Quote:
Originally Posted by Findm-Keepm
Just curious, but were any of the CRTs prefixed with RE? There was a time in the TV repair world where "RE" tubes were shunned out of ignorance, with technicians believing the tubes to be "rebuilt" tubes vice those with the newer/replaced Rare Earths, with increased brightness and deeper reds. They made the scene i the 1960s, with RCA and Sylvania touting the improve characteristics of the tubes.
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/...-Page-0026.pdf
The funniest part is that rare earths were already in use, it's just the shift to different rare earths (and marketing) that brought about the prefix.
Sylvania advertised the tubes and mentioned the prefix, but still many techs stuck to the ignorant idea that they were rebuilds. Somewhere there is a Jack Darr or Art Margolis article about the fallacy/idiocy...
When I started back in the 1970s, all I ever saw was rebuilt tubes from Channel Master and Empire Video, so the tube labels with any identifying info were long gone.. |
No. The 15G through 21CYP22A were never manufactured in a later rare-earth type. The 21FBP22 was interchangeable with all of the later 21 inch tubes, so it was possible to stick a rare earth tube in a CTC-11, but I purposely tracked down the oldest FB I could find thus ensuring it could only be a sulfide tube.
The rare earth tubes did bring the red nearly back to '53 red, but the obssesion with deeper reds seems unwarranted to me. The major shift was in the green, and that was never reversed or corrected. Orange, yellow, skin tones, etc all depend on both red and green phosphors lighting up. A yellowish green phophor can make for a nasty orange or yellow even with a good "deep" red phosphor.
All of these shifts and butchering of NTSC's gorgeous color gamut all in the search for slightly brighter pictures. For shame...