You can get pretty close to an HDTV with nothing but a dumb VGA monitor. Context: as late as 2012, I had nothing but two Sun Microsystems (rebranded Sony) 19"

You can get pretty close to an HDTV with nothing but a dumb VGA monitor. Context: as late as 2012, I had nothing but two Sun Microsystems (rebranded Sony) 19" Trinitron CRTs. The picture quality on these monitors was _phenominal_, and I kept it as long as I could, before the siren song of more desk space got me to give them up. To get from component video to VGA, I had a color space converter. Then I hooked up a 3x component switcher to give me a few more inputs - for the game consoles, of course. To get television, I had an old DirecTV tuner with a VGA output. I didn't actually have DirecTV service, but it had an NTSC/ATSC tuner, to which I had a pair of rabbit ears hooked up. To get composite and S-video input, I had an RF modulator. The DirecTV tuner tuned to channel 3 would show whatever was on that. The weak link, of course, was HDMI - an HDMI to analog converter was, at the time, more expensive than real televisions (this article appears to show that this is no longer the case).