So who has the oldest Daily Watcher?

[Jeffhs]

The oldest TV in my apartment is my Zenith 19" Sentry 2 from 1995. Still works like new, great picture and all, although the paint is starting to wear off the cabinet in spots on top. The set may have 11 years on it, but in terms of actual usage, it's only four. The reason I say this is that I only used it as a daily watcher the first four years I had it; the last seven it's been sitting in my bedroom, being used only to back up the RCA CTC185 in my living room and to cross-check when the cable goes out or acts up. The fact that the Zenith was actively used only four years would likely explain why the set still works so well, although I would think the Sentry 2 model, being the little brother of the System 3 series, would have pretty much the same great picture and so forth the System 3's always had--and would last as long. I think that, the way my Sentry 2 is going now, it should last at least a few more years; in fact, I hope it does, as I intend to put it back into daily-watcher use when my CTC185 RCA eventually goes bad. The way the RCA has been running, however (seven years with only one very small repair and a fantastic picture on cable, VCR and DVD), I may not be putting that Sentry 2 into daily use again for some time.

I also had a Zenith Y121 12" b&w solid-state portable TV, bought new in 1978. The set went 22 years without one bit of trouble and was still going strong, original CRT and all, when I got rid of it in 2000 (no room in my apartment for three TVs). That set was my daily watcher for twenty-one of those years (replacing a 1969 Zenith 19" SC300 portable), until I moved here in 1999.

BTW, slightly OT, I wish that 1969 Zenith SC300 set would have worked longer than it did (I got it in 1977 as a trash-day find; it went bad the following year--horizontal output tube, hard-to-find 22-volt tube, went gassy and overbiased the AGC system, which in turn almost completely cut off the entire 3-stage IF strip, leaving me with a picture so weak it was unwatchable--and I bought the then-new Zenith solid-state 12" portable the next day). That SC300 set had an excellent picture for its age at the time, and the CRT, as far as I knew, was the original. Couldn't test the remote control functions, as the hand unit was missing (and I think the power tuning drive system may have been stripped or removed as well, as I could operate the tuner by hand with no resistance; there didn't seem to be a manual push button or bar on the front of the set to activate the power tuning either).

If I would have held on to that set, it would be a collectors' item today; not quite an antique, but a classic at 37 years. I suppose I could have found a replacement for the horizontal-output tube, but I wasn't in a position at the time to look all over town for new tubes; the only radio/TV parts store anywhere near my home at that time may not have even had tubes for a TV as old as that Zenith. Where I live now, I have to go to a TV shop in the next town south of here to get service on my solid-state sets; their technicians probably wouldn't know what they were looking at, however, if they saw the inside of a tube-powered set like my SC300, even though that shop has been in its same location since 1947. Reminds me of a cartoon I saw in an old electronics magazine years ago. Two technicians at a TV repair shop had just gotten a tube-powered TV in for repair, and they were stumped when they took the back off and saw all the tubes. One tech promptly turned to the other and said, point-blank, "What the hell is a vacuum tube?!"