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I've noticed the modern JVC, GE, and RCA sets are total garbage. The GE tops at the worst, RCA and JVC sets next. In the US, these sets are either assembled in mexico or china it seems, and the design is just so poor. The CRTs look like crap. The sets I've liked are toshiba flat screens and sony wegas, which have beautiful sharp pictures.

Here in Italy good television sets are long gone! The only maker of high quality tv sets that also sells tvs here is Bang and Olufsen.Another good one is Loewe.Best european brands (Telefunken,Saba,Nordmende,Grundig,Itt Schaub Lorenz...)are long gone. Unfortunately almost every brand (cheap or less cheap) is turning to plasma and lcd technology! What a shame! How can people prefer such products that at the best produce a rather poor picture compared to picture tube based sets?Is it fancy design enough to justify paying thousands euro to buy an lcd or plasma television?

I've got three old 21" round color sets and love them to death but I'd have to be smoking something potent and illegal to agree that any of them even come close to a really nice bright 60" plasma set with 3000:1 contrast showing an HDTV program and at eye level on the wall instead of on the floor. Or even standard definition program for that matter. I'd even pick my 51" crt-based projection set over the roundies if it comes to what I would want to watch a couple of hours of tv on a night, sorry. (And at least it still has real picture tubes in it! : ) I mean it's just like my Victrola, I love that thing too and it's really cool playing my acoustic records on it all day but I'm not going to say it sounds better than my hi-fi with 5.1 sound. But I use the Victrola a ton more than my tvs since I don't have to worry about frying a flyback ; ) ..Frenchy

Not vintage but I think the absolute worst are the newer Philips tvs some of them still branded Magnavox.Just had a 32" in only a year old with a bad flyback.At least they did one thing right.The flyback was putting an excessive amount of voltage on the ABL line due to the shorted internal rectifiers but they had a protection device rated at 35 volts on that line to ground.It is similar to the line device in some tvs that usually fails shorted.Otherwise this voltage would have went directly into the jungle(tv on a chip) ic and fried it.On this particular set it is a surface mount device with lots of pins.No picnic to change.The flyback was really cheap.Less than $20 bucks which was surprisinng for an OEM flyback but the whole set is made cheap.The master G2 adjustment is critical on this set as these sets shutdown if it's not right.What a pain turning it back on again til you get it right.IMO the picture was crap on this set as it was lacking in contrast and sharpness.The color tracked very poorly from channel to channel and just a crappy picture.But this is normal for these sets as I've seen several.Had a Walmart special Sanyo sitting beside it and the Sanyo blew the Magnavox away.What junk!

I think you are comparing apples to oranges here. :) NTSC monitors and TVs can display only so much picture information. Plasma displays are higher resolution with better contrast, but they can display more picture information than a NTSC set. Compare a really nice NTSC set of today to a roundie. There shouldn't be much difference.

And don't most color roundies contain a 3.59MHz crystal in their chroma oscillators? My Felton with a CTC9 chassis does. I know it's not much of a difference from NTSC's 3.58MHz, but maybe that could limit color reproduction, I really don't know. Can I replace the 3.59MHz crystal in my CTC9 with a 3.58MHz HC49/U crystal? Will that give me better color or is it just a waste of my time?

Jonathan

I've got three old 21" round color sets and love them to death but I'd have to be smoking something potent and illegal to agree that any of them even come close to a really nice bright 60" plasma set with 3000:1 contrast showing an HDTV program and at eye level on the wall instead of on the floor.

I didn't compared 30 or more years ago tv to lcd and plasma. I compared modern crt televisions to plasma and lcd. The difference is quite obvious if you have the chance to see an lcd and a picture tube type television at the same time, receiving the same signal. The lcd doesn't give the same quality at all! Perhaps in your country you have perfect tv signal or high definition ( anyway I don't remember having seen any tv with astonishing picture during my trip in u.s.a...) but also with a good digital signal ,in my opinion you can't compare a good picture tube based (recent) tv to a plasma or lcd! sorry!

A CRT of the same resolution as the LCD will give a better picture than a crappy LCD.

<rant>LCD TVs contain an LCD panel that can only display one resolution. If you watch 480p on an LCD at 1024x768, the 480p signal is upscaled to LCD resolution. It's pretty much the same with plasma TVs. If it's not a 1080i signal, then an LCD or plasma will look like crap. With CRT,you get a clarity you get nowhere else. The sharpest, clearest, and brightest pictures I've seen have only been on CRTs. I realize everyone loves the lightness and smallness of plasma and LCD, but they won't give you the sharpest picture. And with most properly aligned color roundies, the picture quality is just as good as any decent NTSC TV of today.</rant>

Jonathan

Fair enough I would not really say there's a great difference between a modern CRT set and a roundie other than a lot of the picture carved off by the roundies. Except of course when watching a DVD or something like that and you get twice the horizontal lines displayed or something like that.
I agree LCDs are at the bottom of the tv heap, but shouldn't the newest plasmas be pretty comparable to even a very good CRT? Seems like basically the same idea, a panel made of fixed phosphor-type pixels, except on a plasma, sharpness and convergence are both essentially perfect since there is no concerns about 3 different beams and how sharp each is. Maybe I would not have thought this when plasmas first came out but with the brightness and contrast going thru the roof on them lately, I think I'd pick one over a same-sized and priced CRT. (Low priced plasma, right!) I'd really like to hear an explanation of why a plasma would not have as 'sharp' a picture as a crt if it had the same # of fixed pixels (like CRT dots) except they are individually controlled with no convergence or beam alignment/spot size issues. Is there an issue as far as the ratio of black space between the CRT dots and between the plasma pixels? What is the contrast ratio of the best CRTs that are still made?
As far as standard def looking like crap on a plasma or LCD, to me that is a much more a byproduct of the picture being blown up to 50 or 60 inches vs. a 36 inch CRT. You're talking about making the picture 3 to 4 times the size so of course 'Gilligan's Island' eventually looks like garbage. If it wasn't for HDTV resolution, no way would I have sprung the $ for a set bigger than the CRTs I've owned.

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This is what I LOVE about this place;We have the "smarts" here enuff to have a complicated thing like CRTS Vs Plasma Vs. LCDs explained so even an old dummy like me could understand it-You'll NEVER hear a sales guy "'splain" it that way w/so much clarity...Doubt that many of 'em would know, anyhow...-Sandy G.

<<They also can't do continuous tones of brightness. You'll notice that continuous light to dark shades show up as bands of brightness.>>

So is that due to what you said about the difficulty in dimming the plasma dots compared to a CRT, or just that they aren't using enough brightness resolution when they are driven? I.e. even if you multiplied the resolution of the plasma's driver system by 100, the plasma dots are just not capable of showing that resolution anyway? Can you still see those bands when they are displaying HD? I never looked close enough to notice.

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One big design problem I've seen with plasmas especially is their use of COF(chip on film) ics.The actual drive ics for the plasma panel are mounted on the ribbon cables going to the panel.If one should fail they are not replaceable and the panel must be replaced.Usually causes vertical lines or horizontal lines in the picture.If they short they can shut the whole set down.None of the boards in Plasmas are component level repairable making them expensive to repair and have to get the propietary boards from the manufacturer.A lot of times they'll only sell the parts to a factory authorized repair center.Same with the boards in LCDs.The lamp is expensive in the DLPs and LCD projectors and short lived.Depending on use and on-off cylces I've seen a year or so on average.A lot fail long before a year is up.They advertise 2 years.Also Plasmas are power hogs.Look at the wattage rating on a Plasma.Some of them exceed the wattage of an old tube type color console.

I have an RCA (Thomson) CTC-185A7 19" set, bought new almost six years ago when I moved here. The set has worked just wonderfully all that time, with only a slight problem a few months after purchase (the RF connector for antenna/cable snapped off the tuner PC board). Other than that, the set works extremely well on cable (antennas don't work well in this area :no: ). The auto color circuits work very well also, as I have not had to adjust the onscreen color controls in months. It is for these reasons I intend to keep this set fully as long as it works as well as it does. Digital? Doesn't bother me. I use the set with a cable box now, so if I still have this set when everything goes all-digital, all I'll have to do is call the cable company and have them put in a HD-capable box--if the one I'm using now won't handle the new channels, that is.

I agree with the posters here who have said that plasmas and LCDs, particularly the former, still have bugs which must be worked out. I was particularly interested in one post, in which the writer said some LCDs now are built with some of the video ICs actually incorporated in a cable which requires the entire panel to be replaced if those ICs go bad. The projection lamps in DLPs and other projection HDTV sets are something else yet again. These lamps can open after only a year or two, depending entirely on how much the set is used, and are expensive as all get-out to replace (I saw one for an RCA/Thomson projection set listed for something like $400). Compare this with standard TV CRTs. If you get a good one in a modern analog set, it can last years. (The CRT in my set is the original and still looks as good as the day I purchased the TV; I had a Zenith b&w solid-state 12" portable that was still making a great picture on its original CRT, after 22 years, and I also have a 10-year-old Zenith Sentry 2, original CRT and fantastic picture.)

There are still problems with image burn-in in plasmas. I was browsing ebay earlier this evening and saw a listing for an RCA or Zenith 27" CRT set, in which the seller mentioned the burn-in problem with plasmas and that the CRT set he was selling could last another 25 years without the tube burning out or burning up the screen. Some day, plasma panels will have a similar reliability record (with the panel lasting up to, say, ten years or so; I wouldn't expect a plasma or LCD to last anywhere near 25 years), but the current technology is still new enough that it has bugs in it yet. Perhaps when all TV is digital in 2009 (or whenever; I read recently where some Washington bigwigs are trying to move the deadline up to late 2006 or 2007) this may change for the better, but for the time being we are stuck with what's currently available. Compare today's plasma sets with the first CRT televisions 55+ years ago. Back then, the idea of sending pictures over the air was new, and the technology to receive those images was primitive by today's standards. The same thing can be said for today's plasma/LCD TVs. The technology is still very new and has more than a few bugs (heck, even some TV stations are having problems with their digital signals; for example, several stations in Cleveland are transmitting poor-quality, on-again off-again DTV signals because of problems with the transmitters and so forth), so it is not realistic, IMHO, to come to the conclusion that digital or HDTV has "arrived" yet. Far from it. In five years, maybe, but for now the technology is still evolving, so we have to tolerate the bugs in the current system. Speaking for myself, I won't even think of getting a flat-panel plasma or LCD TV until they work as well as and are as reliable as any good CRT set.