Tldw watching a somewhat worn out version of Alien VHS on a 4:3 CRT TV in a dark room compared to a super bright plasma TV and some remastered wide-screen version can be much scarier.
She’s onto something. CRT displays and VHS recordings are very imperfect in the best way; they lie to us so sweetly. There’s a lot of production mistakes and fakery that is really hard to spot with old tech. These things stand out in ways unforeseen on digital remasters all the time - it kind of kills the magic of it all, really.
CRT displays with old pixel art are something I taught her about very early on. Scanlines made things look different; and art looked better on CRTs because they were designed with them in mind.
In particular, dithering was a very common way of blending colours together in old video games and programs despite hardware limitations preventing more than a few colours per block of pixels. The CRT display helped blend them together since the individual pixels weren’t as clear as on a modern LCD display. A lot of old games look noticeably worse on a LCD display compared to a CRT.
My 13yr old collects Tamagotchis, and my 17yr old watches VHS tapes because she likes analog horror. So…yeah, I’m already there.
“Analog horror” is such a hilarious phrase.
I mean, I get it – Digital either works or it doesn’t. Analog provides all of that scratchy mess on the screen, distorted audio, etc.
You, or your 13-year old, might enjoy (or already have seen) this video-essay;
The Power Of VHS | SCANLINE
Tldw watching a somewhat worn out version of Alien VHS on a 4:3 CRT TV in a dark room compared to a super bright plasma TV and some remastered wide-screen version can be much scarier.
She’s onto something. CRT displays and VHS recordings are very imperfect in the best way; they lie to us so sweetly. There’s a lot of production mistakes and fakery that is really hard to spot with old tech. These things stand out in ways unforeseen on digital remasters all the time - it kind of kills the magic of it all, really.
CRT displays with old pixel art are something I taught her about very early on. Scanlines made things look different; and art looked better on CRTs because they were designed with them in mind.
In particular, dithering was a very common way of blending colours together in old video games and programs despite hardware limitations preventing more than a few colours per block of pixels. The CRT display helped blend them together since the individual pixels weren’t as clear as on a modern LCD display. A lot of old games look noticeably worse on a LCD display compared to a CRT.