Trouble ahead, what's a good brand nowadays?

[Jeffhs]

As has been stated here many times before (by others as well as myself), the RCA CTC185xx series are good sets which will run for years once the issues with the on-board tuner are resolved. I have a 19" CTC185A7 XL-100 set which I have only had serviced twice (both repairs having to do with the area of the tuner around the RF port) since it was new in 1999; the set has been working fine the last two years since the connections around the tuner were resoldered. No problems at all with the circuitry itself or the CRT; the picture is beautiful on cable in my area.

I recently read another person's post here regarding Magnavox TVs and VCRs now being manufactured by the Korean electronics company Funai, not by The Magnavox Company of Fort Wayne, Indiana (and, in its early years, New York City, New York--the company's big 3-way consoles and console color sets, not to mention stereo consoles, radios and the like, were all made there in the '60s).

What is it about Funai-built equipment that is so bad? Just because these sets are made in the Orient does not, IMO, necessarily mean they are all junk (or "crap" as I have seen these sets described in this forum). Almost all televisions today are manufactured overseas; however, not every make is junk. I have a friend who swears by Toshiba (he has three such sets in his house which have given him little or no trouble in all the years he has had them); as well, one of my great-aunts had a Sony Trinitron 15" portable for many years which gave her no trouble at all. The set finally gave up the ship after perhaps 15 or 20 years and was replaced by another Sony which, the last I heard, was working quite well.

I will admit that some of the smaller Japanese, Korean, etc. television manufacturers' sets may and often do have design flaws caused by the slap-dash manner in which they are assembled (on automated assembly lines), but the better makes can and often do last many years. If I were to buy a new TV tomorrow, it would probably be either a Toshiba, Sony or possibly Sharp. These are probably the last good makes of TV left (except, as I said above, for the RCA CTC185xx series once the tuner's bugs are resolved).

Keep in mind as well that every make of TV set will break down eventually, regardless of make or model. If they didn't go bad once in a while, the stores which sell them, not to mention TV repair shops (which, so I've read here, only do mostly warranty repairs these days), would be out of business in a hurry.