It can be a rabbit hole but it ceratinly is difficult to find stuff that hasn't seen huge hours of use. I once got a 17" monitor where previous owner had accidentally spilled water into in past. I repaired the few bad parts in it and it actually gave a super bright and nicely focused image suggesting it died early on in its life and I simply lucked out with the fix. Now that monitor lives in Germany with a friend who appreciates it.

The zapping noise and blinkng is because of dust and humidity. Cleaning it all out will fix these problems. You especially want to clean up the flyback transformer and anode cable and the surroundings of them. That is where high voltages that can jump physical distances are created.

As far as motion performance goes, not even OLED exceeds that so a kinescope will have a place at least in gaming for a while longer. I think only laser based setups can possibly exceed the motion performance.

For modern gaming in the livingroom the options are a bit limited, vast majority of TVs will not take anything beyond 15KHz (240p/288p/480i/576i only) and monitors sort of top out at 20" range which is a bit too small for a livingroom environment. HD capable TVs were pretty much only sold in USA although in Europe some late-mid 90s 100Hz TVs may have VGA input that can do 480p60 and 400p70 (enough for DOS and low res Windows) but getting something that can do more is quite unlikely since there was no market demand it seems. Such TVs also crappily frame double the 15kHz sources and it makes them terrible for retro consoles etc. unless you use something like OSSC to use that VGA input when present, since it bypasses all the crappy early digital processing. VGA input in general is quite uncommon, I lucked out on a 32" kinescope from Osta.ee some years back that had VGA on some models in the same series, after a bit of hacking I gave it to the model I got and I could play Doom and Duke on it 🤣.

>small

hell nah chief we go big 21" CRT gang

@Tiido Yeah no "zapping" after cleaning. I have have been using it more than week now.
As for main Livingroom CRT setup for modern gaming I was half joking. Big CRT screens are not practical, besides finding something in perfect working order is challenge. Besides I have modern device with VGA input in my living room providing 4k@60Hz / FullHD@240Hz 92" screen. 😀 Hint: Optoma However it sadly does not support DOS resolutions. Still good one for Win9x and up retro gaming.

I'm not ruling out getting bigger PC 17" CRT monitor at some point however...