Colours on a properly calibrated CRT are indeed the same as on a calibrated LCD. However, most screens in the world are far from calibrated.
CRTs definitely had worse sharpness, but their colour contrast in areas where light and dark were next to each other was better then even some monitors sold today. I think the blur of the CRT screen is essential for the pixel-perfect look of 90s GUIs as they were designed with the colour stretching in mind.
My computer screens have about four or five dimming zones between them at best and this becomes painfully obvious when trying to watch high-contrast imagery. Single-pixel lines also need to align perfectly with the pixels on my screen or require some kind of blurry processing or you'll get weird artifacts (as others mention, this CSS adds a green tint to some LCD displays). When my screen renders mostly black it's black enough, but when it needs to render black lines over a grey background, the result just doesn't work like it would've on a CRT screen, which has an entirely different image buildup.
Sure, I know that HDR screens with 600 nits exist and I know that they're better than any CRT ever produced has ever been, but for most people, those fancy expensive screens are simply out of reach for the majority of people because of their price. The mediocre mid-range screens are what most people actually rely on for their business and that's the painful truth when designing anything. We can compensate for that in our designed by using the higher pixel densities of modern monitors and adding all kinds of effects, but in my experience, this simply wasn't necessary for CRTs exactly because of their flaws.
CRTs have also been obviously superior for quite a lot longer than people seem to remember. The first generations of LCD screens were simply awful to look at. They were unresponsive, bland, had terrible contrast, the colour representations were all over the place because of needing analog to digital conversion, the UIs of the time were all designed with the blurry CRT effect in mind, the viewing angles were atrocious, it was all quite bad unless you went for the top of the market. I'm sure the more modern flat design and newness of these devices made people buy them before they were any good, but back in those days a high-res CRT would've been a far superior option for anyone not constrained by physical space.
I've recently turned on an old flat screen I found lying around at my parents' place that I thought back in the day was a good screen back then. Looking at it with modern eyes, it's absolutely terrible, actually worse than the 90s CRTs I've used.
I appreciate your comments, but I still have literally no idea what you're talking about. I think you might be confusing contrast with something else, but I don't know what.
There's no difference in colors between LCD/CRT, as calibration can be good or bad for either, and you can calibrate yourself. The idea of color contrast between light/dark being better on CRT makes no sense -- the colors are the same, although LCD's are sharper and actually have darker blacks. Dimming zones can similarly only darken blacks even further which is desired for contrast. And when you talk about "Single-pixel lines also need to align perfectly with the pixels on my screen or require some kind of blurry processing" that's to do with anti-aliasing or scaling, none of which have anything to do with CRT/LCD. "Black lines over a grey background" will always be worse, not better, on CRT due to the gray blurring into the black since phosphors "bleed" more. And we're not talking about first-generation LCD's (or first-generation CRT's), we're talking about the regular LCD's that come on average computers today.
It's clear that you genuinely seem to be perceiving some difference that leads to a preference for CRT... but it's definitely not contrast. The only thing I can guess is it's a preference around disliking antialiasing or disliking "jaggies", or scaling modes, or subpixel rendering maybe? All of those are generally adjustable in system settings though. And the only one specific to LCD's is subpixel rendering, and you can always turn that off. (Macs got rid of it years ago already, anyways.)
CRTs definitely had worse sharpness, but their colour contrast in areas where light and dark were next to each other was better then even some monitors sold today. I think the blur of the CRT screen is essential for the pixel-perfect look of 90s GUIs as they were designed with the colour stretching in mind.
My computer screens have about four or five dimming zones between them at best and this becomes painfully obvious when trying to watch high-contrast imagery. Single-pixel lines also need to align perfectly with the pixels on my screen or require some kind of blurry processing or you'll get weird artifacts (as others mention, this CSS adds a green tint to some LCD displays). When my screen renders mostly black it's black enough, but when it needs to render black lines over a grey background, the result just doesn't work like it would've on a CRT screen, which has an entirely different image buildup.
Sure, I know that HDR screens with 600 nits exist and I know that they're better than any CRT ever produced has ever been, but for most people, those fancy expensive screens are simply out of reach for the majority of people because of their price. The mediocre mid-range screens are what most people actually rely on for their business and that's the painful truth when designing anything. We can compensate for that in our designed by using the higher pixel densities of modern monitors and adding all kinds of effects, but in my experience, this simply wasn't necessary for CRTs exactly because of their flaws.
CRTs have also been obviously superior for quite a lot longer than people seem to remember. The first generations of LCD screens were simply awful to look at. They were unresponsive, bland, had terrible contrast, the colour representations were all over the place because of needing analog to digital conversion, the UIs of the time were all designed with the blurry CRT effect in mind, the viewing angles were atrocious, it was all quite bad unless you went for the top of the market. I'm sure the more modern flat design and newness of these devices made people buy them before they were any good, but back in those days a high-res CRT would've been a far superior option for anyone not constrained by physical space.
I've recently turned on an old flat screen I found lying around at my parents' place that I thought back in the day was a good screen back then. Looking at it with modern eyes, it's absolutely terrible, actually worse than the 90s CRTs I've used.