As CRT TVs becomes scarce and demand surges, could we one day see a return to CRT manufacturing for Retro?

[Supermodel_Evelynn]

Something interesting I noticed lately, about 8 years ago you could get a CRT TV for $10, prior to that you could get it free.
But today there is a huge market online for used CRTs that go for hundreds of dollars and people are paying for it.
This suggests to me there is demand, more so than we realize. A big problem with buying CRT these days is the aging electronics inside them, I recently got a nice Sony Trinitron 21" CRT to add to my collection, still has decent brightness and all a real testament to SONY's incredible 90's electronic quality build, but I can see the soldering on the board and components a lot of stuff are starting to get corroded and needs to be recapped etc

Perhaps when all the CRTs are gone we might see manufacturing picked up again? I cannot imagine SONY executives and management even considering CRTs right now, I mean any CRT TV they build wouldn't be able to compete with the amount of used CRTs floating around for under $100, business is always about supply and demand, it doesn't matter that CRTs are expensive to build, heavy and toxic or the analog technicians who built it are all dead and gone now.
If there is demand high enough then they will find a way.

If I could buy a new one I would, I would pay $500 USD for a brand new Trinitron any size doesn't matter much but I think 23" is perfect.

For $500 I could also get an OLED but OLED's are sample and hold technology so perhaps I could also get a RetroTink 4K CE? that thing can output scanlines at 4K and these days you can get 4K OLED 32" Monitors for $400 or less although those are 60hz ones.

But would it truly match the quality of a CRT when playing retro games?

[SMGJohn]

LPD or MEMS laser projectors are more likely to become bigger since they are impuls displays by design.

They already work very similarly to a CRT, scanning lines and/or the laser hits a phosphor screen and its either projected or there is a glass panel in front like with CRT, there also some form of very early prototypes that uses blue laser on quantum dot screen.
The problem is there almost zero interest in this tech by companies, its mostly used in large display projections in Corporate and advertising settings, its also becoming increasingly popular in AR and headup displays.

Controlling the laser is the biggest issue, we can easily scan 8k at 240Hz, the lasers today are small enough and accurate enough, its just a matter of actually controlling it, MEMS use mirrors while there also ways to manipulate the laser using soundwaves or solid tubes.

I just have my doubts it will ever see big commercial releases, its almost easier to build it yourself since mirror assemblies with stepping motors exist in the GHz range for affordable prices, you just need to figure out how to project 3-6 laser diods into a single spot on the mirrors with incredible accuracy and then using the mirrors to move the laser across the fields at ridicules speeds.
Laser Raster Scanners been a thing for two decades, built by students and engineers in their free time, its possible - full colour at high res and high Hz, possible if you have a year to spend on it.

[Chief Blur Buster]

its almost easier to build it yourself since mirror assemblies with stepping motors exist in the GHz range for affordable prices, you just need to figure out how to project 3-6 laser diods into a single spot on the mirrors with incredible accuracy and then using the mirrors to move the laser across the fields at ridicules speeds.
Laser Raster Scanners been a thing for two decades, built by students and engineers in their free time, its possible - full colour at high res and high Hz, possible if you have a year to spend on it.

Yup, easier to build yourself. Just use this cheat:

There are multiple potential cheap long-term solutions for the alignment problem:

The Projection Mapping Cheat for DIY Laser Color Alignment

1. Projection mapping algorithms. Just crazily don't care about how scanlines overlap. Use projection mapping algorithms in a GPU shader to overlay the lasers to "good enough digital convergence". At 8K, you're bruting the pixels anyway, so a bit of resolution loss is a big "who cares" if you save 75% of the cost of a homemade DIY laser projector by not caring about laser alignment. Bruteforce for the win, cheap phone GPUs have enough horsepower for this now (at the 1080p level)! And if you used even a midrange GPU, you'd still get a super sharp ~4K-looking image out of randomly scattered 8K rectangles that are just human-overlapping each other (like stacking 3 projectors on a table), it won't get worse than nyquist oversampling (2x blur), by avoiding the pain of physical alignment.

2. Include a camera in your laser projector for automatic alignment algorithms in the firmware/controller. Physical alignment becomes a lot less important, as long as the sweep rectangles sufficiently heavily overlap. Just run a startup calibration pattern to find the corners or grid. Perhaps dot-grids flashed one laser at a time, get camera grabs, then funnel this through math, and voila! Multiple rapidly flashed passes of course and fine dot grids should do the trick for staged coarse/fine autoalignment.

As long as you successfully get a single laser to scan an extremely sharp monochrome image, that's a much easier project.

To do color, these can be completely independent monochrome laser projectors connected to 3 separate GPU ports on a PC -- if you preferred PC programming over firmware programming. Or just build it into one big box with your custom video-processor (can even be PC based video processor with a Elgato 4K video input & camera input -> run your program -> split to 3 GPU outputs for the three monochrome (R-only, G-only, B-only) laser projector. Although that "lowest common denominator rapid application development" hack approach might be a bit laggy at 60Hz, it would make for rapid prototyping as long as you could afford the parts. (You can brute some of the in/process/out lag out by using a higher refresh rate). Or build your FPGA (laser-specific), like the "Retrotink" approach of manipulating video signals as a box-in-middle, as the automatic projection mapping algorithm. You have open source projection mapping libraries out there already, and these can theoretically be commandeered as a R/G/B aligner for lasers.

So you have lower-skill and higher-skill approaches available.

YouTubers, start your engines, create this. (Credit me for grabbing this idea from this forum, I like callouts. lol.)

(Note: Those "missing 5% skills" are the tough ones to overcome for a DIY tinkerer. While using AI is anathema to many, used sparingly, you can even ask one of the "smarter" frontier AIs a few key questions to help jumpstart learning and research. "I'm trying to align three separate independent home made mono laser projectors, as R/G/B channels, using a projection mapping algorithm, to create a color image without the need for physical laser alignment. Perhaps I can projection-map in a GPU shader. I have a camera. I need to align via calibration patterns, maybe dot grids or similar flashed in sequence. Teach me at Grade 12 style level, and give me options for my project including off-the-shelf open source libraries I could potentially use." (a longer version of that sorta question, etc). As long as you are good at the rest of the engineering and such, you can learn rapidly through new concepts and fill minor skill-gaps in your indie creation tasks to pull off things like these, while avoiding vibecode slop.)