[Jeffhs]

I still have my RCA CTC185 and Zenith Sentry 2 19" CRTs, both working extremely well. CTC185 has eight years on it, original CRT, Zenith Sentry 2 has almost 13 years on it as well, also original CRT. Both sets make a wonderful picture on cable. The Zenith isn't being used much at the moment, but it will be moved into my living room (set is currently in my bedroom and unplugged--presently only used for cross-checking when I have cable trouble, and to back up the RCA) when the RCA set goes bad. The RCA set makes such a good picture right now, however, that I don't see it going West any time soon. The only repair I ever had done on that set was to have the RF connector on the tuner PC board replaced/resoldered when it snapped off (twice) the first year I had the set. The technician who repaired my set the second time also resoldered the ground points around the onboard tuner, which was troublesome in the CTC185 and other RCA/Thomson sets made in the late '80s-'90s. The TV has been working great ever since--in fact, I read somewhere that once the tuner grounds were resoldered properly on this chassis, the set will run for years virtually trouble-free. I believe it. It's been seven years since I last had this TV serviced and it still works as well as it did the day I purchased it.

I don't want an HD flat panel at this time, not as long as my analog sets are working as well as they are. I agree with the others in this forum who say that FPs are no match (yet, anyway) for CRTs, especially in the area of black level and so on. Flat-panel high-definition TV is a good idea, but the technology is still very new and has a long way to go before it will really catch on with the American public, in most areas of the country except the West Coast (particularly the Los Angeles/San Diego/southern California area, where they always seem to have the latest of everything as soon as, or at least shortly after, the stuff goes on the market). I live in the Midwest (northeastern Ohio near Cleveland), and I'll bet there aren't more than a small number of HD flat-panels in this entire area even as I am writing this. This may well change when the old analog sets eventually develop serious problems such as defective CRTs and defective circuit modules that turn up NLA (no longer available), but for the time being most folks in my town (a village 33 miles east of Cleveland), including myself, are sticking with analog CRT televisions. Come February 2009 the TV signals will be digital (analog will go off the air for good), but with over-air STBs (set-top boxes) and digital cable there is no real need to get a FP set unless you want one--again, at least for now. The day will come when every TV in the country will be a flat-panel high-definition set, but I don't see that day coming for quite some time (read decades) as there are far too many perfectly good analog CRT televisions in use at this time (millions).