| Jeffhs |
01-17-2010 01:04 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by miniman82
(Post 2964197)
There's never anything here in the midwest. argh!
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I know what you mean. I live in a small town near Cleveland, and there's nothing much here either as far as antique/collectable TVs go. I've lived here ten years and have only seen two old TVs on the curbs here in all that time: a small 1980s-vintage RCA tube-powered 12" b&w portable and a 1978 RCA 25" color console. I did see a couple of recent-vintage CRT-based color table models being put out for the trash last summer, but they couldn't have been more than five years old or so, so these didn't count as collectibles. Couldn't see the brand names, but from the looks of these sets they were probably cheap Pacific Rim junk made by companies no one ever heard of, so it may have been no wonder these sets gave up the ghost so soon.
I moved here from a Cleveland suburb, and by 1990 or so there weren't that many old TVs in that neighborhood anymore. I do remember, however, seeing old sets--Zeniths, mostly, but an RCA or Admiral, etc. would show up every now and then--on the curbs in my old neighborhood in the late '60s, early '70s and '80s. These were probably junked when the homeowners got color, or the old sets had developed major problems which were deemed too expensive to have repaired. Some sets had nothing more wrong with them than one or more bad tubes. I once picked up a 1963 Zenith b&w 23" console that was missing all its tubes but the HV rectifier and CRT. I replaced the missing tubes and--wonder of wonders--the set worked as soon as I turned it on; strong CRT, razor-sharp picture, typical Zenith. The set worked flawlessly the next three years, until I moved and had to give it up. :no: I bought a 1949 Zenith AM/FM table radio at a thrift store in the 1980s or thereabouts that only needed a new fusible resistor to get it working again. :yes:
Ah, memories.
However, that was then; this is now. It seems the only places to find vintage televisions these days are eBay and Craigslist, as the days of being able to find vintage and even antique TVs in the trash are just about gone. People who misunderstood the early messages regarding digital TV, before ATSC->NTSC converter boxes were available ("your TV will go black in 2006 [later 2009] unless you get a new HD flat panel") are now discarding perfectly good small portables and even recent-vintage consoles (the latter's particle-board cabinets and cheap plastic "wood" accents over the speakers and elsewhere on the cabinets notwithstanding), the owners having believed those first warnings and are now all but convinced their old sets will not work anymore. I understand that many perfectly good recent-vintage CRT TVs are showing up at Goodwill stores and Salvation Army for the same reasons, and going begging for new owners, since of course these older sets will not work with today's digital signals unless a converter box or cable are used ahead of the sets, and there are still a lot of folks out there (yes, even now, over seven months after the DTV transition) who do not know analog TV does not exist anymore and why their old TVs don't work any longer. |
