1991 Emerson EC-1331 14" Color TV (pics)

[Jon A.]

Originally Posted by Robb

I bought it on ebay. It popped up and I bought it immediatly.

Funny, it didn't show in the sold listings.

[Beachboy]

I really miss the days when even inexpensive TV's like this Emerson had some chrome and woodgrain trim. I know it's just aesthetics, but it adds some class compared to the new flat panel TV's, which are just a cheap looking black plastic frame and equally cheap looking gray plexiglass panel. I want to buy flatscreens for my living room and family room, but I don't want the industrial look of the new TV's. My TV is turned off 23.5 hours a day, so how it looks when off is just as important as how it looks turned on. I know there are some furniture-grade wood cabinets which raise and lower the flat panel TV and keep it out of sight when not in use, but those are prohibitively expensive. Am I the only one that wishes a new TV could blend in with the furniture?

[Jeffhs]

You may not like the looks of flat screen televisions, but that's how they are built nowadays; the old style sets with heavy, real wood cabinets are relics of a bygone day we may never see again.

Have you thought of putting your flat screen in an entertainment center cabinet? Not necessarily one that raises and lowers the set (shades of Zenith's Space Screen 45 projection set of the early 1980s), but a cabinet that can hold the TV as well as your DVD and audio gear; some of these have doors you can close over the equipment when not in use, but they are rather large. A friend of mine has his TV and stereo equipment in a large, floor-to-ceiling cabinet (it fits since his family room has very high ceilings), and I personally have my small video setup (19" flat screen, VCR and Blu-ray player) installed in an old oak-finish woodgrain utility cart. My stereo gear is separate from the TV, with the main unit next to my computer and the speakers at either side of my desk. This is about the closest I'll come to having a large cabinet TV/stereo entertainment unit in my apartment, since the place is very small.

BTW and IMO, if you use your TV only 30 minutes a day, any flat screen you get should last years, despite the estimates that most flat screens last only two years due to the use of cheap parts, mainly power supply capacitors that swell and burst or outright explode. My 19" Insignia flat screen is just out of warranty and still works; I use the set about two hours a day, mostly watching DVDs and retro TV stations (there are three such stations in my area, two of which are subchannels of local network affiliates). Don't have much use for the major networks these days, except for news.

[Jon A.]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

I personally have my small video setup (19" flat screen, VCR and Blu-ray player) installed in an old oak-finish woodgrain utility cart. My stereo gear is separate from the TV, with the main unit next to my computer and the speakers at either side of my desk. This is about the closest I'll come to having a large cabinet TV/stereo entertainment unit in my apartment, since the place is very small.

Ha, my place is probably smaller than yours and I have two console TVs along with six other sets, only two of them portables. Right now, there's a 27" table set sitting behind my chair (gotta move that one back into place) that will serve as a parts donor (if needed) for my RCA-built Sears console, and one of my portables is on the desk beside me. Mom and I share an apartment and she has two more CRT TVs of her own, but one is smaller and a spare. I guess it depends on how "obsessed" one is. I don't get any trouble for it; after all, she wouldn't be able to manage without me.

Robb, in regards to the Zenith console, what's that little window above the channel indicators for? A Color Sentry indicator perhaps? At first I thought it may have been for a VHF tuner indicator as it has what looks to me like a 7 behind it, but then I noticed the VHF numbers farther down.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by mstaton

I noticed that the UHF tuner only goes to 68. Nice set!

The FCC reassigned channels 70-83 to land-mobile use in 1970. By the '80s most UHF television tuners stopped at channel 69, but all sets with UHF tuners made prior to about 1985 still tuned the full UHF band, 14-83; some people used the upper range to listen in on cordless telephones, before they were moved to the gigahertz range for security reasons.

I am only guessing as to when the upper 13 channels were eliminated from the tuning range of most UHF TV tuners, but '70 is the figure that sticks in my mind. Both my CRT TVs (1999 RCA/Thomson and 1995 Zenith Sentry 2) have tuners that only run from 14 to 69, so by the mid-'90s (perhaps even a bit earlier) the 55-channel UHF tuning range had become standard. The move to DTV chopped up the UHF band even more. Today, there are only about 35 channels remaining for those few UHF stations still operating under the NTSC standard.

I understand, however, from reading on broadcastingandcable.com and other TV-industry websites, that low-power and translator stations will be required to switch to digital by some time in 2015, if they haven't done so already. This will eat up what few analog UHF channels there are left, so that the entire UHF television band (channels 14-51, IIRC) will be digital by that time. We will just have to wait and see what becomes of the FCC's plan to "repack" U. S. TV channels; this plan, if and when it comes to fruition, may force the few DTV stations presently operating on VHF channels to move to UHF. The VHF band has already been vacated by full-power TV stations, so moving the few remaining DTV stations to UHF would release the rest of the former VHF TV spectrum for use by other services; this, after all, is what the FCC had in mind when they decided to end analog TV in June of 2009.

[Vinylman86]

My parent had an similiar Emerson set like that from the late 80s with a column-style tuner w/ remote. We had it 'til 1994 when the color went bad on it. It had a green tint to it.

[Robb]

Originally Posted by Vinylman86

We had it 'til 1994 when the color went bad on it. It had a green tint to it.

You could have repaired it no ?