If you walk into a Best Buy today and ask for a brand-new CRT TV, the teenager behind the counter will probably look at you like you just asked for a pet dinosaur. It’s a fair reaction. We’ve been living in the era of paper-thin OLEDs and massive 4K panels for so long that the "big back" television feels like a fever dream from the 90s.
But honestly, the question of whether are CRT TVs still made isn't as simple as a "no."
If you mean can you go to a major retailer and buy a shiny new Sony Trinitron in its original box? Absolutely not. That ship didn't just sail; it hit an iceberg and sank over a decade ago. However, if you dig into the weird, dusty corners of industrial manufacturing and the obsessive world of retro gaming, you’ll find that the heart of the cathode ray tube is still beating—just barely.
The Short Answer: No, but also... Yes?
Let’s get the "official" stuff out of the way first. Large-scale consumer production of CRT televisions for your living room effectively ended around 2010. LG and Samsung, the last of the titans, shuttered their consumer tube plants as LCD prices plummeted and everyone decided they’d rather have a 40-inch screen they could actually lift without throwing out their back.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
There is a company called Thomas Electronics. They’ve been around since 1948, and they didn’t get the memo that CRTs are dead. They still manufacture cathode ray tubes today. The catch? You can’t use them to watch Stranger Things. They build high-spec tubes for the military, aerospace, and clinical medical displays. Think cockpit displays for fighter jets or specialized HUDs where "near-zero latency" isn't just a gaming buzzword—it's a matter of life and death.
Then there’s the "New Old Stock" (NOS) loophole. You might see "new" CRT TVs pop up on sites like AliExpress or from niche brands in regions where the transition to digital took longer. Usually, these aren't actually newly manufactured tubes. They are often "franken-TVs" built using old, unused tubes that have been sitting in a warehouse for twenty years, slapped into a fresh plastic shell with a cheap, modern logic board.
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It's basically a zombie TV. It looks new, but the heart is a relic.
Why Did They Stop Making Them?
It wasn't a conspiracy. It was physics and money.
The Lead Problem
CRTs are environmental nightmares. A single 27-inch tube can contain anywhere from 4 to 8 pounds of lead in the glass to shield the viewer from X-rays generated by the electron gun. Manufacturing that glass is toxic, expensive, and regulated into oblivion. In 2026, the environmental permits alone to open a new CRT glass plant would cost more than the GDP of a small country.
The Logistics Nightmare
Shipping a 32-inch Sony WEGA is like shipping a small boulder. They are heavy, fragile, and take up massive amounts of space on shipping containers. In a world where you can fit twenty 50-inch LED TVs in the same space as five old-school tubes, the math just doesn't work for retailers.
The "Resolution" Ceiling
While we love them for their motion clarity, CRTs struggled to hit high resolutions. Most consumer sets topped out at 480i. Even the legendary "HD CRTs" of the mid-2000s were buggy, flickery, and couldn't compete with the pixel-perfect sharpness of a $300 4K panel.
The Retro Gaming Obsession
Despite all the "dead tech" talk, the demand for these things is actually skyrocketing. If you look at the CRT gaming community on Reddit or Discord, people are paying hundreds—sometimes thousands—of dollars for Professional Video Monitors (PVMs) or high-end consumer sets.
Why? Because modern TVs suck at playing old games.
When you plug an original Super Nintendo into a modern 4K TV, the image looks like a smeared, blurry mess. That's because LCDs are fixed-pixel displays. They have to "guess" how to stretch a 240p image to fit an 8.3-million-pixel screen. A CRT doesn't have pixels. It has a continuous beam of electrons hitting phosphors. It creates "scanlines" that naturally mask the low-resolution artwork, making it look vibrant and sharp in a way digital screens just can't replicate.
Are We Ever Getting New Ones?
Honestly? Probably not.
There’s been talk of "boutique" manufacturers starting small runs for gamers, but the infrastructure is gone. The machines that made the aperture grilles and shadow masks were sold for scrap or rusted away years ago. The engineers who knew the secret "sauce" for the phosphor coatings are mostly retired.
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We are currently in the "Great Squeeze." The supply of working CRTs is shrinking every year as components fail and tubes lose their brightness.
What You Should Do Instead
Since you can't just go buy a new one, you have to be smart about how you get your analog fix.
- Don't buy on eBay: The shipping will kill you, and there’s a 50% chance it arrives in a million pieces.
- Facebook Marketplace is your friend: Look for "old TV" or "heavy TV." Avoid listings that say "Retro Gaming TV"—those people know what they have and will charge you a "nostalgia tax."
- Check the manufacture date: Look for sets made between 1995 and 2005. That was the "Golden Age" where the tech was perfected before it was abandoned.
- Invest in a Scaler: If you absolutely can't find a CRT, look into a RetroTINK-4K or an OSSC. These devices take the old signal and "translate" it for modern TVs, adding fake scanlines that get pretty close to the real thing.
The reality is that are CRT TVs still made is a question that leads to a bittersweet dead end. We are currently living through the final lifespan of the world's remaining tubes. Once the last Trinitron dies, that’s it—the era of the electron beam is over.
If you want the authentic experience, find a local CRT now, learn how to discharge a flyback transformer safely, and keep that piece of history running as long as you can.
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To keep your current setup going, you'll want to check the capacitors on the power board; replacing those "caps" is the number one way to prevent a total failure and keep your screen bright for another decade.