Sears Medallist II Hybrid Insta-view?

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Tubejunke

I think this statement says a lot about the current human condition in American society. I think that this mindset could be looked at in regards to age or "generation," but I honestly believe that we have reached a point in time where the ultimate "generation" (50-70 ish) is getting older and want to remain forever young and hip, so they are almost as quick as a 25 year old to push a perfectly good working device to the "obsolete" bin for whatever popular culture finds is the latest and greatest "must have" item. It was their parents who generally had higher moral standards, patriotism, and a superb work ethic that we have not seen since, and unfortunatly their numbers are growing very thin.

So now it seems that people no longer consider much of anything in terms of the hard work that it may (or may not) have taken to obtain a given item, and nothing made these days is really of any use or built of good quality material for use as something else, as was the case of the old B&W console becoming a stand for the new 19" color portable. What I never get is HOW everyone, no matter how poor, seems to have most of these things.

I am 54 years old and currently have two CRT televisions in my apartment, a ten-year-old RCA CTC185 in the living room and a 15-year-old Zenith Sentry 2 in the bedroom. I intend to keep both these sets as long as they work as well as they do. I also have an eight-year-old Panasonic VCR and a bunch of VHS tapes of 1950s-80s TV shows and movies, as well as a DVD player and a small but growing DVD collection, also of mostly 1970s TV series.

A recent NBC news broadcast featured a report on the last incandescent light bulb manufacturer in Winchester, Virginia, which closed its doors permanently at midnight that night. The same report mentioned that VCRs are obsolete. I don't entirely agree with the latter statement; the machines may well be obsolete from a technology standpoint, but they still have uses today. As long as people still have tapes they can watch on them (and have little or no interest in recording off the air), as I do, these machines will still be available for some time on the used market, and as one half of combination VHS/DVD players.

I don't want a flat panel TV right now. Many if not most of the off-brand sets (from what I have heard and read) are too unreliable. They are junk after two years, when the video ICs molded into the cable linking the panel to the chassis fail, unless you spring for a premium brand such as Panasonic's Viera line, which is advertised to last twenty years with an average eight hours per day of use. I cannot afford such a set and will not buy a cheap FP made by some no-name, fly-by-night offshore electronics company. I have toyed with the idea of getting a Magnavox (Philips) 15" FP (they show up in the ad flyers in my Sunday paper every now and then), but won't go through with that either as long as my old reliable CRT sets are working so well.

I am not the kind of person who has to have the latest/greatest of anything; it's just as well, since I am on disability and cannot afford much if not most of the lastest whiz-bang technology. Everything in my apartment is at least a decade old; I intend to run all of it "until the wheels fall off", as the expression goes. At the rate my RCA CTC185 19" main-watcher TV is going (ten years old with only one repair, and a fantastic picture), and my Zenith Sentry 2 (which still works amazingly well after 15 years, and has had no repairs to date) currently in line to replace it if and when the RCA set goes belly-up, I won't even be thinking of getting a FP TV for quite some time.