zenith-what happened?

[sampson159]

just pulled the back off my 1991 zenith console set with audio problem. cleanl
as a pin,however,so many cold joints. in the audio alone were 15! thin circuit board and low budget caps. i changed 5. they were borderline,so get em out.sound picked up nicely and set has a great picture! for about 3 hours,then video problems. more joints-just going to solder entire chassis this time. what happened to "the quality goes in,before the name goes on"?

[MRX37]

That disappeared around the 90's.

Thank your lucky stars that your picture tube still works...

[andy]

Zenith has had problems with their soldering for as long as I can remember. They never managed to solder a circuit board properly.

[MRX37]

I dunno about that. The Zenith's I found that had awful picture tubes, the soldering on the boards was fine. The only thing really wrong with the TV was the picture tube being shot.

[sampson159]

tube is very good in this one. i was surprised. guess ill take the cold joints over a bad inline gun anyday. it just looks so cheaply built. the cabinet is very nice style,but,alas,it is particle board. even the plastic of those old chromacolors are
better. i guess i cant look a gift horse in the mouth-it was free.

[freakaftr8]

True, it's just too bad that this is just another notch in the belt as to the downfall of another great american company with sudden economization.. Going global, then knocked down.. I work in a machine shop, you have no idea how many companies cheaped out on quality to go quantity then.. Whats this??! Out of buisness!?!? And here come the auctioneers!

[radiotvnut]

Is your Zenith the "dual module" chassis? As far as '90's Zenith's, that was probably the best one. I've seen a lot of bad soldering in mid '80's to early '90's Zenith's. Especially in the tuner and the IF circuit. I've seen a great many Chromacolor II modules from the '70's with bad solder connections on the little connectors where the board plugs into the chassis. Zenith should have stuck to their hard-wired chassis!

[sampson159]

main module and then the upright audio module. this a top of the line unit,with all the bells and whistles. just lousy quality. the lady that gave it to me said it never
worked right from the start. always a sound issue and the techs would come in and wiggle stuff around,collect their money and go. i am sure she was just fed up when the last guy told her it was a piece of junk and to buy a new set. very clean with remote and all papers.she also gave me a vcr with the box,papers,remote,batteries,etc.it works very well and the picture is fine. rca!

[Jeffhs]

I have a Zenith Sentry 2 19" TV that still works every bit as well as the day I got it, as a birthday present in 1995. Still has its original CRT and hasn't had the back off even once; has a great picture. This set was my daily watcher the first four years I had it, then I got a new RCA in 1999 and put the Zenith in my bedroom. The latter doesn't get much use these days except to cross-check when I have trouble with my cable service (and once for about two weeks while the RCA was in for repairs), but I do turn it on every now and then just to make sure it works.

Has anyone else here had (or still have) a Sentry 2, and if so, how well has it worked for you? Judging by all the postings I've seen here regarding the seemingly endless problems with 1990s-vintage Zenith TVs in general, I almost get the feeling I was downright lucky to have gotten a set that has been trouble-free almost 13 years (knock on wood). I also had two Zenith 13" portables that lasted over 20 years, and a small 12" Zenith b&w set that went 22 years with no chassis troubles; the only thing that ever went wrong with the 12" b&w Zenith (and my first 13" Zenith color portable as well) was that the detent mechanism on the UHF tuner broke, jamming the tuner on one channel (as [bad] luck would have it, it jammed on a blank channel in my area.) Other than that, the sets worked perfectly all those years.

[wb2mep]

My family has 3 or 4 Sentry 2's in use, of various vintages. They replaced
Zenith tube sets that none of the shops would touch, after I graduated
college and moved away in '83 and was no loger around to maintain them.

There's an '84 Sentry 2 19" in my former bedroom at my parent's house that
gets almost daily use as a second set. First time the back was opened was
about a year ago because the set had developed an intermittent "blue
screen" problem. I confirmed it was a short in the CRT as I could get it to
flash blue by tapping the neck of the CRT. I tweaked the gray scale while I
had the set open, and it still has a great pic & sound whe the blue gun isn't
acting up. I have a late '92 27" console I inherited from my grandparents,
must have been made just before the bad CRTs, as they used the set daily
for 6 or 7 years until they passed away. The blacks were always greenish
on that set since new, probably just needs the green G2 adjusted. That set
is currently stored in my shop. There is a '96 or '97 19" in the back room
at my wife's store. This set was stored unused for 3 or 4 years before being
put into service. This set was made during the "bad CRT" years, but so far
has a good pic. Tinny sound, though, - it has one of those little oval
speakers below the CRT. The fourth Sentry 2 is a mid 90's 25" console
that belonged to my other grandparents. One of my cousins inherited that
set, last I saw of it was about 2 yrs ago, they had it in the basement for
their kids to play video games on.
So 4 out of 4 Sentry 2s still operational. They didn't have the great
picture like on the Chromacolor IIs, just average pic quality for their day, but
still seemed better made than the cheap sets that were beginning to come
on the market.

[zenith2134]

I've experienced bad solder connections in many of their sets from about the late 70's til the 90's. Another big issue was the poor connections where the ribbons for the modules plugged in. I always, always clean those up even if their isn't an intermittent yet.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by sampson159

what happened to "the quality goes in,before the name goes on"?

The quality runs out when the nameplate falls off...

Zenith used to eschew circuit boards for the longest time. "Hand crafted". Heard what they really did, with those chassises with the cone shaped terminals, as that the parts were stuffed into the cones, and then wave soldered. Then bigger parts like IF transformers and such were added.

Didn't Zenith get bought by GoldStar or some other Korean company sometime in the late 80's?

[ChrisW6ATV]

Yes, LG (formerly GoldStar) bought Zenith, but I think it was the late 90's. Zenith developed most or all of the ATSC digital TV system, and the LG-designed (via Zenith) ATSC tuners are still the best.