S-VHS recordings from DVD sources look mighty sharp indeed, IMO, through that aforementioned 46in. LCD i have;



regular VHS playback ain't too terribly bad either i think;




in fact, ALL my SD sources, -Video Games most certainly not withstanding- look fabulous to my eye through this display,
my SEGA GENESIS, the game console i started out with as a 9-year old boy, now looking the very best i've ever seen it by far in 20-odd years...

I know that LCDs and Plasmas are better at displaying resolutions, and I'm using a plasma myself, but a really good CRT still has its pros and that's why I want to dig into the subject.

You should take a look at what a Sega Genesis looks like with an XRGB-Mini on a modern display (using RGB of course). You will be amazed by its quality, even better than a great CRT in some aspects.

I think the late PVM's and especially BVM's deliver both - but YMMV.

Philips "HD Prepared" CRT 28PW9551,
which is essentially just an EDTV 576P that can take up to 1080i signals via HDMI.
At the time 2006, many lcd's didn't satisfy me at all, or way too expensive. And many big Plasma screens were just 852x480 pixels and expensive.

This Philips i like that it takes all the inputs from history, antenna, composite, s-video, Scart RGB, component and HDMI. I also discovered that when i select deep color and 16bit 4x4x4 on my bluray player that it switches to blue screen and back again and can display that.
It displays colors and textures very nicely.
At many neighbours and friends i always see lcd's with washed out colors and blurred faces, because most consumers just still have that analog cable and dvd attached via scart or composite. And one thing lcd's electronics don't do well is coping with analog signals!
So i keep my crt as long as possible to have the most plausible quality for both digital and analog worlds.
(Though a pity it doesn;t do 3D, 3D Blurayplayers won't allow to just convert to 1080i30 interlaced 3D)
Of course it is no Aconda, Wega, or studio HD CRT quality, but it is still awesome to me.

Alright, I found a big Toshiba locally I'll audition. It's not super old. It's one of the 480i generation so I'm hopeful that SD will function normally.

@nissling, I would love to have a multi system Trinitron in 28" or even 25"! Is that what yours is? It would be great to plug and play my multi system VCR. I spotted a 25" on ebay not too long ago but it was several hundreds of miles away

@tasuke, what is the brand and model of that LCD? I was recently playing DC Gauntlet with some friends on believe it or not a Westinghouse. All we had handy was the composite cable. It looked pretty darn good, amazing really.

My Trinitron died after eight years of heavy use. But when it worked, it was a beast and fantastic in every sense of the word. There are certainly better CRTs out there but in comparison to an average consumer model there's no competition.

With modern displays having better comb filters than MOST LD players most of us use composite, but was it genuinely a 50/50 split on what had a better comb filter back in the day with people playing their LDs on their CRTs in the 80's and 90's?

@nissling Heck no! No competition. I love em. The garden variety S-video Trinitrons of the 90s are solid! But I can't say it enough, 27" or the 28" in your market is the biggest I'd go. Not just for display quality either, but also because the larger sets have many reliability issues archived around the web, especially with PIP sets. There were bare-bones 36" on the U.S. market, the KV-36S4X ones. Not too many complaints about those.

But really if you look at the high end XBR stuff, 27/28" seems to have been the reference size on these, with 32" available if you needed a bigger set. I know the XBR100 only came as 32" but that was a different deal with the super tube. 27" is honestly a little too small once you start to have nicer definition. However in any case a quick search on that model makes me not want the hassle. One came up locally on craigslist and I just couldn't bring myself to jump on it. Too unreliable.

Did Europe have a presence of the Super Trinitron in consumer sets? That was the only one here in the States.

alien, I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt your post. I was writing mine while you posted.

I actually think so though I'm not sure.

Just won a Sony PVM 14m2mde at 32 euros. It's actually made for medical enviroments, but it'll suit me perfectly. I'm really excited to try it out. Cheap price and far lighter than 20" PVMs yet it's a relatively late model (circa 00/01) so I'll hopefully enjoy it.

Looks nice! Here's the service manual:

http://neohyphengeo.com/PVM20M2MDU_SM_SONY_EN.pdf

Paid it today and bought a SCART (RGB) -> BNC adapter. Got one without a sync stripper, but if it cannot take composite video sync then I'll just play my Saturn on it. Let's just hope it survives the shipping but for this amount of money (50 euros total) it's worth the risk.

EDIT: How picky are the PVM monitors when it comes to sync? Does it have to be Csync or can it be composite video?

The postman rang on the doorbell this morning and had my PVM. The entire package weight 27,4 kilograms (60lbs) and yet shipping was only 17 euros. Can you believe that?











Powers on with no issues whatsoever. Screen is still very clear so it seems like the shipping was no problem. Such a relief!
It's a very well-built monitor indeed. This is very exciting.

EDIT: Plugged in one of my Blu-Ray players to it via YPbPr in 480i (as it doesn't accept 480p or higher) and saw some scenes from Mimi wo sumaseba. The screen is small and interlacing is visible, but when it comes to colors and contrast this is some of the best I've seen. Puts all of my old CRTs to shame. Will try out the 4K remaster of Ghostbusters. A fantastic monitor.
EDIT2: There are some defects that has to be fixed (mainly some cloudy colors in upper right corner) but otherwise it's really nice. Saving Private Ryan looked amazing on it and Ghostbusters as well. Very satisfying just to look at.

Played around with it some more and have to say that while blacks are fantastic and colors are generally great, my eyes get very tired of the phosphor look after about an hour. I would have a hard time using it as my primary display for this reason although I did feel kind of sick too when I went from CRT to plasma back in 2013 but from what I remember it was in a much lesser degree. Furtheron I will try to fix the issues with it (the cloudy colors don't go away after degaussing) as it's clear that an excellent CRT outshines nearly all modern displays in some aspects. The contrast is simply stunning.

@nissling could it be a purity issue? Maybe you could test some magnets around the housing to see if it is worth trying it on the tube.

The Toshiba Theaterview I mentioned was a dead end as another taker was able to get it sooner. I've gone against my own opinions and picked up a big Trinitron. I was able to find an immaculate kv-35s42, build date Dec 2001. Screen geometry on the unit is generally outstanding although the tilt is a touch off (1/8") even after maximum consumer adjustment to -5. It isn't too bad -- the comb filter is really nice and the support wires are very very slight compared to my older, much smaller sets.

The true value is real-life friends enjoying it more with a bigger screen, especially with standouts like animated Spawn which offer a remarkable experience on the format.

I had a CRT engineer over at my house a week ago and I let him inspect the monitor. He did manage to fix the color issue, which was done by manual degaussing, but there is an issue with the shadow mask. The PVMs have a more sensible one that in this case seem to be slightly out of place. For this reason there is sort of like a dark spot in the middle of the screen but it's only visible whenever the screen is entirely white and moving at the same time or when using specific test patterns. Played some Dreamcast on it tonight and there were no visible issues whatsoever. Haven't tried any Laserdiscs so far but DVDs, Blu-Rays and HD-DVD all look great on it.

I have a really nice CRT pro monitor myself, the Ikegami TM20-80R. These were still listed at around $6000 new until a few years ago and Ikegami is one of the last CRT holdouts in pro video, with HD versions of this basic design still available for prices approaching ~$10k. A tank of a display: I was really impressed at the fact that the CRT bezel is a solid metal casting (this thing is back breaking to lift) and the pop out control tray is nice:



I need to dig out my CLD-98 and see what reference stuff like my Princess Mononoke LD and Ghibli Box look like on this beast. I've heard that Ikegamis are known for very accurate color too, and it would be interesting to screen a bunch of laserdiscs on this CRT "master monitor".

Problem with the pro monitors though, is that they have little to no video processing in them. So whatever you feed it is what you get. So any scaling/filtering will have to be done before connecting it to the monitor.

I'm still having an issue with my newer Sony Wega Trinitron 32" crt. When I got it and plugged it in, the image was severely tilted to one side. I fixed this with the menu tilt correction, but ever since there has been a slight artifact running on the left edge, that is either just a black area as if on an improperly keystoned projector-and sometimes it has a slight color to it like blue.
I've tried moving speakers etc. but nothing seems to work. My previous 36" sony which was 2-3 years older had no issues.

I bought a BVM-1454D yesterday, which should arrive within two or three weeks. My PVM is so good that I couldn't resist going a bit further. At 50 euros it was a bit expensive but it looked to be in excellent shape and total price with shipping to Sweden wasn't too bad in my opinion. Seller also has very good reputation from my understanding.

For retro gaming I still prefer XRGB-Mini + plasma or LCD but I found these monitors being very interesting to experiment with.