Room lighting and Vintage TV
 

My 1-128 Sylvania has the standard 12VP4 instead of the 12VP4A so background lights ruin the contrast unless you keep the lights very dim. Incandescent lamps are a problem, but CFL and fluorescent lamps are the worst. They all produce some near UV and deep blue light. It seems that it makes the CRT phosphors fluoresce.

I recently purchased some Philips 75 watt equivalent AmbientLED LED lamps. They have no UV and produce a warm light.

To my surprise, even with the lights at full brightness, I get good contrast and am no longer bothered by the room lights when I watch the set.

I don't know if the results would be the same with other sets but I thought I should mention my experience with the AmbientLED.

John

That's interesting. I watched CRT TVs with standard incandescent lights on all my life until I got a flat screen last year, and never noticed any anomalies such as you mention. Of course, this was before CFLs. I have no experience with the straight fluorescent tubes; that is, there were a couple of such tubes in the house at the time (in the basement), but none in the living room, where the TV was. My bedroom only had three incandescent lights: two in the overhead fixture and one in a table lamp near my small TV. Again, no problems with the CRT phosphors glowing or the lights interfering with the picture in any way.

When I moved to an apartment 12 years ago, it was some time before I used CFLs in my table lamps. I did have problems with the overhead light in the apartment (four bulbs, two 60-watt and two 40-watt, for a total of 200 watts of light) reflecting off my TV picture. This forced me to use only one light, the one on an end table closest to the TV, when I watched television after dark. That lamp had a 60-watt incandescent bulb (no problems with the light spoiling my TV picture) until about five years ago, then I replaced it with a CFL.

I still have an incandescent bulb (40 watts, Sylvania [!] soft white) in the lamp on my desk, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems with my flat-screen computer monitor when I am working at the computer after dark. The desk lamp sits on the hutch above the desk, so it isn't shining directly on the monitor screen; however, when I had a Hewlett-Packard mx70 CRT monitor on this computer, the lamp did shine directly on the tube, but wasn't much of a problem if I adjusted the lamp head so as not to reflect onto the screen.

Flat screen monitors and TVs seem to be all but immune to glare from room lighting, probably due to improved designs that use non-reflective materials in the panels. For the first time, I am now able to watch TV with the overhead light on, and no reflections.

Zenith did have a line of televisions in the 1950s (round screens, the "porthole" type) that used what were referred to as "blaxide" CRTs. These TVs could be used in brightly-lit rooms with little or no reflections to ruin the picture; unfortunately, this type of tube was only available with a round faceplate and was used only in early Zenith televisions of about 1949 to perhaps 1952.

The company had stopped using the blaxide CRTs by, I think, the late 1950s, and the tube was not being made in any rectangular size, so it quietly faded away. The CRT designs that followed were not nearly as good at blocking reflections from stray ambient light, so TV viewers who had later-model Zeniths than about mid-1950s -- or any other make of TV set -- went back to watching with one dim light on behind the set, or even watching the TV in the dark. I read in an old TV repair book some years ago about how some viewers, upon being told by a television repair technician that the picture tube in their TV was getting weak, would not have the tube replaced (claiming it would be too expensive); the viewer would then continue to use the set until the picture was so dim that it could only be seen in a pitch-dark room, or in daylight with the shades drawn. Then they would put a brightener on the tube, which would give them an often just barely usable picture for perhaps six months, after which the tube absolutely had to be replaced. By this time the set owner, more often than not, perhaps, got tired of looking at a faded picture, and junked the old set, purchasing a new b&w or even a color TV. The sets that were junked were, in many cases, the old 1950s-era console TVs we used to see in trash piles and on curbs in the '60s-'70s, and that collectors here on VK are still finding.