[Jeffhs]

I had a 1964 Sears Silvertone 21" roundie color set in a metal cabinet, with provisions for screw-in legs, in the early '70s, a trash find in my old neighborhood around 1970. It didn't work really well (convergence was off and I didn't have a generator to reset it, the picture developed hum bars, the color sync went haywire, etc.), but I used it for three years until a circuit board cracked. I missed it for quite a while after that (was watching b&w TVs, of various makes except Magnavox, until I found my next Sears color set in the trash in the mid-'70s) but when I bought my first new color set in 1979 I realized how much of a difference a modern set can make. The picture on my 1979 Zenith color portable (on the attic antenna in my home at the time) was much, much better than either of the two second-hand sets I'd had previously. I bought a Zenith 13-inch portable with one-knob varactor tuning some four years later; the picture was as good on that set as it had been on the '79 portable. I had these sets for close to 20 years, then I moved and bought a new (at the time, late 1999) RCA CTC-185 XL100 19" table model, the TV I have now as a daily watcher. The picture on this set is excellent! I have Time Warner basic cable (broadcast channels only), and I swear the picture on my now decade-old RCA (and a 14-year-old Zenith Sentry 2 in my bedroom) are better than any of the color sets I had owned previously.

I was thinking tonight as I watched the evening news how much TV has changed since I got that 21" Silvertone roundie in 1970, and am glad I don't have that set anymore. Not that I don't like vintage TVs -- my basement was full of old trash-picked sets 40 years ago, and goodness knows I enjoyed working on them and actually getting a few of them to operate well -- but since I now live in a small apartment, I no longer have the room for such things. Anyway, I got to thinking how much more stable color TV signals are today, how much more reliable the sets are since they are (and have been since RCA's first XL100s) solid-state, and again, I found myself actually happy that the old days of tube TVs and analog signals are behind us. Digital TV had problems during the transition (and still does in some areas), but I think it is actually better now than it was when all television was analog. Remember when UHF first appeared in the US, and all the reception problems some areas had, even areas in supposedly prime-signal locations for VHF? And who can forget the problems a lot of viewers encountered with weak signals, etc. when color arrived?

One of the best things to happen to TV, IMHO, was the arrival in the '70s and '80s of cable in cities and their suburbs. With today's DTV standard, many viewers have such problems getting decent reception using a converter box and an antenna that they have given up on outdoor or rabbit-ear antennas altogether, turning instead to the cable with its rock-solid, stable signals. Even if a viewer cannot afford the high rates most cable companies charge for digital or expanded basic cable, basic (what I call "bare-bones" basic) cable service, at least in my area, costs under $20 after the initial installation, and with all digital broadcast signals converted to NTSC for viewers with older analog sets, there is no need for the viewer to rent a digital converter box unless he or she actually wants the extra channels -- and most of the programming shown on cable movie channels, to say nothing of older TV series from the '90s back to the '50s, is now available on DVD. I'm saving a lot by having gone that route (downgrading to basic cable and watching older shows on DVD and/or VHS), which is important to me since I live on a fixed income, and simply did not want to pay through the nose for expanded basic any longer when it exceeded $50 per month.