Widescreen/HD TV; your take on it

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My Toshiba 34hfx84 Cinama Series set was made in Chicago Illinois so I bet they took over the Zenith plant some time after LG bought them out. LG is Gold Star which were known for being horrible sets. They changed their name a bit and most of their gear is now pretty good. Their newest sets are actually very good now too, they use direct lit local dimming with a high quality ips screen on many of their better sets.
 
Yes, it was GoldStar that absorbed Zenith's consumer electronics line. Groupe Bull of France took over Zenith's computer division.

When we bought that last Zenith set I noticed that the logo had changed slightly, it was now tilted to the right. It would work right for awhile, then it wouldn't turn on and took it in to be told the power supply had a problem. This happened several times. It was a 27" portable rather than a cabineted model. Finally one night one of our dogs woke us up barking her head off. Went out into the den to find it filled with smoke and flames shooting up from the back of the set. I unplugged the set and the fire quit. We had the fire dept out and they took the set and brought it out of the house and onto the lawn. That dog didn't stop woofing at that set until it was removed a day or two later. The thing that got us was the smoke alarms didn't go off, even though the room was full of smoke.

I can't tell you the last time I even saw a Zenith set for sale. Too bad.
 
The name was still there long after the quality took a MAJOR hike. I worked on a fleet of Zeniths in 1976. Chronic vertical failures, and the horizontal section was a fire hazard. When they worked, they were 'fmeh'.
 
@arbilab,

Funny you should mention that. We had a 19 inch Zenith from that time frame that drove us crazy. It was a hybrid set, and the picture was constantly going out. It was always in the shop. It was the main TV set also. When that tubed Maggie came along, we almost replaced the Zenith with that one because it was turning out to be more reliable.

The Zenith was replaced by an RCA and I just kept using the Maggie.
 
Still have a 90's era 31" Sony Trinitron in the spare bedroom. It has a great picture and color, and even the sound is pretty good. Weighs a ton, too. I've ditched the smaller CRT sets (A Toshiba and another Sony) but will probably keep this around for a while longer.

 

IMHO the best flat panels for color, definition, and contrast were and still are the plasma displays.

 
 
It's a whole different world...

Things have sure changed with regards to televisions since I was a TV Buyer for a department store back in the 1970's. 25" was pretty much the max then until those projection units started appearing. Zenith, RCA, Magnavox and a few other US brands were still on top. This was a San Francisco-based store and the Northern California educated customer readily accepted Sony with it's quality picture, but when we started advertising sets like Hitachi and Sanyo my desk was flooded with hate mail...shades of "Mad Men".

 

I'm very impressed with today's big screen televisions. I like the comments on here concerning curved screens. Unless you're sitting a foot away I'm not sure what their purpose is. Perhaps you need to own one. Since I spend a great deal of time in my office/computer room I watch almost all television on a 9" Sony I purchased in the early 80's. Sometimes I watch cable TV on a 7" tablet. I'm fine with that too. I do have a projection system with a big ol' screen that comes down from the living room ceiling but it's rarely used. 
 
Currently I'm enjoying streaming video content from my smartphone or new i3 notebook computer to the 42" flat screen in the living room, via a Chromecast gadget and a wi-fi repeater. When it's working it's just like broadcast or cable TV.
 
The 'fleet' Zeniths (OKC Presbyterian Hospital) were all transistor. When you've got several hundred of the exact same thing, excellent opportunity to observe what they did wrong.

The horizontal problem was a single part, a 4-wire capacitor. Replacing them was mandatory fleet-wide as they were a safety hazard. Though we never actually saw a failed one.

The vertical problem, they ALL failed eventually. They had a rigid mount of the vertical outputs with no strain relief. The transistors ran extremely hot. At which temp the leads expanded and broke their internal bonds. All they needed to do was bend a knee into the leads so the expansion had someplace non-destructive to go.

Had they actually tested the damn things more than 15 minutes it would have become obvious. But no. And this pattern of oblivious engineering was by no means confined to Zenith, or televisions. Wonder why your FL fails all attempts at spinning? Umm-hmm.
 
>Had they actually tested the damn things more than 15 minutes it would have become obvious.

Testing? Testing? Who has time for THAT? There are TVS to be made, and profits to be had!!!!
 
When I worked for Goldstar

in their Alabama plant, we used Zenith and Philips/Magnavox picture tubes, and I want to say some RCA tubes as well, depending on the size needed (that was 23 years ago so can't remember for sure).  We built sets with the Goldstar name on them of course, but also LXI for Sears, Citizen, I think JCPenney, and it seems like Curtis Mathis.
 

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