What's so great about scanlines?

[Valkyrie-Favor]

Scanlines are a big deal to retro gamers. People look for CRTs with a nice scanline effect. People but "Scanline generators" for their HDTVs because they'd rather enjoy their sloppily scaled image with every other row erased. I guess that makes it look like 240p again?

I know most gamers grew up with 240p on 8bit and 16bit consoles, but I grew up playing PC and game boy games and never really seeing scanlines. You could say they were two or three years before my time.

So, what's so great about them?

[Jmustang1968]

I honestly am not a big fan of them.

[Retronomy]

Well, standard definition TV's aren't pixel resolutions, but rather have an interlaced resolution of 480 lines vertically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/480i

Beyond that, many of your favorite game's pallets were initially chosen with scanlines in mind, and the lack of them can introduce some unforseen issues concerning contrast or saturation.

That said, it ultimately comes down to playing the game the way it was meant to be played. I could take or leave (real) scan-lines. I love them, but I don't need them. However, when people go through all the trouble and money to produce fake scan lines, it makes wonder why they didn't just purchase an already excellent CRT.

[AppleQueso]

Simple answer: it sells the "240p on CRT look" and adds a bit of 'faux detail' back into the image. With high quality signals, it can look very nice (and very sharp!), and with lower quality signals, scanlines can help a bit with hiding artifacts and cleaning up the image a bit. All of this is of course assuming that we're talking about 240p to begin with here. With 480i or higher there's not really much of a point to scanlines.

"Sloppily scaled" though? Every standalone scanline generator I've seen needs 480p VGA to work, so before you can even touch them you need to feed the original 240p signal into a linedoubler. After that, depending on whether the TV can handle VGA and whether the TV is good at scaling it, it'll go through a scaler/transcoder of some sort before hitting the TV.

And how effective are scanline generators, scalers, etc at recreating that CRT look? Having played a lot of games on both high quality CRTs and on my XRGB-mini, I'd say pretty damn close, but maybe I'm a bit biased.

I do have pics though! Maybe that will speak for itself.

(images stolen from some dude on shmups.system11)
Sony BVM CRT monitor:

Xrgb Mini on an LCD:

And really, at normal playing distances, the scanline effect is quite subtle. It's just that little bit of extra niceness, and frankly I love it.

Well, standard definition TV's aren't pixel resolutions, but rather have an interlaced resolution of 480 lines vertically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/480i

480i is the standard broadcast video mode. A lot of old games just did 240p, which can display on an entire single field without needing to interlace. This is pretty apparent if you look closely and go from say, watching a TV show on your CRT TV and then playing an NES. The 'flicker' of the interlacing stops and the scanlines become very visible.

240p was banned as a broadcast standard by the FCC. It's pretty much the reason why a lot of modern TVs don't support 240p at all, it was never an officially allowed signal.

However, when people go through all the trouble and money to produce fake scan lines, it makes wonder why they didn't just purchase an already excellent CRT.

This one's easy. Same reasons one would want to move to an HDTV in the first place. CRTs take up more space, CRTs have geometry and convergence issues, high quality CRTs can be difficult to find depending on where you are. In my case, I simply wanted a nice picture for all of my games, retro and current, without having to resort to a dual tv setup.

[TheGregzilla]

Ive never seen the appeal. On the one hand you do get that classic gaming feel...on the other hand..I feel like there are unecessary horizontal lines all over the screen. I guess what Im saying is if I have a choice, I go without, but they dont bother me enough to avoid or anything.