Retro Photo Converters: CRT, Commodore 64, Halftone, Dot Matrix, Low Ink

Original coastal town photo, before the CRT effect — Before

Same photo converted to an NTSC CRT television look with scanlines and phosphor glow — After · NTSC tube

CRT / Old TV

Seven tubes, from NTSC and PAL to Soviet SECAM, P31 green and amber, each with scanlines, phosphor bloom, shadow mask and curved-glass barrel distortion.

Open converter Examples & guide

Original sunset pier photo, before the Commodore 64 effect — Before

Same sunset converted to Commodore 64 pixel art with the 16-colour VIC-II palette — After · Multicolour

Commodore 64 / CBM64

The VIC-II palette holds sixteen colours. Add four dithering algorithms and the genuine per-cell colour limit of the 320×200 hires and 160×200 multicolour bitmap modes.

Open converter Examples & guide

Original harbour photo, before the halftone screen — Before

Same harbour photo screened as a full-colour newspaper halftone print — After · Colour screen

Halftone / Newspaper

A real print screen with adjustable dot size and screen angle, four dot shapes (circle, square, diamond, cross) and four aged paper stocks.

Open converter Examples & guide

Same Venice photo printed as a Star LC-10 colour dot matrix output — After · NLQ photo

Dot Matrix Printer

The Star LC-10 colour printer in Draft, NLQ and Photo modes, with nine pins, adjustable ribbon wear, contrast and colour pop, in mono or colour.

Open converter Examples & guide

Same puffin photo with a dying-cartridge low ink look: streaks, banding and washed colour — After · Low toner

Low Ink Printer

A dying cartridge: streaking, horizontal banding, washed-out colour and whole ink channels dropping out.

Open converter Examples & guide

Why these converters dither

Every machine in this collection had the same limit: it could only show a few colours, or nothing but black and white, at low resolution. A photograph carries thousands of smooth tones. Send it straight to that hardware and those tones collapse into a handful of hard steps: flat bands across a sky, blocky skin, fine detail gone. That abrupt, posterised result is what you get with no dithering at all.

Dithering is the way around it. Instead of forcing every pixel to the one nearest available colour, it scatters the colours it does have in a fine pattern and lets your eye do the blending. From a normal viewing distance the eye averages neighbouring dots together and reconstructs a tone the screen or printer cannot actually produce. Denser dark dots read as shadow; sparser dots read as light. It is the same trick a newspaper photo, a comic-book sky and a Game Boy screen all rely on.

The photo's real tones

Rebuilt from black & white dots

The same dots, magnified 10×

A smooth grey gradient (left) rebuilt with nothing but black dots on white (middle). Step back from the screen and the middle panel turns back into the gradient, because your eye is doing the mixing. Magnified (right), the individual dots it is really made of become obvious.

That is why the halftone, dot-matrix and Commodore 64 converters each run a dithering pass: it is the only way to pull a believable gradient out of sixteen colours or a single black ribbon. The CRT and low-ink tools work on full-colour pixels instead, so they do not need one.

The four algorithms differ only in how they push the leftover rounding error from each pixel onto its neighbours.

Floyd-Steinberg

Pushes the full error to four neighbours. Organic, flowing, the best tonal range.

Atkinson

Diffuses only ¾ of the error. Crisp, clean highlights, the original Macintosh look.

Bayer 4×4

A fixed threshold grid, no diffusion. Regular crosshatch, the true computer-era texture.

Threshold

Hard cut, no grey at all. Maximum stencil / high-contrast graphic effect.