Does the gamma of CRTs vary wildly?
Gamma of a properly adjusted conventional CRT varies anywhere between about 2.35 and 2.55. CRTs have acquired a reputation for wild variation for two reasons. First, if the model luminance = voltage is naively fitted to a display with black-level error, the exponent deduced will be as much a function of the black error as the true exponent. Second, input devices, graphics libraries, and application programs all have the potential to introduce their own transfer functions. Nonlinearities from these sources are often categorized as gamma and wrongly attributed to the display.
