I had a Zenith tv growing up. I beat the hell out of that thing. It was indestructible. I was always hooking and unhooking my game systems to it and I’m told often you would hear loud crashes as it went slamming into the ground but it never broke. Eventually we changed over to flat screens and we got rid of the tv, and I’m not sure what happens to that tv. Someone might still be using it today. I wonder if the downfall of Zenith is that they made their products too well.

I bought a Zenith System III 21 inch table top set made in 1982 in 2000 or 2001 for 5 dollars at a yard sale. It lasted another 18 years.

TV's were expected in that time period to last 20+ years, they were a major investment.

The other interesting thing about Zenith is, its not uncommon to buy an older Zenith table top radio and have it work out of the box (and by older, I mean, tubes), they use mostly Mica Capacitors, and they seem to last forever.

I had a Zenith from the 1980s that I eventually had to just throw out as I didn't really have space for it and the 20" size had been obsolete for some tie. The thing wouldn't die. It actually had a better picture than some later TVs I'd owned before I inherited it from my parents. I still have mixed feelings about letting it go.

Here's a GREAT IEEE article about the death of Zenith. Was on HN a while ago.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/zenith-tv

Delves deeper into the "lower cost of overseas manfuacturing" as cause of death for the US TV industry, with a focus on Zenith. Zenith saw this coming and tried to avoid it by investing in technology and R&D - and unfortunately chose to invest in technically superior but unpopular or uncommoditizable technologies like Betamax, digital signal transmission standards, and early analog HDTV. Heck, they paid to develop the standard for stereo TV broadcast audio, then gave it away royalty-free.

I enjoyed that. I disagree with some of the suggestions in there, RCA went to PCB's early (so did Philco, who went even earlier), and the reliability of their products markedly suffered for it. As I mentioned in a parallel article, it's not uncommon to find older (60's era) Zenith electronics that still work as new from the box. Zenith waited until the mainstream use of transistors to move to PCB's because it solved the primary issue of PCB's - heat. There (still) is no reliable way to put tubes on a PCB and have it last, and this was particularly true for television applications one, because of the amount of heat generated by particular tubes used for certain aspects of TV design, and because of the sheer number of them. Zenith went to PCB's for the Transistorized sections and kept point to point wiring for the tube portions in hybrid sets. It's part of why they had a good reputation for quality - one that persists today.

Interestingly enough, there is still a small rump of Zenith humming along in Illinois, mostly doing R&D and Technology Licensing. LG owns them now, I've often wondered if LG ever introduced US Television production, if they'd do it under the Zenith brand name.

https://zenith.com

The article was published in 1988, before Zenith decided to sell the PC business (a very successful unit, as the article indicates), rather than exit the TV business.

Lots of wrong bets out there in time - notably, look at AT&T, they held on to Western and Long Lines, they probably should have divested those and held onto the RBOC's

> Zenith was quite successful, and was making TV sets in the US until the early 90's - but eventually the lower cost of overseas manufacturing caught up with them.

Zenith's TV engineering business was bought out by South Korea's LG, and Zenith's role as main guiding force behind North America's ATSC digital TV broadcast system was grandfathered to LG with many of the same people.

I'd intimated that in a parallel comment. I think its good that LG has maintained Zenth's labs.