I am quite fortunate to have a BVM D20F1 in my possession, I became interested in monitors just as their popularity really began to outstrip availability and managed to secure one for a reasonable price.
It is not clear cut that CRTs are always better than any given flat panel tech, but the motion clarity really is unmatched. Especially at a given refresh rate, i.e. 60fps gaming, is markedly superior in motion. Obviously we are getting the option for higher refresh rates, but modern AAA games simply aren’t going to target 100fps+ any time soon, and we already have thousands upon thousands of games that cannot be played above 60fps or even 30. Black frame insertion is also pretty great for motion, but you lose out a lot on brightness. I think BFI or something like it will be the answer long term, though.
There is also a certain amount of comfort in plugging your old console straight into a device that has no problems with the signal, with no scalers, lag or any other kind of faff to worry about.
Still, CRTs are heavy, bulky, and have comparitively small screens. If I am playing games with a group of friends, crowding around a 20 inch monitor is hardly an ideal setup. Sometimes I just want to kick back in front of a huge screen. I would say my gaming is split about 50:50 between CRT and flat panel displays. On new systems I favour the latter, but I do still use scalers and the like to play older systems on them quite often.
On the topic of modern displays, though, what I find more amazing is how many people, avid game-likers, don’t have game mode enabled on their TV. I have been in a few situations at friends’ houses where they put a game on and I immediately notice how incredibly laggy everything is (and normally horribly oversharpened, too) so I politely ask if I can change all their settings.
The first is latency. Games both old and new run around 60 Hz, so anything that’s under 1/60th of a second (16.7 ms) is absolutely playable. If you think that you can react to something that is faster than Millia’s 19-frame overhead, you’re straight up lying to yourself.
@antillese I disagree with this. Input lag and reaction times do not overlap, they are additive. If it takes me 250ms to react to a thing on a CRT, it will take me ~267ms at one frame of lag, and ~283ms at two frames of lag, etc. In most cases this doesn’t matter, but it is still longer in all cases. Even if you don’t notice it, there may be many occasions where if you’d got the input in a few milliseconds earlier you might have avoided that enemy, or made it over the gap, or whatever. I’m sure there is an element of placebo but I have on several occasions been struggling with a particularly tough timing-based task on an LCD (with known lag - only around 1 frame), then moved onto a CRT and had a significantly easier time reacting consistently.