I think there are a large number of factors but, as a starting point, you could try reading Glassner's "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis" which has a good section on the behaviour of CRTs.Is there a way to figure out how many pixels a crt is physically capable of producing depending on the dotpitch of it?
how do you figure? My 21" Trinitron has a dot pitch of ~.24mm and has a viewable area of ~430mm wide and ~323mm tall; that comes out to right around 1792x1344 dots, and running at that resolution doesn't aliasing issues. The display supports inputs up 2058x1536 as well, but even with that being notable less than one dot per pixel it doesn't cause aliasing, it just looks a bit blurrier than lower resolutions.
Busting out the trusty windows calc and seeing how you got those numbers, does that mean that on a 17" total size monitor with .27 dotpitch the max res you should run is 1152x864 since it has about 1192 dots, or maybe push it a little to 1200x900?"Trinitron" is a trademark of Sony for their aperture grill CRTs, but I just used that example as I have one sitting in the other room to easy measure. I didn't intend for the design of the phosphor layer to cause confusion, so to aviod that; how about this this 19" shadow mask display I dug up as an example instead:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824002248
Being 19" total screen size and an aspect ratio of 4:3 making the tube ~360mm wide, and width at .25mm dot pitch giving ~1440 columns of dots. That comes out to just a bit over a dot for each pixel at the recommended resolution of 1280x1024. From what I have seen that is generally how CRT monitors' size/dot-pitch/resolution work out. I can't say I even know of an example of a tube that uses a "number of dots per pixel" to run at it's recommended resolution.
Well I use 1200x900 because its the highest res I can do 75hz at, 1280x960/1024= 66hz.. flicker city.Radeonic I'm just speaking from end user experience and looking at the numbers and don't have any qualifications here beyond that. I'd think 1280x960 would work well your Viewsonic despite being a bit beyond the dot-pitch though, at least that resolution has always suited me fine with similar 17" displays. As for why a 5:4 resolution is so often recommended for 4:3 displays, best I can tell it is just because most people don't know any better and 1280x960 would look like notably less when compared to 1280x1024 in marketing.
Because the electron beam is never perfectly focused, the tube itself acts as a low-pass. So there should be no aliasing even when the intensity changes "mid-dot". No need for an additional low-pass filter.Ahh. I suspect that it's going through a low-pass filter first which would fix nasty problems with the aliasing in the X direction. Since it's a trinitron (Sony?) it very likely is using an "aperture grill" system and so there are no dots in the Y direction.
I agree that the beam is likely to be a few dots in width (i.e. something like a Gaussian filter), but I suspect that the D to A conversion and other electronics will still be performing some additional lowpass filtering for the horizontal direction.Because the electron beam is never perfectly focused, the tube itself acts as a low-pass. So there should be no aliasing even when the intensity changes "mid-dot". No need for an additional low-pass filter.