Black levels on CRTs

[Josh128]

Later CRTs had REALLY dark blacks. My 27" Trinitron Wega has blacks that at least to my eyes, appear darker than my Samsung plasmas (which are fabulous themselves). Its black levels are insane...

[Syntax]

Same result across composite, RGB, svideo?

[Hoagtech]

You could try your luck with a gamma booster.

The reason most modern games blacks are crushed is because the color scale algorithm of older sets misinterpret the expanded color palettes.

These gamma boosters were all the rage for low contrast ratio projectors in the early 2000s.

The have their own share of problems and tend to lose black levels in brighter images but I liked using mine.

They are hard to find though and discontinued.


http://www.curtpalme.com/GammaX.shtm

[Josh128]

Later CRTs had REALLY dark blacks. My 27" Trinitron Wega has blacks that at least to my eyes, appear darker than my Samsung plasmas (which are fabulous themselves). Its black levels are insane...

Could this just be a case of newer CRTs having less use and therefore less worn tubes compared to older CRTs?



No, they really did. I still have a Sanyo 32" in GREAT shape, but blacks are just OK. The Trinitron and my older Hitachi Ultravision had really dark blacks. Some later CRTs touted their black levels in their product literature.

[FoxMontage]

If you can access the service menu, you might be able to adjust the cutoff values for the red, green, and blue signals separately. The procedure from my trinitron's service manual says to turn the brightness up to max, then adjust the cutoff values until the white-balance is to your liking (or correct).

I guess you could call it black balance. Obviously these settings may have different names in your service menu, and be sure to return the master brightness to normal when you're done.

Oh, and write down the ORIGINAL values before you change anything in the service menu.