Well, this CRT is destined for the charity shop. It works perfectly and is about 10 years old.
It is a Pacific combo VCR/CRT TV with a single SCART and antenna connection. Nothing special, but it was the TV I used to play PS2 on when I was young. Anyway, I tore it apart before it goes to the charity shop just to see how well it was made.
I'm extremely impressed. For a cheap TV, it has excellent build quality:
- All Rubycon capacitors (including the small ones all across the board), except the primary, which is a Panasonic.
- Primary cap is a 150uF 400V - well sized for the power consumption of under ~50W.
- Soldering is superb. All components, even axial power resistors sitting off the board, don't budge if you try to bend them - I'm not sure how they've done it, but they are very well seated.
- Murata TV tuner. I didn't know Murata made tuners. Nice.
- Excellent line filter components made by Panasonic.
- No components get very warm in operation.
- Picture tube looks very nicely assembled. (It's an ORION picture tube, no idea if this is good...)
- The power supply has an actual controller IC, not a self-resonant/ringing-choke converter.
- All components look high spec. There aren't any bodge resistors/capacitors, for example. Big capacitors are held down with a small amount of epoxy.
- Despite being well used, the board has no signs of heat damage as has been seen in cheap LCD monitors and some TVs.
- The general board layout is very well done and it is clearly labelled throughout.
- It's *not* a Vestel!
I'm not sure who the OEM is for this. No clues whatsoever on the boards.
So, whatever happened to quality electronics? I'm sure we can in part blame the consumer for demanding the cheapest price possible. But this *was* a cheap, store-brand TV. And yet it looks like the engineers who designed this really cared about making a quality TV that would probably last 10-20 years.
I put it on the variac as a test to see what it would do. Strangely it just cuts out at ~122V in. It seems like they missed a trick by not designing the supply to work at down to 100V in (or lower), then they could sell the same PSU for both US and European markets. The PSU board does say "PAL".
Anyway, I will reassemble this and donate it, as it is just taking up space. There is another one in the loft somewhere.
It is a Pacific combo VCR/CRT TV with a single SCART and antenna connection. Nothing special, but it was the TV I used to play PS2 on when I was young. Anyway, I tore it apart before it goes to the charity shop just to see how well it was made.
I'm extremely impressed. For a cheap TV, it has excellent build quality:
- All Rubycon capacitors (including the small ones all across the board), except the primary, which is a Panasonic.
- Primary cap is a 150uF 400V - well sized for the power consumption of under ~50W.
- Soldering is superb. All components, even axial power resistors sitting off the board, don't budge if you try to bend them - I'm not sure how they've done it, but they are very well seated.
- Murata TV tuner. I didn't know Murata made tuners. Nice.
- Excellent line filter components made by Panasonic.
- No components get very warm in operation.
- Picture tube looks very nicely assembled. (It's an ORION picture tube, no idea if this is good...)
- The power supply has an actual controller IC, not a self-resonant/ringing-choke converter.
- All components look high spec. There aren't any bodge resistors/capacitors, for example. Big capacitors are held down with a small amount of epoxy.
- Despite being well used, the board has no signs of heat damage as has been seen in cheap LCD monitors and some TVs.
- The general board layout is very well done and it is clearly labelled throughout.
- It's *not* a Vestel!
I'm not sure who the OEM is for this. No clues whatsoever on the boards.So, whatever happened to quality electronics? I'm sure we can in part blame the consumer for demanding the cheapest price possible. But this *was* a cheap, store-brand TV. And yet it looks like the engineers who designed this really cared about making a quality TV that would probably last 10-20 years.
I put it on the variac as a test to see what it would do. Strangely it just cuts out at ~122V in. It seems like they missed a trick by not designing the supply to work at down to 100V in (or lower), then they could sell the same PSU for both US and European markets. The PSU board does say "PAL".
Anyway, I will reassemble this and donate it, as it is just taking up space. There is another one in the loft somewhere.
Attached Files
). It revealed a forest of Rubycons on the board. I couldn't find a single cap that wasn't a Rubycon. Anywhere. 
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