Tube television bargains

[kendrick]

Plasma and LCD televisions are slowly but steadily outpacing traditional tube televisions. They're cheaper to manufacture than they were before, and consumers are demanding higher levels of resolution and color fidelity to match their overpriced, underused movie-watching equipment.

For reasons we're all aware of, LCD screens aren't necessarily best suited to our outdated gaming preferences. Has anyone noticed if tube CRT televisions are starting to drop in price yet? I'm not expecting any kind of mass liquidation, but I was expecting to be able to replace my Sony Wega set some time soon. If my past behavior is any indicator, I'm going to want to be a tightwad and I'm going to have game machines from 1989 connected to this thing still.

Just curious to know what people have observed. If anybody knows of specific bargains on otherwise high-end tubes, I owe you a bottle of Scotch. :)

-KKC, watching the N-gage store website get less and less useful...

[viletim!]

I don't think the prices for quality televisions will drop much lower than they are at currently. If they can't push them then they'll either lower the quality or stop making them.

[kendrick]

I don't think that there's going to be a drop in the MSRP of tube televisions, but I do think that their popularity is dropping. What I'm hoping is that retailers start to see that they have a big backlog of tubes that people are passing over in favor of LCD screens. That means that they'll have to move those sets at cost or at a loss, which is a circumstance in our favor.

-KKC, being awfully effective at work today for some reason.

[Endymion]

For what it's worth, just last week I read an article that stated the reason LCD prices had dropped as much as they had in the past year was due to an overproduction. Everything marches on of course but the analysts expect their factory orders to be more conservative, which will have the effect of maintaining prices for some time.

I don't think this is a situation likely to affect CRT prices. CRT prices overall are already pretty low. If anything I would expect the volume of them to shrink as more manufacturers abandon the technology.

[ido8bit]

I'd guess that the prices of the bottom of the range sets is probably about as low as they can get.  However, we aren't looking for bottom of the range sets.

Around here the higher end stores have already ran out their stocks of CRT sets.  They were selling remaining stocks for half price and less.  I remember seeing ads for monster 91cm Grundig sets at $1999 (they came out at $7000!).  Those deals are long gone now, but if there are any stores in your area that carried highend CRT sets it's worthwhile checking the prices on their remaining stocks.    

The best deals are probably on secondhand sets being sold off cheaply by those who "upgraded" to a panel.  

Even cheaper are dead sets dumped by those who don't think they are worth repairing.  These can work out very cheap if you can repair them yourself and can still be good deal even if you pay for the repairs.  Some people are replacing very nice sets, some with only minor faults.  I've picked up a couple of Loewe sets (all of which have SCART RGB inputs) for little more than the price of parts.  I recently picked up an 76cm Toshiba set with 3 video inputs (including SCART RGB), picture in picture, picture in picture and built in surround decoder (for old analog matrix system) for $2.  The fault was a single capacitor, a 50 cent part and 30 minutes to repair.  

[mr. newbie]

home tv repair? i always thought they were full of enough electricity to kill you or something.

and kendrick, have you tried looking at brick and morter stores? i've seen a deal or 2 frys on random occacions.

[ido8bit]

TVs and monitors are not as difficult to repair as some people think.  If you're willing to invest the time to learn some basic electronics you'd be surprised how easy many repairs are.  

The EHT supply for the CRT is what most people seem to be scared off, but it's not likely to kill you as there is very little current there (it will hurt though).  You far more likely to be killed by the 300+ VDC present in the switchmode power supply.  The same danger potentially exists in anything that has a switchmode power supply (which these days is pretty much everything).

That said if you have no experience with this kind of stuff TVs/monitors are probably not the best place to start.  

[viletim!]

TVs and monitors are not as difficult to repair as some people think. If you're willing to invest the time to learn some basic electronics you'd be surprised how easy many repairs are.

That's certaintly true. Learn to solder and spot a bad joint and now you can fix about 1/4 of all faulty TVs.

I think the dangers lurking inside should be taken seriously though. While there's not much that can bite in a functioning TV (while turned off), A faulty TV (one with a faulty power supply in particular) on the other hand can have a fully charged mains filter cap. If it's a big TV this will hold a lot of energy, much more than the CRT "capacitor".