Found 2060u crt for $50

Looked around craigslist, and found an old Mitsubishi 2060u for $50 about 20 minutes away. Now, I have mostly used lcds. Are crts really better than lcds? Is the monitor simply a piece of junk? Or does it put any lcd to shame?

CRTs have a few advantages, they look good at any resolution where most LCDs have issues at non-native resolutions, the good ones also have image quality at least as good as the best LCDs. But they take up a ton of room and use up more energy, and the older ones tend to have image ghosting, brightness and convergance issues.

If that monitor is in good shape, it will look great. Mitsubishi CRTs were very good quality, if you don't care about the size/power thing, and the screen is not bad due to age, you'll be happy with the image.

Refresh rates don't quite work the same way with CRTs and LCDs. LCDs don't have a "scan line" drawing a picture on the screen, the whole image is drawn at once. So the refresh rate on a CRT which is how fast the scan line goes across the same part of the screen does not apply to LCDs. The fluid part you are seeing would be the fact that CRTs don't have a lag when the LCDs need to change colors (the ms speed setting you see in LCDs), so it looks like the screen is running smoother.

CRTs do have some advantages, but the fact that they take up so much more room and more power offsets that.