1956 general electric!

[Jeffhs]

Merry Christmas, Johnny. I will be waiting to see the pictures of your "new" (to you) '56 GE TV. Those were good sets in their day, and can still work well today if you recap at least the power supply. That filter capacitor is very important to the television's proper operation; if it loses capacitance, you will see bends in the picture and/or hear hum in the sound. If it shorts, it can burn out the power transformer if your set is transformer powered, if the B+ (plate voltage) supply is not fused or if the house fuse or circuit breaker does not open/trip.

BTW, it seems to me you must have resolved your camera issues, as I remember in one of your previous posts your statement that your camera was at first dead, then broken. If you don't have a new camera, I'm thinking you may have found the problem with the one you have, which I think may have been no more serious than a dead battery in need of a charge.

If you don't drop or otherwise abuse a digital camera, it should last a long time, needing only a new battery every few months or years, depending on how often you charge it and how much you use the camera. I've had my Radio Shack "FlatFoto" digital camera for about seven years going on eight; it works very well and still has its original lithium battery.

Enjoy your "new" GE 1956 TV. That set is as old as I am (56 years), but it can still make very good pictures if in good shape. I assume you will be using either a cable box or an OTA (over the air) antenna with a converter box, as this TV (or any other CRT television ever made) will not work with today's digital TV signals unless one or the other option is employed. The only way your TV will work with just an antenna connected to the terminals on the back will be if Indianapolis still has analog low-power TV (LPTV) stations or translators on VHF channels; however, bear in mind that these translators/LPTVs will need to convert to digital by the year 2015. When that day comes, there will be no more analog TV -- period; you will need to have a cable box or converter box on your TV to get any reception at all once those translators/LPTVs convert to full digital.

Note as well that your area's cable service may be all-digital (as the service in my area, from Time Warner Cable, already is and has been for well over a year), in which case you will need a digital cable box on your TV. However, remember that even with digital cable, your GE TV will show digital and high-definition channels as standard definition (the latter being 4:3 aspect ratio), not as HD, so you may see black bars on either side of the raster when viewing such programs. There is no way on earth any standard CRT television will display programs in HD, even if it is fed a high-definition signal from an HD cable box.

Please keep us posted.