alt Hacker NewsI find it amusing that we now obsess over the missing flaws in our pixel images. This is exactly analogous to the vinyl/digital debate.
One way you can tell this nostalgic quest is a little silly is by the fact that new indie pixel art games are mostly excluded from this nitpicking.
I lived through the CRT > LCD transition and the only downside to LCDs at the time was A) resolution interpolation, and B) motion blur. (Both of these issues have since been addressed.)
When CRTs were the norm we were never satisfied with their crispness. We always yearned for more clarity and a smaller dot pitch. When you saw a game displayed on a sharp monitor the improvement was both obvious and somewhat amazing. But now we've finally got what we want in the form of high-resolution LCDs and OLEDs and we're trying hard to find new faults to be fixed, haha.
I am a bit of a hypocrite: I like a good CRT overlay on my retro games. It invokes a feeling. But I won't say it's objectively better.
Brian Eno put it pretty well in 1996
"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."