Cathode Ray Missionaries
The strange appeal of scanlines on old TVs.
One by one, the great television manufacturers shrugged their shoulders. Sony was among the first to bail. Then Panasonic bowed out. By 2015, when Sharp quit making cathode ray tube televisions, it was difficult to find a new CRT TV anywhere. (A website I visited suggested that Philips still sold them in India, but when I clicked on the “where to buy?” button, I was greeted by a page for electric breast pumps instead.)
With the rise of huge, crisp, cheap high-resolution TVs, many consumers never noticed the slow death of the old, granular, blurry CRT. However, aficionados of classic games started missing the aging TV sets almost immediately. From the moment they plugged a non-high-def game console into a high-def television, something didn’t feel old enough.
