Quote:
Originally Posted by AndyMack
Anybody remember the notorious bad solder joints between boards in late 80's vintage RCA sets? I was the CE at a hotel that had 145 of these sets, all manufactured in 1989. (I forget the model #, silver XL100 set with analog AM/FM radio). Anyways, right about the end of 92 and into 93 I spent plenty of days fixing these darn sets - which never really had a single component failure that I can remember - just bad solder joints throughout. But with that experience, I have never purchased an RCA or GE set either for work or personally since.
The next facility I took care of had 85 Zenith 25" Concierge sets m'fd in 1995, and I rarely had a problem with those for the two and half years I was there. Sometimes the Smartcards would need to be reinstalled (sorta like a reboot), but that's it.
The place I'm at now had all 1996 vintage mexican-made Zenith HealthView sets, and those were problematic - either bad modules or the CRT's would go south, sometimes both. But those had high hours. Most of those are gone now, but we still have a dozen or so of those old sets still in daily use with the original CRT's. Couldn't even guess how many hours are on 'em. I spec'd out newer Philips 19" commercial TV's, and we purchased about 15 of them several years back. Those are all going strong with great pictures and no servicing req'd. The rest are all just LG/Zenith HealthView's, same exact model that we've used all along. The bean counters insist we keep buying them. The newer ones are hit & miss, a few have died outright within months, I've seen two with bad guns within a year, but most are still OK after a few years of service.
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I remember the late '80's RCA's with the MTT tuner module that always had bad solder connections on the plugs and the wirewrap stakes. These would have been in late production CTC120, CTC130, and CTC136 chassis sets. The older RCA's with the MSC tuner controller and MST tuner module suffered from the same problem. The solder problems with RCA really took off with the introduction of the CTC175/76/77 chassis in '92 or '93 and continued thru the later production CTC203's when RCA finally got sense enough to use a seperate tuner instead of their lousy "tuner on board" design. Those sets are usually good after the tuner grounds are resoldered. The main component failures I've experienced were bad eeproms (due to bad connections), shorted HOT, defective regulator IC and shorted B+ rectifier, and the occasional bad flyback. Once RCA started using a real tuner again, their flybacks started going south way too soon! Go figure!
One of our local hospitals had those Zenith healthview sets like you mention. I wound up with a few of them that had, of course, bad CRT's. Years ago, another hospital had a bunch of mid '70's 19" Sylvania's with motorized tuning (heavy as lead and probably their best sets). Those were replaced in the late '80's by 20" Magnavox cable ready sets. Those sets were recently replaced by Philips BPC sets. I wonder if they'll last 20 years like the previous Magnavox sets.