Quote:
Originally Posted by maxhifi
I find it fascinating that the USSR was producing black and white tube chassis TVs well into the 80s
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Here really were some weird things. On the one hand, fully-semiconductor color TVs with aperture grille CRT in late 60s! On the other hand, B/W tube TVs were really being produced inertially up to mid 80s...
Of course, those late "tube" TVs were not chassis-designed tube monsters. They contained a vertical tin frame around a CRT holding a few PCB boards with some tubes poking out of them. The tubes were used in output stages only to simplify the circuits, and mainly for price-reducing reasons. For example, in 70s a good high-voltage flyback transistor in DO-3 package was valued notably higher than EL500 cheap as dust, so designers made no bones of using some tubes in inexpensive TVs. Sometimes it looked really crazy, for ex you could see a modern DIP-14 IC as a video detector/preamp and 6BM8-like tube in the output stage. Of course, in 80s tubes were completely ousted by cheap plastic transistors and special ICs.
I remember my grandparents bought one of those discounted vestigial TVs in 1987 to use it in their summer house. It really was very inexpensive, so they weren't afraid that somebody could steal it from the empty house in winter:
