Cathode-Ray Tube Television

The cathode-ray tube was the display technology inside virtually every television set and computer monitor from the 1930s through the early 2000s. It worked by firing electron beams at a phosphor-coated glass screen, producing light by direct excitation. By 2000, CRT computer monitor sales alone reached 90 million units per year; TV sales peaked five years later at 130 million units globally. The technology was dominant not because it was elegant but because nothing else could match its brightness, color accuracy, and price at scale.

LCD pricing collapsed through the early 2000s. By 2003–2004, LCD monitor sales exceeded CRT sales in units. By 2005, LCD TVs began outselling CRTs in developed markets. Sony closed its Japanese CRT production in 2004; Samsung SDI stopped entirely in 2012. The shift took roughly seven years from parity to near-total extinction in consumer markets — one of the fastest category deaths for a technology so deeply embedded in daily life. A handful of niche users — retro gamers and military systems — kept small numbers in service, but as a mass-market object the CRT was functionally gone by 2015.