19" Zenith from 1995 with, of course, a weak jug

[radiotvnut]

I found this 19" Zenith from 1995 at a privately run thrift store and I could have probably gotten it for free, but I ended up giving them $5 for it. The main reason I did that was because they are basically not taking in CRT TVs, because they don't sell, and since they know what I'm looking for, they might save any older ones that come in.

This one is a "bare bones" set, with mono audio, no composite A/V input, and a grey plastic cabinet.

It works, but the jug is tired and I adjusted it as best I could. As you know, these '90s Zenith tubes are not great and with that said, I will not attempt to rejuvenate this tube. These tubes were crap to begin with and rejuvenating them often makes them look worse. If they come up, they'll look better for a brief period, and then they'll fall off again and look worse than they did before.

As far as the cabinet design, I don't recall seeing many Zenith sets from this era with the controls to the right of the screen. I think I've only seen one or two ordinary consumer-grade sets that were laid out like this, but most of the ones I saw that were laid out like this were hospitality sets (hotel/motel and hospital). I know this one isn't a hospital set because the hospital version had a 3-wire AC cord, an internal isolation transformer, and a jack for the pillow speaker remote.

The chassis in this one is also one that I haven't seen much of. Most from this era had the STR53041-based switching power supply, but this one looks to have an STR30xxx based regulator.

With a good jug, these had a nice picture and if I find a good 19" jug that will drop in this cabinet, I might do a "tube swap" on it, one day.