As told by this exhaustive and detailed dissection on NFGWorld.
An excerpt:
CDs and plasmas (and DLP projectors) are fixed resolution displays, and they don’t scale images well. Photographs and TV shows and movies look just great when you zoom in or stretch them a little. They use a technique called resampling to create an image that’s not quite entirely unlike the original, but bigger.
Pixels, however, are hard-edged pointy little things which look really terrible if you stretch them at all. Resampling a pixel makes it blurry, and half the appeal of pixel art is its clarity… Even if you’re not a pixel-art fan, they often look out of focus. Many people won’t notice, or won’t care, and they might as well stop reading here.
There’s no problem if you know how to use your expensive new TV!
I still love using my C64 monitors for 8bit computers and consoles.
What Keff said…
If you know your medium, you can use it perfectly down to EVER YSINGLE PIXEL.
It’s the same as with huge LED displays… Those who know how to use it down to being able to illuminate a single LED, you can tell: they master the medium.
The rest just keep trying :P
It says on the box to not use a huge monitor. I still use an old ass 7″ monitor for Nes game play
I won’t give my CRT away anytime soon.
If you want a non-sucky flat panel tv you gotta invest a fortune. Any high end crt is still better than most of the new technology and much cheaper to get your hands on anyway.
Furthermore, even the best upscalers don’t seem to be satisfactory in all points and they, too, cost quite a few bucks.
That is, of course, if you prefer how games looked back in the days. I’ve seen people preferring pixel crispness as on their emulators/handhelds.