It is amazing how many vintage CRT'S are still great!!

[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..