Apparently a Taiwanese company is still manufacturing arcade CRTs, they're available in NA from Suzo Happ: https://na.suzohapp.com/products/monitors/49-2715-00

A used Crt from Craigslist might be cheaper in most cases but I'm tempted to get one of these. Edit: One would need some kind of processor to convert signals to RGB/VGA for LD/DVD watching, though. A cheap HDMI to VGA box would probably be fine.

Nice pics captain.

Wow shocked someone still makes CRTs BusterD. That’s all kinds of awesome.

Wow! Cathode ray tubes still live! I wonder if someone could 3D print an 80's retro tv style cabinet for that?

I imagine a freshly made tube with high quality components would have a good chance of lasting a very long time as long as it's not abused, although with arcade machines there's always the risk of screen burn depending on the title.

Yeah, since these are presumably made to be left on all day every day for years when used in arcades, they should last decades when only used for a few hours or so each day in a person's home.

Checking and replacing some or all of the capacitors every decade or two might be necessary, but I'd imagine these are fairly easy to work on when compared to consumer sets.

IIRC CRT expected life is around 10000 hours, but I could be wrong... if so, plasma life is 10x, then a better choice IMHO.

Got that 65 8th gen Panasonic 65 plasma and rated it quite good, only later I discovered it has 38279 hours of life!

I recently looked into finding ICC profiles of CRT monitors. Found for example some that used to be bundled with Windows 95. To my surprise, using them on screenshots did not actually change the colors meaningfully, it mostly only slightly affected gamma and such. I fully expected it to fix the look. Starting to wonder if maybe they truly were red/pink back then and they just aren't now because maybe the "greening" is what happens as a CRT ages?

Well anecdotally, I've tried another CRT BVM someone had and been trying a CRT projector and got similar results. My friend's BVM (used for retrogaming) had high hundred of hours which is not that much for a CRT of that type. I wanted another source of confirmation before I started out on this project.

That could be all circumstantial evidence but its evidence that fits the theory at hand. Even if the whole CRT thing is off, which is possible, there doesn't seem to be a better or logical explanation why these masters of a particular age have that consistent red look on modern flat panels. Aging phosphors can't explain that. The only other thing might be some odd workflow thing but again that doesn't explain why its happens over many studios.

This is guaranteed to be more about NTSC decoding than the tubes. TV manufacturers all had their own NTSC color decoders and tweaked them differently to improve color from NTSC signals. I believe the red push was just to keep skin tones looking healthy and not going to the sickly green side

What I don't understand is why the profiles for CRTs will not in any way influence colors. A proper ICC profile should incorporate such things in my eyes.

I suppose it could be a case of "compensating for consumer equipment", but you'd still expect the profile for consumer monitors to incorporate that. Hmmm.