A cathode ray tube is a kind of technology that uses electron guns to - among other purposes - show pictures on television screens that use these electron guns instead of an LCD display. Most often televisions that use this technology are simply referred to by the acronym CRT.
CRTs are honestly pretty scary for what is essentially just a way of playing video media. They really are, with their static shock startup, huge internal electrical voltage, probability of breaking in some way easily, and emission of slight X-ray radiation - and they are also very atmospheric.
As an old technology, you can expect CRT televisions coming into your life in this day and age to create moments of tonal shift. You wouldn't exactly have no change in feeling if somebody showed you their 1990's tape player. I think old machines just inherently create a vibe. But to me, old televisions, TVs that I knew as a kid but didn't feel were odd back then and eventually totally forgot for a while, are special in this area.
One day in the early 2020's I found myself suddenly obsessed with the likes of old televisions that were common two decades ago, and having recurring dreams about them that were just nudging the wits out of me to get a cathode ray tube set. In 2022 I eventually got around to buying myself one.
It's a pre-owned Sony Trinitron weighing 56 KG that costed more than a thousand dollars when the first owner bought it, which was sold to me for about $200. I also loved it. It came with a home-crafted cabinet underneath - as these heavy fuckers often do - finely crafted at that, so that it could be perched and moved, and it was just fun to look at. The dreams were right. Though it's weird that even in the heart of my Trinitron-retro era I was still having more of them.
I won't claim that games and television automatically look better on an old cathode ray tube television than they do on a more current TV. I don't think I'm even qualified to describe that kind of statement. These old TVs had a visible flash to their not-so-high-frequency picture scanning and are not as clear and sharp. My assertion was that it makes things look cool. And at this point I honestly can't run some tests to back that up, because after a hard mentally-ill full year of amazing CRT use, it broke down in 2024. That was so sad, and I'm still waiting for my repair worker to receive a shipped overseas part. More than 20 months later.
My 2023 was horrible, as I'm sure was yours. Though I bet you didn't have the same experience as me with your thyroid. It was an absolute nightmare of a year, but it was the golden era for my time spent on an old TV. Even if I could sometimes feel hollow about the TV and nihilistically wonder if I really wanted it. Pre-widescreen shows and games in the form of recorded videos became a very sought-after asset, and naturally I watched lots of Spongebob and the Yu-Gi-Oh anime and played my Playstation 1 exclusively on that monitor. I even spent a lot of time matching trauma chi with Ren and Stimpy, which I truly remember being perfect for viewing on a CRT. For all its disturbing parts, Ren and Stimpy was a bit of a remedy when I did that. In that age I used my old TV all the time.
I feel a bit sad any time I look over to the opposite wall of my bedroom and manage to notice the lonely cabinet sitting there with no matching TV perfectly slotted into it. It seems to be part of my current downer era. This is a time where I'm in the middle of a slow serious technology crisis. This crisis has been ongoing for more than two years. I hope the TV comes back from repairs sooner or later. I want to get an old CRT computer monitor and play early days Minecraft on it when all this shit is over.
My CRT television set was good, and it was a pain. I miss it for how good it was. I remember its issues.
Here's what you should expect from a CRT, if you ever want to get one. First, it's probably fucking heavy. Be cautious to avoid making the possible mistake I did and make sure you know it'll be a feasible task to drive it to your house and position it. It takes a while after you press the on button to actually start up. However it's got perfect enough response time to a plugged in Playstation that you actually get to see the famous console logo, which my 2010's TV stalls and ruins. The screen gets temporarily covered in a sheet of invisible static electricity that on contact can startle-attack you. As a kid I think I used to rub my head against it. I'm too scared to touch it with my finger now when I'm an adult. It's difficult to get a computer connected to the TV but you can do it. You will spend a lot of time trying to figure out obscure settings if you have to make the CRT not decide that the picture should be zoomed-in and cropped at the edges for no reason. We call that problem "overscan" as if we're trying to hide that it's the dumbest thing ever. The picture is uniquely dark. Seeing moderately dark scenes in TV shows like The X-Files can feel like barely any visibility compared to what you see on a flatscreen. Or maybe I just didn't use the settings right (I really tried). The menus are cumbersome to go through with a basis of repeated button pressing to cycle through lists combined with a requirement of intense concentration. My remote basically didn't work. There will be various settings that you, if you're unknowledgeable about it like me, will not understand. That or you use values of intuitive settings (like contrast and brightness) unwisely and end up with an outcome you don't want. Its volume control will probably be really loud unless you only use the bottom 20% of volume slider options. Changing the channel by accident to an unsupported channel will make the well-known black and white random cloud effect appear, but this time it'll have audio and the TV will straight up horrifically screech at you. You'll hear the TV itself make a random crack noise sometimes - even and especially when it's turned off.
Boy do I miss it.
The component that was so helpfully ordered for me from China by my preferred business to fix the short maybe could have felt like it was going to be a brief wait at first, but quickly huge delays became obvious to all of us and it is partly because of all the world event shit from 2024 that was going on. As you might have gathered, the world situation affecting this is probably getting worse...