Olafur and Andi,
For what it's worth, here is a personal experience of mine when it comes to the CRT style displays.
I have always invested heavily into the displays, primarily because given today's way of "human computer interface" the display is really how we gather much of the information. This is slowly starting to change, tablets and mobile computing in general are a good indicator of this, however, we are not quite there yet.
So...in my previous high-res setups I have used Mitsubishi displays (yeah, the price tag was somewhat astronomical, even by today's standards)...specifically, the last model prior to switching to the LCD panel (Samsung 214T) was the DiamondPro 1010. This 21" CRT was fully capable of displaying 1800 x 1440/76 Hz NI resolution providing a pretty decent 0.26 mm aperture grille pitch. While my Matrox cards had no problem driving the monitor, especially since I was using heavily shielded BNC cabling (each cable carrying separate RBG signals), the attempts to use 1800x1440 resolution on a 21" CRT panel (remember the darn CRT geometry problems??? even with a high-end aperture grille displays like the 1010 you always fought the converegence issue - separate beams not quite aligning on the surface of the display thus causing a drift and fuzziness). The end result was that the 21" CRT (which really was a 19.7" diagonal display size) was far too small of a format for this high of a resolution unless you were doing pure CAD/graphics work. The text, especially smaller fonts was simply hard to deal with. I ended up running 1600x1200 on that display and was extremely happy with it for quite a number of years.
I've attached the monitor spec file if you are interested in the details.
Now, once I upgraded to my Samsung 214T LCD, boy, all geometry issues went away...yeah, the colour was never the same, but how could it when compared to an extremely high end CRT display like the 1010? I accepted that because for me geometry rendering was far more important. Moving on to the 245T display simply carried on with the display resolution progression, that gave me 1920x1200 but required me to move to a DVI connector video adapter, which was the ATI X850, top-of-the-line in SNAP supported video chipsets at that time.