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Old 12-10-2017, 10:44 PM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
Quote:
Originally Posted by TUD1 View Post
Got this 25LC20 set today in a deal I made with a friend and local collector. I had to give up my CTC-15, but I also got another set. Had to completely set it up. When I first plugged it in, the picture was horrible. Very dim and blurry. Had to rejuvenate the original tube, and now it's better, but not great.
Dave, you simply cannot expect a 52-year-old television to work anywhere nearly as well as a modern set; even if you replaced the CRT, the picture still wouldn't be as good as a modern HDTV. Those old sets will not work without modification on today's TV standards, so I don't know how you are getting a picture on yours unless you are using a DTV converter box or cable. I don't know how your cable service is set up in Birmingham but here where I live, in northeastern Ohio, the cable, as of the first of last month, is 100 percent digital, so a cable box is required to get any reception at all unless you use a streaming video system such as Roku, Google TV, et al. I have a Roku (Internet TV) box on my 19-inch Insignia flat screen and am getting beautiful pictures on every one of the seven TV stations (and their DTV subchannels) serving Cleveland.

However, I will say it again for emphasis, you cannot and will not get anything but snow on your 52-year-old Zenith roundie if you try to get local reception using just an antenna; again, I am baffled as to why you are getting anything on your set as it is unless, as I said, you are using a DTV converter box, satellite, or cable. If you have cable, your local cable system in Birmingham must not have made the full conversion yet to digital if you can hook up your cable directly to the TV and get a picture. However, the day will come when you will need a cable box on your TV to get anything at all. Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable) was the last cable system in the US to convert to full digital, so the cable in your area has probably been 100-percent digital for some time. The only other thing I can think of is there may still be one or several VHF NTSC television stations operating in your area.
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Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.
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