Harmy said:

I'm sure there are parts of the world, where people are still watching B&W TVs but that doesn't mean, that B&W TVs aren't dead technology (not to mention, that there are parts of the world, where people don't even have electricity).

As mentioned by another poster, recent movies are still being released on VCD, so it is not a dead format.

SilverWook said:

That makes me wonder if a digital tuner would even work with a monochrome set?

Yes, it would work fine. It just needs to output an NTSC signal, which all of those digital tuner boxes that you use with older TVs do. NTSC was specifically designed to support color and be backward-compatible with black & white.

Black & white CRTs have an extremely high quality image potential. Just play a game of e.g. Asteroids or any other black & white vector arade game to see it. The reason for that is: the inside of the CRT is only coated with a solid sheet of white phosphor rather than droplets of red, green, and blue phosphors in a triad arrangement. This means that black & white CRTs never have any convergence issues, because there is nothing to converge (only one gun instead of three). On top of that, black & white TV have no shadow mask or aperture grille, so there is nothing between the glass and the phosphor impeding the brightness or breaking up the image. This is why the color vector arcade games don't have such razor sharp lines with such an intense glow as the black & white vector games.