The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)

Summary

The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again) Autumn 2025 Memes and reality Roughly a year ago, I wrote a text about the effects of CRT screens on pixel art. It surprised me by becoming one of the most controversial pieces I've published here. In it, I propose the following: Classical pixel art techniques are often (but certainly not always) missing in contemporary pixel art, which contributes to making the art look overly blocky. The inherent fuzziness of a (PAL or NTSC) CRT blends and smooths pixel art, especially with dithering and anti-aliasing, into something greater than the sum of its parts. However, contemporary claims that CRTs more or less erased any notion of visible on-screen pixels are false. Signal quality matters. The last point, about signal quality, was perhaps one I communicated poorly. I also used a popular meme as an illustration of how CRTs and pixel art is usually explained. This meme compares a blown-up sprite of Peach (from Super Mario RPG) to a photo of the same sprite on a CRT. It looks like this: For the record, I want to be very clear that I think this is a poor way of illustrating the effects of a CRT. Firstly, the photo is out of focus - which is understandable, because it's notoriously hard to take a good photo of a CRT screen. Secondly, nobody sits that close to a CRT (or any other screen). Finally, the meme doesn't tell us what connection type is used in the photo. The Peach meme seems to originate from this page, which has no information about the video signal used. All of the pictures on that page are in turn stolen from Twitter/X user CRTpixels, who seems very passionate about CRTs, posts a lot of interesting material and of course does provide information on the signal source. With a bit of searching, it becomes apparent that the video source is S-Video (Tweet screenshot here). S-Video is better than composite, but worse than RGB. Most comparisons on the linked page seem to use either S-Video or composite. For exampl...