Some Zeniths from the mid-to-late '90s had great pictures as well. My 1995 Zenith SMS1917SG 19" table model has an excellent picture; better, I think, than my daily watcher RCA CTC185. The Zenith has 12 years on it, but I only used it four years at my former home; it's been sitting in my bedroom here the last eight years, just being used now to cross-check when I have cable trouble. The most use that set ever got since it's been here, however, was for two weeks in 1999-2000, when my RCA was in for repairs. The Zenith will replace the RCA when the latter eventually goes belly-up, but exactly when that will be I don't know--the RCA has seven years on it and still works almost as well as when it was new; razor-sharp picture and all (but again, not quite as good as the Zenith). I'm expecting to be using either the RCA or the Zenith with digital cable in just under two years when the TV standards go to all-digital, the narrow 16:9 picture on a 4:3 set notwithstanding. The only problem the RCA set has, that I know of anyway, is a small problem in the jungle IC, but to see the picture today one would never know it (though it might show up if the set were being used on an antenna--I have digital cable here and have never used the set on an OTA antenna because antennas don't work well in my area). I have never once had the Zenith in for repairs, which speaks volumes for how their TVs were built even in the mid-1990s (before the Gold Star era spelled the end of Zenith forever
). I had a local TV shop repair the RCA twice, both times for the same problem (antenna connector snapped off the tuner PC board), but the one on my Zenith is still holding on and working well, as is everything else about the set, a dozen years later. Maybe I was lucky to have gotten a good set, considering how much trouble Zenith TVs of 1990s vintage were. No problems with the CRT or anything else--yet, anyway.
Knock on wood.
It wasn't, IMHO, until Gold Star took over Zenith and moved the company to Korea that the quality of their TV sets started sliding downhill. I am surprised, moreover, that LG still uses the Zenith lightning bolt logo on at least one of its current production flat-panel TVs. As I mentioned in another post a week or so ago, I was sure LG had abandoned that logo very shortly after they took over the company.