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The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art
A follow-up to this text is available here.
It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also
examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT
systems.
There's a recurring argument made about how modern pixel art often doesn't look right. For example, TikTok user "mylifeisanrpg" has made a popular video in which he explains how pixel artists used to work with the innate physical properties of Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs). In short, he describes how the fuzziness of a CRT smoothed out the rough edges of low resolution pixels and made things look much less blocky than if viewed on a modern flatscreen display.
This is correct. I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia. However, there's a lot more going on with both pixel art and old gaming hardware than mere CRT fuzziness.
In the above screenshots from mylifeisanrpg's video, we can see an illustration of the "raw" visual data of a Nintendo sprite (to the left) and a rendition of the same image on a CRT screen. I don't know if the CRT version is taken from an actual CRT, but I doubt it - I actually think it looks too fuzzy. I may be wrong - it could be an effect of a close-up photo scaled up - but it's more likely a CRT approximation generated by a software filter on a modern machine. Such software filters are often available in modern software emulating old hardware. While the intention is amicable, I've never seen a filter that can properly convey the peculiarities of a real world CRT. I personally use old CRTs regularly (as in, at least weekly) and when I use an emulator on a modern system, I always disable CRT filters.
2024-08-02: It's been brought to my attention that the above image is indeed a photo of a CRT. Mea culpa! For reference, a less out-of-focus close-up of a CRT will better reveal scanlines, the shadow mask and RGB cells.
2025-10-13: I've written a more in-depth text about the Peach meme and signal quality.
Above is another example, from Twitter user KaelanRamos. It's hard to reproduce the true CRT feeling on anything but an actual CRT: the picture on the right is much too dark and fuzzy to give an accurate sense of what CRTs look like.
Both examples makes it appear as if individual pixels were almost undetectable on CRT screens, which - as will be demonstrated below - simply isn't the case. But while they might be exaggerated, they do illustrate that a certain type of CRT will significantly change the pixel art viewing experience compared to a modern flatscreen.
Like with any artistic medium, CRTs and old hardware have their particular quirks, drawbacks and advantages. On early 8-bit systems, such as the C64 and NES, strict hardware limitations dictated what could be done by way of graphics. The above screenshot is from the Commodore 64 game Maniac Mansion, released in 1987. The original resolution is 160x200 pixels. It would take a tremendously fuzzy CRT to smooth out that kind of blockiness.
Above is a photo of my C64 connected to one of my Commodore 1084S monitors. Despite the poor photo quality, jagged pixel edges are clearly visible, demonstrating that a CRT isn't a catch-all solution for blocky 8-bit graphics.
With time, artists and programmers learned more about these 8-bit systems. Various programming tricks and artistic techniques were developed to produce better quality graphics on the exact same hardware. Below is a screenshot from Mayhem in Monsterland, also on the C64 but released in 1993, six years after Maniac Mansion.