Ok, so heres my two pence worth, as there are two main sorts of crt, aperture grill and shadow mask, there so happens to be two dissimilar ways of using the technology.
aperture grill uses a triangle of guns, 120degrees apart, and the aperture at the front end has the holes for the electrons to fire through in a triangle type shape.
shadow mask has the three electron guns lined up horizontally so there often appears to be three lines of colours. thus if you use a magnifying glass you can often diferentiate these technologies easily.
the dot pitch combined with the refresh rates in the horizontal plane are still the issue. lower dot pitch and higher refresh is preferable, but keep an eye on geometry and loss of cohesion in the corners.
shadow mask also uses two thin wires at about 1/3 2/3 up the screen, these are neccessary evils, in the begining of thes tech, the mask used to distort, casuing all sorts of picture issues, the wires are basically a system of supporting the mask.
nuff said. I'm off to buy a iiyama 451 pro.........