[Robert__law]

The best CRT TV I had was a Phillips 21inch set which I got in 1985 it had FM stereo sound and supersound which was a simulated sound had the BBC gon for FM Stereo which I believe was the system used in Germany this would have worked , Nicam came out about a year after I got this set , The Screen was pure flat it had a hi tec Japanese look to it the remote was large and had the usual strange phillips hieroglyphic symbols ! it had excellent picture and sound and lasted 10 years before the famous memory problem caused it to loose channels , a friend new about the problem and told me what battery to get from the TV shop and he soldered it on

the tube was showing signs of ageing and in 1995 after being made redundant from my job I could afford to buy a new set also a philips but this time a 28inch but the CRT was not flat

[andys corner]

hmmm decisions decisions.........

had a few good ones, we rented tvs in the 80s and i cant remember them being that great, we eventually bought a sony crt in the early 90s, 25 or 28 inch crt 4:3 type, knocked spots off everything else and we had that until widescreens became the norm (and i was getting staff discount on them), they were rubbish, the first one went pop within about 2 months and after about 2 years the replacement was sold and we bought a panasonic viera plasma, 42 inches but an amazing set, worth every penny.

i had a portable which was made by akura, had that from about 1993 till i was about 21 (2002) the picture would start off ok when changing channel but would lose quality suddenly after about 5 seconds, i bought a bush with nicam (it had the speakers on the front which was unusual for a 14 inch), it was rubbish and i sold it after less than 12 months, i replaced it with a 21 inch flatscreen sony, bought ex-display as a 'doorbuster' in an empire direct sale, one of those where people queued round the block for panasonic 28 inch crt widescreens for £200 (they were still £800 then i think), kept that until 2008, it had a vcr attached which i wasnt using and it was very bulky, at a loss for what to buy me for my birthday my parents suggested something towards a new tv, we found a 23 inch phillips lcd for £250 and i bought it, still got it in my spare bedroom (dont have a tv in the bedroom, got a hifi in its place, no upstairs aerials), its ok not marvellous. had a thomson crt 25 inch (non widescreen) given to me by my mum's business partner's mum when i moved into my own place, it was ok nothing special, we used sky freesat through an old pace 2200 box until that gave up, my lodger moved out and i was bought a tv for christmas, a 32 inch lg lcd, we got it from my friend's shop for about £330 with a 5 year warranty, its a really nice set and it is used alongside a humax 9150

[PsychoTherapist]

The best CRT I ever had, was an old Ferguson TV. I've forgotten most of the details, think it was a 20" screen and must have been manufactured in the late 80s. I got it from a family member 2nd hand, in the early 90s.

It had wood effect plastic casing & no fancy extras - no teletext, mono sound, single coax aerial input, manual tuning with a little plastic orange-coloured tuning stick, lol.

It was still working when we finally chucked it out, in the early 2000s! It had developed only 2 slight faults - if you turned the brightness & contrast up too high, you could hear a very slight whistling sound on bright scenes, with a kind of faint rippling line effect to the picture around edges of objects. The 2nd fault, was crackly sound when the volume was changed (fixed that myself, once before in it's lifetime).

This was also a wonderful TV when I had analogue cable. At one point, a certain scrambling method in use, did not work properly on this TV. The result was, some nice free PPV movies in the late 90s, albeit with wonky colours.

[vinnielo]

An excerpt from my private blog, entitled "My Sony KV-28FX65 TV":

It is with some sadness that I announce the approaching retirement of my primary television set at home.. my Sony KV-28FX65. I've had it since 2001 and remembering paying quite a great deal of money for it back then.

I feel it has had a great and fulfilled life, providing me and my family with years of top-notch televisual pleasure. It's one of very few "recent" widescreen TVs that have actually satisfied my picky self in terms of picture quality and features.

It produced a fantastic picture, with a nice brightness and contrast with no compromise in terms of wash-out even when cranked up. The whites were impressively pearly and looked stunning when watching Sky through my RGB SCART. Bearing in mind the year it was bought, it had the hint of luxury by sporting a flat screen.. and by that I don't mean a thin flat panel, but that it had no visible curve on the glass (the goldfish bowl effect) that older sets seemed to have to inflict on its viewers. But one of the most pleasing features about this TV was its Advanced Digital Plus 100Hz technology meaning that any screen flicker was pretty much unnoticeable, YET any additional MPEG artifacting effects weren't introduced in this up-rating process. I've seen other 100Hz sets where digital TV channels look awfully messy and noisy, as if there was a dodgy domestic PC-encoded video file being routed to the display.

A common problem experienced with CRT TVs at the time of my purchase was the annoying high-pitched buzz. This Sony set was practically silent when in normal operation, and you wouldn't have known if it was switched on or not if the screen was entirely black.

The TV's teletext caching is also something I can boast about. I think it must've had a 500 page storage capability, meaning most pages I want to look up is pretty much instantaneous. (It's a shame that teletext will no longer be available once Digital Switchover happens.. the BBCi / Red Button's infamous "Please Wait" caption just doesn't cut it.)

All in all, it's a fantastic TV that lasted over 10 years.

Having said all this, I never did consider this TV to be the 11-out-of-10 dream set. I mean, there WERE little niggles, such as how it would revert to its default picture settings when teletext subtitles were turned on, and how you could just about spot the thin support wires of these Trinitron sets when a white patch was shown on the screen. Oh, not to mention how horizontally-scrolling text can sometimes have a weird juddery effect.

But I did love my TV so and gave it great care and deserved admiration. I even treated it to an Engineering System Menu Tweak (supposedly dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing, and certainly voided any current warranties). By doing so, I managed to give it the optimal overscan and geometry settings so that I saw everything that there was to see on the active video lines without getting any black borders. Who would want to miss any of the action, eh?

[AidanLunn]

Originally Posted by Robert__law

The best CRT TV I had was a Phillips 21inch set which I got in 1985 it had FM stereo sound and supersound which was a simulated sound had the BBC gon for FM Stereo which I believe was the system used in Germany this would have worked , Nicam came out about a year after I got this set , The Screen was pure flat it had a hi tec Japanese look to it the remote was large and had the usual strange phillips hieroglyphic symbols ! it had excellent picture and sound and lasted 10 years before the famous memory problem caused it to loose channels , a friend new about the problem and told me what battery to get from the TV shop and he soldered it on

the tube was showing signs of ageing and in 1995 after being made redundant from my job I could afford to buy a new set also a philips but this time a 28inch but the CRT was not flat

Sounds like the same set I described earlier.

[Robert__law]

Originally Posted by AidanLunn

Sounds like the same set I described earlier.

It was not a matchline set but it looked high end Phillips I think it cost £450 , the battery memory system was used in all Phillips TVs of that era I think

[Nigel Goodwin]

Originally Posted by Robert__law

It was not a matchline set but it looked high end Phillips I think it cost £450 , the battery memory system was used in all Phillips TVs of that era I think

Yes, Philips were long behind the times, and used battery backed RAM for storing settings long after most other manufacturers had moved to EEPROM.

Nice little earners though

[Orbitalzone]

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

Yes, Philips were long behind the times, and used battery backed RAM for storing settings long after most other manufacturers had moved to EEPROM.

Nice little earners though

They were the best faults to fix out in the field weren't they! - they took 10 mins to repair (including 5 mins for the iron to heat up) and the rest of the time you'd spend setting up the tuning and other settings and maybe do the LOPT for joints if you felt generous.

.... I think someone at Philips had a sense of humour as often the symptons included loss of all settings BUT the volume defaulted to maximum so when the user tuned in a channel they got an earful.

[Orbitalzone]

I think my fav TV's were the Salora 22" from the late 1980's and the B&O slimline from mid 1980's (the ones with the heavy metal remote control and very slimline chassis) - both were from customer's who'd purchased something newer and I got these for free and fixed.

[jjne]

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

Yes, Philips were long behind the times, and used battery backed RAM for storing settings long after most other manufacturers had moved to EEPROM.

Nice little earners though

Funnily enough this was the first repair I performed on a TV

Couldn't get the two Li-Ion cells tagged to each other from RS, so bought them seperately and had a right old time trying to get my 15W soldering iron hot enough to solder the damned things together.

then smothered the two cells together with insulation tape and the TV worked fine from that point onward.

This was around 1991 (edit: no, actually it'll have been 1988-89), when I was a mere teenager. I thought even then that it was odd that they hadn't used an EEPROM

Of course, had I known then what I know now about the potential dangers of running Li-Ion cells out of spec (these weren't, but I wasn't to know that!) I might have been more hesitant.

[terryfc81]

The Panasonic killed all other brands back then and it probably still does, but I got to give LG some props on their smart TVs. The sales have been gradually increasing each quarter.

[AidanLunn]

Originally Posted by PsychoTherapist

The best CRT I ever had, was an old Ferguson TV. I've forgotten most of the details, think it was a 20" screen and must have been manufactured in the late 80s. I got it from a family member 2nd hand, in the early 90s.

Early 80s if it had a tuning screwdriver. These had disappeared from larger TVs by about 1986/87 as electronic memory tuning (PLL/EEPROM as it's known in the trade) became cheaper.

[AidanLunn]

Originally Posted by Robert__law

It was not a matchline set but it looked high end Phillips I think it cost £450 , the battery memory system was used in all Phillips TVs of that era I think

As well as their Charley-deck VCRs. I'm trying to find a replacement for the one in mine.

[AidanLunn]

Originally Posted by Orbitalzone

I think someone at Philips had a sense of humour as often the symptons included loss of all settings BUT the volume defaulted to maximum so when the user tuned in a channel they got an earful.

That's exactly the fault we had with our Matchline (the volume thing), though the tuning and other settings remained constant

[Nigel Goodwin]

Originally Posted by jjne

Couldn't get the two Li-Ion cells tagged to each other from RS, so bought them seperately and had a right old time trying to get my 15W soldering iron hot enough to solder the damned things together.

Why did you use LI-Ion

RS sold (and probably still do) the correct NiCd cells. You could more easily soldered two AA NiCd's together as well, and connected them via longer wires (always handy in an emergency).

As for the comment above about 'full volume', the reason is simple - memory usually reverts to all ones when blank, so once the memory is wiped the volume (and brightness etc.) is at maximum.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Originally Posted by AidanLunn

Early 80s if it had a tuning screwdriver. These had disappeared from larger TVs by about 1986/87 as electronic memory tuning (PLL/EEPROM as it's known in the trade) became cheaper.

The first sets to do electronic tuning/memory were Grundig's, and they used an immensely complicated board covered in IC's to do it, based on a Texas chip set if I recall correctly?.

[jjne]

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

Why did you use LI-Ion

RS sold (and probably still do) the correct NiCd cells. You could more easily soldered two AA NiCd's together as well, and connected them via longer wires (always handy in an emergency).

As for the comment above about 'full volume', the reason is simple - memory usually reverts to all ones when blank, so once the memory is wiped the volume (and brightness etc.) is at maximum.

To be perfectly honest, given it was about 25 years ago it could well have been NiCd. I just remember that they were a non-standard size.

RS did not have the correct cells at the time, I do remember that much. They only had the single cells, which I soldered together. They worked, so I can't have made that much of an error.

Incidentally this particular set didn't do the full volume thing; instead it defaulted to zero volume. It also seemed to keep sensible settings for brightness/contrast etc.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Originally Posted by jjne

To be perfectly honest, given it was about 25 years ago it could well have been NiCd. I just remember that they were a non-standard size.

That's fine then - the correct batteries were NiCd, and either one cell (1.2V) or 2 cell (2.4V), depending on the Philips model. We used to keep both in stock (and probably still have some!), but you could obviously fit two of the single cell ones together to make a 2.4V one, or cut a 2.4V one in half to make a single.

Sometimes a job is urgent, and you don't have the exact one in stock.

[Orbitalzone]

I've still got a coupld in my old tv repair toolkit, must be 15 years old now so I really should dispose of them

[leslie123]

Like Psycho Therapist I had the same set exactly as he describes. It was an excellant set from the Ferguson TX range. These sets were being advertised at the time by Andre Previn as the best pictures of all time. He was not wrong. I purchased my one from Selfridges in Oxford Street, London and I paid £205 back in 1983. Best value for money ever. I was so impressed that I bought two more sets from the Ferguson range in 1986. One was a 16 inch teletext with a grey cabinet and two handgrips either side for easy lifting and a 14 inch manual portable with eight push buttons. Both sets had loop aerials fitted to the back covers if required. These two sets were purchased from Comets. These sets were workhorses and would not breakdown. I have never known reliability such as these. The picture tubes never showed any signs of deterioation. Sadly these sets are no longer in service and have been retired to my loft.

[neo_wales]

Had a few good sets over the last forty odd years. For absolute reliability a portable Sony was the best, model 940? We used this camping for many years and in between trips it was the 'kitchen' television. I might still have it in a box somewhere as I can't remember giving it away. Had a couple of Trinitron's over the years, good sets, good pictures. Got a bloody great Sony flat screen now and I'm not that impressed with the picture quality to be honest.

[AidanLunn]

Originally Posted by neo_wales

Had a few good sets over the last forty odd years. For absolute reliability a portable Sony was the best, model 940? We used this camping for many years and in between trips it was the 'kitchen' television. I might still have it in a box somewhere as I can't remember giving it away. Had a couple of Trinitron's over the years, good sets, good pictures. Got a bloody great Sony flat screen now and I'm not that impressed with the picture quality to be honest.

I've never known any Japanese set more reliable than the Sony 9-90UB - apart from cleaning the contacts of the 405/625 switches, mine has lasted and worked every day for over 40 years - was last used as a security monitor for my Grandad's TV repair shop.

He actually preferred 405-lines right up to the end in January 85, using it to watch TV in his workshop and an old GEC BT302 as his dining room set, on which he only ever watched BBC Breakfast and Question Time. He told me it was "she who must be obeyed" who told him to get a colour set in 1969 - a Sony KV-1320 and then when my dad took that with him to Uni in 1975, a larger Sony which they had up until 1991, when NICAM was "officially" launched.

[iangrad]

Originally Posted by leslie123

Like Psycho Therapist I had the same set exactly as he describes. It was an excellant set from the Ferguson TX range. These sets were being advertised at the time by Andre Previn as the best pictures of all time. He was not wrong. I purchased my one from Selfridges in Oxford Street, London and I paid £205 back in 1983. Best value for money ever. I was so impressed that I bought two more sets from the Ferguson range in 1986. One was a 16 inch teletext with a grey cabinet and two handgrips either side for easy lifting and a 14 inch manual portable with eight push buttons. Both sets had loop aerials fitted to the back covers if required. These two sets were purchased from Comets. These sets were workhorses and would not breakdown. I have never known reliability such as these. The picture tubes never showed any signs of deterioation. Sadly these sets are no longer in service and have been retired to my loft.

From memory the Andre Previn advertised TV's were a lot more expensive that £205 , The starter 59 cm FST range was from about £599 with its 4 speaker ( 2 either side ) quality sound .but thinking back now there might have been a 51 cm model at around £499 ish ?

[Nigel Goodwin]

Originally Posted by AidanLunn

I've never known any Japanese set more reliable than the Sony 9-90UB - apart from cleaning the contacts of the 405/625 switches, mine has lasted and worked every day for over 40 years - was last used as a security monitor for my Grandad's TV repair shop.

They were great little sets - the only 'downside' was the stupid use of a 3.5mm jack socket for the aerial?.

[Orbitalzone]

Originally Posted by iangrad

From memory the Andre Previn advertised TV's were a lot more expensive that £205 , The starter 59 cm FST range was from about £599 with its 4 speaker ( 2 either side ) quality sound .but thinking back now there might have been a 51 cm model at around £499 ish ?

And as I recall Andre Previn didn't actually own a Ferguson as the one of the papers (sun I think) did a story about him owning a Hitachi at the time he did those ads!