Who Still Watches a CRT Television?

[askolover]

Speedqueen - Richard

"When did you work at Gold Star? I own a 1981 Gold Star color table top set."

 

I went to work at Goldstar in 1991 after I finished college for my first career.  We made televisions for Sears, Citizen, CurtisMathis, JCPenney, and I'm sure a few others.  I usually worked on the table top models 20"-32.  Occasionally they would loan me to the console set line (I liked the console line because it moved a little slower).  I did everything from chassis assembly, white balance, color/tint, final inspection, and packaging.  It was a clean climate-controlled job.  Now Nursing is a climate-controlled job but it isn't always so clean :-(

 

[neptunebob]

If these older TVs had beautiful color,

I remember when I was a boy my dad would take me to Horne's department store and I would see color TVs where Walter Cronkite was on the news in a vivid purple, and our aunt who paid "top dollar" for everything had an RCA TV where the color image looked like a bad "acid trip". I think this might have been one reason color TV may have been slow to catch on, we did not have one until 1974. I don't think it was until about 1980 that one could buy a color set that was reliable about the image. The thinking was I would rather look at a clear B&W image than a bad color one. So why is your old TV so "beautiful" when the new ones back then looked so bad?

 

[speedqueen]

Askolover - Thanks for the information about your career at GS. Very interesting.

Neptunebob - Your aunt's set probably had thrown a 6gh8(likely the one by the color crystal), like Akronman's Magnavox, sets of this era just ate these tubes, ESPECIALLY RCA. Also, because those sets were at a department store, they might not have gotten a proper setup.

 

[daveamkrayoguy]

Surprisingly nearly all of all our old CRT's have been Color, but my grandparents bought a fairly large-sized black & white in the '70's (the thing had a jack for an earplug) to replace various black & white sets, (the one before it was a very small, compact table-top sized) then eventually in the '80's getting their very first color...

Somehow the compact CRT my wife & I had, I believe was also a color set (a surprise considering its little size) and I remember various B&W portables growing up, that my family had, which despite being an American brand, had Japanese components, inside & all breaking down, one, by one...

-- Dave

 

[askolover]

A little known fact about Goldstar televisions....we used tubes made by Phillips and Zenith (back then Zenith was not a part of LG...Lucky Goldstar), and I think occasionally I would see an RCA tube but I'm not positive about that.  At Christmas, Sears was our biggest customer and we worked overtime building sets for them.  I enjoyed that job...I later returned to college for another degree in nursing.

 

[revvinkevin]

No more CRT's for me

 

 

The last ones I had were #1, a 27" Hitachi from the mid / late 80's and #2, a 50" Toshiba rear projection.  The Hitachi was a really great TV even after 25 years with good image quality and color accuracy, plus really good stereo sound.  I was very happy with this one.

 

The first Toshiba projection TV I had was bought back under the 5 years "bumper to bumper" extended warranty.  Service tech's were never able to get the picture and color dialed in correctly and after 2.5 years, got a full refund.  When it's replacement finally died (another Toshiba) 2 or so years ago, I replaced it with a 55" Samsung LED flat panel.  Much less bulk & weight, plus a better picture too.  Have been very happy with it!

 

[lordkenmore]

I remember when I was a boy my dad would take me to Horne's department store and I would see color TVs where Walter Cronkite was on the news in a vivid purple, and our aunt who paid "top dollar" for everything had an RCA TV where the color image looked like a bad "acid trip".

 

I can't comment about 1970s color TV from personal experience. But I seem to recall reading old Mad Magazine pieces that made fun of it.


 

Also I recall a crack I read in a British electronics book: NTSC stands for Never Twice the Same Color. LOL

 

 

 

[lordkenmore]

So why is your old TV so "beautiful" when the new ones back then looked so bad?

 

I can only speculate, but maybe the TV was somehow better than what competitors were doing. Also it may be also a factor of broadcast quality--I assume the equipment TV stations use has evolved and improved over the years. The TV is only as good as the signal put into it...

 

[dartman]

I think for some sets as far as proper tint and color balance many owners didn't care that much, plus many cheap sets had sub par circuitry and really didn't resolve the color properly. I liked Zenith sets best, but many of the later sets did a good job as long as you spent some time tweaking and calibrating them properly. I always set the white balance, black level/contrast, and brightness as perfectly as I could for any decent set I rebuilt or used for myself. I had a few Magnavox late 80s sets that had a excellent picture, some of the later RCA sets could look really good, and many of the Japanese made sets in the 19" size had excellent pictures. Sony had a tube and look all their own. I usually preferred other makers sets but I did use a 26" Sony console set that looked very good, unfortunately the first big Trinitron tube had major reliability issues and they sometimes only lasted 3 to 5 years before the CRT was shot and the picture looked like crap. They didn't take a cleaning or rejuvenation well either so usually you had to buy a new or rebuilt tube to make it look good again. I did a few and they were difficult to setup and get everything right too.
Some of the cheaper early sets had a really flat picture with lousy black levels and contrast too, so you had to be picky unless all you wanted was something cheap you could sorta stand to watch that was color.