Another question for those who were "there"...

[jstout66]

I "was there" when the listed Zeniths were new. Not much warranty work on the CC2's, and a few on the System 3. Biggest nightmare was the Zenith cap recall on the CC'2's.
Not one of the brands you asked about, but the circa 1979-1980 GE VIR sets were DOGS. Many yoke issues, and they would fail on the showroom floor. We briefly sold those as a secondary line.

[Zenith26kc20]

Let's see.... GE sets with the griplets that had to be resoldered, The small RCA chassis with the flybacks failing like lemmings going over a cliff (If I remember correctly, RCA was sued and lost over those flybacks).

[rrrhre2s]

Aah! The Good old days:

GE 1977 -1980 Ate yokes and flybacks, The CRT's weren't much to brag about either.

Sharp of approximately the same vintage ate flybacks like kids eat candy...

Sony went through a rash of bad CRT's at about this time.

Zenith System 3 series one was OK but when the 9-160 series 2 sets came out was getting like 35 at a time with every thunderstorm, the hot / cold ground system did not like spikes.

Zenith system three version 3 with the 9-191 / 214 series of boards were better except the remote power supply was very likely to be damaged by spikes.

The last Zeniths I worked on was pure junk could not feel safe the CRT would no fail on the dealers showroom floor. The projection sets were bad to arc and destroy power modules...

Rarely seen a CC2 flat chassis except for the occasional triac failure on the remote sets.

rrrhre2s

[wa2ise]

I used to work for RCA at the Smirnoff Labs, and around the early 80's CTC101 sets had the infamous integrated flyback problem. Seems the problem was that the very high voltage winding was split into 6 sections, and diodes were supposed to go between each section, but someone cheaped out and only used 3 diodes and pairs of windings were joined together. This made for higher AC voltage at each diode, diodes were fine, but they used sharp edged stakes as terminals to connect the winding wire and diode leads. This made for excessive corona. And the epoxy eventually failed, shorting the flyback and taking out the horiz output transistor. Was a warranty disaster.