Nowaday names don't mean much

[andy]

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[colorfixer]

I can remember the first time I saw a Zenith FTM CRT monitor at the UBC in 1988. The display was so flat it had the appearance of bowing inward!

I think I recall an article that indicated Zenith had issues with yields in making the FTM tube in regular television sizes like 20 and 26". I imagine that such a tube would weigh something akin to a comparable Wega or more.

I came across a new in box FTM monitor a while back. Every pot in the thing needed going over with Cailube, and it was filled with those pink painted hex screws... The picture is breathtaking, but like it was said, fixed frequency monitors were getting dated in '88. My first 20" VGA monitor was a NEC multisync XL. It still works, and at 1024x768. I find it interesting that the FTM tube still used a round dot trio mask/phosphor rather than stripes.

[jshorva65]

A transcript of a speech given by a prominent official in the Chinese government in too public of a forum was leaked via the Internet some time ago, resulting in this official's loss of his title for having "let the cat out of the bag" about China's plans to conquer the West (starting with Amerrica) for its food production capabilities (land for farming and a population to enslave as at-gunpoint farm workers under Communism) and discussed plans of a massive bioweapon attack aimed at killing enough Americans to beat us into submission for conquest by China. Every one of those Chinese slave-manufactured products feeds the Communist military monster and finances its bioweapons laboratories, but many officials in our own government are wholly bought and paid for with campaign contributions from China laundered through other channels.

I have a still-working-like-new "Assembled in Greenville, TN" Magnavox 25" stereo monitor set with PIP in the small home theater setup in my living room. The thing is as old as my child, but the set is well maintained. I also have two "roundie" color sets in my personal collection along with many early postwar B/W sets. No plans of buying a new set any time soon here, even after conventional NTSC format is phased out as a broadcast standard. The quality of today's programming is so intolerably filled with anti-American propaganda that I don't even recall the last time I watched an entire program before turning off the set in disgust after enduring one too many racist stabs at my European heritage in the show's dialogue.

Yes, I drink beer from a bottle and watch partial NASCAR races just to keep track of the curreent leader. I also have two Technology degrees. I'm proud to be an intelligent AND educated REDNECK. lol Incidentally, "Redneck" is a reference to the "farmer's tan" which is a product of working outdoors ... NOT a reference to a predisposition to commit murder by lynching as some well-financed poverty pimps seem to insist.

My earliest "roundie" memories involved Sunday afternoons at my grandparents' house, three '66 Zenith color sets tuned to three different football games, and fried chicken made using my family's own secret recipe. I was also a huge fan of "Lost in Space" and recall watching syndicated reruns of the show's second and third season color episodes on one of those sets during other visits. As for my family having three '66 Zenith color sets in 1969-70, what can I say. We owned a trailer park. Grandma's brother owned a restaurant / bar in town, known for the same fried chicken recipe, and his three children each operated restaurant-only locations in the suburbs. I come from a long line of micro-entrepreneurs who fled Eastern Europe just before the descent of the Iron Curtain which trapped many devout Christians like my own ancestors who were not quite so fortunate as to realize that the 1905 attempt to overthrow the (not perfect, but far more merciful than the Bolsheviks) Czar would be repeated and thus begin to plan their escape to the religious freedom for which America was once known.

After I had moved 40 miles away to attend college in the 80's, the still-working sets got sold to tenants who couldn't afford new color sets because my grandparents weren't getting around as well and bought new Magnavox sets with remote control.

[andy]

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[peverett]

IBM may have sold their PC business, but they are one of the few companies developing high performance semiconductor processes at .045 u and below. Intel and TSMC (of Taiwan) being the others that I am aware of. This is a very expensive effort, so they are far from a name only. TI just recently gave their effort up.

[Whirled One]

Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV

Unless we in the USA want protectionist laws, the changes in industries are almost always going to be due to consumer choices. How many of us really still buy most of our hardware, paint, and tools, for example, at a local hardware store rather than at Home Depot or Lowe's? The word most there was important, because if we make our big shopping trips to the "big-box" stores and just get the occasional screwdriver or couple of bolts at the neighborhood store, it is "our own fault" when the little store closes.

You're absolutely right. The reason why there are no American companies left that make TVs (or any number of other products) is because we really can't compete on price. Go back to the late-70's to 1980 era (about the last years there were several TV manufacturers in the USA), and look how expensive TVs actually were compared with today. According to the 1978 Admiral dealer catalog, the *cheapest* 19" color TV (a basic table model) had a list price of $399.95 and dealer net of $314.55. That's roughly $1240 and $975 in today's money according to the CPI Inflation Calculator. The cheapest 25" color TV (a console in simulated walnut) had a list price of $609.95 and net price of $494.25. That's about $1890 and $1530 respectively in 2007 dollars.

Today, you can walk into any discount chain store and buy a new 19" color TV (such as those typically made by Funai in China) for under $100. I don't think you can still buy an NTSC-only 25" or larger TV any longer, but when they were last still offered, they could be bought for as low as around $150. Anyway, using the 19" set as an example, if you went to the store and saw a Chinese-made 19" color TV for $100, and a USA-made 19" color TV next to it for $1200, which do you think most people would choose? ...Especially if the $100 TV had a full-function remote control, cable-ready tuner, A/V input jacks, closed-caption decoder-- all of which were lacking in the $1200 TV. Granted, this is a gross exaggeration-- obviously, today an American company could build a modern 19" color TV to retail for a *lot* less than $1200, but think about it-- how can anybody make money selling a (relatively) large CRT color TV set for under a hundred bucks?? After all, the dealer and the manufacturer have to make something on the deal, and there are lots of overhead costs (including shipping/transportation) that are included in the price of the TV that have nothing to do with the manufacturing itself. Even with the slim margins on electronics that mass-retailers generally work with, and even with factory-direct shipping to the retailer, that $100 TV set must have had to cost less than $60 to produce at the factory, including all materials, labor, rent/property, machining/tooling, and taxes. Yow!
That's why we don't make stuff like that in the USA any longer.

In consumer electronics, this trend really started with transistor radios in the early 1960's. Within just a few years, there were hardly any small transistor radios made in the USA. Who was going to buy an American-made transistor radio when you could buy a Japanese-made one for half the money, and worked about as well? The American manufacturers didn't mind either, since little transistor radios had quickly become such a low-profit-margin commodity anyway-- it was easier to make money with high-ticket items like color TVs anyway, and it's not like the Japanese companies were going to actually be able to build a decent big-screen color TV anytime soon, right? Now even Japan has lost that market to China and other nations.

Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV

Also, I do not understand the singling out of Wal-Mart for driving manufacturing out of the USA. Wal-Mart, as far as I know, has only truly been a huge force in U.S. retailing for maybe the past 15 or maybe 20 years (since it expanded from only rural areas into the cities and suburbs), but the shrinking of U.S. manufaturing has been constant and continuous for 40 years.

Exactly. Also, my experience has been that Wal-Mart has generally been much better than other mass-retailers at trying to carry American-made products when possible. I also collect cameras, and the last two American companies that still made consumer-grade cameras in the USA (aside from some disposable cameras) were Polaroid and Keystone. Polaroid gradually shifted production away from the USA and the UK, with some models starting out as USA- or UK- made but then shifting elsewhere over time. A big example was the preennial OneStep 600 in its various guises. I think it was during its run as the "OneStep 600 Flash Close-Up" when I started seeing it shift production locations, but perhaps it was the earlier "OneStep 600 Flash" model. Anyway, it started out appearing to be entirely USA-made (at least those for the USA market), but then I started noticing in the stores ones that were instead made in Mexico or China (I'm thinking there may have also been some Brazilian ones or something too). I started watching this more closely and noticed that pretty soon Wal-Marts were the only store that still generally had USA-made OneSteps, while Target and K-Mart and such had only the Mexican and Chinese ones. I believe the last USA-made Polaroid camera was the Captiva (and as far as I know, all Captivas were made in the USA), and Wal-Mart was by far the last of the big mass-marketers that continued to carry the Captiva even after it had ceased being much of a big seller. Wal-Mart was also the last big chain store that I saw consistently carrying the Keystone line of point-and-shoot cameras when they were still made in the USA. Then there was the time 5 or 6 years ago when I went out to get a toaster. Nothing fancy, just a plain-ol' pop-up toaster. I planned to buy a Toastmaster pretty much for 'historical' reasons, but also because I figured it was still made in USA. Went to Target, and aaaaaah-- what's this..? They had Toastmasters, but they were made in Mexico..? They also looked more 'curvy' and bulkier than the last Toastmaster toasters I had seen in a store. When did that change, I wondered. I checked all the other toasters, and they were all made in Mexico or China. Went to K-Mart, same thing. Went to Wal-Mart, and what do you know-- they had USA-made Toastmaster toasters. They also had USA-made Proctor-Silex toasters. ...And they weren't any more expensive than the Mexican and Chinese made ones at the other stores (though they had the more squared-off lines of an earlier generation of toasters). In fact, they had a nice end-cap display of the USA-made Toastmaster toasters with a free box of Pop-Tarts packed right in the box. ...Not a coupon for free Pop-Tarts, mind you, but an actual box of Pop-Tarts packed right with the toaster. ...And all for about ten bucks. [Would a tie-in like that even work out well if the toaster was built and packaged overseas..?] I checked Wal-Mart several months later, and sure enough, no more USA-made Toastmasters. I think they may have still had USA-made Proctor-Silex toasters, but nowadays I don't think any of them are made in USA, and the last time I noticed, Toastmaster toasters were all made in China. So apparently I now have one of the last USA-made Toastmaster toasters... Kinda sad, really.
Oh, and as far as I know, Wal-Mart was also one of the last mass-merchandisers that still consistently carried USA-made Westclox ("Big Ben") alarm clocks (which are now made in China), and Wahl electric shavers (I think they still make hair-cutting and other grooming equipment, but not shavers).

Anyway, this isn't supposed to really be a gripe/complaint about non-USA products or the sellers thereof-- it's all really a result of the world we live in today and the realities thereof...

[dr.ido]

I think that AWA was one of the last if not the last company to manufacture TVs in Australia. For a while they were sticking there name on some cheap nasty Onwa sets while still manufacturing some higher end sets here. Not long after that they went to only rebadging Onwa crap (exactly the same sets that were also sold under the Masuda and Akai brands). On the last curbside collection collection I saw what had to be one of their last Australian made sets, a stereo 26" set with AV inputs in a full sized wood (well chipboard) console cabinet. I wanted to grab it, but it was simply too big for me to handle on my own. The AWA brand disappeared totally for a while, but has recently reappeared on the same silver plastic sets sold under many, many, different brand names. A while back I was looking through one of those chinese export sites. The quantity price (minimum a container load) on these sets starts at $30 for the 14" up to $60 for the 27" with whatever brand name you like on them.

I had one of those 14" Zenith monitors, but I never bothered to get it going. It wasn't worth it for 640x480. I wonder if they were at all related to the flat screen Idek monitors that came out at around the same time. They were the flattest screen monitors I owned until I got a Diamondtron when Gateway closed down. I had a couple of the MF-5150 15", they'd do 15-38kHz making them one of the best Amiga monitors. I remember lusting after the 21" version, but I never did find one. I think the 21" model would probably beat the Diamondtron in picture quality if it still had a good CRT.

I'm typing this on the Thinkpad 600X that is my daily driver (I still have my 310ED, 560X and a couple of 600Es). I've yet to actually lay my hands on a Lenovo Thinkpad, but something tells me they just won't feel the same. I use Thinkpads exclusively for the feel/action of the keyboard/trackpoint. I just can't stand the feel of other laptop keyboards or those rotten touch pad things. I've got a much faster Toshiba laptop sitting here doing nothing because I find it so awful to use.

[Pete Deksnis]

Originally Posted by Whirled One

...American manufacturers didn't mind either, since little transistor radios had quickly become such a low-profit-margin commodity anyway-- it was easier to make money with high-ticket items.

I can confirm that. A GE public relations guy fixed that in my young Editor-head in the early seventies when he said "...sure, we can set up a line to make transistor radios at a profit. But why?"

[andy]

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[jedo1507r]

Whirled One, good thing you've brought up Polaroid Captiva cameras, the interesting part of the model's history was its tie-in on WGN's "Bozo Super Sunday" show in the early 1990s (I was little, so that's how I know).

dr.Ido, I had a friend with a "Sony" VCD player that resembled a Technics minisystem, didn't last too long - like most inexpensive video players. Turned out the same as you posted, a company had pallets of these things with the brand of your choice.

The infiltration of Chinese-imported RPTVs is an interesting thing. Back in 2003, Apex (known for their DVD players) sold some of their 46-inch 4:3 sets at/around $800 or so, but as far as I know the store that carried them had a couple of them in repair and seriously discouraged those models. Typically these RPTV sets are made either in Mexico (Thomson, Mitsubishi) or in the States (Philips, Sony). Of course, Apex has scaled down their presence, not sure but the company/distributor was in some legal trouble or something; or was that Cyberhome and the MPAA?

[andy]

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[bigolds98]

The last thing I am going to say on this subject is this. If you want to know the truth about Wal-mart and how they have cost the jobs of thousands of Americans I mean the jobs that pay paid a living wage not the the seven dollar and fifty cent an hour jobs that they create. Please read these books. "Take this Job and Ship it." By Senator Byron Dorgan. When I read this book it made me so mad I had a headache for a week. In it tells how Wal-Mart being the largest retailer in the World forces it's suppliers to charge less and less for there goods. Forcing once American made product companies to have no other choice but to close up shop here in the USA throwing people out of work and moving production to China. I still have not seen the benefit of any major savings on anything. One example and there are millions of examples. Is I bought a Hoover vacuum 3 years ago. It was made in Canton Ohio. I paid $100.00 dollars for it at Target. Since then the Hoover vacuum cleaner factory in Canton has closed the workers were making 20 dollars an hour and is now building them in China and Mexico. The same vacuum today made in China is still 100 dollars. The reason Hoover moved production to China and Mexico was that Wal-Mart wanted them to continue selling the vacuums at their stores but could not sell them to Wal-Mart at the lower price they wanted to pay for each vacuum. Hoover said No to Wal-mart. Well seeing that Wal-mart is the largest retailer/seller of Hoover vaccums Hoovers sales fell off so bad they had no choice to throw everone out of work and go to China/Mexico. This is just one Example. There is Radio Flier wagons, Etch-a-sketch and a billion more this has happend too. It also why wages have gone backwards not forwards in this country. Please read this book it is not just on Wal-Mart it is on how the Middle Class in this country is disapearing at an alarming rate and how corperate America runs the government. The other book is by Lou Dobbs called "War on the Middle Class". It is just as good. There was a Time when I shopped at Wal-Mart it is when Sam Walton was still alive and prided himself on having American made goods in his stores. When he died that all changed. I don't want to change peoples minds. I just want people to look at the big picture and make up their own minds.

So anyways now onto TV's. In the next couple of weeks I will be taking my CTC-5 "Wescott" into a TV repair guy that said he would work on it. All of my freinds can't wait to see it working again. I just hope it doesn't cost a fortune to get it working again. Sorry for the rant.

[peverett]

Not too long ago I read a story about the demise of Cannon towls that echos what Andy and bigolds98 said about Wal Mart.

I have also read that 90+% of Costco and Target's employees have employer supplied health insurance, but less than 60% of Wal-Marts employees do. (Wal-Mart would rather us tax payers supply it through Medicaid, etc.) For the reasons mentioned above and by several other posters, I try to avoid shopping there.

[dr.ido]

Originally Posted by jedo1507r

dr.Ido, I had a friend with a "Sony" VCD player that resembled a Technics minisystem, didn't last too long - like most inexpensive video players. Turned out the same as you posted, a company had pallets of these things with the brand of your choice.

Argh! I know exactly which player you're referring to. They were sold here with Sony and/or other labels on them (literally, I found one that was marked Sony on the front, but with some other house brand on the back). Both the S-video jack and the fuse holder on the back panel were purely cosmetic. Not only were they not connected, they didn't even have any metal contacts in them. The power supply was not fused. I wonder if any of them ever caught fire.

At least even the cheapest, nastiest, crappiest DVD players I've seen have an actual fuse on the primary side of the power supply.

[Richard D]

I have found that some transformers in cheap electronics do have a primary fuse, it is located in the transformer under the cardboard covering the primary side. It is connected between the input wire and the begining of the windings. Sometimes if you are carefull you can cut the cardboard vertically with an Exacto blade and peel back the layers to get to the fuse. It can be a pain, but if you have a transformer with multi-tap secondarys that is impossible to find and it presents with the primary open, it's worth the look. All you have to lose is some time. Crown Power Amps do it right, they have the normal fuse holder on the rear panel, plus there is another one inside the amp, rated at 1 amp higher so when the road tech wraps a fuse with foil and makes it a zillion amp no-blow fuse, the amp has an internal backup.
Richard.