I want to know the answer to this too. When I was a kid and videocassettes were the only common form of video media, nobody ever said “VHS player.” It was just “VCR.”
When and why did this switch happen?
I refuse to ever bring another CRT of any kind into the house. They are so damned heavy, such a nightmare to move: it has nothing to do with picture quality, and everything to do with mobility.
That said, my cheapskate heritage is showing: I was delighted when our 15 year old CRT broke a couple years ago because we finally upgraded to the flat screen. Before I read this thread, it never occurred to me that people replaced working TVs.
Check Woot and Newegg. You can get much better deals than that.
I swapped all the CRT televisions and monitors in the house for LCD flat screens two years ago, and never loomed back. I agree that a high-resolution CRT offers a superior display to a pre-LED LCD. However, there’s the bulk factor. My 21" CRT monitor destroyed my desk by bowing the wood; I could not bow it back to level. The TVs and monitors are effortless to move, and their boxes easy to store. They’re just more practical.
I bought a 32" 1080p LG flat-screen for my Dad, who’s now in a nursing home. Normally a Luddite, he LOVES it, saying he never knew what he was missing.
Also, my family always called it a VCR. However, my Mom was director of operations for a large video store chain, so that was the terminology used.
Wow. Thanks for all the replies. Keep them coming. I live in Canada and I feel that the flat screen plasma/lcd TV has become a status symbol. It really has. Everyone wants the bigger better flat screen TV.
I still can’t justify buying one when the old school TV I bought works perfectly fine and I paid 1100.00 dollars for it.
As I mentioned my FIL bought a flat screen TV and he had an old school TV that was working fine. He bought ANOTHER flat screen TV just because it was 46 inches and it was on sale. In my opinion this is a new cultural phenomenon that can be called “screen envy”.
My husband jokingly asked his father if he could have the older flat screen TV and my FIL looked at him like he had gone out of his mind and responded “yeah right”.
We have a 36" JVC CRT in the bedroom which my wife watches all day every day. I was going to replace it for Xmas with a flat-screen HDTV, but feeling her out about it yielded negative results. She will not replace it primarily because it fits perfectly in the armoire in which it’s situated. Also, she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about HD. As a geek, I am somewhat offended by this.
The only HDTV in my house is a big old 55" Mitsubishi projection TV which I watch from time-to-time mainly for sports.
For the last 10 years our primary TV has been a 32-inch Sony CRT.
That’s changing real soon, though. I am in the process of building a home theater in the basement. It’s 99% finished. It will have a 103-inch screen, projector, and 7.1 sound.
I’ve had a few CRT TVs because they’re being literally given away. If they all disappeared, I wouldn’t be able to afford a flat screen.
When we remodeled the upstairs living room, our older 36" CRT TV didn’t fit (by about 1" of space) so we moved it into the family room - and it weighs a ton, so it will remain there. It does have a great picture though. Plus, we bought it about 12 seconds before the flat screens became somewhat affordable.
We have a 25" CTR in the guest bedroom - bought it in 1988 and it still works great.
Have another 27" CTR in our bedroom that we inherited - again, great picture and works fine.
We did buy a new plasma television after the living room was remodeled - damn thing cost $1,500 and now you can get the same (or better) for about $450.
CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is in Las Vegas now, with all the new gizmos and gadgets and the local news is covering it daily.
The new thing?
They showed a 92" LCD flat screen, thin as a quarter, that shows films and TV shows in 3D - and it costs $6,000.
Even if I had the money, we wouldn’t know where to put that monster - plus, by the time I got it home it would cost $5,000 and by the time I figured out how to work all the bells and whistles, you will be able to buy one for $900.
use it for it’s functioning lifetime.
I was joking with my best friend the other day about how he and I are the most financially stable people we know, and we’re also the only ones without a flatscreen TV*! 
I do really want one, but I can’t justify the cost just yet. It’s in my budget for this year’s tax refund, tho!
I run my computer off my TV. My previous TV was a 21" CRT monitor. Then my folks got a flatscreen and I upgraded to using their 27" CRT television. Looks and works great, only my video card can only display 640x480 on it so it really sucks to try to do anything computer-y on it. I do have a digital converter box for the TV on the rare occasions I watch broadcast (football).
I agree with people who said they upgraded because of size/convenience. I used to have to help my parents any time they needed to move the TV to re-arrange their family room. Now, they do it all the time by themselves (yes, they re-arrange their family room all the time). I think having a nice light television set is awesome and I look forward to it.
*I am not saying everyone who has a flatscreen is bad with money. I don’t think that at all. Just me and my friend know so many people who have bad money problems and they all have nicer televisions than us!
there were and are now devices that only play the tapes, both external and internal to a tv.
yeah but I don’t think most people care about being that technically accurate when talking about them
I’d suspect it is something more to do with trying to make a phrase analogous to “DVD Player”
“VHS Player” works
The use of “VCR” was itself a bit of an anomaly-- VCR was originally the brand name of a specific pre-VHS videocassette format (standing for the exceedingly bland “Video Cassette Recording”); I’m guessing the industry needed a handy term for the concept of a tape deck that recorded video, and the Philips coinage was a sufficiently generic name that conveyed the entire concept efficiently, but I’m surprised that informal usage didn’t settle on “video deck” or “VHS deck” or something similarly derived from the world of hi-fi cassette/tape components, or settle instead on simply using “Beta” or “VHS” rather than the clunky “Beta VCR” and “VHS VCR.”
I do think that manufacturers would have shunned “<videotape format> player” back in the day since the primary selling point of the cassette formats was that they could record, unlike the competing disc formats.
I still have two CRTs, and I don’t really watch much TV, and watch movies on a computer pretty much always. No cable, neither – 1 (one) DTV box. Works fine for me, except that I have an OK stereo system and an OK mixer that is good enough for live music, but not for hi-fi sound, and it hurts my ears to hear bad (=any) sound through those crummy 1" speakers built into most CRTs, and no way to get an output for the sound except through the earphone jack for broadcast TV.
I’m with ya bro, old school all the way.
ETA: my DTV box has separate audio outs, I just don’t use them.
I have a 27" Toshiba CRT in my bedroom, which I sometimes have hockey or baseball on. I can’t think of a good reason to spend money to replace it. For HD stuff, I have an LCD in the living room, not that I watch it much, either.
Wow, I guess I’m the odd man out. I haven’t had a CRT TV in my house for several years. I’ve got 4 LCD TV’s (ranging from 20-52 inches)… 5 if you count the one in the van.
We have old-school CRT televisions. (We also have big clunky monitors.) We seem to have an almost endless free supply available via Freecycle. I’d rather have lighter, less bulky devices, but “free” fits our budget.
Seconded. We have a CRT that was bought in 2001. It works fine, and as long as it continues to do so, we won’t be replacing it, even though it is kind of a pain in the ass that it doesn’t have all of the cool ports and jacks that newer flat-screens do. Also, the edges of all broadcast TV are cut off on our screen. Annoying, but not annoying enough to drop a bunch of dough on replacing a perfectly functional television set.