Tech-Jutsu I own a CRT TV, namely a Bang&Olufsen BeoCenter 1. It’s not mine originally, as I bought it second hand a few years ago for my MisterFPGA for only 600 SEK. It’s not my ideal TV either. That would be the Sony Trinitron, which is one of the best ever made.
But now there is a dilemma, as scalpers on second hand market sites want SillyMoney for anything with the word “Trinitron” in it. And most other sets on sale are the cast offs of yesteryear. Seeing a 21” Sony Trinitron for 25000 SEK feels outrageous. Curiously, it seems that the console-crowd are the ones most enamoured by CRT TV’s, but in my case, owning a Mister and an Amiga, a traditional PC monitor such as NEC Multisync or Iiyama Visionmaster or even a Sony Trinitron, would be ideal for me, but these are nowhere to be found on market sites. I suspect that their owners treasure them more the gold, and will _never_ let them go.
As a result, I have considered alternatives. Buying (an outrageously expensive) RetroTink 4K, and getting access to all those lovely shadow masks, and connecting equipment to a modern large OLED seems like a good idea. My Sony A80J has only 8ms lag in Game mode. It might not be zero, but I think it comes pretty close for most cases apart from twitch reaction games. Apart from the nostalgia of owning a physical CRT for a gazillion credits, and the bragging rights of having absolutely zero lag, are there any strong arguments left for buying the old tech when the market is as it is, and no one can repair them anymore if you can’t do it yourself? Don’t get me wrong, if CRT’s were ubiquitous, I would prefer the nostalgia aspect. But with no one to repair these old sets, and the state of the phosphorus degradation and geometry issues that appear with age, it’s just a matter of time before there are none left.