[Electronic M]

The 1954/55 color sets that used the 15GP22, it's 19" version and the 21AXP22 had wider color gamut phosphorus that resulted in a broader color space than later CRT sets...Those phosphors were dimmer than the newer ones that replaced them. Also many of the sets of the time were based on the CTC-2 chassis that had wide band IQ chroma demodulation...those sets were 40 tube monsters and tube count was reduced by limiting color reciever bandwidth (video detail).

Tube sets also have a serviceability advantage all the circuitry is discreet and all components are generic to the point almost everything can be substituted or in the case of inductors/transformers rewound.

The disadvantage is usually 6 Month -2year maintenance intervals.

An SD set from 1955, 65 or 75 can give an SD set from 1995 a run for it's money on picture quality.

If you like monochrome movies the best CRT experience you can get is a well aligned monochrome TV (or 60s era Video Tape monitor) designed to provide full bandwidth 4.5MHz video from the IF...Color sets typically limited monochrome video bandwidth to 3MHz to prevent color dot crawl....If you feed the luminance signal of S-video output (or the green component output) DVD or LD player or other SD capable source device through a modulator or via direct injection to a quality monochrome set the results will be better than any SD color set.

People have made electrostatic 7" sets into video monitors that will do 720P....It's harder with magnetically deflected sets as significant re-engineering of the deflection is needed to accomplish that.

It is possible to run a modern inline CRT off of a vintage chassis at SD resolution. Test jigs for TV shops made in the 70s and 80s would have an inline gun CRT and an impedance matching box to allow them to be connected to a disembodied console chassis from anything from a modern SS set with low impedance yoke to a 1954 color chassis using a high impedance yoke with the right adapter cables.

My daily watcher (and newest TV) is an 04 Sony KD-34XS955 HD-CRT TV with super-fine-pitch CRT...It supports 1080i as it's native phosphor resolution and scan rate (and can handle 720 and 480 obviously), has an HDMI input, 2 HD component inputs and supports ATSC 1.0 . It's really all the TV I need I don't watch anything in 4K and even if I did I doubt I'd be bothered by only seeing it at 1080i, it's contrast ratio and brightness have been better than consumer grade LCDs for years (it may have been eclipsed recently, but it doesn't matter to me). If you want ultimate CRT performance hit the gym, make a friend to help you lift it's 200lb girth and get one of these.

It's possible that someone with a LOT of time on their hands could take a CRT from one of these and build a tube sweep circuit and video amp that could take component video at 1080i (or even one of the K resolutions) and make it work. You would have to be a superb engineer with knowledge of high frequency tube circuits and access to custom transformer winding facilities to pull it off....... It's one of those "look mom I built a fully functional government safety standards approved 100KW nuclear power plant in the garden shed" level projects. It's not impossible, and there's probably enough people with the aptitude to do it to count on more than 1 hand...Whether someone actually will is the question.