Yea response times for CRTs are practically nonexistent.
CRTs rely on electron guns hitting a phosphor screen every so often. The screen itself very rapidly loses its brightness after getting hit by an electron, somewhere less than a millisecond. Unfortunately, the gun refreshes the screen only 60 times or so every second (60 Hz), which is 17 ms, or 75 times a second (75 Hz), which is 13 ms. This means that for a CRT, most of the time is actually spent in "darkness" so to speak (actually, more like the decay of a previously bright dot). Your eye sort of averages it out, because the refresh rate is too high to consciously notice. My pet theory is that this is actually why CRT monitors are hard on the eyes; because a large part of the time is spent in the dark position, the bright part has to be much brighter to compensate. However you don't notice this consciously. Too bad the cells in the eyes do (since they're basically rapidly receiving bursts of light). But that's my pet theory, I don't know if it's correct or not.
Incidentally, this is why CRT has a contrast ratio in theory of infinite. Simply put, it doesn't emit radiation unless the electron gun decides to fire an electron at it. I suppose there is a chance that the gun might fire an electron when it's not supposed to, or something.
For LCD monitors, each pixel (actually, each subpixel) basically acts like an electronic shutter, to either block the light coming through or to let it pass. This means that the light is always on, until the shutter changes position, so no flickering for LCDs. The bad part is that the shutter takes time to change between open, close, and anywhere in between. The problem though is that how fast it changes is roughly proportional to the difference between how bright you want it to be, and how bright it actually is, and thus the actual response time is NOT based on the magnitude of this difference. That is to say, the shutter has farther to go from black to white than dark gray to light gray, but it also moves faster when going from black to white than dark gray to light gray. Thus you'll also see "gray to gray" response times. In fact, for the dominant LCD technology today, the black-to-white response time is actually faster than the gray-to-gray response time.
My personal preference would be for manufacturers to list response time as an average across all grayscale to grayscale combinations. Or better yet, to release it in the form of a 3D graph (x be initial, y be final, height be time), for visual guys like me. Unfortunately, this would mean an immediate increase in reported response time to whoever adopts this standard; consequently, Gresham's Law ("bad money drives out the good"; in this case, substitute response time reporting for money) dictates that manufacturers follow a better-sounding, if more deceptive, reporting method. Unfortunately, until the ISO adopts this standard, we'll have to make do with this common industry practice.
Incidentally, if you look at this carefully, this means that it's actually easy for LCD monitors to have a low response time. Say you're going from dark gray to light gray. Currently, the LCD simply sets the voltage to what's appropriate for light gray, then waits for the subpixel to stabilize to that color. But all you have to do to minimize the response time is to drive the voltage as if you were going for white (so drive it toward the max), then immediately change to light gray once the subpixel actually is at light gray. I thought of this immediately when I was looking into how LCD monitors work after I started working at Amptron. Unfortunately, I found out later on that manufacturers had apparently already developed this technology several years back. Boooooooo. If only I had been born 5 years earlier I guess. But I would expect this technology to be commonplace fairly soon; it's very easy conceptually, and as was noted, it does not involve any sort of new technology in terms of the LCD substrate; all you need to do is to modify the controller that governs how much voltage to apply to each subpixel. I imagine that most monitors appearing on the market will soon be using this concept, if not already. Maybe at that time it'll be more practical to report gray-to-gray response times, and we'll finally get a figure that means something. And, of course, the elimination of ghosting for LCD monitors.
An article about this can be found here:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,10085,00.asp
Chuck Hsiao
Amptron