It's funny that you consider this set to be "early color"... What would you do if forced to watch this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../65Zenith2.jpg

:D

Ok, about my 32" Sony Trinitron..... like I said above,... when you first turn it on, you have no video but you have audio, and then the video finally appears after oh say about 1 min. to a minute and a half. and then once you are sitting there watching it, it starts that the screen goes black, but you still have audio and then the video comes back on and then just continues to flick off and on the whole time you are watching it, but you always have audio? so brokenbroken, do you still think it is the picture tube, because if so, then maybe I will have someone come and take a look at it since its the picture tube that I have the lifetime warranty on. its just a shame to have a 32" sony trinitron sitting and collecting dust in the shed, if I could possilby get it fixed and better yet for free with the warranty!!! :thmbsp: instead of watching its replacement, my 20 yr. old 19" that doesn't even get all the upper cable channels. :tears:

Oh, and thank you jstout66 for offering a Type J battery, but I bought one today and the remote is working fine! I guess it is true, that they just don't make things like they use to! And Carmine, I didn't know where else to post my questions on this oldish Zenith. All I know is it is not one of those fancy HD Plasma things that brews your coffee for you and that costs $3000. so I figured I was safe posting it here. and as far as your roundie? as you all so call them on here? It looks like its so round, that it would almost be like 3D. Do you really watch that tv and how old is that?

...

ok dah........ what is a CRT?

Cathode Ray Tube, i.e. the Picture tube.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube

I've seen many Sony's that have some bad PC connections on the chassis that will do exactly what your set is doing. Have a good Sony repair tech have a good look at it before you condemn the CRT/Kinescope/Picture tube. I'd have a look, but I'm in North Carolina.

You can talk for days on the Rectangular Color forum just below this one in the index about your Zenith. Sony, too!

BTW: When your Sony blanks out to black, does the standby light on the front of the set blink, too?

Carmine, don't sell the roundies short. Your Zenith has a much better picture than a 1964 Silvertone roundie I had in the early '70s. My set had a picture badly out of convergence, and at the end (a year or so before the video-output tube socket broke out of the video PC board in 1973 :no: ) I had hum bars in the picture as well, not to mention so-so color sync. I admit, it wasn't the best color picture on earth by a long shot, but this was a set I got from a neighbor in my hometown who had had the set in his garage for years, so I considered myself lucky to have gotten the TV to work at all.

IMO, the picture you show on your set (using rabbit ears as an antenna--you must be in a prime signal area for Detroit stations) isn't so bad, even by today's standards, although today's dark-tint inline tubes are brighter and have better contrast than even the best roundies had 35+ years ago. Roundies may not have produced the best pictures on earth, but they were all that was available in the '50s and '60s until rectangular tubes were introduced. There were also roundie b&w sets in the fifties (Zenith's Great Circle sets with the Glare-Ban Blaxide reflection-proof CRTs come to mind, as well as a 16" Majestic b&w round-tube set I got from my aunt in 1969 when she moved), but the rectangular tubes did produce better and brighter pictures as the technology improved.