Rauland plant photo
 

For what it's worth.

Looks like the photo dates from the 90's. Great, great sign though its age shows that Zenith was too broke to install a new one! I wonder where this was located, and what was the Ford facility next door?

This was the Rauland plant on North Avenue in Melrose Park Illinois. I believe the Ford sign belonged to some sort of regional offices.

Those were the good old days. I bet the Ford site is gone too. Cars look recent like '90's era as previously stated.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1...zenith-factory

"
Zenith Electronics Corp.'s painful migration from a bankrupt TV maker to a marketing arm of a South Korean company marked another milestone Monday when the company gave notice that, barring last-minute developments, it will shut its Melrose Park color picture tube plant by the end of the year and sack 2,000 employees.

American companies haven't made televisions in the United States for years; Zenith shifted actual assembly to Mexico years ago to cut labor costs. By deciding to close the tube plant--its last U.S. factory--Zenith is admitting that its U.S.-made parts can't compete against lower-cost foreign competitors, either."

I sincerely hope our military base in Japan has been worth it.

I noticed that the article was from 1998, as much as i love the color of a crt tube. I don't think anyone would want a crt smart phone or a laptop computer with one. I wish zenith had spent its r&d money on color lcd screens instead of hdtv. it might have allowed them to fare better than they did. They will be missed. :tears:

Who knows how things might have turned out. But look at the LCD market today, and note how disposable the products are. Zenith might have developed the best-there-is of LCD screens and been competing with everyone else who is racing to the bottom.

And then the same ending.

mr_fixer, I agree with you about lcd screens. However, I had one CRT monitor which I wish I still had. It was a Sun Microsystems 21" monitor with a Sony Trinitron CRT. I was on my third lcd display before I found one that out performed the Sun monitor. The Sun was very heavy and warmed up the room, but it had an unbelievable picture. At one time, I toyed with the idea of getting a TV board for my computer, but I doubted the performance of the board would be a match to a modern TV.

BTW, my folks had a Zenith color for years and it was always a great performer requiring little maintenance.

Years later, we bought our older son some Zenith and Home Depot stock at the same time as an entry into the stock market. We all know what happen to Zenith. Home Depot fared much better.

You can have a better CRT monitor...Sony made Super fine pitch HD CRT TV/monitors. Some had a DVI computer monitor port, others had a HDMI port (which DVI and DisplayPort can connect to with an adapter cable), Some have ATSC tuners too...Catch is most are 30"+ and weigh 100Lbs plus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FD_Trinitron/WEGA


I paid $50 for a used KD-34XS955 with ATSC tuner and HDMI...It is my main TV and PC/video monitor. Excellent picture. If I have room in the future I may buy another as a backup/spare parts.

Modern TV tuner cards are quite decent and have been going back a ways...Whether or not one would have been good for you back then would have depended on how far back and how good of specs your PC had then.

The only way they could have survived would have been the way Vizio and Apple operate. Design it here, contract the manufacture out. As we know, Zenith did that successfully with a lot of products but what they kept in house bled them dry.

One of the things that bleed them was their CRT operation in the 90's. IIRC then new EPA regs caused them to switch processing chemicals with the result that their CRTs had a very high in warranty failure rate during that time.

They also sunk a ton of money into modernizing this plant with automation and it never worked out. The robots were breaking CRTs and they never got it right before finally closing the facility.