| SpaceAge |
05-03-2020 08:03 PM |
In this age of the internet and particularly eBay, it amazes me that these types of people wouldn't bother to at least google the model number to figure out if their item has any value. They don't have to care about preserving antiquated technology, the prospect of flipping it for big bucks on eBay should be enough of a motivation. Off topic but relevant, just recently I saw on the local news someone here in Denver found a complete set of blueprints of the world trade center towers in the trash. Apparently one of the lead engineers moved to Denver decades ago and after he died, his daughter was getting rid of his stuff and assumed it was all worthless??? And then the guy who pulled them out of the trashcan sold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Moral of the story: lots of people have zero intuition when it comes to the value of old and obscure items.
I do think there are a few steps we can take to help people that do actually bother to try to find info about their TV. When you search a question in Google, the algorithms attempt to pull the relevant information from the top search result and display it. Well, if you search "Are vintage TVs worth anything?", this is the result:
Quote:
Most sets made after 1950 are not worth much. Consoles, because of their shipping cost and because they take up so much room to display, are worth even less. A typical set from the 50s might sell for $50 or so.
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You can imagine people see that and don't do any further reading. They don't know how old their vintage TV is or if its color or black and white, but to them it looks like it's from the 50s so it must be worthless. Google has actually pulled this line from the ETF page about the value of vintage TVs, and this particular line is specifically talking about black and white TVs but you wouldn't know that from Google's result.
https://www.earlytelevision.org/how_much.html
That page has a lot of great information, but only a small bit is displayed on Google. I think it would be a lot better if the top result was something like "The value of vintage TVs varies widely depending on the age, condition, and type of TV." Then people actually click onto the ETF page and figure out what kind of TV they have and how much it's worth, and get a real answer. If we could get my line above added to that ETF page, and then petition with google to make it the top result (you can provide feedback for search results) it might help someone figure out what they have and prevent even just one valuable set from getting wrecked. I would also argue for that ETF page to be updated with pictures. It has links to different kinds of TVs but it would be easier for people to see them all on the same page. Not to mention people have almost no attention span, so they are more inclined to look at pictures than spend the time reading even a little bit of text. Just my two cents.
The lesson for all of us is to be ready to pounce on a TV when you see it come up for sale. That's about all we can do. I'm still a bit irked from several years ago when I missed out on a CTC-9 on craigslist. It was in Fort Collins IIRC which is 3-4 hours round trip from me. The parents were cool with me getting it but wouldn't let me make the trip on a school night. I arranged to pick it up the following weekend but of course they sold it to someone else in the interim. It has never popped up in any TV collector circles that I know of so I assume it ended up as some hipster's Pinterest project. I will soon be done with college, out on my own, and in full control of my life, and this will never be a problem again. :) |
