[HN Gopher] Why the last major U.S. television set maker, Zenith...
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Why the last major U.S. television set maker, Zenith, finally gave
up (1988)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-09-19 11:13 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| hvs wrote:
| Growing up in the early-80's, my parents were diehard Zenith
| customers. "They make the best TVs" was something I heard often
| from them. I was just a young boy, but a few things stand out in
| retrospect:
|
| 1) Zenith was likely a very popular brand in their Boomer
| households in the 50's and 60's.
|
| 2) This was an age when there were still "Television Repair
| Stores" where you would take your TV when it failed for some
| reason. These probably leaned towards US-built brands.
|
| 3) There was probably not a small amount of "Made in the U.S.A."
| boosterism by my parents going on. The 80's was a decade when
| "fear of Japan taking over everything" was very common.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The 80's was a decade when "fear of Japan taking over
| everything" was very common.
|
| What an outdated, parochial view of the world.
|
| Everyone knows China's taking over everything.
| tuatoru wrote:
| And in the '40s, it'll be "India's taking over everything".
| And in the '60s, "Nigeria's taking over everything".
|
| Demographics is the least cloudy crystal ball.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Point 2 is interesting, because one of the reason that foreign-
| manufactured TVs came to prominence is because they were cheap
| enough + reliable enough that TVs could functionally be a
| disposable good. Another is that right during the late
| 80s/early 90s is when TVs started showing substantial
| improvements every ~5 years, whereas things were more static in
| the early 80s and before, which meant that instead of repairing
| an old TV, you could buy a new one that was substantially
| better than your old one.
|
| Basically the TV market turned from being similar to the car
| market to the computer market.
|
| Interestingly, I think we may be heading back in some ways, as
| the improvements/"upgrades" on TVs are slowing down, and
| there's also a growing anti-waste movement + a squeezed
| poor/lower class. I wouldn't be surprised if TV repair makes a
| comeback.
|
| (My grandfather repaired TVs.)
| hedora wrote:
| Old TV's had consumable, user-replacible components (the
| tubes), and were unreliable due to being hand wired.
|
| I don't see the industry moving back to either of those
| things.
|
| These days, the repairable parts are likely to out last the
| display anyway. I don't see TV repair becoming common again.
| I could imagine them encouraging recycling (and local
| shopping) by adding a "core" fee like they do for lead acid
| batteries.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I can see the mainboard being replaceable. The SoC's become
| slow after a few years on smart TV's and makes using them a
| pain because of how sluggish and unresponsive the UI
| becomes
|
| That's wishful thinking though, I don't see this happening.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| You'd think TV repair was dead, but we have a local TV
| repair guy who has a few lucrative warranty repair
| contracts with some of the bigger brand names.
|
| He usually doesn't do much other than replace fried main
| boards, but occasionally will do a proper repair (where
| possible) on out of warranty TVs. That work I can't see how
| he makes money out of it, but he does it anyway.
|
| I'm glad he is still going, he is a dab hand at fixing
| vintage hi-fi which is subsidised by his TV warranty work.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| Their replacements were far less reliable because the ICs
| were socketed, not soldered onto the board. My old man
| regularly opened the back of his 1980 RCA to "crack
| knuckles"...firmly seat ICs that had lifted up from the DIP
| sockets.
|
| The unreliable nature of tube NTSC color TVs was entirely
| the fault of tubes being pushed to their limits and the
| need for 600 volt plate supplies.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I thought that there was some definite economization-to-
| death in the later years.
|
| From like 1995 until their demise, was there any
| meaningful enhancement to NTSC tube TVs? There were minor
| enhancements in on-screen display, flatter glass fronts,
| and maybe the addition of S-video inputs, but there
| wasn't really much that could be leveraged as a "premium"
| set that could demand a higher margin except for _maybe_
| a Sony Trinitron. There was no meaningful "Replace your
| 720-line set with a 1080- or 2160-line one" sales pitch.
| The obvious way to compete is to go full Madman Muntz and
| cut every possible corner.
|
| I recall in the early 2000s a fairly newish (at the time)
| RCA 27" tube release the magic smoke, and the discussion
| on sci.electronics.repair was very much "oh, that chassis
| design is all but guaranteed to fail catastropically when
| it does fail, may as well buy a new set". I don't doubt
| that group had several thousand man-years of repair
| experience, and they had very little positive to say for
| any set made after the Carter administration.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Yeah, inside the enclosure of a modern TV is an LCD panel
| connected to a board the size of a raspberry pi that holds
| a SOC and some input connectors. There just isn't anything
| to be repaired. The minimum unit of replacement is the
| entire unit.
| vel0city wrote:
| It kind of depends on the failure modes. There was a wave
| of Samsung TVs which were a big victim of bad capacitors
| at the time. Replacing <$1 worth of caps would often
| salvage the TV.
|
| Also, a number of TVs these days fail because of poor
| phosphor coatings on the light strips causing color
| issues and uneven brightness. The stuff literally starts
| falling apart inside the TV. A quick clean and
| replacement light arrays ( often <$75) will then refresh
| the TV, making it like new again for at least several
| more years. Hopefully the replacement light arrays will
| last longer.
|
| Sometimes the power supply, core logic, and inputs will
| be on separate boards. This means if an input connector
| gets physically broken it may be possible to replace just
| the board for the inputs instead of having to replace the
| entire board. Even then, assuming you can find it the
| board itself can be significantly cheaper than the entire
| TV. YMMV on parts availability though.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Hmm, my family once replaced our LG 1080p TV's mainboard
| after the HDMI ports failed, then the TV stopped powering
| on past the splash screen at all. The built-in content
| apps (the early days of smart TVs before they turned into
| a surveillance capitalism hellscape) are dead, and 1080p
| non-HDR is obsolete for pixel-peepers, but for our
| limited use, the screen still works just fine.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| What changed is that TVs are no longer primarily being used
| to watch broadcast television.
|
| Nowadays a television is used to watch Netflix and to play
| videogames on.
| autoexec wrote:
| It's not that TVs are so cheap that they are disposable, but
| rather that repairs are so expensive that you might as well
| just replace the whole thing. Even when all you'd need are
| some inexpensive parts the cost of parts + service just to
| get am extra year or two out of a TV before something else
| fails (as they are designed to do) is less attractive than
| just replacing the device.
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It took some close reading of the article to determine that this
| account is from 1988. I'd thought Zenith had long since ... met
| its nadir.
|
| As it turns out, the company still exists, somewhat, as a
| subsidiary of Korean-based LG Electronics, according to
| Wikipedia:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenith_Electronics>
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Even weirder, a few years ago Dell was selling Zenith co-
| branded thin clients.
|
| "Dell Wyse Zenith Zero COOX Thin Client"
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/162817003918?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...
| vidanay wrote:
| That's a double zombie. Wyse mainframe terminals were popular
| in the 80's.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Wyse#History
| neilv wrote:
| The WY-50 and similar models were also popular for Unix
| systems and microcomputers.
|
| The screen looked great, IIRC they could do smooth scroll,
| and they were overall kinda stylish. (Though today in a
| vintage terminal I'd prefer the command set to be ANSI
| X3.64 or VT-102. Not Wyse, nor Televideo, nor something
| else.)
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, some of the WYSE terminals can do Tektronix
| graphics. AFAIK only DEC ones do ReGIS. Also, oddly
| enough, the last two generations of DEC serial terminals
| (the VT 400 and 500 series) dropped graphics support
| (they kept the 300 line in production for that).
|
| These machines should be extremely inexpensive to make
| (an 8-bit microcontroller, 68xx or 8032 and barely enough
| memory to back the display) back then and the high prices
| they commanded (and that ended up killing them) were very
| hard to justify in comparison with a PC.
|
| I miss these machines. Smooth scrolling (speed adjusted
| to keep up with the backlog) should be a thing in modern
| terminal windows.
| neilv wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't know that about Tek graphics in Wyse,
| nor about DEC dropping ReGIS. (I once tried shopping for
| an original Tek terminal, to play with the graphics, but
| prohibitively expensive, and also large.)
|
| One attraction of the later DEC terminals is that they
| can take a PS/2 keyboard, which are somewhat easier to
| find in good condition, and in compact versions, than the
| original DEC parts.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > they can take a PS/2 keyboard
|
| The bright side is that their fonts are somewhat nicer.
| IIRC, a VT330 has 240 scanlines (even though ReGIS
| pretends it's 480)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Right. Also Unix serial terminals.
|
| There was a brief hint of a resurgence in the late 1990s
| with "thin-client" craze.
|
| We've got thin clients now, but they're phat, made by Apple
| and Samsung mostly, and fit in your pocket. For
| increasingly large values of pocket.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > but they're phat, made by Apple and Samsung mostly, and
| fit in your pocket.
|
| Also Chromebooks and those Windows laptops that can't do
| much more than running Chrome (and swapping to eMMC).
| jerf wrote:
| Reminds me of RISC vs. CISC. Who won? Yes.
|
| Thin client or thick client? Yes.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My first IBM compatible was an AT class WYSE with passive
| main board.
|
| It was a decommissioned CAD machine so it has that high
| resolution Hercules monochrome display.
| MisterTea wrote:
| This is just some weird keyword spam the seller has added. I
| have one of those and there is no Xenith, Zenith, Zero or
| COOX branding on them, Just Wyse. I ran it as a light ssh
| server with an external USB disk for extra storage. Upgraded
| the internal 44pin ATA flash disk to 8GB and it ran Debian.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It took some close reading of the article to determine that
| this account is from 1988. I'd thought Zenith had long since
| ... met its nadir.
|
| Your mental ad-blocker may have caused you to ignore the box
| that explained that:
|
| > This article was first published as "The longest survivor
| loses its grip." It appeared in the August 1988 issue of IEEE
| Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The
| photographs appeared in the original print version.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The box uses small type and isn't prominently placed. It is
| of course what I ultimately did stumble on.
|
| I'd searched the top, bottom, and sidebars (usual places) for
| a dateline without luck. There _is_ a notation presently
| reading "23 h" (I presume "23 hours ago) at the top of the
| article. This is of course misleading.
|
| There's no other prominent notice that the piece is
| historical, and very little context within the text itself
| placing dates, though the notion that CRT masks would be a
| _current_ (2022) technological development struck me as
| unlikely. IEEE should do better.
|
| Hiding datelines, amongst other sins (relative times, e.g., X
| time-units ago, or JS-dependent datelines), are an
| increasingly common Web annoyance.
|
| Contrast _The Guardian_ who rather refreshingly note
| prominently when a piece is no longer current. E.g.,
| <https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/apr/04/offshore-
| secrets-...>, which notes _in a bold black-on-yellow box at
| the top of the page_ "This article is more than 9 years old".
| (From an earlier comment of mine.)
| dpkirchner wrote:
| That box only appears after you tap the "read more" button
| that is styled as plain text, at least when viewed in mobile
| Safari. It's an odd pair of decisions made by the folks at
| IEEE.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| I similarly found myself irritated that there was no mention of
| Zenith's prominent place in the advent of the ATSC digital
| television system and their subsequent role as technical
| shepherds of ATSC hardware and software development, which went
| with all the rest over to LG. My bad for not noticing the 1988
| timeframe of the article.
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