The advantages are getting slimmer, but yes, a CRT still has advantages.
My 17" LG StudioWorks 78i that I got in 1995 or 96 for $250 easily did 1920x1200 @67Hz. If I lowered it to an annoyingly flickery 56Hz I could get it to do the 2560x1600 used by today's 30" monitors. And while the crispness was totally lost at that resolution, you could change a single pixel and see it. If you lowered it to 800x600 to find a font with the minimum number of pixels to be legible at any size, then started cranking it up, you could see that the absolute minimum sized fonts were legible up to 1920x1200. The "powerstrip" utility was awesome for creating/tuning custom video modes.
As a second monitor with that I eventually got a 19" with good specs (don't remember the model name) for an unbelievable $160 at J&R. With dual inputs and a built in USB hub in 2004. That 19" did 1920x1440 @74Hz, or 2560x1600 @65Hz. 100% legible even with fonts only having the absolute minimum number of pixels to make out the chars (usually about 6 point, depending what font we're talking about).
And yes, this is with analog input signals -- good old VGA actually has more bandwidth than DVI, although I would say it is beat by dual-link DVI, let alone newer standards like HDMI1.4, & Displayport. Any signal reflection in the VGA cable or timing difference between the 3 color pins becomes very noticeable at 2560x1600. Typical A/B switches add enough signal reflection to lower it to about the same bandwidth as single link DVI or worse.
I eventually replaced both of those monitors with 24" LCDs to reclaim some desk space. Or so I thought.... I'm not surprised to see a 24" LCD take as much space as a 17" CRT (even taking into account depth). But the stupid stand that came with the Dell 2408WFP makes it take more than the 19" CRT did, which was quite deep. At least my Samsung LCD doesn't have this deficiency, so it takes about the same space the rather compact (for a CRT) 17" did.
I also expected the switch to LCDs to result in lower power bills, and was sorely disappointed. The LCD power usage seems nearly independent of what is displayed on the screen, and mainly depends on how bright you set the backlight. For the CRTs, power usage increased depending on how bright the current picture is, (I mean white pixels, not just the setting) and also increased appreciably proportional to the
horizontal refresh. (Roughly horizontal refresh = vertical resolution * vertical refresh + about 20% margin for vertical blanking interval). Given similar brightness the 24" 1920x1200 LCDs use about the same power as the 19" CRT when displaying a medium brightness image (like say XP default desktop) at 1920x1440 @74Hz. If the CRT is lowered to the 1920x1200@60Hz the LCDs are doing, it takes a mostly white screen (like a maximized word document) to use the same power, as measured by my UPS. So really, I am not seeing the power efficiency gains.
The real advantages of the LCD I'd say are:
- Weight (my desk actually warped from years of having 2 CRTs on it)
- Completely flat screen
- Real rotation support. I rotated CRTs for awhile for code editing before LCDs were around. They tend to last less than 2 years in that orientation.
- Ultimately, passive 3D, but not many options for that yet
- digital input support (HDCP)
- Potentially less space depending on the model
- You can't hear the horizontal scan when blind people switch to a low resolution & refresh.