Last year for vacuum tube type radios and TV's?

[Adam]

Newest tube set I ever had was a 12" b/w GE with the SF chassis in a puke-green plastic cabinet from 1974. Never had a tube set new enough to have the click-stop uhf tuner - which I think was used starting in '75?

[holmesuser01]

Originally Posted by Adam

Newest tube set I ever had was a 12" b/w GE with the SF chassis in a puke-green plastic cabinet from 1974.

I think that was avocado...

I like puke-green better.

I had a 12" B/W GE in 1971. It didnt work very long, and the handle that made it portable broke off while my cousin was borrowing it. Had a fairly good picture, and was the same puke-green and white.

[zenith2134]

Technically, tube type 'radios' are still being produced---in the form of component stereo tuners...Magnum Dynalab makes hi-end (pricey!) tuners such as MD-109, MD-107 and others with triodes and dual triodes in the output circuitry.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by holmesuser01

I think that was avocado...

I like puke-green better.

I had a 12" B/W GE in 1971. It didnt work very long, and the handle that made it portable broke off while my cousin was borrowing it. Had a fairly good picture, and was the same puke-green and white.

I bought a "Kenco", house brand of the former '70s retailer Kennedy and Cohen (rebadged Broadmoor) 12" b&w tube-powered TV new in 1975. The set lasted all of three years, then something burned up (never did find out what was smoking on the chassis; could have been the yoke or 1001 other things) and I trashed it. The longest-lived b&w portable I've ever owned, however, was a Zenith J121Y 12" solid-state set. I bought it new in 1978; it was still working as well as ever 22 years later (except for the UHF detent mechanism breaking, jamming the tuner on one channel--as bad luck would have it, a blank channel in my area). I had just moved into my small apartment and had no room for three TVs (I brought 1 color set with me from my former residence and bought a then-new RCA 19"), so I put the little Zenith portable out back behind the building. A day or so later, I looked back there and the set was gone, probably picked up by someone else. If that's the case, I hope the person got some good use out of it. The CRT in that set was as strong as ever when I put it out, so it would have been a darn shame if in fact it had gone straight to a landfill. For all I know, my little portable may still be working as well as always for its new owner to this day; after all, it was a Zenith, made in the late seventies before the company left Chicago. This was one of the first SS TVs I ever saw with almost everything on one PC board, although my Broadmoor tube portable was built like that as well. I don't like those one-board tube designs because the boards get brittle over time, especially around high-power tubes such as horizontal outputs that get extremely hot in normal operation. I have told the story here many times of my 1964 RCA CTC-12 clone Silvertone color roundie, in which the video output tube socket broke out of the socket; that is what soured me on PC boards. To this day I don't trust them; thank goodness today's TVs are designed not to run as hot as the earlier tube sets did.

I have yet to hear of any kind of circuit board problem in modern flat-panel TVs being caused by overheated transistors, ICs or other components, although I have read here in VK accounts of sets that have suffered major damage from being dropped; flat panels are especially vulnerable to such damage, which is almost always irreparable when the screen shatters. I see sets on eBay daily that are being sold as parts sets because of broken or cracked screens. I like the improved picture quality afforded by digital TV and FPs; however, given how fragile the latter are, I sometimes wish CRT sets were still being made. Those old sets were practically indestructible, unless they were dropped or thrown down a flight of stairs. My former stepmother (now deceased), in a fit of anger, threw a Silvertone b&w portable down the stairs of her house; the CRT did not implode. The set, miraculously, still worked quite well for six months after that. As well, my RCA CTC185 survived a fall off its stand a couple years ago; the only damage was a slight bend in the CRT shadow mask, which I was able to remedy with just a couple of sweeps across the screen with an old speaker magnet. Again, however, with today's FPs, one fall off the stand and the set is usually instant junk, the moment the set hits the floor.