The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

I'm kinda curious if CRT technology advanced to the point where a TV like that would've been possible at a better weight and price tag? I assume that CRT technology development stopped decades ago, but could we have e.g., replaced the heavy glass with some plastic-like material to save weight without compromising the picture? And are there any heavy components in the mechanism itself (Coils, Magnets?) that would have had alternatives?

I know it's just theorycrafting, but I do wonder what kind of CRT someone could've created if it wasn't for market economy forces.

The next big thing was supposed to be Field Emission Displays. Microscopic electron guns directly behind each phosphor. The big manufacturers experimented and tried getting it commercialized for decades, then pretty much gave up in the 2000s when LCDs got stupid cheap.

https://www.engineersgarage.com/field-emission-display/

There was also a brief reign of plasma TVs in-between, now almost a forgotten technology

I have an HD plasma and it is fantastic. It is the very best living room display I have owned.

Like the CRT, it has glowing phosphors in a tube. Unlike the CRT, it is pixel addressable, where the CRT is basically not addressable, or maybe just field, frame and or line addressable. Of course the tradeoffs are well known. Resolution scaling on a CRT is rarely an issue, except when the dot mask is too coarse. It still looks great. It can be a major issue with pixel addressable displays, when uneven multiples are in play.

In my experience, a good plasma is right there with the CRT on color gamut and contrast, even does well on speed. Or can. Mine is 120Hz and does not lag more than a CRT does on 60Hz signals.

(If you want a fast one, get one of the 3D capable TV sets from that era. They have fast video processors and basically can run at least double the necessary frame rate. And if you have an nVidia GPU and good CAD software, you can even use one as a wall sized 3D display featuring a bunch of things an ordinary set will struggle with and large assembly visualization as well as technical surfacing being two use cases I found amazing.)

AMOLED looks like it may be the next plasma. I have one from Waveshare that is 10.5" and has 2560x1600 resolution. I wish it were bigger. It is fantastic! It has a much higher DPI than my plasma does and appears to not require a PWM cycling of pixels to get those hard to hit grey levels.

I am learning I like displays where the light is not filtered down to a color, instead is just emitted at the color. Micro LED could be another contender if they can get the dot pitch high enough.

All that said, I keep a few CRT displays. I really like them for retro computing and gaming.

microLED is the next plasma, with tiny non-organic LEDs. Organic LEDs have some problems with color gamut and (AFAIR) response time that make them inferior to plasma, whereas microLED, while still exotic, is being rapidly developed.

I've even worked on a color science-related project that attempted to use LG OLED TV as a poor man's reference display, and turns out they use a lot of tricks like dithering, heavy power limiting and low brightness resolution for each subpixel that make them look bad when pixel-peeping.