I think this article from 1995 sums it up:
<a href="http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf</a><p>Summation: A pixel is a "picture element," a sampling of the intent.<p>On CRTs, the phosphors would sample the electron beams, which in turn sampled the memory. The phosphors, when hit, would diffuse in a perfectly round manner. As the voltage and intensity of the beam increases, the rays become more plentiful and the diffusion dilates; the output brightness becomes non-linear. In modern displays, this non-linearity is corrected for with "gamma."<p>So we have two changes in modern displays that affect the way the picture is presented to the eyes:<p>1. Square edges. These don't exist with CRTs, barring double-scan and prescaling.<p>2. Dilation. Pixels of higher brightness on a CRT occupy more area than that allocated for a pixel on an LCD. Brightness bleeds over into neighboring pixels, (importantly) making dark lines finer.<p>So, objectively, pixel art originally displayed on CRTs needs to be altered to have the same appearance on a LCD. The worst problem I see personally is that a bilinear-filter is often used, but it does the interpolation in gamma-space instead of linear. This causes dark lines and black areas to become more pronounced and blurry. This, coupled with the lack of dilation completely changes the character of the image.<p>About artistic intent, I can provide an anecdote as a counterexample: Shigeru Miyamoto said early sprites were first laid out on graph paper--as square blocks. There's photos out there, and the blocks are filled in completely and are <i>very</i> square. This was early on, so I don't know if they went back and adjusted them, or if later artists often used the intended display to model their art or not.