What is it with 1990's Zenith televisions?

[andy]

Originally Posted by julianburke

I am in the coin machine and video game business. Wells Gardner (also in Chicago) who makes most of the monitors for these games used the Zenith Rauland CRT's in many of the 90's units. There were mostly all crap and seldom lasted more than 3 years.

The bowling alley I went to regularly upgraded to automatic scoring in the mid 90's. They had nice big 27" score monitors. It was great, but they had those Wells Gardener monitors with Zenith CRTs. There were always a hand full with bad CRTs. Some were missing one or two colors, others were way out of focus, and some had a bright raster with retrace lines. At least the Wells Gardener chassis could take the strain of a shorted CRT unlike Zenith's. Interestingly, there were a few lanes that looked perfect. Either they had non-Zenith CRTs, or there was a small percentage that were ok. I should have offered to repair all their monitors.

The funny thing was that the town's other bowling alley never had much trouble with their monitors even though they were about 5 years older.

I wonder how much money was lost by companies like Wells Gardener due to Zenith's mistake? Did anyone sue Zenith over this?