What is it with 1990's Zenith televisions?
 

I know Zenith's overall quality went downhill after the golden age of television, but GEEZ!

I own or have owned several Zenith televisions all made in the 90's. All of them have problems with the CRT.

1994 25" Zenith. I forget the model number. The picture was sharp, but dim. So dim I had to adjust the flyback to brighten it. It also had color bleeding and poor contrast.

1992 25" Zenith console TV. Found on curbside. Picture tube was very dim. So dim that even with flyback adjustments it was unwatchable.

1997 27" Hitachi. It's a Zenith with the Hitachi name. It has Zenith guts and a Zenith CRT. I've grown to hate this one. I mean I really hate this TV. The middle of the screen has a decent picture, but the edges have such poor convergence that small text is unreadable, and no amount of playing with the yoke or ring magnets will fix it. The tube also has color bleeding, usually bright red or orange.

1998 27" Zenith A27A23W. The best 90's Zenith I own. It hasn't seen a whole lot of use in its lifetime, but already the corner convergence is not as good as in the middle of the screen. Playing with the yoke helped somewhat, but it's still noticeable if I look for it, and I suspect it will only get worse.



I have found TV's from the 1980's and 70's that are still going strong. I had an RCA Colortrak TV from 1991 that had such a good picture that I would have kept it if I hadn't found a newer and bigger RCA Colortrak TV. I've messed with various models of RCA TV's made throughout the 90's, and the picture tube usually had a lot of life left in it.

What happened to Zenith in the 90's, and is their new stuff just as crappy?

I too would like to know what Zenith did to cause their CRT's to be so bad. I heard somewhere that the aquadag coating would flake off inside the tube and cause shorts; but, I don't know how true that it. There was a Zenith dealer in town that used to give me all their Zenith sets that were not approved for repair (so they wouldn't have to toss them). I'd say 95% of the ones made in the '90's had some sort of CRT defect. Most of them had shorted CRT's that burned up the power supply or video drive components. Others were so weak that the picture was lousy. Any attempt to rejuvenate them would usually make them worse. Even if they did come back; they didn't last long. These would have been decent sets had the CRT been of good quality. The chassis wasn't a '70's Chromacolor; but, they were usually simple to repair. That rebranded Hitachi is interesting. I've seen some Ward's sets that were Zenith made and I've seen some GoldStar sets with Zenith branded CRT's (also bad).

It's amazing that a lot of sets from the '70's and '80's still have the original CRT's that test almost new; but, a set that's only a few years old has a worn out CRT. That should tell us something about the products of yesteryear.

I suspect these "bad Zenith" sets will be harder to find in 30 years than some of the sets we now collect from the '70's and earlier. It seems like I find more '80's sets than those '90's Zenith's (thank goodness).

I know my 1982 Zenith System 3 when it was fixed last, 1999 I think, the guy who fixed it said the CRT was still very good but showing its age a little. The only difference I notice is that it take about a minute or two to go to the brightness we want instead of like 10 or 15 seconds but we still have an excellent picture that is just as good as it was when we got it in early 1983.

It's because Zenith is losing competition to Japanese makers, like Sony, Panasonic, and Toshiba. You don't want to know how many people own a mid-90s Sony, Panasonic, or Toshiba TV. It's like many. That caused Zenith to go bankrupt in 1995, and it was brought up by GoldStar (now LG Electronics).

I have a Zenith SMS1917SG "Sentry 2" 19" color TV that still works after 12 years--great picture, sound and everything else. No problems whatsoever with the set in all that time, although it hasn't seen much use since I moved here almost eight years ago (I bought a 19" RCA in late 1999 and put the Zenith in my bedroom; the Zenith hasn't been used much except for cross-checking on those rare occasions, and I do mean rare, when I have trouble with the cable). The most continuous use the Zenith has seen was the first four years I had it; it was my main set in the living room of my former home. I did use it at my current residence for about two weeks when my RCA set was in for repairs, but other than that the Zenith has been sitting in the bedroom getting very little use. Its CRT is still as strong as when the set was new in 1995. This surprises me because of all the posts I've read here about 1990s-era Zenith televisions being nothing but trouble; bad CRTs, HV regulation problems, power supply failures and so on. I must have been lucky to have gotten one that has gone a dozen years without one bit of trouble, and as I said, with a picture as good as when it was new. It's interesting to me that this TV was made the same year Zenith went bankrupt and was taken over by Gold Star. Perhaps my set was one of the last models manufactured before everything caved in for Zenith? The set has a label on the back cover that states "Zenith Electronics Corporation, Glenview, IL 60025" and below that, "Made in Mexico." Well, they must have done something right if the set still works after all this time, even if it was manufactured south of the border; however, the quality of most of today's Gold Star TVs is nowhere near that of sets made by the original Zenith Radio Corporation. Sad to say, the only thing left of Zenith as we used to know it are the business offices which are still in the Chicago suburb of Lincolnshire. :no: The quality fell off the boat when the name was sold.

I fixed and sold a 1986 Toshiba TV, and to this day that TV is still going strong. It had one bad capacitor in the vertical circuit. The picture tube is still in excellant shape.

Two of the worst Zenith's I had were made in 1992 and 1994. I think Zenith went bankrupt and was bought by LG because they made junk in the early 90's, and as far as I know, they still make junk.

The tube on our 1995 zenith went on thanksgiving day of 1996, during the parade if I recall. Cant remember much as i was only six, but i believe one of the guns shorted and took most of the chassis with it.

I am in the coin machine and video game business. Wells Gardner (also in Chicago) who makes most of the monitors for these games used the Zenith Rauland CRT's in many of the 90's units. There were mostly all crap and seldom lasted more than 3 years. In fact I just threw one away a few days ago. It was a skinny neck tube and a bad process that ruined the tube. In the late 80's and early 90's whoever had a source of tubes would be one of the strong dominant manufacturers of TV sets. Brands like Curtis Mathis and others who had to outsource their tubes would be hurting because others like Magnavox/Phillips who bought Sylvania only for its' CRT division would be able to compete. Only manufacturers who made their own tubes would be safe in this dilemma at that period of time.

Additionally, Phillips/Sylvania sold few tubes to be outsourced because they could not keep up with their own demand just like other manufacturers at that time. Instead, they sold complete contract marketed sets to Curtis Mathis, JC Penny and a few other home brands. They were based right here in Knoxville, Tennessee and I know most of the engineers and we often talked about this at length among other things! You heard it from the horse's mouth right here! What else do you want to know??

My former boss and I were looking for TV sets in local pawn shops last year. The shops were chock full of 90s Zenith sets that had serious CRT issues - unfortunately, the Zenith sets were quite good in features. OTOH, the Thomson RCAs that he used in his business have been on 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, for the past seven years never had a hint of trouble, just the typical wear.

He had to settle for a recent model Sony, which the image quality isn't as good as the early-80s Trinitron I picked up at the trash heap a couple of months ago - and even he saw it, though he was turned off at the missing control door. :D

The bowling alley I went to regularly upgraded to automatic scoring in the mid 90's. They had nice big 27" score monitors. It was great, but they had those Wells Gardener monitors with Zenith CRTs. There were always a hand full with bad CRTs. Some were missing one or two colors, others were way out of focus, and some had a bright raster with retrace lines. At least the Wells Gardener chassis could take the strain of a shorted CRT unlike Zenith's. Interestingly, there were a few lanes that looked perfect. Either they had non-Zenith CRTs, or there was a small percentage that were ok. I should have offered to repair all their monitors.

The funny thing was that the town's other bowling alley never had much trouble with their monitors even though they were about 5 years older.

I wonder how much money was lost by companies like Wells Gardener due to Zenith's mistake? Did anyone sue Zenith over this?

this is my third Zenith tube TV in 23 years.. and they all have been great TV sets. Only had one problem with my first one.. and it wasn't a CRT problem. it was a relay switch problem. fixed for $7
my current HDTV is Zenith too.. great picture. My next TV in a couple years may be Zenith too, not sure yet. but for me. i still have my first one in the spare bedroom 27" that just won't die.

I'll take tube Zenith anytime. THHHHHHHHHHH to this modern junk. My mother bought a Zenith floor model in 1990 and it went south in about 1998. I think the CRT went kerblooie and wiped out the motherboard. I attempted to, and failed to fix it. My tube sets work nicely and will continue working for a long time.

NO you don't!! Those bowlling game 27" monitors were alful!!! I had to work on them for a little bit thinking I was helping them. They called me daily and I could'nt get any work done and had to quit and never got paid either. The chassis' were very complicated and hard to fix. The whole unit weighed about 90 lbs each and had to have scaffolds to get them down. I never want to see them again!

I put a Mitsubishi CRT into one of these bad CRT 27" Zenith sets...the set was headed for the junk heap "as-is" so I thought I'd try it. The CRT is not an exact fit but is not too bad. It really has a good picture...even used the Mitsubishi yoke and it has been working fine for years. The chassis does seem to be pretty good apart from the CRT issue.

What about the 19" and 25" Zenith tubes? They don't seem to be as common but did they still have the failure issues? We saw a 19" early 90's "New Horizons" hotel Zenith set at the Majestic Hotel in Hot Springs, Ark. which still seemed to be working OK as of a few years ago.

From what I've seen, the 25" tubes were just as bad as the 27" sets. I also ran into my fair share of bad 19" tubes. A friend gave me a few 20" early to mid '90's Zenith hospital TV's and they all had weak CRT's. I never saw too many Zenith sets bigger than 27". The few I did see had tubes made by someone else and they had nice pictures.

From my experience 25 and 27 inch tubes in 90's Zenith's are junk. They get tired too quickly.

Interesting bit there about using a Mitsubishi CRT in a Zenith. I'd try something similar, but I don't mess with the high voltage parts. I know certain capacitors are supposed to be discharged, but I don't have the proper tools or knowledge to attempt that. My field is computers. Every now and then I get lucky and fix a TV or two, but I stay away from the high voltage parts inside a TV.

Speaking of TV's that refuse to die: I have a 19" Zenith Sentry 2 which was new 12 years ago. Still works great; haven't had to have one bit of work done on it yet, and the CRT is as good as new too. My 19" RCA CTC185 has seven years on it and still works as well as the day I bought it; the only problem I've had with it in all that time was a couple of instances of the RF port for the antenna/cable breaking off the tuner PC board. One of the techs at a local TV shop told me several years ago the jungle IC had a problem, but I'll be darned if I can notice it if it is in fact defective. The CTC185 and the Zenith are connected to cable (I have never used either set on an antenna since I've been here, almost eight years), so maybe the signal is so strong the jungle IC problem, if there is one, doesn't show up so readily.

Sometimes you get lucky with Zeniths, and get one that will work for years without problems. My Sentry 2 was made during the time frame when the company was having all sorts of problems with CRT failures (mid-1990s), but the set worked the first day I had it and has been working very well ever since, though I don't use it much these days.

Score displays in bowling alleys with automatic scoring systems are driven extremely hard, sometimes 24/7 (I'm sure there are a few 24-hour bowling centers in this country), so I'm not surprised that the monitors go bad so frequently. In bowling centers that shut down in the evening, the situation may be worse since the monitors are turned off at night and back on when the lanes would reopen the next morning; the thermal shock to the CRTs' filaments often burns them open or causes heater-cathode shorts, etc. if the tubes are a few years old. This can happen no matter what brand of CRT is in the display unit, but those which have Zenith CRTs are more likely to develop serious problems after a year or two, not unlike Zenith TVs (not the least of which could be destruction of the entire video chain when the tube shorts--and the tubes will short sooner rather than later; this was the nature of Zenith CRTs of the mid-to-late 1990s, and it wouldn't surprise me if the high failure rate of these CRTs and the damage they caused to the sets in which they were installed, leading to one or more callbacks, could have been one of many reasons Zenith eventually went bankrupt in the nineties--the company just couldn't afford to be repairing these TVs for the same problem over and over and over again under warranty).

The bowling alley I mentioned ran the monitor 24/7 even though they weren't open 24/7. They were closed one day that I went and I could see rasters on some of the monitors through the windows with all the lights out.

When I met my wife she was boarding with an older lady who I remember would always be sitting in the living room watching Lawrence Welk. She had a 90s Zenith console; the major defect it had was a total lack of pincushion correction. There may have also been convergence issues. The other set I have experience with belongs to the sweet old lady next door-a later 90s 20" Zenith. The picture is the worst I've seen on any late model set. I've tinkered with it to try and improve things but there really isn't much you can do. Totally washed out and muddy. She really doesn't seem to mind, though. Funny, she has a nice 27" GE (RCA) in the front room which she never uses, and it works fine. And in the back is a 19" GE (pre-RCA) which is great as well. But she likes the remote on this Zenith, and is used to it, so that's what she watches!

Some people just don't care what their TV picture looks like, as long as it's there. I saw a 19" Portland TV about 20 years ago with about the worst color picture I have ever seen in my life (colors were all wrong, and I thought I saw the tint control set fully CCW or CW), but the family that owned it didn't seem to care. When color TV was still fairly new in the '60s, technicians would often go on service calls for TV pictures with no color only to find that the fine-tuning control was set incorrectly. A simple twist of the wrist changed the black-and-white picture to full color, often to the amazement of the set owner. Some people watched color shows in b&w on their fantastically expensive (in those days) color TVs for years, unaware that a simple fine-tuning adjustment would restore the color in the blink of an eye.

Today's color sets, however, are almost foolproof and almost always work right out of the shipping box (no setup, convergence, etc. required--just connect the antenna or cable, plug it in, turn it on, do a channel scan and you're good to go). My own RCA CTC-185, for example, is fully automatic as far as video processing is concerned, thanks to the jungle IC; because of this (and the set's automatic fine tuning system, which doesn't even have a menu option on the set's main control menu to enable or disable it, is excellent as well), this set is set-and-forget television at its best, IMHO. I don't think I've had to adjust the on-screen picture controls more than once or twice, if that often, in the nearly eight years I've owned the TV. I don't know if my set has automatic color tracking or not, but even if it doesn't the picture is still very good, even for a set almost eight years old that is used quite a bit (I watch TV a lot, both cable and DVD/VHS).

BTW, hmmm. It's interesting to me why your neighbor prefers the royally messed-up picture on her Zenith TV to the most likely better picture she must get on her other sets. :scratch2: It seems to me, from your description of the picture, as if the CRT in the Zenith set is about shot. How long has your neighbor had this TV, and how much does she use it? This sounds like another case of a junk Zenith CRT; the tubes in their 1990s-vintage sets historically don't last more than a year or two, three at the outside. The fact that the tube in your neighbor's TV makes any kind of picture at all seems amazing to me if the set is more than a couple of years old. Given the short lifespan of most Zenith CRTs these days, I'd guess the tube is going to go West any day now.

When I see a picture tube that bad, Zenith or otherwise, I usually go by the "It could last a week or a year."

I've been right in both cases. One tube gave out 6 days after I said that, while another went on for 10 months.

Zenith SL 3285
 

I have a 93 Zenith AVI in daily use. 32", don't know who made the tube. Great, just wish I had sprung for the 36". Set was one of the first zeniths that I recall having a full service menu you could bring up on screen. Seems to have 100's of adjustments you can make. I got selected in 1996 or 1997 to be part of the AC Nielsen computerized survey. They wired each TV and had a small computer that would call home each night and report what you watched. They saved the Zenith for last. Took 2 nights to run all cables and then they found out the Zenith was digital and could not be monitored.

Zenith never made CRTs bigger than 27", so the CRT in your 32" should be fine. You might be able to figure out who made it by looking for the EIA code.

People like to blame LG for the quality problems, but I have to blame Zenith. By the 90's their CRT technology was hopelessly out of date. They never made big CRTs and they never made CRTs with flatter screens. Even RCA was making CRTs that were almost completely flat in the mid 80's.

Zenith didn't make picture tubes bigger then 27 inches?

I will keep this in mind just in case I find a 32 or 36 inch Zenith.

I think Zenith shot a major portion of their 80's and 90's R&D budget on HDTV and computers. I think they tried hard but nothing made a real return on their investment, Computers, Heathkit, or HDTV. None of it paid off in a long term profit.
And when that happens, the bean counters tinker with the products to see if they can save a buck here, 50 cents there. cheaper grade of materials, etc.

I hope I never have to find the EIA code to see who made the tube. This mother takes two men with strong backs to get it down from where it sits. Only way I will know EIA code is if it quits. Only thing I ever had to do was replace one main module when it was about 3 years old. I didn't have it on a surge protector then, but added one after. This is the only series of Zeniths I have seen with a split motherboard with several smaller modules. I can't remember if it was the main power or the sweep module now. I have a 27" twin to it that needs a CRT driver board and it should make a nice tv for the bedroom, if I ever find someone with a module or I take the time to send mine to PTS or someone to be rebuilt.

That set is probably 9 years old now, and sees use about 8-10 hours a day, 7days a week! I did see another bad picture lately. That was on a late 90s (or newer) GE 20". It looked like the GE color sets of my youth! Muddy, washed out, blurry. I suspect some of that had to do with misadjusted controls.

My contribution to the TV that won't die list: A Quasar 19" purchased in August of 1979. All that we ever have done to it is to periodically clean the tuner contacts. Sitting next to a 3 year old Panasonic 20" flat crt, it looks pretty darn good, except for overscanning a bit. I know this is after Matsushita purchased Quasar from Moto, but it was built in the Illinois plant. Receipt says it cost $300 :D

I've often wondered what's in some of those commerical monitors. The monitors used in some train stations here for timetable information ran 24/7/365 and rarely died. Other than screen burn from the static text display most of oldest ones still had a sharp bright picture (can't say anyting about color, all they ever displayed was yellow text on a blue background). The few times I did see one that was dead or had a bad picture it was usually one of the newer ones. They're probably still going (I haven't rode the train for a couple of years).

In the late 90s the TAB closed a lot of their standalone betting shops in favor of TAB facilities in bars. A huge number of 21" Orion TVs that were used for displaying race information hit the used market. Most of them had screenburn, but most of the ones I saw still had a decent picture. Some store bought the lot and sold them varying prices depending on how bad the screenburn was. The worst of them sold for $25, an unheard of price for a working color TV at the time. I still find them occasionally today and they're still working.

Someone give me a 1994 SM2568S Zenith back in 2002. The picture has a green/yellow tint and it also makes a weird oscillating whine.

Yep, another one with a bad CRT. The oscillating noise is probably coming from the flyback or some other part in the horizontal section. The CRT will probably eventually short and take out the power supply. Do yourself a favor and dump that set!

YEAH. this is always the case at the bowling alleys in town... and they don't care.

What brand of bowling alley was it? The ones I've been to are AMF.