I was the one who mentioned Zenith's move to Korea. I was asking Doug what all those buildings at Zenith's corporate HQ in Franklin Park/Chicago were being used for, now that the company's manufacturing plant for all its products (radio and TV, not to mention home theater, etc.) has moved permanently to the Orient.
There was also mention made of the fact that Zenith is now just a meaningless brand name on televisions manufactured by Gold Star, and RCA has now apparently licensed the use of its brand name and logo to Radio Shack.
Well, there go two of what once were the best brands of TV's ever made. (A friend of mine has a 25-year-old RCA [when RCA still meant RCA] 12-inch monochrome portable set which still works great for him on cable.) I haven't seen the new "Zeniths" up close lately, so cannot comment on the quality of the sets' pictures or CRTs; however, as I have said several times in my posts to this and the SS/rectangular tube TV board, RCA, even though now owned by Thomson, still puts out some good TVs, though many sets have had problems with solder joints around the on-board tuner cracking and the EEPROM IC losing its programming when noise gets into the chip. My own RCA CTC-185A7 XL-100 (another meaningless label these days) 19" set was repaired twice because of a problem on the tuner board that had nothing to do with the tuner or the EEPROM; the problem, rather, was that the RF port to which the antenna/cable connects had snapped off the tuner board. The technician who repaired this works for the local TV shop in the next town; he told me that the RF port on CTC185s was mounted very flimsily and was a weak spot in these sets. He managed to reinforce the connector on mine with an improvised bracket the second time around; so far it's been holding up well (I had this repaired the second time about a year or more ago; the first repair was earlier the same year). In fact, the technician so much as told me if this problem ever occurs again, I should throw the set out and get a new one.
I can't afford to go out and buy a new TV every time it goes bad, which is why I purchased a three-year service contract for mine. At least until 2006, I'm covered if anything goes in the set, including the tuner, EEPROM or anything else except the RF input port to the tuner, and perhaps the CRT. Why RCA did not cover that (the repairs to the RF port) in the first service contract I had, I don't know.
IMO, the glory days of RCA and Zenith ended when the companies went overseas, if not before. The brand names and logos on the fronts of these sets, right beneath the CRTs, mean nothing anymore, since the televisions are no longer manufactured by RCA, Zenith or any other American company.
Many of the old-line TV manufacturers such as Admiral, Emerson, Philco, etc. are out of business today. Why? Because, again IMO, they couldn't compete with the Japanese, Korean, etc. market when United States retail stores and places like Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. in the '90s and maybe earlier started marketing sets with names like Sharp, Toshiba, Gold Star, et al., all of which are made overseas.
The same thing has in effect happened to RCA and Zenith. These companies exist today only as meaningless labels on TVs manufactured not in Chicago, Illinois or Camden, New Jersey, USA, but by companies the likes of Gold Star and other Korean/Chinese, etc. entities. We had better get used to having to repair these sets a lot more often than before, and for more catastrophic problems such as flyback or power supply problems, etc. as they aren't made these days like they used to be.
