Memes

People have taken it way past the point of sanity now, but they are better for game consoles from PS1 era and below. Especially for 2D games, as the pixel art was often designed around the square aspect ratio, and the tendency of CRTs to soften images and blur minor details.

It's how the waterfalls in Sonic appeared transparent. Every line alternated between waterfall and background, so when the TV blurred it slightly it looked transparent instead of alternating lines. You'll also often see it in old games with dithering, using a checkerboard pattern of two colors to approximate a third color in between the two when "smoothed" together.

Like I said though, people take it way too far. Most people don't need a reference quality Sony Trinitron monitor meant for professional video editing studios with less than 500 hours of time powered on so it's still in perfect shape. You do you, but there's some real elitist shit I've seen, and some audiophile level "$600 cable for digital signal" delusion going around.

As long as you aren't streching a "square" image to a widescreen one, it's really up to preference on the blur/softening side. And even the streching is just the one point I'm personally elitist about.

As moderm screen resolutions get better, we get better and better approximations of CRT screen effects through using graphical shaders. There's some mad genius shit out there that does things like simulating how the electron beam scans across the CRT vacuum tube.

Same 👍