Quote:
Originally Posted by compucat
Although everyone thnks I am weird for this but I actually prefer the round screen shape. I don't really like the 90 degree angles and hard edges of today's rectangular screens. Widescreen is great for movies and computers but I like my TV to be circular or very heavily curved like the 1950s sets.
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That is exactly the way I am, and always have been. Actually, I think what started my interest in older TVs was seeing sets like this still in living rooms as a kid in the 70s and still as a young adult in the 80s. I remember thinking that they were, in some strange way, simply more interesting to look at; on or off! That interest led me to acquire a few of them at different times throughout the 80s. I would simply wander into one of the then plentiful TV repair shops where they would often have repaired sets that people had not come back to pay the bill on. Sometimes they would give me sets gladly to make room. Seems like I paid $10 for a nice remote RCA set that performed fine for a few years. Eventually the remote control section started acting up, so I just turned it off. Heck, even in the 80s having remote control was still a non-essential creature comfort and it really didn't matter. It was cool if you had it, and still OK if you didn't. Back then, even if you had upgraded from rabbit ears to cable, there was still only a small portion of the available channels compared to today with a few hundred useless DirecTV. At first there was no "cable box" with remote; the coax just plugged into your antenna adapter. Funny thing to me is even though I have DirecTV, I still only watch about the same amount of channels as I would have with basic cable, not many more than the antenna days which we got around five clear channels.
My dislike of a rectangular screen runs so deep that I actually tried to convert my 1947 RCA 8T-243 set from one of the old fake rectangular viewing areas over a round tube to the "double D", but I never came up with the parts. Really, it would destroy any antiquity or value that the set has, but like most hobbies, I have learned that it's best to just enjoy what you have as opposed to worrying about what it is worth to a certain degree. In the case of the old 47 RCA, I would probably be hard pressed to get rid of the set for what the tubes and capacitors are worth. On a final note, I am glad that more interest is rising in 50s sets. I have always liked the space age look of those sets and often surprised at how little interest existed in them. I have found them at dumpsites more than anywhere else. Even though the CRTs are rectangular, they still possess a unique look I think, and many of them are far easier to work on than the 40s sets in my opinion. I must add that through all of my old color sets, the backup set was always my 56 Philco 21". The set still performs well today!