I have a 20" Sony PVM 20M4U RGB broadcast monitor:
Pictures do not do it justice. The main problem is the blooming, glare, etc that the camera picks up but also the moire patterns introduced by the fine pixel density of the camera beating against the fine density of the aperture grill in the screen.
In person it looks flawless, it's like a CRT arcade monitor or better. Looping the Metroid Prime idle demo through this monitor with the crystal clear digital audio coming through a Klipsch 2.1 Promedia setup, I swear it's like playing on a top of the line arcade cabinet back in the late 90s.
Another option is any of the last generation Sony Wega flat tubes that accept component and using something like a
JRok RGBS to component converter which is passive on the signal. RGB to component is just adding/subtracting the signals, it isn't doing any kind of conversion or scaling. NTSC RF, composite, and S-video (which still carries NTSC) should be avoided like the plague.
Any old system that natively puts out RGB, component, or VGA should be used with that signal. Framebuffer to NTSC conversion is like consuming sushi and then taking a dump. The output signal has ZERO correlation with the input signal, it's a completely different format and it sucks. But converting RGB to component is like rearranging the sushi. It's still the same sushi.
I don't know if those TVs can do 240p over component though, might need a line doubler as well, but it's a good option for big screen 32-40" CRT gaming since there aren't many broadcast reference monitors with RGB inputs beyond 20-25".
I'm personally contemplating going this route on Sony 40XBR850 one of these days. If I don't like it oh well its only like a $50-100 TV now. Maybe even get one free since people are hoping someone else will come and pick up their 400 lb behemoth.
Older systems only provided 240p 15khz RGB output as their native output, and most have those pins bypassing the NTSC encoder and going to the AV out connector. Regardless what you use for a display you should always use this. Even a RGB to component converter and hooked up to a flat panel set to 4:3 ratio with nothing else will look 100000x better than hooking a yellow composite signal up to your flat panel. It's not the blockiness and upconversion that is really bad, so much as when that upconversion occurs form a single yellow RCA composite or s video source.
All the color errors and fine detail loss, as well as signal interference, dot crawl, etc, will be sampled by your image processor when it does the scaling and that stuff becomes part of the image information where it it scaled and processed and sampled and blended along with the game image. In short, the NTSC artifacts and RF noise and ghosting become part of the picture, not just something riding on top of it. The resulting picture looks as if you just smeared your wet ass crack on the TV screen.
The other problem, which I encountered the other day while testing a NES at my parents house where my sister just HAD to play Super Mario, is input lag. This is going to be a bigger factor than anything else. When she kept dying and I took the controller away and was all "this is how it's done" ready to blow through it, I was faced with spongy rubber band feeling time offset controls that made it IMPOSSIBLE for me to perform any kind of pixel perfect jumping/landing/timing, etc. I felt it immediately the first time I went to jump on that first goomba and took 3 tries to hit the mushroom block.
While this will vary with TV make and model and settings, just keep in mind that you are only ADDING to that lag by adding external scalers, line doublers, scanline generators, etc. in your quest to make it "good enough" on your LCD.
Another thing to consider is light guns only work with CRTs.
If you're on a budget or just don't want a huge heavy hulking box just pick up a 19-25" tube TV for $1 at the next random yard sale you come across in your daily driving. Try and get a decent name brand unit though and not some off the wall never heard of blury piece of crap with like half an inch of misconvergence from the factory.
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