Comment by Lerc

Are you judging by experiencing them on a CRT, or from modern displays? The range of colours was certainty broad enough, but I agree that the screenshots tend to look a bit bland. I wonder how much this came down to variance of the video signal at the analog stage. You had knobs for brightness, contrast, and saturation instead of the digital tweaking you have now. Perhaps it is that the color representation of live video has improved so that the knob level adjustment isn't needed anymore, but the output of the old consoles were tuned that level of adjustment people used to use to make the original video look nomal.