Many culturally significant products and practices go down this path. I believe washi particularly shoji will eventually settle into the category of "isn't produced on an industrial scale but never stops being made" with other products such as chainmail, non-electric typewriters, swords, powder horns, quill pens, parchment, monocle, coonskin caps, cathode ray tubes, hand drills, etc.
Is anyone making CRTs? As I understand it, original broadcast CRT monitors (so-called PVMs and BVMs) are becoming rare and expensive. They are sought after by retro gamers in particular.
I use CRT on my main computer, in my country all flat panels I seen so far are too expensive OR useless for my purposes.
1. CRT can use arbitrary resolutions, I love that, not only for retro gaming, but some modern games can reach "ultra" settings when lowering resolution a little, on a "mid-range" GPU (I own a Radeon 380X, sadly the last GPU to have analog video, I dunno what I will do when purchasing my next one)
2. My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... CRT I never felt the need to readjust contrast and brigthness after I found the setting I wanted.
3. Input lag... for most games this is not obvious, specially since lots of recent games have input lag anyway (for example I noticed a couple games check the controller status in a certain order that make all input always 1 frame late, sometimes 2 frames late if there is vsync and whatnot in the mix) but for example playing "Necrodancer" on CRT is much, MUCH easier for me.
4. This one is more theoretical, since the CRTs I own are cheap, but for a long time some CRTs could reach crazy high refresh rates.
5. "HDR", well, to be honest I never seen this either in person, but I know that some manufacturers did made some cool CRTs that supported HDR, most notably for SGI workstations that could create images with some ridiculous amounts of bits per pixel.
6. Retro gaming without expensive hardware: many, MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic, on a system that has the intended hardware instead of seeing alternating columns of pixels, you would see a transparent waterfall, there are lots of emulators with plugins to simulate those, but to make the art work REALLY right on a modern screen you need a 4k screen, expensive powerful GPU and whatnot... as weird it sounds... it is cheaper to buy an actual CRT and even an actual old console to play some games.
> My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls...
Your software isn't doing color management correctly for your display then. It probably thinks the gamma/native contrast are much higher than they really are.
That said, most customer displays have shitty filtering code they never actually document. You should turn everything off except the backlight control and then never touch it again.
>MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic
But handheld systems with sharp pixels used the same art techniques, and many pieces of official artwork showed game art drawn with sharp pixels (think early NES game cover art). The Sonic waterfalls even use distinct vertical lines to represent falling water, instead of a checkerboard dither pattern, which would be the natural choice if you assumed it would be blurred. Arcade games used the same art techniques too, and they used high quality monitors and RGB connections, so pixels were clearly visible.
The thing about CRT pixel "bleed" is that it is a pure Gaussian blur, which is practically the best way of upscaling a raster image within a purely analog system. Strictly speaking, you can of course do much better with a digital-upscaling step, using e.g. Lanczos filtering (which is far better at preserving sharpness while smoothing out "blocky" appearances), or even with special "pixel-art scaling" algorithms that work strictly within the original palette. But still, even a CRT is much better than what can be shown on a fixed-resolution handheld screen!
That's assuming that the pixels are point samples, which isn't true of pixel art. Consider the typewriter on Crono's desk at the start of Chrono Trigger, where a single pixel checkerboard pattern is used to represent the keys. The best way to scale this is nearest-neighbor. The same technique is used in many games to represent chainmail armor.
It's assuming that "a pixel is a point sample" is a better model, even of pixel art, than "a pixel is literally a small square". Checkerboard patterns are also used quite often for simple dithering (in pixel art with smaller-palettes) which is perhaps the polar opposite of your example! (And if you really don't want blurring, most pixel-art-specific scaling algorithms will nicely match nearest neighbor on that particular pattern, while still doing their best to smooth out "jaggies" elsewhere.)
How can the scaling algorithm distinguish between "checkerboard representing high spatial frequency detail" and "checkerboard representing intermediate color"? There are games that use both. The only scaling technique I know that can do this with acceptable accuracy (in real time!) is "human brain scaling".
That's exactly when there appears a market for building CRT's to order and to size, when they become economically viable again. It's like when vinyl pressing and/or cassette tape recording machines were pulled out from storage again.
It's not so much a matter of the art being lost (well, for now), more of things not being economically viable.
There's also a guy somewhere who's stocked up on diskettes and drives, there's still a large amount of devices that rely on them (e.g. in manufacturing, think stuff like weaving patterns and the like)
Though of those linked it appears 2 of the 3 applications are essentially refurbishing or replacing screens in existing systems. The only application that seems "new" is the CRT HuD which I don't believe is going anywhere soon.
Once the displays in older machines are replaced with LCDs (as in new machines won't include them) I assume the only application will be that HuD.
Parchment, well vellum, is interesting. There's still a company or two producing it in the UK as all UK law is published on vellum, as it's been shown to last thousands of years. When they've looked at switching to archival paper, it's not been much cheaper, and only that it should last. Parchment also has a fair amount of natural fire resistance.
If that rang a bell for you, it might be via Baumgartner Restoration [0], the excellent painting restoration YouTube channel. He refers to it as "Japanese mulberry paper" and IIRC relies on it for its light weight but reliability.
When I see articles on these kinds of materials - handmade and fairly unique, but not in wide demand any longer - I tend to wonder:
Are there any applications for the techniques used in the making of the materials that could be applied to other modern materials that could potentially create new uses for those materials.
For instance - just spitballing - but what if a different fiber and "glue" were substituted; could a very thin "mat" of such material be made, and what could it be used for?
I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this, though...
I think, in this case, the pertinent question is the reverse. Could you make paper out of kouzo fiber using regular mass-produced paper making techniques? (It’d likely be smoother, and so wouldn’t have the “feel” of washi paper; but it’d probably still have the properties being discussed in the article—longer lifespan/durability than regular paper.)
As well, there might be other things kouzo fiber could be used for besides the uses it’s been put to (panels in shouji screen doors, and origami paper, mostly), that haven’t been tried because they don’t occur to the artisans who grow the kouzo. Maybe, due to its length, kouzo fiber has better wicking properties than regular paper fiber, and so washi paper would make a better substrate for pH test strips, for example. Or maybe the raw fibers would make a good base for a spray insulation product (presumably in combination with fire retardants.) Or maybe they’re durable enough that you could work them into a cloth, as is done with hemp.
This is bit nit-picky of me, but it's a thread I've been noticing lately in some international news, so I'd like to know if anyone has observations or thoughts.
In South Korea, China, and Japan (to the extent of my observations), it seems when some culturally significant norm, craft, or product begins to lose said status, partit chalked up to a result of (what tone usually conveys as destructive) "Westernization". But a significant amount of the advances (i.e., emergent products or norms that have supplanted the ones in question) themselves tend to be celebrated and attributed to the progressive trajectory of their culture & state. It's just an odd bit of nationalistic hypocrisy that gives me an itch.
Of course, I do not think for a moment this is the case for everything, or that their peoples even embrace this view (as I believe to have been conveyed by the media). And I'm sure the West has behaved or.continues to behave in a similar manner, either now or (surely) in the past.
Perhaps I'm completely amiss, which, in that case, all the better.
From a western (uk) perspective I would say theres Americanisation going on, where in the past there would have been a diversity of opinions.
In the 80/90s we seemed to look to Japan for Business/technology and culture, to Europe for food, and culture as well as America. I suppose China has somewhat filled part of the gap, but it seems to be a near US monopoly at the moment.
It seems to me that being exposed to the diversity of the world is a good thing, becoming a copy of one other place not so much. This is of course highly subjective.
So to answer your question, being exposed to, and picking the best bits of western culture seems a net positive, becoming a generic western country not so much.
I have absolutely no idea where the balance is between 'progress' and 'tradition', and I don't even think I'd recognise the balance if I saw it. I'm not even sure if there is a balance. Perhaps we'll forever be bemoaning the loss of washi, whilst celebrating the things that replace it.
Many culturally significant products and practices go down this path. I believe washi particularly shoji will eventually settle into the category of "isn't produced on an industrial scale but never stops being made" with other products such as chainmail, non-electric typewriters, swords, powder horns, quill pens, parchment, monocle, coonskin caps, cathode ray tubes, hand drills, etc.
Is anyone making CRTs? As I understand it, original broadcast CRT monitors (so-called PVMs and BVMs) are becoming rare and expensive. They are sought after by retro gamers in particular.
Sadly, no.
I use CRT on my main computer, in my country all flat panels I seen so far are too expensive OR useless for my purposes.
1. CRT can use arbitrary resolutions, I love that, not only for retro gaming, but some modern games can reach "ultra" settings when lowering resolution a little, on a "mid-range" GPU (I own a Radeon 380X, sadly the last GPU to have analog video, I dunno what I will do when purchasing my next one)
2. My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... CRT I never felt the need to readjust contrast and brigthness after I found the setting I wanted.
3. Input lag... for most games this is not obvious, specially since lots of recent games have input lag anyway (for example I noticed a couple games check the controller status in a certain order that make all input always 1 frame late, sometimes 2 frames late if there is vsync and whatnot in the mix) but for example playing "Necrodancer" on CRT is much, MUCH easier for me.
4. This one is more theoretical, since the CRTs I own are cheap, but for a long time some CRTs could reach crazy high refresh rates.
5. "HDR", well, to be honest I never seen this either in person, but I know that some manufacturers did made some cool CRTs that supported HDR, most notably for SGI workstations that could create images with some ridiculous amounts of bits per pixel.
6. Retro gaming without expensive hardware: many, MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic, on a system that has the intended hardware instead of seeing alternating columns of pixels, you would see a transparent waterfall, there are lots of emulators with plugins to simulate those, but to make the art work REALLY right on a modern screen you need a 4k screen, expensive powerful GPU and whatnot... as weird it sounds... it is cheaper to buy an actual CRT and even an actual old console to play some games.
> My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls...
Your software isn't doing color management correctly for your display then. It probably thinks the gamma/native contrast are much higher than they really are.
That said, most customer displays have shitty filtering code they never actually document. You should turn everything off except the backlight control and then never touch it again.
>MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic
But handheld systems with sharp pixels used the same art techniques, and many pieces of official artwork showed game art drawn with sharp pixels (think early NES game cover art). The Sonic waterfalls even use distinct vertical lines to represent falling water, instead of a checkerboard dither pattern, which would be the natural choice if you assumed it would be blurred. Arcade games used the same art techniques too, and they used high quality monitors and RGB connections, so pixels were clearly visible.
The thing about CRT pixel "bleed" is that it is a pure Gaussian blur, which is practically the best way of upscaling a raster image within a purely analog system. Strictly speaking, you can of course do much better with a digital-upscaling step, using e.g. Lanczos filtering (which is far better at preserving sharpness while smoothing out "blocky" appearances), or even with special "pixel-art scaling" algorithms that work strictly within the original palette. But still, even a CRT is much better than what can be shown on a fixed-resolution handheld screen!
That's assuming that the pixels are point samples, which isn't true of pixel art. Consider the typewriter on Crono's desk at the start of Chrono Trigger, where a single pixel checkerboard pattern is used to represent the keys. The best way to scale this is nearest-neighbor. The same technique is used in many games to represent chainmail armor.
It's assuming that "a pixel is a point sample" is a better model, even of pixel art, than "a pixel is literally a small square". Checkerboard patterns are also used quite often for simple dithering (in pixel art with smaller-palettes) which is perhaps the polar opposite of your example! (And if you really don't want blurring, most pixel-art-specific scaling algorithms will nicely match nearest neighbor on that particular pattern, while still doing their best to smooth out "jaggies" elsewhere.)
How can the scaling algorithm distinguish between "checkerboard representing high spatial frequency detail" and "checkerboard representing intermediate color"? There are games that use both. The only scaling technique I know that can do this with acceptable accuracy (in real time!) is "human brain scaling".
That's exactly when there appears a market for building CRT's to order and to size, when they become economically viable again. It's like when vinyl pressing and/or cassette tape recording machines were pulled out from storage again.
It's not so much a matter of the art being lost (well, for now), more of things not being economically viable.
There's also a guy somewhere who's stocked up on diskettes and drives, there's still a large amount of devices that rely on them (e.g. in manufacturing, think stuff like weaving patterns and the like)
Did floppy drives all have the same interface? I know there were different data formats but were the physical drives all compatible?
Pretty much yes - on the lowest level you've just got signals a stepper motor and analog signal from head(s).
Thomas Electronics still make CRTs, mainly for the defence and aerospace industry.
https://www.thomaselectronics.com/
Though of those linked it appears 2 of the 3 applications are essentially refurbishing or replacing screens in existing systems. The only application that seems "new" is the CRT HuD which I don't believe is going anywhere soon.
Once the displays in older machines are replaced with LCDs (as in new machines won't include them) I assume the only application will be that HuD.
> hand drills
These are still mass produced: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/drilling-machine-manu...
Parchment, well vellum, is interesting. There's still a company or two producing it in the UK as all UK law is published on vellum, as it's been shown to last thousands of years. When they've looked at switching to archival paper, it's not been much cheaper, and only that it should last. Parchment also has a fair amount of natural fire resistance.
If that rang a bell for you, it might be via Baumgartner Restoration [0], the excellent painting restoration YouTube channel. He refers to it as "Japanese mulberry paper" and IIRC relies on it for its light weight but reliability.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ/vid...
When I see articles on these kinds of materials - handmade and fairly unique, but not in wide demand any longer - I tend to wonder:
Are there any applications for the techniques used in the making of the materials that could be applied to other modern materials that could potentially create new uses for those materials.
For instance - just spitballing - but what if a different fiber and "glue" were substituted; could a very thin "mat" of such material be made, and what could it be used for?
I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this, though...
I think, in this case, the pertinent question is the reverse. Could you make paper out of kouzo fiber using regular mass-produced paper making techniques? (It’d likely be smoother, and so wouldn’t have the “feel” of washi paper; but it’d probably still have the properties being discussed in the article—longer lifespan/durability than regular paper.)
As well, there might be other things kouzo fiber could be used for besides the uses it’s been put to (panels in shouji screen doors, and origami paper, mostly), that haven’t been tried because they don’t occur to the artisans who grow the kouzo. Maybe, due to its length, kouzo fiber has better wicking properties than regular paper fiber, and so washi paper would make a better substrate for pH test strips, for example. Or maybe the raw fibers would make a good base for a spray insulation product (presumably in combination with fire retardants.) Or maybe they’re durable enough that you could work them into a cloth, as is done with hemp.
This is bit nit-picky of me, but it's a thread I've been noticing lately in some international news, so I'd like to know if anyone has observations or thoughts.
In South Korea, China, and Japan (to the extent of my observations), it seems when some culturally significant norm, craft, or product begins to lose said status, partit chalked up to a result of (what tone usually conveys as destructive) "Westernization". But a significant amount of the advances (i.e., emergent products or norms that have supplanted the ones in question) themselves tend to be celebrated and attributed to the progressive trajectory of their culture & state. It's just an odd bit of nationalistic hypocrisy that gives me an itch.
Of course, I do not think for a moment this is the case for everything, or that their peoples even embrace this view (as I believe to have been conveyed by the media). And I'm sure the West has behaved or.continues to behave in a similar manner, either now or (surely) in the past.
Perhaps I'm completely amiss, which, in that case, all the better.
From a western (uk) perspective I would say theres Americanisation going on, where in the past there would have been a diversity of opinions.
In the 80/90s we seemed to look to Japan for Business/technology and culture, to Europe for food, and culture as well as America. I suppose China has somewhat filled part of the gap, but it seems to be a near US monopoly at the moment.
It seems to me that being exposed to the diversity of the world is a good thing, becoming a copy of one other place not so much. This is of course highly subjective.
So to answer your question, being exposed to, and picking the best bits of western culture seems a net positive, becoming a generic western country not so much.
I have absolutely no idea where the balance is between 'progress' and 'tradition', and I don't even think I'd recognise the balance if I saw it. I'm not even sure if there is a balance. Perhaps we'll forever be bemoaning the loss of washi, whilst celebrating the things that replace it.
Japanese Washi Paper making video. John Daub interviewed Washi paper master, Rogier Uitenboogaart living in Kochi Japan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwu1t3d6kU4
One of the many victims of plastic perhaps?
Dave Bull of Mokuhankan has occasional blog posts about problems sourcing washi paper: https://mokuhankan.com/conversations/archives/2016/04/how_ar... https://mokuhankan.com/conversations/archives/2016/07/paper_...
Though I seem to recall one other earlier post, but I can't find it at the moment, it was about debris/bark being mixed into the paper IIRC.
There is even a photographic "film" made from washi paper:
http://filmwashi.com/en/products/handcrafted_films/
Does anyone knows if washi paper notebooks are available somewhere? Search queries led me to no where.
https://awagami.com/collections/stationery-decor-gifts
https://www.washiarts.com/accessories/gampi-handmade-noteboo...