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Old 05-10-2019, 09:17 PM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
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I have an RCA 19" CTC-185 TV, bought new in 1999, which also has "XL-100" and next to it "Commercial SKIP", at the upper left corner of the cabinet, above the CRT. I spoke over the phone with an RCA representative several years later and found out that "XL-100", as used on RCA TVs of 1990s-21st century vintage (as mine is), did not stand for "Extended Life" but was simply a model designation. I haven't seen this on today's RCA Roku TVs or other RCA flat screen sets; perhaps the "XL-100" designation was dropped, either at the turn of the last century or when RCA began marketing Roku sets. It may have been that RCA felt it no longer had to promote its 100-percent solid-state TV design after the year 2000 (and certainly after the DTV transition, when CRT sets were declared all but obsolete), although this is purely conjecture on my part.

BTW, I am not at all sure if the XL-100 branding had anything to do with the RCA CTC-16XL (I doubt it very much), but it is certainly possible. As another person here mentioned, however, the "XL-100" designation originally was used when RCA began building its TVs with 100-percent solid-state components, no tubes whatsoever except the CRT and the HV rectifier (though I believe by the time the original "XL-100" chassis came out, the latter may have been replaced with SS components, namely a high-voltage solid-state diode and associated circuitry).
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Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.
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