Rca and Zenith from 1st to worst

[Fisherdude]

Not to defend manufacturers who prostitute quality for profit, but the tv business has changed radically in the last 20 years, even more so than during the shift from tubes & point-to-point wiring to solid state.

TV's used to be very expensive, and were meant to be kept for a long period of time and repaired. The technology remained stable for, essentially, decades.

Now, the technology changes so rapidly, (think s-video in/out, component video connections, cable/vcr/dvd/picture-in-picture, not to mention HT, etc.), that a tv that's only a few years old doesn't have the features that new tv's have, so if it fails the customer will naturally choose to buy a new tv with all the bells & whistles and toss the old one.

Thus, tv's have become disposable items, like computers & printers, which means price drives everything, and manufacturers build them with the understanding that many, many of them will be junked instead of repaired.

Bottom line, current manufacturers are perfectly capable of building sets that will last, and are repairable. That would make them more expensive, which means that you need to keep them for a while to amortize that up-front purchase cost, which means you'll have an old tv that won't have what every new set will have in 2008, which means you'll be unhappy, which probably means you won't do that again.

Doncha just love stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences!

Anyway, that means all the lovers of vintage tv's really should keep and cherish their babies, because we probably won't see the likes of them again.