Old CRT monitor taught me to check my color profiles

A print shop guy in Austin looked at my flyer and said the blues were way off. I had been using an old Sony Trinitron from 2002 that still works perfect for word docs and browsing. He told me to calibrate it with a simple online tool instead of guessing. I spent 20 minutes dialing in the brightness and contrast settings. Has anyone else had a vintage display mess with their design work without realizing it?

2 comments

2 Comments

rubyj1115d ago

A buddy of mine was making wedding invites on an old Dell CRT from the 90s and the ivory paper he picked came out looking greenish when he printed them. He spent like a week blaming the printer and the paper company until someone told him to check his screen. Once he fixed the color settings he had to redo all 150 invites with the right paper stock.

michaelrodriguez15d agoTop Commenter

Yeah that story is wild but I gotta call out one thing - CRT monitors from the 90s didn't really have "color settings" you could fix easily like modern screens do. They usually had basic brightness and contrast knobs and maybe a color temperature switch if you were lucky. Most of them just drifted green or pink over time because the phosphors wore out unevenly. Your buddy's invites probably looked right on screen because his eyes got used to the green tint after staring at it for weeks.