CRT

What is the CRT? A CRT is a cathode ray tube, and a CRT TV is the most popular form of rear projection TV - that is, a TV in which the image is projected onto the screen from the back of the television. Most televisions in the world are CRT style televisions. The reason that ordinary televisions are so bulky and large is because of the deep cathode ray tube that ends in an electronic firing unit at the back of the screen. The cathode ray tube was invented all the way back in 1897 by the German physicist Karl Braun (who you could call the CRT TV inventor, although television would take some time after that to become a reality) and combines an electron gun and a fluorescent screen with dots of pigments that are lit when they are struck by electrons. The electron gun quickly traces the inside surface of the screen and causes the red, green or blue dots to light up (generally it hits them on successive trips or multiple electron guns can sweep them all at once). That is essentially how a CRT television and all of the CRT monitors around the world work to encode images into the dots on the screen.

A CRT monitor can be in relatively low resolution, or it can be a CRT HDTV. It can be all kinds of sizes, from a 19" CRT monitor to a 36" CRT TV. In general computer CRT screens (which often have CRT accessories such as a CRT monitor arm, a CRT screen protector or a CRT monitor arm stand) are smaller than the CRT televisions. Brands of CRT are manufactured by all of the major electronics makers, including Matsushita which creates the Panasonic CRT screens, and there are also high end models of CRT being created today such as the Sanyo CRT HDTV.

CRT vs LCD technology: The biggest advantage that LCD technology has over the CRT is obviously the thinness of the screen that you can achieve when you don't need a long vacuum tube for an electron gun to fire through. This makes it a lot easier to position an LCD television in a room wherever you want. An LCD television is also considerably lighter and there is less immediate risk of breaking it if it happens to drop a little. Sometimes there can be errors with individual dead pixels, etc. but nothing really akin to what happens when a cathode ray tube is popped and becomes completely unusable. As LCDs have become steadily cheaper, there is less and less reason to use cathode ray tubes anymore, but they will always remain a part of display technology history.