Quote:
Originally posted by maxm
Sorry to bring back an old thread, but I just found this picture at my grandma's house , taken in 1981, but the set is older, I know nothing about it, and nobody can rebember anything about the set, seems like an intersting design with the knobs across the top of the screen.
Any ideas about brand, or if it was color??
Somewhere is have a much better picutre of her late 60s RCA color console (She had a lot of TVs), which she used until 1990, and would have kept using it, but the picture tube died...
And was replaced with a Zenith Sentury 2 Console, still going strong today.
Yes, that's all of the TV that was in the picture, sorry I don't have a better one.
Thanks...
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Max, that set looks to me like a Zenith. I discovered this while looking at the partial pic you attached; found the name right above the CRT. I can't tell you if it was a color set, though, without seeing more of it.
The Sentry 2 series was a great line of TVs. I have a Zenith Sentry 2 19" table model in my bedroom which still works as well as it did when it was new, almost ten years ago. I don't use it much anymore; it was my main watcher until 1999, then I bought an RCA XL100 when I moved in November of that year. I still keep the Zenith around to back up the RCA, and will use the Zenith as my main set when the RCA eventually goes West.
Zenith was my favorite make of TVs and home audio gear until the company went offshore (grrrrr!). Whereas the company's old slogan for years was "the quality goes in before the name goes on" (this was true of their older radios and TVs--I have two Zenith radios that still work today, and well, in addition to having had several old Zenith TVs from neighbors' trash in the '70s that often worked as soon as I got them home, or after very minor repairs--tube replacements, adjustments, etc.), in the case of today's Zenith-branded Gold Star televisions, "the quality went out" the window when Zenith left Chicago for Korea in the '80s (this was probably when their audio division went offshore; I once had a Zenith integrated stereo system which was made in Korea, however, that worked well for me for some 17 years).
I did not realize until I read your post, however, that the Sentry 2 model was also offered in a console cabinet. Was always under the impression that this model was only made in a gray table-model cabinet, as mine was.
BTW, I don't much care for the way the finish has been flaking/scratching off the cabinet of my Sentry 2. The set was made almost a decade ago, as I said above, and already the cabinet is starting to look bad, although the TV itself works great on cable (no CRT or chassis problems whatsoever so far). What was used to finish the cabinets of the Sentry 2 table models? I've never seen the finish scratch or flake off a plastic cabinet before now, and I'm baffled. I'll probably wind up refinishing (if that's the right word) the cabinet with woodgrain Contact paper or some such material if and when I put the set in my living room, but I would like to know what caused the original finish to go to pot as it did. My best guess would be that the cabinets of these offshore-manufactured TVs are nothing like earlier ones, but then again, a lot of what comes to us today from Korea and other offshore locations isn't of the quality things used to be, when everything was made in the United States and Zenith, for example, meant Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago, RCA meant Radio Corporation of America of Harrison, New Jersey, Magnavox meant The Magnavox Company of Fort Wayne, Indiana...and so on.
Personally, I suspect Zenith started cutting corners on its color televisions as soon as its System 3 line, with plug-in printed circuit modules (gasp!
!!!!! horror of horrors!!!) , was introduced in the '70s. This was the beginning of the end for Zenith as far as the company's reputation for reliability was concerned. The day the company abandoned hand-wired circuits in favor of circuit modules was the beginning of their downfall, IMO.
Oh well--that was then; this is now, like it or not. Offshoring, as it is known these days, is a way of life for many (if not most or all) manufacturers of consumer goods. The quality of these goods has, in many cases, gone out the window as a result, but there is precious little if anything we can do about it short of putting up with it.