the shots he’s posted. Yes you can trick the camera into blurring those subpixels together to look more like RGB triads but it isn’t the same.
I’ll agree that OLED is better than anything else, but it’s still not a perfect replacement for a CRT.
What model is it? Last time I checked, which admittedly was a while ago, there weren’t any OLEDs on the market with a standard RGB structure. They’re all weird.
Samsung QD-OLED
Nintendo Switch
iPhone 13
If this trend continues we can kiss the dream of perfect mask emulation on a CRT-like display goodbye. Maybe I should just get used to scanline-only setups.
S95b, which has no W subpixel. While the triangular layout I previously assumed would be problematic for emulation, the emulated phosphors actually look quite fine at least using aperture grille, not positive on the others
I can’t see anything out of sorts in person unless I’m an inch away from the screen, and even then it’s hard to tell for sure if I’m imagining it or not. That said I’m less particular than most, my friend who owns a CRT would be a better judge and he overall was pretty pleased when he saw it. I’ll inquire about what his nitpicks are someday, since he’s been able to see it in person.
That’s not good enough for me, personally. Yes, I am pickier than most. To me it looks like any old display using a shader with too much bloom. There’s way too much going on at the subpixel level and the RGB triads are not clean. I can notice such things at normal viewing distance but I have a pretty unique eye for detail. Give me a tour of your house and I’ll point out everything that’s not level. These are just my opinions. If it’s good enough for you, that’s great. Honestly, I wish I wasn’t like this.
I had a conversation with Kurozumi once where he expressed the same opinion. I wonder how he’s doing these days. Moved on, I suppose.
I guess all 3 of us feel the same then. I looked at those shots you posted up above and had no idea the rgb structure of those qd-oleds looked like that, I could never use that for crt shaders. I hope one of these companies takes it back to the basics and at the least include some kind of option to switch over to standard rgb triad structure in some future release.
Ive got even more bad news for you: even if they had an RGB layout the colours of the sub pixels would be wrong as theyd now be matching rec. 2020. This means the straiggt line from the whitepoint to green does not go through the green of rec 601 and so you have to turn on other subpixels to get the right colour (red in this case). This happens in the blue and red too. So basically we’re stuffed for 100% RGB masks on any modern display going forwards.
This is very horrible news. So now we’ll all be hoarding RGB displays the way people hoard CRTs, I guess.
I take it you have a similar problem with rec 709 and DCI-P3? Curious if working with sRGB or Adobe RGB is easier for achieving CRT colour accuracy.
Also curious in your testing how much the RGB structure of the s95b is messing with the final image compared to your PVM if you had the time, Cyber mentioned how OLED owner’s opinions have evolved over time along with techniques to mitigate issues.
Here’s a little roundup I did, of some of the comments of OLED TV users after things started working at a more acceptable level.
I really enjoy RetroGaming on my OLED TV. I get it that everything may not be perfect at the subpixel level but using a 55" screen, I don’t sit 1 foot away from the screen and I can’t see the subpixels at all. Furthermore the only compromise I really have to deal with when it comes to subpixels at least on my display is the phosphor order of Red-Blue-Green instead of Red-Green-Blue and that’s more psychological or academic as they say than anything else at normal, real world viewing distances.
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor
So in summary for those who are into zoomed in pixel pr0n these may not satiate any appetite but for those who actually still enjoy playing games and having fun they’ll probably be in for a treat.
Back in the day, we played on whatever we had available, wherever we were. I knew about composite connections so I was the one to insist on that over RF. Actually, it was what I had to use at home since I gamed on a Commodore 1702 on my NES back in 1991!
So for me, I see this whole thing as a glass half full rather than half empty thing. At first we were getting really crazy results using WOLED and people were screaming Oh, the White LED, after accidentally discovering that Guest’s BGR fit and worked perfectly with WOLED displays, where’s the white OLED is the devil talk now?
So who knows what else might figure out over time once we keep our minds open enough? Do we really appreciate and understand how microscopic these OLED subpixel elements are to begin with?
@thephonypope, if you’re interested, you can read up on some of the ground work that went into getting some major improvements for OLED TV users over the past year.
You’ll see how far we came from when RGB Mask Layouts were being used and getting horrible alignment issues (but still looking good from normal viewing distances) and the thinking then was that the most suitable Masks for OLED TVs were BW masks.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, as far as I know you still get weird triads. And if we’re going to use viewing distance to solve everything, hell, let’s just not use shaders and stand 20 feet back, raw pixels look fine at that distance. It’s all about your particular situation/setup and what you’re sensitive to.
I can absolutely see these differences when sitting 2-3 ft from my desktop monitor, which is a common way to play games. For couch mode gaming? Probably not as big of a deal, but then you could probably just do without the mask, too.
This is how triads look on my OLED TV. If you think that’s weird then that’s okay.
A bit extreme, I hope you didn’t miss my point.
My point exactly. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Okay.
I wouldn’t say so because even if you can’t see the individual elements which make up the picture from certain distances, the final image you see only looks the way it looks because it’s made up of those elements.
Anyway, my main point was that over time things have improved considerably for OLED users and I’m thankful for that and was sharing it with @thephonypope based on a statement he made.
At times I’m a pixel sniffer but at other times I’m a couch gamer. I too can see and notice things, many things. I’m also an optimist and I like being happy but that’s just me and that has nothing to do with TVs, Shaders and Emulation. This is not a jab at anyone else, just stating the obvious that we’re all different and the way we handle and perceive things may be reflected in our opinions towards these things.
