I am gonna ramble a bit because I really like the era and CRT displays.

... a lot of the picture quality impact the pro grade CRT TV displays had was due to finer pitch CRT's.

The circuits matter too. Don't get me wrong.

Even without a spiffy fine pitch CRT, a well calibrated 80's era TV (some 70's era ones too), worked well as a monitor.

I had worked at a TV repair shop as a younger kid. The Atari machine I had was just good enough to generate respectable alignment and calibration signals. If you were willing to put in a good day, many sets could perform far better than they were just sitting there on, showing slowly degrading TV programs.

But, they tended to age and degrade a lot more quickly than we are used to today. I did my special one three times over the course of 5 years or so to keep it at peak.

That's another difference in the pro grade gear. It stays on point for ages.

With Apple setups, one could deliberately calibrate to maximize the essentially monochrome screen, and expand it to take up a larger area to get a little bit more benefit from the often coarse shadow mask on color sets.

Many people would just run both. Monochrome for text, some color TV for graphics.

A workaround for color sets was to run saturation a bit low and make sure the color killer circuit was hair trigger so it worked when the Apple requested no color.

Moderate contrast, bringing up the screen levels while at the same time lowering the drivers would sharpen things up considerably. End result was a decent resolution and that "don't use it in a brightly lit room" tradeoff.

Bonus points for tapping into composite, avoiding RF. Where I lived a lot of people had UHF modulator on their Apple computers. These worked on something like channel 34 instead of the more interference prone channel 2, 3 or 4.

The real fun began when VCR's got the scene. Hit record, set for SLP recording and you got an up to 8 hour record of what you did.

Or, run the VCR faster and get a higher quality record for show and tell or debugging.

If you crave a CRT today, obviously the pro grade displays on their way out are great. You will likely be impressed when watching something off DVD, or Bluray. Standard definition was much better than most of us saw due to the tradeoffs made in mass market displays.

But, those are harder amd harder to get.

The next best thing is a newer CRT. Clean and recap that if needed and then go through the alignment and calibration using one of the many DVD images available for that purpose.

Many of those have great filters that can do a lot for Apple 2 like signals.

Then enjoy the artifact art in all its glory!

http://www.appleoldies.ca/bmp2dhr/disclaimer/

The images on this page use the better "Double High Res" artifact color possible on the Apple //e

There are some examples of Apple 2, the original graphics being discussed here, on that page.

Many artists used patterns to exploit secondary artifact effects (best seen on an NTSC TV with color saturation turned up a bit), and our own color perception to produce images that appear more colorful than the basic 6 color design one would expect to deliver.

This pixel art can be seen all throughout the 8 bit era running from the late 70's to mid to maybe late 90's.

https://images.app.goo.gl/1wzZhp76tsC3hC6G6

In that one, only one color attribute set was used. Black, white, orange and blue. The secondary artifacts shows nicely here.

A single orange pixel by itself on black delivers a little bit different overall image color when nestled in all white pixels.

Dithering coupled with these subtle effects could really change the overall viewer perception!

In addition, due to how the NTSC color worked, intensity and color got coupled together, giving pixels a sort of texture and subtle position difference when viewed on a color display. On the Apple, this can be seen as a smudge of color around the pixel. You can see this in the lower resolution graphics where the pixels literally don't quite line up.

Many more and better can be seen on the Total Replay image being developed right now.

Emulators have modeled what a real display would do very well. You get a whole lot of the experience that way.