[Jeffhs]

When you consider how inexpensive off-brand (e. g. Craig) flat screen TVs are these days (I often see Craig FPs advertised for under $100 in the sales ad flyers in my Sunday newspaper), it really doesn't make sense to repair these sets when they develop even slight problems. I paid only $130 for my going on five year old Insignia 19" FP, so when it dies I won't bother even taking it in to a repair shop for an estimate--I will get a new set, or perhaps blow the dust off one of my CRT TVs and use it with my Roku player and an RF modulator.

TVs are like almost everything else these days--use them until they break down, then throw them out and get new. This has been going on for decades, and will not end as long as our electronics and most everything else are made in China and other offshore countries. It started in the '50s with those little transistor radios, and once the trend started there was no stopping it.

The only company that made radios (and TVs) worth repairing, IMHO, was Zenith, with their hand-wired chassis. I have two Zenith Trans-Oceanic solid-state radios from the '60s that still work after a fashion (one works but the dial cord is broken, on the other the AM and shortwave bands do not work anymore although the FM works beautifully), and I intend to hold on to both of them because, as I always say about older Zenith radios, TVs and stereos, they don't make them like that (handwired on metal chassis) anymore. Even my Zenith model R-70, which is from the early 1980s and was built on a PC board, although the radio is very solidly built and sounds great, is much, much better, IMHO, than most any of the one-chip plastic headphone stereos available at discount stores. Those older Zeniths will outlive these gutless wonders by many years. My T/Os are over 40 years old and are still going strong, and the R-70 is 35 years old and still plays as well as it probably did when it was new, which is more than I can say for any radio made offshore these days.