Why does 480p video on a CRT look fine but a 480p video on a same-size modern monitor look blurry?

Question

I get the modern display will have more physical pixels, but since the pixels on the old CRT are just bigger, it too should look blurry shouldn’t it?

In: Technology

Answer 1

A CRT doesn’t inherently have pixels, it scans the electron beam across the screen in continuous lines that are broken up into pixels by the video card. What this means in practice is that a CRT is effectively running at its native resolution at all times, it never has to blend neighboring values together like a LCD does if the number of pixels of the current resolution doesn’t divide evenly into the native resolution. The scanlines themselves are also narrower than the pixels on an LCD, and this significantly impacts how things look.