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Originally Posted by Eric H
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Hmmm. I don't know. The seller has zero feedback and says the picture tube (CRT) may be "burned out". (Most CRTs do not fail from open filaments, but from low or no emission, although many non-technical people say a tube is "burned out" when it doesn't work anymore, even if the filament lights normally.) The set may be restorable or it might not. If the CRT is gone, there is no guarantee that a replacement would be available, especially these days when CRT TVs are all but obsolete. Probably the only way to get a replacement CRT for this set, if it needs one, is from a junked set with the same size and type tube.
A defective CRT, as we AKers know, is not the only reason a television set can fail to produce a raster. The horizontal oscillator and/or output stage could be dead (or the oscillator could be far off frequency), the HV rectifier tube could have an open filament (the 1B3/1J3/1K3/1BC2, et al. tube often used in older TV sets has been known to fail, even though it has a one-volt filament powered by a single turn of exceedingly well insulated wire on the flyback), the high-voltage fuse in the doghouse (HV cage) may have blown due to a short in the rectifier tube or other problems, and so on.
My point is that there are several other reasons besides CRT filament failure why a CRT would fail to produce a raster. The seller may not (probably doesn't) know nearly enough about how a TV set works to have even considered these other possibilities.
I would be wary of the seller's zero feedback rating as well. Ebay sellers with feedback ratings of zero or some very low number are almost certainly brand new to online auctions, and are prone to making the mistakes many first-timers make, such as setting the opening bid too high, omitting important details in an item description, etc. While I wouldn't be too concerned over winning an auction for some small item from a seller with zero feedback, I would think at least twice before bidding on a vintage radio or TV (for example) being offered by an eBay seller with such a low rating. Granted, an eBay seller has to start somewhere, but I don't think starting out by auctioning off something like a TV set, especially when the seller probably knows little or nothing about the inner workings of the set, is the right way to do it.