Conclusion:

This monitor is without a doubt a very fascinating piece of hardware. It's a wonderful toy for adults. There is so much time you can spend tinkering with this box. There is so much to take in if you've never dealt with something similar.

It can be used as a TV, but it is no TV and that's its biggest weakness. It has the size of a TV, but the brightness and characteristics of a desktop monitor.

Watching movies on it can be very enjoyable if your room is dark enough and the movie is bright enough. You can get really pretty colors with this monitor. Especially the reds are impressive, possibly the best reds I've seen yet.
But watching movies with dark visuals is just not much fun with this monitor. The same goes for games with dark visuals. The old games I'm playing are mostly bright and colorful. But look at more recent games, there is a lot of dark stuff out there.

It's really cool to have something where you can play an old game in its native resolution one moment and in the next watch some TV in HD. I like the modularity of this monitor. I love how much freedom you have in configuring channels. But in the end, the lack of brightness just doesn't really make me happy. Okay, this also has its advantages, the BVM is much easier on the eyes. Since it is not that bright you don't notice the flickering as much as with a bright CRT TV.

As a one device solution for my needs, it is a bit better than the TVs I have. If I would rate it on a scale from 0 to 10, I would give the BVM D32 something like 7.4. The Philips is not much worse overall I might rate it at 7.2 and the Panasonc LCD at 6.5.

If you have the room for an extra gaming corner or an extra gaming room, then using a good CRT TV plus a modern flatscreen TV is clearly the better solution. But I don't.

Getting this monitor made me appreciate the quality of the CRTs I already had, more than before. The picture of the Samtron 98PDF, a monitor that cost a mere 200 EUR in its days, absolutely doesn't need to hide behind the BVM. The Philips TV might not be as sharp as the BVM but the brightness counter balances that really well. Playing 240p games on the Philips TV is not any worse than playing on the BVM, it's just different. And watching high definition movies on it downscaled to 576i50 looks surprisingly good. The amount of detail with that screen size is almost enough for me. The flickering is not that cool of course. If the Philips TV could display 720x576 progressively at 60hz, I think I would stop using the BVM.

For now I will continue to use it. Until I find something that satisfies me more... or until I'm getting tired of it... or until it stops working.