Drop them a line and get a quote, should be good for a laugh! :D
Yep. That's aerospace contractors for ya.
In fact, the RetroTINK 4K will even use a HDR container to boost the brightness to offset the loss from drawing scanlines and other unlit areas over the image.
It’s a super cool effect and one of many signs how much a labour of love those things are, but it would never fool anyone into believing it was an actual CRT.
I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I’ve often thought the “CRT look” is as much biological as it is physical, it’s almost like the phosphor glow and persistence and the mask overlaid on the image convinces the brain to start filling in detail.
Source: I have a house full of CRTs and am continually trying to move away from them as I know I can’t keep them going forever (I can do basic repairs). I have a collection of consumer TVs, VGA monitors and broadcast monitors I use currently, including a 21” trinitron that still sits on my desk.
My endgame for “close enough” will be a reasonably size 4k oled with like 60hz strobe which will cover a large enough portion of legacy content.
[1] My thought was that you could "restore" old test equipment for which tubes were no longer available without changing the interface the electronics in the gear expected.
I don't use it often, but I have a moment of terror each time I pull it out to fiddle with something and it takes a moment for the picture to display. So far, thankfully, I've been able to follow that moment of fear with a sigh of relief.
I should probably keep an eye out for a few more decent specimens just to keep in the closet as back ups.
I had a 20” Sony PVM for a while for retro games and still don’t think any display I’ll ever own will match it for that specific purpose. Ended up selling it on because it was starting to have geometry issues itself, and I don’t have the ability to maintain it nor know anyone who does—plus it was hard to find a good space for it anywhere I’d actually want to play games. I do miss it though.
People will still be using and maintaining existing CRTs for decades - there are still a lot in operation run by hobbyists, old people, and hipster types that make use of them.
I'd say we have at least another 30 years before they are entirely relegated to museums and collections, and at that point, who knows what life expectancy will look like.
There could be people alive even now who'll be among the first to achieve immortality, if the rate of improvements to longevity starts exceeding the speed at which people age against their life expectancy.
We live in interesting times.
Or you can take up glass blowing! This is, in principle, 125-year-old technology, and therefore possible to construct with non-esoteric tooling.
Tooling maybe, but I wouldn't underestimate the required know-how. For example, making good vacuum-grade glass-to-metal seals is a technology that took decades of research and experimentation.
also, fusion (not online, but available in many university libraries) is the quarterly journal of the american scientific glassblowers society https://asgs-glass.org/fusion-journal-asgs/ and they also have had symposia which have published proceedings (not online)
and it's common for scientific papers from the period when this stuff was getting figured out to describe their apparatus in detail (rather than saying they purchased such-and-such a model from such-and-such a company), and those are online
finally, the bell jar seems to be defunct, but they have put their 27 issues online https://www.belljar.net/articles.html
Adrian from the Youtube channel "Adrian's digital basement" has done several recent videos about replacing CRT TVs and CRT monitors' PCBs with new, still produced (and easy to order) chinese PCBs.
So there are still new (and cheap) parts being made.
As for the screen itself: they've been produced by the hundreds of millions and there many lying around in caves/garages/basement so it should be possible to at least find some for the foreseeable future.
I ended up trashing a few older CRTs that had pretty severe burn-in and bad contrast. As far as I can tell there was no alternative, no way to repair them or obtain new components.