[miniman82]

Originally Posted by Hagstar

I'd say it's, of course, the 1969 RCA G2000 with the first 100% solid state chassis.

I though this was the early color forum, a G2000 is hardly early color and it has a square tube.

clearly tubes were a kluge of sorts in all the color sets I have seen. They ran hot, gradually destroyed the PC boards with that heat, and often ran at the limits of their ability.

Kludge? They were the prevailing technology of that time period, what else were they supposed to use? Transistors didn't get good enough for service in horizontal output circuits till the late 60's, and even then quite a lot of sets were all transistor EXCEPT the horizontal out and HV areas. Why? A tube was still better and more reliable.

The whole center of their appeal to me is the fragility and bold daring of building color sets anyway though reliability and performance suffered so in the tube era. It appalls me on forums to hear people praise the cranky tube sets as built to last...IF tube sets are so reliable why was there a repair shop on every corner then and none now?

Tubes themselves are actually a lot more stable than their silicon counterparts in a lot of ways, they don't drift with temperature for example. The main reason tube based electronics failed was because of wax or oil capacitor breakdown, or a tube lost emission or failed in some other way. Misadjustment either by the user or a technician is another source of grief, it's easy for the horizontal section to be out of alignment and draw too much current which has a habit of melting the flyback for example...

Now if you want to talk about the quality of the parts that went into them, like the capacitors, that's another thing. But again, what else could they do? There weren't high quality Mylar film caps, and even today B+ rated caps have a definite MTBF that you can see on any published data sheet.


I bring all of this up because none of my sets are unreliable after having proper servicing done to bring the caps and resistors up to modern specs, in fact I left one (a CTC-7) to its own devices running 24/7 in a museum in Chicago and it made it nearly 2 years before anything went wrong with it. When it did need service, guess what had gone wrong? A power supply electrolytic had exploded, after replacing it it again worked flawlessly. Another member later acquired it from me, and is completely satisfied with how it works.

A correctly repaired and set up early color set can be a totally reliable tv, when it will fail you is when you ignore published procedures for setting them up. Line voltage too high, horizontal current out of spec, ect. Outside of that, I see no basis in calling them unreliable.