Analog video:

- RGB (including VGA) and component (YCbCr, green/blue/red RCA jacks) video are theoretically lossless encodings. S-Video blurs color information (chroma) horizontally, but has theoretically unlimited brightness (luma) bandwidth horizontally.

- Composite video (single yellow RCA plug), as well as RF, encodes color as textured patterns (a 3.58 MHz sine wave in QAM with variable amplitude and phase) added to a black-and-white signal. TVs rely on various filters to separate color and brightness information, inevitably resulting in horizontal color blur, some degree of brightness blur, and (with some video sources and TVs) horizontal changes in brightness being interpreted as color, or changes in color being interpreted as brightness dot crawl.

- - Some games were actually built to rely on composite video to blur color horizontally (https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587), or even smooth out dithering (https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1454896073508413443).

As for my personal setup, I mostly play GC/Wii games (rather than earlier generations of consoles), and run it through a component cable (lossless) at 480p (no interlacing), through a GBS-Control transcoder/scaler, into a Gateway VX720 17-inch Diamondtron VGA monitor. This monitor is useful because it's relatively compact compared to large TVs, has excellent geometry and no audible whine (31 KHz is ultrasonic), and is sharp enough to be used as a computer monitor. The downside of using this monitor with console games is that the phosphors are too fine to add texture, the image (electron beam focusing/scanline size) is too sharp to act as antialiasing like a real TV (so I have to simulate it with bilinear scaling to 960p), and it cannot display 240p games properly unless upscaled like you were displaying on a LCD.

Sometimes I also plug this monitor into my PC (RX570 -> https://plugable.com/products/dpm-vgaf) and use it as a second monitor. I bought this DP++-to-VGA dongle because I heard that DP-to-VGA dongles are less likely to have image quality problems than HDMI-to-VGA dongles, but unfortunately most of my devices don't have DP ports so I can't use this dongle with any of my laptops.

Additionally, my monitor doesn't broadcast EDID data when the front power switch is turned off (I power it down when not in use to reduce CRT wear). And my DP++-to-VGA adapter identifies itself as an "unrecognized but present output" when the VGA cable is unplugged or EDID is missing. So for my computer to properly recognize my monitor, I have to first power on the monitor and plug in the VGA cable to the dongle, then plug the dongle into the DP port (and if it's already plugged in, unplug it first, DP latch and all).

I used to have a 24-inch flat-screen Trinitron SDTV given away by another person. Unfortunately, the screen geometry linearity was poor due to high deflection angles (objects were wider in the left and right of the screen, causing scrolling 2D games to warp and distort unnaturally) and wide pincushion at the top of the screen. Additionally, the TV only ran at 15 KHz, did not support 480p from my Wii (which improves fine detail in fast motion), and had painful levels of high-pitched whine requiring I wear headphones and/or put layers of sound-muffling clothing around the TV's vents (and set up a forced-air cooling fan to replace the obstructed air circulation). I ended up giving it away for free (after two people on Facebook Marketplace ghosted me).

Sadly it's now common for eBay and Marketplace sellers to offer CRT TVs and monitors at absurdly inflated prices, waiting for a desperate buyer to pay hundreds (or thousands for BVMs and widescreen PC monitors) of dollars for a monitor, or most likely sitting on their listing for months on end with no takers. These listings tend to clog up search results if you're looking for a CRT TV. I'd advise you to look out for the occasional "free TV" Craigslist/Marketplace listings (and mythical "free VGA monitor" offers), or see if any electronics recyclers will sell their CRTs to you at a reasonable price ($40 for a 17 inch VGA isn't a small amount of money to drop, but it's downright generous compared to the average eBay scalper).