When I lived in Berkeley a few years ago, they used to have a 'dump all you want day'. And I would go around the night before the stuff was collected picking up all the TVs. Of all those TVs which was usually around 10 or so about 2/3 of them would work. Most of them would be working 21-25" ss color sets 15-25 years old. Once I picked up a 71 Zenith color hybrid in working order, a few system III consoles (one person with a 25" system 3 console even gave me some free lamps and helped me carry it just to get rid of it - and it worked great). I couldn't beleive that people would just dump perfectly good TVs. Basically I think people put a value of about -2$ on most used TVs working or not, unless they are either look really old, or really new. Mabye this is because the new stuff is so cheap. The one positive thing that comes of this is that good quality late model tube sets and early solid state sets do go cheap.
I certainly think that the older stuff was just built better, and much easier to service, TV, cars, most things. I'm going to be watching my old TVs and driving my old cars my whole life, because I like them better, and I can just keep fixing them. If maintained and adjusted properly they will often perform better than their newer counterparts and certainly last longer.
Long live the tube.
