>>Nothing against HDTV, but I still wish manufacturers hadn’t discontinued CRT TVs. They didn’t want to spend the money to put digital tuners in them (now a requirement).<<
I gave all my old portable tube TVs to relatives in Mexico. I did buy a HD receiver and a small portable HD TV just in case of emergency.
I understand why the FCC did what it did — those fat broadband frequencies were just begging for re-purposing. But it is and was a it of a pain in the tucas.
Oh, I would take NTSC artifacts (dot crawl and color bleed) any day over MPEG artifacts and signal breakup. The analog signals would fade, but they didn’t freeze and the sound didn’t cut out. The main advantage of digital TV is that it frees up bandwidth for HD transmission. HDTVs are also poor at handling standard-definition stuff unless you get an expensive upscaler box.
If you still want a traditional TV, you can try and get ahold of a CRT security monitor. There are still loads of them around and they’re basically just TVs without a tuner.