Buying a small old television (CRT thread)

A few months ago I gave into my long-held desire to purchase a CRT. Mind you, it's a *shitty* CRT. It's a 13-inch Symphonic with a built-in (broken) VCR and composite input that I grabbed for 60 bucks on FB marketplace. I can't overstate how much I love this thing. For the first time in a long time, my retro games (I mean PS2-era and earlier) look correct and beautiful. They're bright and vivid, pleasantly soft, and extremely smooth at 60 Hz.

Before this, I was using CRT shaders on an LCD screen, and those look OK but don't quite touch the real thing unless you've also spent hundreds of dollars on a TV or monitor with 120+ Hz refresh and HDR. And then you also have to futz around with stuff like black frame insertion to get the motion clarity inherent to how CRTs draw their images line-by-line. I'd rather just have the original tech, which remains pretty affordable if you're not too much of a nerd elitist about it. Wind Waker looks amazing on this shitty little box, let me tell you. 90s anime, too.

What's wild to me, and kind of a bummer, is that this is a truly dead technology. New CRTs are almost certainly never going to be manufactured. It's not like vinyl records, where the manufacturing process is relatively simple and AFAIK never really went away. The manufacturing tech and the supply chains that supported it simply no longer exist, and mass demand is never going to come back.

Are any other ilx0rs embracing this miraculous dead tech?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4UgZBs7ZGo

In the process of acquiring a an cabin w/o internet access. I’m planning to buy a CRT w/ working VCR. I’ve been buying grab-bags of VCR tapes, often unlabled, and I aim to play screen roulette.

hell yeah. I do kinda wish the VCR worked on mine, but I have it hooked up to my PC via an hdmi to composite adapter, and it's rad being able to watch stuff like old tapes of 120 Minutes on youtube

a lot of the early cassettes in my first batch were full of Simpsons episodes taped off of Fox.

Glad you enjoy, and I absolutely get it for old game tech, but as a film nut I can’t imagine going back to 480p/576p, noisy blacks and a tiny picture. Not to mention the bulk of the set itself. I really AM glad that OLED has regained the smoothness of CRT colour tho, if not the pixel bloom those games need.