Zenith Handcrafted TVs (Apr, 1965)
This ad pretty much sums up why there are no more American television manufacturers. They are actually advertising the fact that they don’t use circuit boards and that all of their electronics are hand assembled!
BUILT BETTER… to last longer!
Every Zenith portable TV is Handcrafted —built better to last longer. There are no printed circuits. No production shortcuts. Every connection is carefully handwired. This kind of dedication to quality has made Zenith America’s largest selling TV. It is one of the important reasons why Zenith TV gives you finer performance. Fewer service problems. Greater operating dependability. And a sharper, clearer picture, year after year. Don’t settle for less than Zenith—the Handcrafted TV.
ZENITH
The quality goes in before the name goes on
I love the concept that a mass production PCB is more unreliable compared to a bloke with a soldering iron
Comment by HairyFriend — March 6, 2008 @ 7:09 am
I only recently got rid of my Zenith TV, only because I didn’t feel like looking for a replacement tube (not picture tube, just one of the tubes). I’d gotten it over twenty years ago from my Grandmother who had bought it in the ’60s. In fact, it looked quite a bit like the one in the ad. I never had a problem until that tube died. Even then, I mostly only lost ‘red’.
OTOH, I’m on my fourth solid-state TV. They seemed to be designed with a limited life span and are now cheaper to replace than repair.
Comment by nurbles — March 6, 2008 @ 7:24 am
And Zenith ate it’s words in the 1970’s by joining everyone else making modern printed circuit tv’s
Now Zenith, along with RCA are Wal*Mart disposable crap.
Comment by albear — March 6, 2008 @ 10:12 am
Circuit boards at that time were not all reliable and weren’t trusted. you have to keep in mind things have changed… don’t judge any articles on this page by today standers.
Comment by Larry — March 6, 2008 @ 3:23 pm
Everytime I hear “The quality goes in before the name goes on” I think “because the name goes on last”.
Comment by jayessell — March 7, 2008 @ 11:31 am
Well actually a good solid state TV should last for 30 years at least. Maybe capacitors dry out, but that can be fixed.
I don’t know how long those LCD-based TVs will hold. I guess eventually the backlight will fail.
It is noteworthy that most failures of TV sets are in the power supply or deflection anyhow.
Comment by Casandro — March 9, 2008 @ 1:46 am
Ohh last monday I talked to one of the main ingeneers of Telefunken, a back then famous german company. The US were the last to have hand-wired TV-sets, according to him. That also meant that those sets were simply gigantic. Every other country made way smaller TV-sets, maybe except for Brasil where they needed special power supplies to handle large changes in the supply voltage.
Comment by Casandro — April 8, 2008 @ 11:00 am