While home tubes usually don't really go bad, its more the transformers and caps that go.

I wouldn't touch one with a 100' pole.

When this forum started I was getting myself all flipped out about what I would do once my old CRT went out.
Well I don't think or care about that anymore, I am more confident in adjusting my TV to get a good picture out of newer flat screen sets.

My sets are older now, the newest one being around 8 years old I believe, I still get a great image out of some older 2006 LED sets I
pickup from my neighbor when he was going to toss them.

I think crts will be quite sought after in the future for legacy devices such as laserdisc and video games etc. The prices for them will be ridiculous as there wont be many left. I can't tell you how many crts I see on the road side or at the dump. I dont think hoarding crts is a smart idea but if you can keep at least one lying around then I think it will be a benefit in the future.

My neighbour was looking for a CRT for his super Nintendo. The lag he was getting on his plasma and the quality of the picture being blown up to 50" was not cutting it for him. Luckily for him when I was out working in the work van I came across a 4:3 29" sony trinitron with the remote on the side of the road. Managed to haul it in the van and take it to him. The picture running through rgb scart from the snes to the sony was just remarkable. No lag or anything. This is what people are missing with modern displays and will contribute to making them more sought after. You can mess about with processors to reduce lag or add filters to give the look of scan lines but at the end of they day you cant beat the real thing.

So if you can get a working one and have space to put it then do it!

I am not exactly hording (I did get rid of some CRTs) but I also do have a fair number because I think you are correct. They are only going to become harder to get in the future, in no small part to people trashing working sets.

The trick with newer displays is making sure you have a display that introduces as little lag as possible. There will always be some, but with an OSSC (or anything else that just line multiplies) you add zero at that part of the chain. I think a big part of the problem is that now of course people want as big of a display as possible. When these games were being made the absolute biggest displays that most people would have were 40'' and usually things were more in the 27-34 range. I feel like if I'm playing older games (ps2 and back) I really want the screen to be 34'' or less regardless of what I'm playing it on.

From my personal experience, CRTs rarely break on their own. Sure they will need work to get geometry, convergence and white balance right over time but reliability is often quite good. Frequent transporting and such however may cause additional wear on the TV as a whole. If they do break it's usually fixable as long as it's not the tube or flyback.

If you are serious about retro gaming on CRTs I do recommend looking out for professional monitors, though prices can get ridicilously high on auction sites or Facebook. I was lucky enough to find a BVM-D24 about five hours away from my home last summer at a reasonable price. Have primarily used it for Super Famicom and modern PC gaming (through HD-SDI) as well as some work in Lightroom. It's an absolutely phenomenal monitor imo. The 3D comb filter, for composite sources, also does a magnificent job on Laserdisc.

I have lots of CRTs. I just...never threw good ones out. Why the hell would I? My newest is a 2004 XBR960 but that’s more for LD. I have much more low end stuff from Toshiba and JVC (SD only) that are much better for games.

In 2020 I’ve been playing a lot of old video games and it’s made me love CRT more than ever. Why spend hundreds of dollars on and endless line of scaler boxes and new TVs when 16 bit video games have PERFECT VIDEO with ZERO LAG on CRT? I’m in it for the games, not the endless screwing around with hardware.

With LD the picture can in theory get much better with modern displays but at the same time they can also look horrible and LD pretty much never looks horrible on a decent CRT, even a cheap KMart CRT really. Even over RF LD looks OK on a 16” CRT.

I don’t think CRTs will ever be worth big money on a big scale though. Most people are well trained consumers who will always buy buy buy to solve any issue. They’ll keep buy $400 scaler boxes and $1000 TVs and have a less appealing picture than what I have on a 25 year old TV I got for free.

Remember when you modded your PC Engine to work with RGB via your XRGB-2+? And then the 2+ died and so you got the 3 but then it wouldn’t sync to the 3 so you built an RGB amp for the PCE but it didn’t work so you had to build one of a different design? Then you got the Framemeister because you “need” HDMI? Well guess what, this month someone finally dumped the RGB to YUV conversion tables so expect “corrected RGB” to be all the rage soon. Now after spending $2000 on RGB crap you can see the correct colors that only composite and Y/C have been able to produce until now.

Or you could be like sane people and just leave the 30 year old machine plugged into a 30 year old TV and have correct colors the entire time while being ignorant of what lag even is.

The thing about PC Engine composite is that it really is quite nice. I've been finding composite on the SNES JR is really nice too. Composite on Genesis blows, but that's the one that does RGB out of the box.

I agree. The SNES has amazing composite, so does Sega Saturn. In S vid they are as good as RGB, IMO. I have a CMVS with Neo Bitz encoder and the s-video on that is also fantastic. S-Video from early Genesis/Mega Drive is very good, but the composite is blurry as hell.

Worth mentioning some SNES consoles are s**t. There is a very real difference with that 2chip 1 chip stuff. The 2chip console output is very dark and generally not as good. All minis are 1chip, but only output composite natively.

I haven't seen Saturn composite in awhile, I actually don't even have a composite cable for it anymore. I do have svideo and rgb cables. It's pretty damn close to the same thing and if you've got a CRT that takes svideo natively that's probably the easiest way for good enough quality. Great svideo cables for it are dirt cheap too, because no one cares. PS1 is a similar experience. It's like audio I guess, people go to a lot of trouble and expense for that last 1%. I had been debating at some point getting an rgb cable for PS1 then I got an official svideo cable with a system and was thrilled with the result.

You mentioned micomsoft products breaking and I'm not sure how serious it was but those things are flimsy as hell. It's absurd really. For things that retail at about $400, you'd think they wouldn't feel worse than a Fisher Price toy but they do. I really can hardly wait for the OSSC pro. I will absolutely jettison my XRGB3 if the OSSC Pro has VGA out. I do need something that adds zero lag that lets me play on old VGA CRT monitors because I've got a lot of those in fantastic shape. I hope it has SVideo in as well.

The first PSX console (SCPH-1000) I ever got has s-video out jack onboard. I was surprised at the difference myself, back then the quality was absolutely mind blowing

The Mega Drive cannot output S-video without any mods.

Personally I don't see any reason to use composite or S-video for retro game consoles that output RGB without modifications. The very least one could do, if using a later CRT set, is to convert the RGB signal to YPbPr and get most of the experience.

As for 1Chip Super Famicom it is indeed a vast improvement over earlier revisions, with only hassle that it requires grounding RGB with 1.2KOhm resistors to get the proper voltages. Once that is done however, it's a revelation that becomes evident in just about every Snes game out there. It was worth all the effort for me.

The MD does require a mod for s-video. It’s extremely easy though. The point of doing it is that I don’t live in Europe so SD RGB monitors are extremely uncommon here. In RGB it works on my JVC pro monitor, in s-video it works on at least five other TVs I have.

There are a few posts above.
Growing up with nice mid to low high end CRTs I can tell you that I've never had one last longer than 10 years.
I have no idea what you people are doing with yours but using them back in the day as daily TVs they never
lasted that long.

I remember when my father bought a super flat Panasonic TV back in the early or mid 90s and it was around 5 or 6 hundred bucks.
A shitton of money at the time for what we had, it only lasted less than 6 years and we paid the local electronic place to repair
and it lasted another year and we went forward to another set.

The sets that lasted the longest was an old 19 or 20 inch that we had when we moved into the city and used it daily
and then when we upgraded to a larger set I used it for video games until either it died or I sold off the systems and we didn't need
it anymore.

The LD player outlasted from what I can remember growing up with parents TVs and my TVs I believe it was 5 CRT sets.

So where you people get this unlimited life from a crt is just crazy, but good for you if you can do it.

Caps are going to go first and then flybacks, but when I was fixing arcades I never came across a broken flyback unless the wire
was actually cut or broken, even on original monitors from ms pacman cocktail tables tubes were fine caps were burnt.

Then again if your PCB was in bad shape you really couldn't fix it with new caps, you could but it would be the last run on it.

Firstly, some tubes are better than others. I'm not talking about pq, I mean lifespan which is rated in hours.
A lot of people that had crt sets die all the time were running them around 20 hours a day, every day of the year.

To make a crt last longer than 10 years you simply don't use it all the time. It's one reason the really good sets are thin on the ground now, the other reason (which is obvious) is that people turf good sets.

I'm sure the single Trinitron I have atm would be dead if I had been using it all this time as my main. I've probably had it for around 10 years myself but rarely use it now. No idea how much use it had before I got it, it didn't have any cosmetic damage but the remote was missing.

Growing up we had our s****y Zenith tv repaired, maybe even twice it's hard to remember for sure. It lasted a long time if you factor that in.

As far as longevity goes the big thing is already what you said, in a way. These are no longer daily tvs ie on most of the day and ran into the ground in many instances. They are just being used mainly for old video games and old movie formats. Not having contrast and brightness jacked up helps as well. Many used sets I have encountered had bad settings like that.

When you are buying a 2008 set in 2020 and it was a daily driver I'm still shocked that they are working without shrinking image due to caps.

I'm watching an anime DVD right now on my 32 inch flat screen as I type this, I can't even imagine watching this on a 40-80 inch set, just overkill and stupid
considering this TV series was made back in a time when 19 or 25 inch was the largest you could get around 1983.

Just did a google search, yes they did make a 35 inch CRT but it would have been for special people who had more than more money.
What would the normal family have? I know 13 and 20 inch were pretty standard.

Back in the 90's I lived in a share house for a few years. Got a huge old (early 80's or maybe late 70's, National I think?) crt for the lounge as a communal set. Thing had been dropped at some point so the case had some damage, also the image was twisted to one side slightly but I fixed that. It didn't have any av inputs only rf but we had a VHS running into it with av inputs. That thing obviously had years of abuse and was still running when I left the house, so yeah it was over 10 years old. Maybe the picture was a bit washed out but it was still usable, we mostly used it at night anyway.

I'll see if I can find a pic online to identify the model...

I don't want to get an HD-CRT anymore, though i am considering just getting a sizable (32" or 36") SD CRT for classic gaming and such.

Since you can't use light guns on HDTVs, my light gun games for my Saturn are sitting unplayed for years now, and the jagged edges on some 2D games can be annoying on my Plasma.

Ideally, if I can finally get a house with several rooms I'd love to setup a room/mancave with a big SD CRT or maybe a 53"-61" RPTV (4:3 of course) just for analog video sources and classic video games.

A Sony KP-61XBR200 showed up on Craigslist not too long ago for just $50. Was so tempted to get it, but I currently don't have the space for such a monster.

Being an SD XBR have to imagine LD would look amazing on it.

Also has a single Component Video input so it would be good for video games at 480i and below.

Guess it wouldn't be possible to convert a Dreamcast's VGA output to 480i component would it?