Don't dump your CRT RPTV! - Page 338

Well, the dreaded time has finally come. I have to part with my beloved Hitachi 65F59 HDTV. And just when I had cleaned and tweaked it to a superb picture, using the best advice in the world on this forum. I have officially retired. The wife (of 42 wonderful years) and I are downsizing our residence and moving into a much smaller house in Stow Massachusetts. We will be moving in January and February to be 1.5 miles from my youngest Son, his wife and their expectant new son (in February). Anyway, the big Hitachi box will not fit well in the 12 x 12 living room of the new home. Oh how the mighty have fallen! So I will be trying to sell it before moving. I bought it new in 2007. It is in like new condition. And everything works fine. It just doesn’t pass the WAF anymore. If anyone on this forum is interested in it. Let me know. And we can arrange something offline. It must be picked up in Massachusetts, or arrangements must be made to ship it by the buyer. I will not move it or ship it. I hope it finds a great new home. I will be moving my smaller Sony 34” XBR KD 970 HD CRT into the new living room. It’s funny, because that sucker is fatter than the Hitachi. But the wife loves the big 8’ entertainment furniture piece it resides in for her decorations. Go figure. I won’t miss anything on PQ between the Hitachi and Sony. But I will dearly miss the size.

Sorry you have to give up such a fine set. Sure you can't negotiate with your wife?

But congratulations on moving to the lovely area of Stow and its environs!

Thanks taichi. My heart aches over this. I vasicillated over it for 2 months. But we also have a $4000 entertainment center housing the Sony fatboy. And the wife decorates it very pretty on a seasonal basis. She has the top of that thing looking like a Swiss village during Christmas time. So I got beat down pretty bad suggesting we keep the 65"er. I live in Easton MA right now in a 4800 sf beast of a house. She and I are like 2 old ghosts wandering through this big thing by ourselves. It's way too much to upkeep properly. We are moving into a cozy 1200 sf bungalow in beautiful Stow. And I am really looking forward to it except for losing my Hitachi. If we ever decide to part with the entertainment center, I'll probably just buy a small 1080p DLP front projector and screen to shoot a 92" image on the wall. Or I may do that later this year and lower the screen in front of the EC to watch movies and big events like the SuperBowl. I know it won't come anywhere near the PQ of my beloved Hitachi. But I won't look back once I lose it.

Well, making your wife happy is a virtue, and you're moving to a beautiful part of the country. I have some great memories of visits to that neck of the woods. One thing for sure, if you like ice cream you can't get great examples of it in Mass.

By the time you decide to get a FP I'll bet the quality will be very good. They're getting better and more affordable.

Hi Bob:
I will definitely give you a call when we move into the new place. And setup a phone consult on the Fatboy. I didn't know about the service menu in it at all. Can we dail it in over the phone, or will you need to be present? Those little tanks can be intimidating, with all of the magnets and other assundry electrical stuff in them, when they are open. And I don't have any equipment for deguassing or working inside of it.

I did draw a thin line in the sand with the wife on the Fatboy. She wanted me to dump both CRTs and go totally flat. Even though she strongly prefers the image of the Sony over our flat panel 32" Toshiba in the bedroom. She watches FatBoy all of the time. But I long ago concluded, I am from Mars. And she is from Venus. But we are forever bound together by our 3 MarVenus children and soon to be, 5 grandkids.

I tussled mightily with your last question. I figured the big 8' wide x 3' deep sofa would take up much of one wall. And the 96"W x 28"D x 63" H Entertainment Center will take up the other one. The Hitachi is 61" W x 25" D x 59" H in comparison. So its pretty much a wash between them both except for width. Both would only leave about only 7' of space between the sofa and screen. You are correct in that the sitting distance from the rear pillows of the sofa subtracts another 2 feet. Giving a true seating distance of 8-9 feet. I want the gang here to know that the battle over those 7'-9' ensued with all of the ferocity of "The Battle of The Bulge".

But here is where I got caught in her stare down logic Bob. She said, "What about the side chair/mini sofa. That will be just 4' from the massive beast". I swiftly countered with a killer fact. "The EC is a 4 piece cherry wood design with two, 2' W end pieces; one 4' W center piece; all linked together by a slide on 8' top shelf (crown molded). We can separate them Honey to utilize space more efficiently and store the top in the basement". And we can put fatboy in the extra bedroom you banish me too sometimes when I'm snoring too loud.

CRASHHHHH!...as all getup!

The flames from my descent still drifts in the Boston air like a Chem Trail! I waved the white flag...surrendered...committed to sell the Hitachi in the moving sale...licked my wounds...retreated to the family room...and tried to muster up some love for FatBoy. You have to understand...if I'm Archie. Fatboy is Betty. And the Hitachi is Veronica. I put up a spirited battle. But basically the wife said...I don't care if you sleep with JugHead in that room...The EC is going in the living room. That's my sad story. But I have one final straw up my sleeve that may keep the Hitachi near my paws to battle her another day. But that is another story for another time.

A noble fight, in my opinion. Of course the greatest generals preferred strategic action over force.


No movie is good on a small screen.

It's hard to get thrilled by chameleons raging across a small screen, chasing people the size of mice.

That reminds me of a buddy of mine. He hadn't seen Jurassic in the theater, so when it came out on video, he quickly rented it and called me over to watch. Unfortunately, as was common at his house, he needed to watch with the volume low so as not to disturb sleeping parents.

To summarize, watching pan and scan VHS on a 26" TV through TV speakers at a whisper of a volume. At the end of the movie he looked over at me and said, "I don't get what the big deal was".

Yeah.

Thanks for your reply Mr. Bob and thanks for the congrats on the tv!

I've taken a look and can't tell for sure if there is a crt drip cup/shield installed or not. Would you happen to have any pics of it, or know where they are at online (or maybe pics of the shields you installed in your tv)? Also, what causes the coolant to leak--when the CRTs get hot, from moving the unit, faulty seals, or something else?

The tv has a great pic from my Wii and DVD player in 480P (recently ordered a blu ray player and a OTA HD receiver for 1080i, so I'm excited for that), but noticed that some of my older game systems that use composite connections don't have the best picture. Anything I can do to make the picture brighter and have deeper color? I haven't yet received the remote, so I can't get to most of the advanced menus yet, although the it should be arriving any day now.

Finally, I couldn't find much by searching this, but are the caps on the DM board for this unit defective like other Mit tvs? In the event that they go, where's the best place to get high quality replacements?

Even worse. Mini dinosaurs bleating at a treble-voiced Jeff Goldblum.

That is my plan B. I have my eye on a Vivitek H1080FD DLP model at Circuit City for $699. I'm counting on her caving in on the Hitachi to avoid buying something new...and having a 80-90 foot screen drop down in front of the EC for movie and sport watching. I highly doubt she will be thrilled to see Bob Newhart and MTM/Ted Baxter reruns at 90"s! I of course will be thrilled if the FP DLP comes even close to the PQ on the Hitachi. Even though I doubt it.

A brilliant strategy on your part. A two pronged approach, with a good outcome either way. My hat is off to you.

Happy New Year to all the diehards, videophiles, and retro-technos on this thread!

Good health, and solutions to problems this year.

Problems? My resolution is to have NO problems this year!
Happy New Year to all.
Michael

Happy New Year everyone!
Resolution is to have a better year than last year...

Yelp's aggressive filters have been the subject of many news stories and investigatory articles. Unfortunately, I don't believe there is any recourse... they have a "hands off" policy specifically to avoid any possibility of accusations of favoritism. It's all in the algorithm, flawed though it may be, which is why they're constantly tweaking it.

Here's a radio interview with one of the higher-ups at Yelp discussing the situation, that I happened to listen to a few months back:
http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-mo...amationslander

Boy, that is all true. I wrote a very thoughtful restaurant review for an Indian restaurant here in Los Angeles, completely objective, but highly complementary, It appeared on Yelp for a day or two, and then was yanked off for no good reason. It's better to rely upon people to recognize for themselves what is spam, rather than over censoring. Obviously their filter is completely incapable of telling the difference.

I hate to defend them, because I agree that there are clearly serious issues with their algorithms, but they are right about it being a constant struggle to outwit those trying to game the system. It's unfortunate that so much legit stuff is being filtered as well, however.

Two thoughts, in spite of that:

1) The posts aren't DELETED, they are just moved one level lower, requiring users to make one extra click to see the filtered reviews. The better you are at using Yelp, the more you can realize that there can often be good info hidden there... but this is a question of end-user education, so only the more experienced Yelpers are likely to know about this.

2) Yelp is largely driven by "reputation". The reputation in question is NOT the reputation of the business being reviewed, but rather, it's the reputation of the reviewer that's the most important thing. This helps Yelp weed out "review farms" where people are paid to write bogus reviews. The more reviews you write, for varied companies (particularly companies that are local to you, in your geographical area), the more likely Yelp will be to treat your reviews as valid... especially when other Yelp users mark your reviews as helpful. Ditto for how often you "check in" to places, and are otherwise active on Yelp. The point to all of this is this: If a small business convinces a client to sign on to Yelp for the very first time ever, and write one review for your small business, and they never sign back on again? That user is not going to regarded as especially trustworthy, because that's EXACTLY the same type of behavior used by paid review services that pollute the Yelp pages with bogus reviews. Make up one throwaway account, right the one review you were paid for, and discard the account. The overall point I'm trying to make here is that the problem isn't with Bob's Yelp listing... it's with the "quality" (from Yelp's standpoint) of his reviewers. And there's not much Bob can do to control that, other than perhaps encourage people to be active on Yelp in more ways than just writing reviews for him (a tall order, to be sure). Once Yelp gains more trust in their reviews, we might see those hidden reviews popping back up on his main review page. Again, not an easy solution for the small business owner, but that's the way the game is played... at the moment.

Yelp has Lost credibility in my eyes, I'll stick with zagat.

You make good points.

In my case I was never motivated to write a review before. But at least there is a way to gain reputation.

I had an ISF calibrator come out and work on my Elite 730 HDi. Looks better than when I bought it! However, he taped a grid on the screen to line up the convergence (I assume it was the convergence). Anyway, the glue residue from the tape is all over the screen. He suggested rubbing alcohol, I tried it in a small spot, and it barely worked. I've also read on this forum about being careful with chemicals on the screens. So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to get the residue off. Any ideas? If this question has been answered, point me in the right direction and I apologize for the redundancy. I did do a search and didn't find anything.

Thank you in advance!