BLUR BE GONE

Make retro games look as good in motion as they did in the '90s

- 

The 2007 season finale of TV phenomenon Lost ended with an all-timer twist: what had seemed like the usual flashback was actually a flash forward, with protagonists Jack and Kate somehow safe in Los Angeles after three seasons of being stuck on the mysterious island. Escaping had been the whole point of the show or so we thought, until a broken Jack cried, "We have to go back!"

Not long before that episode I'd dropped a great deal of money on a 26-inch 1366x768 LCD that served as my college dorm TV and computer monitor. It was state of the art, so much thinner and sharper and better than the CRT monitor still attached to the family PC. Or was it? Twenty years later, experts tuned into the minutia of display tech are still trying to get back what we lost.

For years, Blur Busters' Test UFO browser tool, starring a little green man in a red saucer, has served as the de facto way to judge the clarity of objects in motion on modern displays. Compared to older CRT monitors, the LCDs of the mid-2000s were particularly terrible, their pixels taking an eternity to change from one colour to another and leaving a nasty 'ghost' trail on fast-moving images. Today's high-refresh monitors are far better - but even the best of the best are still chasing the clarity of CRTs.