This isn't a CRT simulation.
It's the same phosphor process — just
driven by a laser instead of an electron gun.
Physically real. Solid-state. No lead, no high voltage.
Every screen you've ever used does one of two things. Here's what Retrace does instead.
Your phone, your TV, your monitor — they're all grids of millions of individual LEDs or backlit pixels, each one switching between red, green, and blue. The whole grid is on at once, all the time. Every single pixel is its own little light source.
An electron gun shoots a beam at a phosphor-coated screen, painting the picture one line at a time, left to right, top to bottom — so fast your eye sees a full image. The glow, the bloom, the faint lines between rows? That's just what happens when phosphor lights up and fades.
Replace the electron gun with a laser and a tiny mirror. Same painting motion, same phosphor glow, same natural fade. You get the image quality people loved about CRTs — but in a flat panel, with no lead glass, no giant tube, and no 25,000 volts.
That's the whole concept. The rest of this page goes deeper into the engineering, but this is the core of it — same light-painting process, modern components.
The electron gun was just the excitation source they had in the 1950s. The part that actually made the picture was always the phosphor — a material that glows when you hit it with energy and then fades on a natural decay curve. That's the whole trick.
Retrace swaps the electron gun for a scanning laser and the glass phosphor screen for a flat electroluminescent panel. You get the same image formation — real scanlines, real persistence, real bloom — without the tube, the weight, the 25kV flyback, or the lead glass.
The industry accepted that tradeoff and has been clawing back ever since — HDR, high refresh, local dimming, increasingly elaborate CRT shaders. Retrace doesn't try to simulate any of that. It just goes back to the phosphor.
A laser beam rasters across the screen — left to right, top to bottom — the same sweep pattern as a CRT electron beam. The mirrors oscillate on two axes at thousands of Hz. These are mass-produced parts; LiDAR and picoprojector companies already sell dev boards.
As the beam sweeps, each colour channel modulates intensity at pixel-level timing — painting brightness and colour point by point, same as a CRT modulates beam current. These are the same diodes in Blu-ray drives, laser cutters, and pocket projectors. Nothing exotic.
Zinc-sulfide phosphor compounds glow under laser excitation and then fade naturally. That decay is the whole point — it gives you physically real scanline structure, real persistence curves, actual ambient glow, and genuine bloom. These aren't effects. They're material properties.
Every one of these components was lab or military hardware in 1990. Today they're commodity. The idea was never the hard part — the parts just didn't exist yet at the right price.
Shaders have to fake every part of a CRT image — scanline masking, sub-pixel layout, beam bloom, halation, aperture grille, phosphor gamma. That's real compute on top of the actual frame render. Retrace produces all of it as a free side effect of the physics. The phosphor just does that.
Every surviving CRT is older than it was yesterday. They need high voltage, they contain lead, they can't be manufactured or repaired at any kind of scale. Retrace is solid-state — no toxic materials, no flyback transformer, no countdown to a dead tube.
An LCD backlight runs at full power all the time — the liquid crystal layer then blocks most of it to form the picture. You're paying to generate light and then paying again to throw it away. Retrace puts laser energy only where brightness is needed. A dark scene with a few bright highlights draws almost nothing. For typical content, average power should be meaningfully below an equivalent LCD.
Right now there's nothing between a CRT shader on a flat panel and an actual vintage CRT. That's the gap — a physically authentic display that you can still manufacture and service.
Games displayed the way they were designed to look, without shader overhead or the compromises of LCD approximation.
A reference display that matches original developer intent for anything designed with CRT output in mind.
Colourists and studios still reference CRT output as a creative target. This gives them a controllable, repeatable version of it.
Real scanlines, real glow, real bloom — material properties that shaders can't reproduce, for artists working with light as a physical medium.
The vinyl analogy works here. There's proven demand for authentic analogue experiences — Retrace meets it with hardware that isn't dying.
Community-shared personality profiles reproducing specific monitors — Sony PVM, Commodore 1084, and whatever else people care about enough to model.
Retrace is in active research. The physics need to be validated before anything else — follow along as we find out if this actually works.