Quote:
Originally Posted by Sandy G
Well...Companies even back then were all about cutting costs to the bone. You gotta know that for every engineer who was talented & proud of his work, there was a beady-eyed bastard Cost Accountant who was all over him all the time to cut this corner, leave that IF stage out, make the coating/rare earths on the picture tube a few microns less thick... Sure the resulting mess WORKED, but for how long, & at what price to reliability ? The round CRTs prolly didn't see too much of this, but I'll bet you a chicken dinner that the rectangular tubes had been "Doctored", "Cheapened", "Played with".....Sometimes this monkeying around w/things DID result in improvements, but most of the time it was strictly a cost saving measure... And, when color TV really did take off in the late Sixties/early Seventies, mfgers were under IMMENSE pressure to crank out as many as possible-The Dealers can fix 'em in the field...And we can't forget our old friends in the Gummint...Maybe a certain phosphor or process was THE way to REALLY make a good CRT, but the phosphor in question made Yellow-Bellied Sap Suckers' Tail Feathers fall off...Gasp ! Horrors ! Can't have THAT, so that chemical was forever banished..
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JUst looking at the rect. tubes tells one that they had been "played with"-- the whole gun is about HALF the size as on a roundie....so MUCH less cathode area to produce the picture...and it DID show. A good roundie looks "different" in a GOOD way, not really explainable, than ANY rect. tube!!
And let's not forget the "mini necks", those tubes , from the late '80's till the end of the tube era.NO doubt a cost-cutting measure. The necks were even smaller than the normal color tubes of the time--and they did not last nearly as long. They did NOT take rejuv. very well, either....Philco attempted this in the early '50's, with the "neoscope" a very early mini-neck BW tube--evidently it did not work well...but the concept was revived for color with the Zenith trri--potentials in the mid-70's and taken farther by the 1980's...NONE of them last too long!!
However...some of the rect. tubes, like the Zenith CC tubes were made to LAST, as we know. SO were the HItachi tubes made in the late '80s to the early 2000's. RCA used them....and they last almost as long as a CC tube.
OTOH, THe Zenith LG tubes, from about 90 or so till 98 or so...is an example of "cutting" gone WAAAYYYY too far. 3-4 good years was the BEST one could likely expect from one!!