A commenter on my retro game blog said my CRTs looked washed out, so I measured them
I posted a bunch of photos of my old Trinitron setup from my apartment in Denver a few weeks ago and one guy kept saying the colors looked flat. Instead of getting mad I borrowed a colorimeter from a buddy and checked all 4 of my sets. Turns out 2 of them had the brightness cranked way too high and one had a bad cap in the neck board. I dialed them in with a test pattern and the difference on Metal Slug was night and day. Anyone else here actually calibrate their old tubes or do you just eyeball it?
The "washed out" comment would have bugged me too, so good on you for actually testing instead of just getting mad about it. I picked up a cheap colorimeter off eBay last year and found out my main set had the contrast pushed way too far, which was blowing out all the bright colors. Once I fixed it, the reds on my SNES games stopped looking like they were glowing. The bad cap thing is rough though, that's the kind of stuff you never catch by eye. Did the neck board fix take you long?