Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert Grant
Sadly, I had a KTV prison TV and let it go. I went up north with not enough room in the car to bring a large TV set, so I had a 5" cheapie. When the Es season proved itself to be alive and going, the 5" proved inadequate, so I went to a thrift store and found a KTV 1210CLR for five bucks (the town near the cabin also used to have a small prison). It performed pretty well, pulling VHF stations to 1215 miles and UHF to 400. After two weeks, I did not have enough room to bring the KTV home, so I gave it to the resort host, who threw it out.
I only found out later that it was designed for prisons (I had assumed it was part of the clear appliance fad of the 90s (I had seen clear telephones and 5" TVs in stores in the past).
I think console color TV production may have fallen back into the early 70s because of market saturation - so many people had already bought their color TV sets.
I do know that monochrome TV production had fallen during part of the 1950s for the same reason.
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I did have a late '90's RCA clear prison TV; but, I didn't know it was a prison TV at the time. And, I had one of those clear telephones, back in the early '90's.
As far as console TV's, the most recent ones I remember seeing were from 2001 and were made by RCA and Zenith. After '01, I don't recall seeing any new consoles in stores. Not long ago, someone gave me one of those "last gasp" 25" Zenith consoles from '01. The cabinet was still perfect and the owners stopped using it because it had been struck by lightning. Fortunately, the only damage was a blown fuse and one burnt trace where the AC enters the chassis. Once that was fixed, it had a very good picture, for a late model Zenith. I ended up letting a friend have it because he wanted a nice looking console. AFAIK, he still uses it. As you might expect, the cabinet on that set was made of particleboard and plastic and the chassis consisted of a small PC board in the bottom of the cabinet.