[badmintonbaseba]

Pixels displayed on CRT displays are not squares, but they are not infinitely small dots either. They are much less well-defined blobs, that even overlap with each other.

There is also the complication of composite video signals, where you can't treat pixels as linearly independent components.

[codeflo]

Good PC monitors (especially in 1995) displayed pixels as almost perfect discrete squares. It was home consoles on televisions where people get the idea from that all CRTs were blurry.

[p0w3n3d]

Let me guess: when game creators were thinking about result visuals were they considering that everyone would have this good pc monitor with exact square pixel, or were they taking into account possible distortions that would occur on average CRT?

Also: people playing retro nowadays use shaders to emulate CRT https://youtube.com/shorts/W_ZI3w9CYnI

[codeflo]

As I said,

>> It was home consoles on televisions where people get the idea from that all CRTs were blurry.

The video you linked shows a PS1 game, which proves my point. It's possible you're too young to remember the big difference between a CRT TV and a CRT monitor. Monitors really did show discrete pixels (which was important for tiny text in applications to be readable), while TVs were blurry messes.