CRT TV vs. flat screen image quality
 

I will likely be using my 20-year-old Zenith 19" CRT TV to replace my Insignia flat screen when the latter eventually quits. Will I still get the same great picture on the older TV as I am now getting on my flat screen? I ask this because I read somewhere (don't remember where :no:) that CRT televisions will produce better pictures with DTV signals than flat screens, the reason being that CRTs use scan lines, rather than pixels, to create the images.

Thanks.

I believe that. At the end of December, I bought a brand new KCPI converter box and hooked it up to my 1989 Zenith for my dad to use instead of the Insignia phlat pannel. That Zenith has a razor sharp crystal clear picture, and the phlat pannel always had all that garbled digital stuff.

CRT's are a hell of a lot more gentle with scaling than flat panel sets do. Most panels have AWFUL digital scalers which leave lots of weird artifacts and noise when upconverting lower resolution or interlaced video. Now mind you back in the CRT days the same would apply with video comb filters and dot crawl.

At any rate, you won't see me with a phlat pannel set. I detest them.

As much as spell-check? :)

Chip

Its all in what you like. I have crt set in the house and one Visio flat screen, but I get 1080i over the air with a digital converter box. I will keep the crt sets and if the vision goes out. I will replace it or use a back up. I think its just hard for people to let the past go. I guess for me to live in the world is to have one foot in the past and one in the future and then i can make it the present.
that's just my thinking on it.

Was the KCPI converter box, current production or new old stock?
I have one somewhere, that I picked up at a thrift. It seems to work OK. Not as good as a Zenith/Insignia or a Digital Stream.

I've never seen a CRT with a picture anywhere near as good as my Panasonic plasma in 1080p. NTSC was nicknamed Never The Same Color for a reason, and CRT geometry is especially bad compared to any flat panel. I like old TVs as much as anyone here but I can't support any argument that says a good CRT has a better picture than a good flat panel. Only possible exception being last gasp 16x9 HDTV crt's, but those are rare and really heavy!

Dieseljeep, I'm pretty sure it was is current production as they had dozens of them sealed in the box.

As far as phlat skreen sets are concerned, I'm so used to watching a real TV, that watching a phlat skreen looks very distorted and foreign (literally) to me. My hatred for phlat skreen sets cannot be described using real words.

Dave, I am almost 60 years old and was watching CRT TVs long before there were any such things as flat screens. When I got my Insignia flat screen almost five years ago, I had no trouble whatsoever adjusting to its picture quality compared to the RCA CRT TV it replaced.

One of the only reasons I am going to replace my FP with my old Zenith Sentry 2 table model when the FP quits is simply because CRT TVs are admittedly and in fact much more reliable than flat screens ever were. No one ever had to be concerned with having to replace a CRT set every couple of years (unless they wanted a new one or were replacing a worn-out 20+-year old set), unlike flat screens which seem to have a much shorter life span.

There are CRT TVs in use today that are 20 and more years old, and are still going strong. My Zenith Sentry 2, which was a birthday present to me when I turned forty years old in 1996, and an RCA CTC185 I bought when I moved here 16 years ago are two examples. Neither TV had ever had any service work done on it, except for a problem with a loose antenna connector on the RCA set which was repaired under warranty. The Zenith has never had to have any service work on it whatsoever in all its 20 years, and it still makes an excellent picture on its original CRT (even though the set's tube was made during the era of "bad" Zenith picture tubes in the late 1990s; I swear I must have gotten one of the good ones, simply by the luck of the draw), which is one reason I will use it again when the flat screen quits. The other is I have liked Zenith TVs (and radios) for decades.

I don't know why you hate flat screens so much (aside from their very short lives as compared to CRT TVs), but you had better get used to them since they are all anyone can get these days--unless you want to get a used color or B&W television with a CRT, like your RCA CTC25 or your latest acquisition, your Zenith 23" delta-gun color console. (I had relatives, now deceased, who owned just such a Zenith in the late 1960s and liked it; they used it for years before buying a new 25" Zenith console in the mid-1970s.)

Finally, why do you call CRT TVs "real" televisions? Flat screens are just as much televisions as the older CRT sets are, since they receive and reproduce signals broadcast from television stations using an antenna, cable or satellite, although I will admit that FPs do bear more of a resemblance to computer screens than to traditional TVs and are not much to look at when they are turned off, unless they are installed on or in an entertainment center cabinet or stand.

Flat screens and digital TV are all the current generation of young TV viewers know. Mention to these kids, many of whom are too young to remember CRT TVs or the NTSC television era, that there were such things as televisions with something called "picture tubes" that received pictures over the air with an antenna, years and decades before flat screens, cable or satellite TV, and they might not believe you; in fact, some of the younger ones might laugh full in your face and say you were making all of this up.

Too bad Philco is out of business. They would've called their sets"Philco Phlats". :boring:
Regarding the HD converter, does yours have the built in power supply or the wall-wart AC adaptor. Mine has the standard AC cord and the built in power supply.

All of my TV's here are CRT except the computer monitors here which one is on this computer that I'm sending this post.I notice I get alot of artifacts on my CRT sets from the cable TV box and it looks like a internet stream or downloaded MPEG1 file at times.Very blotchy pixelize scene movements .The Dell 22 inch here on my Dell is crisp and clear with the videos and graphics.It must be the cheap cable boxes of they compressing the channels to the max to get more channels.The analog signal cable looked 100 percent better then the digital cable signal.Again the public got screwed.

BUT....with all of the negative baggage that comes with DTV....there is ONE advantage...a WHOLE lot more channels !! I have a LOT of vintage tv channels in this area...Me tv, COZI, THIS, Movies channel, Decades, Grit, Get-tv Comet , Buzzr,and Bounce. Not ONE was available on Analog tv. I watch these channels MORE than ANY others..PERIOD !! Yes--DTV is finicky, troublesome and not great picture detail...BUT it is the ONLY way--to get this many OTA channels...which I have LONG gotten used to.

It depends on what you're feeding it - SD or analog signals the CRT is going to do better. If it's HD programming, the LCD will blow it away.

The only way I can explain it would be this. Suppose your entire life, you have driven body-on-frame American cars such as a Ford Crown Victoria. Now, Ford Crown Victorias are no longer made, but you still cling to them. Now suppose everybody is driving Honda Lunchboxes and Smarts, and the entire population of the planet is pressuring you into getting one. I CANNOT handle change in this way.