The days when a good CRT outperformed a good LCD are gone, dead and buried.
First, it's just about impossible to buy a good CRT anymore. One by one, all the top-class CRT manufacturers have bailed out of the industry. So you will almost certainly have to go second-hand - and accept that you will be getting an old, possibly rather tired monitor, with poor prospects for repair should it need that anytime soon - spare parts for CRTs are also hard to get.
Second, TFT screens have come of age. Good ones are really good these days.
But note well: cheap, games-oriented TFT screens are hopeless for photographic work. If you go TFT, you need one that is designed for doing real work on, not some jumped-up games console display with rapid refresh and lousy colour.
Types of TFT
Twisted Nematic Film is the common sort. It's reasonably cheap to manufacture, easy to make fast for games and movies, and has good contrast if it's done right. But it has bad viewing angle problems and (in most cases) cannot display 24-bit colour. You can put 24-bit colour in, but the monitor electronics clip the 8 bits per channel down to 6 bits. Worse, it has linearity problems - i.e., as well as having a smaller number of colours, it switches between them in an undesirable way. Bottom line: don't do photographic work on a TN/F screen.
S-IPS. Super In Plane Switching panels have much better colour accuracy, and are viewable at a much wider range of angles. They are slow (which doesn't mater if you are not into games) and have poor contrast. They are also significantly more expensive to manufacture. There are several variations on S-IPS which apparently deliver much better contrast and are thus well-suited to photographic work.
MVA and S-PVA. There are so many MVA variants marketed that it is hard to keep track of what is what. The original MVA was decently fast, had good viewing angles, and good contrast, but poor brightness and colour. Newer developments of MVA are apparently much better in those respects. Samsung's S-PVA is a variation on the MVA theme, which provides excellent colour, contrast, and viewing angles, with decent speed as well.
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