Should I abandon my CRT? - Gaming Related

Your TV will look superb in 1080i. Any flat panel you get will be a little sharper at 1080p, but the color and black levels may not be as good, depends on the set.

And most flat panels have lag, with the least lag at their native resolution. But your CRT will only have 0 lag at 1080i, so you have a few things to think about.

Presently, nearly all flat panel displays have worse motion resolution than a CRT, from the perspective of full framerate (60fps @ 60Hz) video gaming. CRT always look really fluid for this.

Plasma is probably a reasonable bet for gaming, if you don't mind a slight input lag -- not important for solo gaming if you can't notice it. Some high end TV's such as the Elite LCD, or one of the Sony "XR 960" / Samsung "CMR 960" displays, sometimes have a mode where motion interpolation is disabled but the scanning backlight is enabled to allow approximately a 75% motion-blur reduction relative to a regular LCD, without using motion interpolation. But it will flicker quite a lot (like a 60Hz CRT) since most of the video-game-compatible scanning backlight modes, only operate at 60Hz, and cost a lot more than a plasma display.

Once input lag is low enough, improvements really only matters during competition gaming: Input lag, even if not noticed by the human, can still be a disadvantage during fast-reaction network gaming -- like the 100 meter race at Olympics every milliseconds matter, the person who shoots 1 millisecond sooner will be the one that wins. Even though you cannot notice the millisecond, the gaming computer calculations will, and the person who shoots first wins! (Even if it's just by one millisecond). Gaming calculations are unable to bias/handicap users that have low input lag, so low input lag is a way to gain some advantage between two very good video gamers in a videogaming competition.

oh yeah, forgot about motion. I wasn't sure if modern LCD's took care of that problem, but all LCD TV's I've seen lose a lot of sharpness when the picture is in motion. Very blurry and hard to make any detail out.

When you do decide to go with a flat panel I'd recommend Plasma, I still own a 34XBR960 which used to be my main gaming TV but when I bought a 50" Kuro plasma in Dec 2007 I never looked back, The picture quality was much closer to CRT than I expected which was a relief, especially the black levels, and the bigger screensize had more of an impact than I imagined (going from a 34" to 50" was AWESOME for gaming), Motion clarity isn't quite CRT quality but it's better than any LCD Ive seen, including 120hz models, Especially when comparing 60fps games.

I only sit about 6 - 6 1/2 feet from the Plasma and it's great, doesn't feel like i'm to close at all if anything it just adds to the immersion with gaming.

Plasma is brighter than a CRT (especially the 2012 models) so if you're ok with your current sunlight situation it wont be any worse with Plasma, but yes an LED would perform better in a brightly lit room if you're unable to control the lighting.

As long as youre not the type of person that gets eye strain and/or headaches from CRTs, then youll enjoy playing on the CRT a lot more. 1080i looks just about as good as 1080p as far as I can tell, and with CRT youll get perfect motion and virtually no lag (as long as you turn off all extra processing in the SM). Plasma is the runner-up to CRT for gaming. If you don't mind jittery motion and a frame of lag then by all means go with plasma, but CRT is better performance for way cheaper.