Quote:
Originally Posted by radiotvnut
There's a slight chance that your tube was made by someone else besides Zenith. I seem to remember seeing a couple Zenith's from this period that used the bonded yoke style CRT's like what Thomson/RCA used. Some of the last Zenith CRT sets used Philips CRT's. Or, maybe Zenith "screwed up" and actually made a good tube. It happened once in a blue moon.
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My Zenith Sentry 2 19" table set is 14 years old and still has the original CRT. As the previous poster described, the tube in my set is as strong and bright as when I got the TV. I also have a 9-year-old RCA CTC185A7 XL-100, with the original CRT and a fantastic picture. The Sentry 2 is in my bedroom and doesn't get much use (was my main watcher from 1995-1999, then I bought the RCA when I moved here in '99), but I use the RCA most of the time, mostly these days for watching the news and DVDs/VHS videos.
I'm almost convinced that I got a good CRT in my Zenith purely by the luck of the draw, considering all the problems Zenith had with CRTs in their televisions from 1990 on. However, I'm not surprised my RCA's CRT is still good and still makes a picture as nice and sharp as you please. The failure mode of most RCA TVs of the early nineties was not, as a rule, the CRT; rather, the onboard tuner becoming ungrounded (through bad solder joints) and bombarding the jungle IC (EEPROM) with noise and ruining it in short order was a major problem until the CTC203 and its successors, as in these sets the tuner is mounted separately from the main board. However, a friend of mine told me his parents had an RCA Guide Plus 25" TV in which the CRT failed after just two years. They bought a new set, same screen size, that worked right out of the box and is still working today, some five-plus years later; no CRT problems or chassis faults. An interesting side note: This TV actually fell off its stand several years ago, but again is still working; the CRT shadow mask apparently wasn't bent when the set hit the floor. I had the same experience last year, with my RCA XL-100 CTC185. However, I was able to eliminate the color splotches in the picture by running a magnet from an old loudspeaker around the screen.