Why is no one manufacturing CRTs in 2026? Seriously this is such a lost art.
Let's say you manage to build a product you could sell as a niche expensive thing and not as a super duper expensive rich-people-only thing; you would still be competing against people buying an old CRT for 20 bucks or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k TV and takes 0% space in your house).
Another advantage of shaders is that you can make them look exactly how you want, down to particular CRT models, screen curvatures, analog signal aberrations, etc. And almost everything you could want comes already included on RetroArch by default, with lots of presents if you don't want to mess with that stuff yourself. Hard to compete with that. A CRT TV comes with only one look. But again, working with the TV you already own instead of occupying a cubic meter of your house is probably the biggest advantage.
I play retro games almost exclusively and I would never get a CRT myself, not even if it was free.
It gets you about 90% of the image quality and 0% of the motion quality. Simulating CRT motion quality on a sample-and-hold display requires around 1000Hz refresh rate.
There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
(Early black-and-white CRTs running at lower voltage did use leaded glass for the front too, but they aren't the CRTs people interested in old games care about.)
Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.
A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.
Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.
IMO, the only factor that kills the crt vs a moderm monitor is the size and weight. I imagine resolution would be limited by how small the dot pitch can actually be made to be with modern processes but with the advances in magnets and power electronics devices I imagine going at MHz horizontal frequency would be not that hard.
then there was Iiyama Vision Master Pro 514 with 140-ish kHz horisontal scan