Is there really no market for a modern CRT tailor-made for retro gaming? Or is it just not feasible?
It's much cheaper to emulate CRT effects so that they work with any display technology. Modern LCDs and OLEDs have fast enough response times that you can get most CRT effects (and omit the ones you dislike, such as refresh flicker). And you don't have to deal with a heavy, bulky display that can implode and send leaded glass everywhere.
https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/
CRT phosphors light up extremely brightly when the electron beam hits them, then exponentially decay. Non-phosphor-based display technologies can attempt to emulate this by strobing a backlight or lighting the pixel for only a fraction of the frame time, but none can match this exponential decay characteristic of a genuine phosphor. I'd argue that the phosphor decay is the most important aspect of the CRT look, more so than any static image quality artifacts.
There is such a thing as a laser-powered phosphor display, which uses moving mirrors to scan lasers over the phosphors instead of an electron beam, but AFAIK this is only available as modules intended for building large outdoor displays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-powered_phosphor_display
Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.
You essentially draw the frame over and over with progressive darkening of individual scan lines to emulate phosphor decay.
In practice, you'd want to emulate the full beam scanout and not even wait for full input frames in order to reduce input lag.
Mr. Blurbuster himself has been pitching this idea for awhile, as part of the software stack needed once we have 960+ Hz displays to finally get CRT level motion clarity. For example:
Many retro signals are 240p60 rather than 480i60. Nearly everything before the Playstation era.
You'd need a screen that had a maximum brightness 10x more than normal, or something to that effect.
In real life, there's no flicker. Motion blur is part of real life. Filmmakers use the 180-degree shutter rule as a default to intentionally capture the amount of motion blur that feels natural.
I can understand why the CRT would reduce the motion blur, in the same way that when I super-dim an LED lamp at night and wave my hand, I see a strobe effect instead of smooth motion, because the LED is actually flickering on and off.
But I don't understand why this would ever be desirable. I view it as a defect of dimmed LED lights at night, and I view it as an undesirable quality of CRT's. I don't understand why anyone would call that "excellent motion quality" as opposed to "undesirable strobe effect".
Or for another analogy, it's like how in war and action scenes in films they'll occasionally switch to a 90-degree shutter (or something less than 180) to reduce the motion blur to give a kind of hyper-real sensation. It's effective when used judiciously for a few shots, but you'd never want to watch a whole movie like that.
Isn't motion blur the best workaround to mitigate this problem?
As long as we're dealing with low frame rates, the motion blur in movies looks entirely natural. The lack of motion blur in a flicker situation looks extremely unnatural.
Which is why a lot of 3D games intentionally try to simulate motion blur.
And even if you're emulating an old 2D game designed for CRT's, I don't see why you'd prefer flicker over sample-and-hold. The link you provided explains how sample-and-hold "causes the frame to be blurred across your retinas" -- but this seems entirely desirable to me, since that's what happens with real objects in normal light. We expect motion blur. Real objects don't strobe/flicker.
(I mean, I can get you might want flicker for historical CRT authenticity, but I don't see how it could be a desirable property of displays generally.)
Motion blur in real life reacts to eye movement. When you watch a smoothly moving object, your eye accurately tracks it ("smooth pursuit") so that the image of that object is stationary on your retina, eliminating motion blur. If there are multiple objects moving in different directions you can only track one of them. You can choose where you want the motion blur just by focusing your attention. If you bake the motion blur into the video you loose this ability.
If there's motion blur on something I'm tracking in smooth pursuit, it doesn't seem particularly objectionable. (I guess I also wonder how accurate the eye's smooth pursuit is -- especially with fast objects in video games, surely it's only approximate and therefore always somewhat blurry anyways? And even if you're tracking an object's movement perfectly, it can be still be blurry as the video game character's arms move, its legs shift, its torso rotates, etc.)
Whereas if there's a flicker/strobe effect, that feels far more objectionable to me.
At the end of the day, my eyes are used to motion blur so a little bit extra on an object my eye is tracking doesn't seem like a big deal -- it still feels natural. Whereas strobe/flicker seems like a huge deal -- extremely unnatural, jumpy and jittery.
With strobing, moving objects still remain sharp when tracked.
Source @1:59: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZxOuc9Qwk&t=119
Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you. A lot cheaper than restarting the production of cathode-ray tubes.
Yes, of course, "objectively" speaking, an OLED display is superior. It has much better blacks and just better colors with a much wider gamut in general. But there's just something about the way a CRT looks - the sharp contrast between bleeding colors and crisp subpixels, the shadows that all fade to gray, the refresh flicker, the small jumps the picture sometimes makes when the decoding circuit misses an HBLANK - that's hard to replicate just in software. I've tried a lot of those filters, and it just doesn't come out the same. And even if it did look as nice, it would never be as cool.
Retro gaming has to be retro. And to be honest, the CRT plays Netflix better as well. It doesn't make you binge, you see? Because it's a little bit awful, and the screen is too small, and you can't make out the subtitles if you sit more than two meters away from the screen, and you can't make out anything if you sit closer than that.
Does that mean we have to restart the production of cathode-ray tubes? Hopefully not. But you can't contain the relics of an era in a pass-through device from jlcpcb.
OLEDs are still behind on motion clarity, but getting close. We finally have 480 Hz OLEDs, and seem to be on track to the 1000Hz needed to match CRTs.
The Retrotink 4k also exists as a standalone box to emulate CRTs and is really great. The main problem being it's HDMI 2.0 output, so you need to choose between 4k60 output with better resolution to emulate CRT masks/scan lines, or 1440p120 for better motion clarity.
Something 4k500 or 4k1000 is likely needed to really replace CRTs completely.
Really hoping by the time 1000 Hz displays are common we do end up with some pass-through box that can fully emulate everything. Emulating full rolling CRT gun scan out should be possible at that refresh rate, which would be amazing.
Direct-view color CRTs topped out at about 300 nits, which is IMO plenty for non-HDR content.
CRT rebuilding, where the neck is cut off, a new electron gun installed, and the tube re-sealed and evacuated, used to be part of the TV repair industry. That can be done in a small-scale workshop.
There's a commercial business which still restores CRTs.[2] Most of their work is restoring CRTs for old military avionics systems. But there are a few Sony and Panasonic models for which they have parts and can do restoration.
I imagine one could target smaller CRTs as an idea though.