---

That was a very good advertised price on that Westinghouse. They must have been a pretty crappy set for so few to have survived. I would have to say that the old Westinghouse stuff I've seen was all sub-par. I would add that I have yet to see ANY Westinghouse color set beyond the first one. I know they sold them up through the end of the sixties; seems like someone would have come across one by now.

I don't think Westinghouse had very many dealers carrying their TV sets back then. Even Westinghouse B&W sets seem to be scarce. I used to look at new TVs in the stores frequently in the late 50s. The only color sets I saw then were RCA and Silvertone. Frequently seen B&W sets were RCA, GE, Zenith, Motorola, Philco, Magnavox, and Silvertone.

=== Now-a-days, good quality HDTV programming is hard to find. Rarely do you see everything at 1080i, as most of the time movies and shows are upscaled to 1080i. It looks like crap to me. The national HDTV PBS feed had beautiful 1080i, and looked amazing. But in my area, this was the only 1080i. Now on the networks they broadcast multiple channels at 480p, including my local PBS, ABC, WB, CBS, and NBC. The best HDTV I've seen is sports events and Discovery HD. Movies still are lacking unless shot with HDTV cameras or it's a 1080i film transfer.===

CBS in Los Angeles has no subchannels so everything they do in HD looks great. And ABC does subs but they are 720p which is barely affected by that and still looks great. All the big network primetime series that are not 4:3 format are NOT upscaled, they are shot in HD. So to me, usually the quality is the content of the shows, not the presentation. (I'm talking over the air here, not cable etc.)
As far as movies being film transfer, I don't know what you are expecting, yes they are transferred to 1080 or 720 but film is film and it has to be transferred as they have always been. Someday they will convert to digital HD cameras but the film transfers still look fantastic when there's no degradation from subchannels. I'm sure the technology for transferring is way better than the old 4:3 days. Anyway the result is certainly tons better than SD or dvds. Personally I'm waiting for HD dvds to come out : )
The one station out here that actually DOES look like crap to me is the main PBS station, they only have one subchannel but they must be giving it a ton of juice because it drags down the HD channel into motion-pixelization-land. NBC is better but not much. I'd prefer they had just gone with 720 and end up with a slightly lower-rez pic but with way way less degradation.

I have one of the Westinghouse b&w tv's. I haven't started working on it yet, so I don't know how good it is. The power supply was unusual, it uses two 5U4's. I like the way it looks though, it is a metal cabinet sitting on a wooden swivel base with metal legs. Here is a pictule of the model from an advertisement (mine is black, and not the red pictured).

I have never restored any B & W set. Mainly because as a young guy, it was b & w I was trying to get away from! Brings back too many (I wish I had a color tv memories)

Yes, they were flat inside. I did some calculations on the refraction, and it looked like the concave effect from that would be much less than the apparent concavity. Also, if there is even a little pincushion distortion, it adds to the appearance of a concave image.