More than 705 million CRT TVs have been sold in the United States since 1980, and the vast majority of these environmentally unfriendly devices are in the process of being broken down and recycled. The problem is many people will never experience it in real-life, and so filters and similar technologies are essentially forms of emulation for television tech. 'These screens will always look so much better in person than even I can demonstrate.' 'Even with all that work, it'll never be perfect,' he said.
Starkweather captures many of the CRT comparison photos himself, constantly fiddling with things like focus, shutter speed, and color balance to capture it accurately. There's no way to capture what's happening without snapping a photo of the game coming through the TV. It's why the only way to understand what's going on is to place a screen shot, typically taken from an emulator, side-by-side with a photograph of a television screen.
