“We Watched The Berlin Wall Fall On This TV”
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on TechRadar.
It’s easy to wistfully mutter ‘things were built differently back then’ when looking back at your old gadgets. But a Guatemalan couple recently shocked even Samsung with the longevity of the CRT TV they recently traded in for a new flatscreen model.
The Morales family bought their trusty Samsung set way back in 1987. After an impressive 39 years of service, the TV was finally struggling enough to convince them to enter the 21st century with a new flatscreen model.
According to its proud owner, Ann Morales, the ever-reliable TV worked flawlessly for almost four decades. “We watched the Berlin Wall fall on this TV,” she told Samsung. “We used it hard, from the morning news to the movies at night, and it always turned on. It was a real workhorse,” she added.
When the family reluctantly took the TV in as part of Samsung’s Eco Trade-In program, it started a new journey for the set. Their local store saw its potential as a museum piece and sent it to Samsung’s headquarters in Panama City for Central America and the Caribbean in Panama City. Cue a mix of head-scratching and wonder.
Samsung’s engineers were initially flummoxed about how to fully restore the TV back to its former 1980s glory – understandably, given many of them weren’t born when it was released. But after a little technical research, they managed to restore the set, and it’s apparently now producing a clear image and working as it did in 1987.
Samsung says the TV, which is now an exhibit piece at its global headquarters in Suwon, Korea, has become something of a local hero, after garnering a lot of attention when it was restored.
A relic from a bygone era
As impressive as this 39-year-old TV is, it isn’t a record-breaker. Back in 2011, a working Marconi TV from 1936 was auctioned and sold for £16,800 (around $22,900 / AU$32,600), meaning it was still going 75 years after it was built.
Still, both of these examples remain outliers, and the longevity of some CRT TVs is often down to their analog simplicity, repairability, and superior heat management, compared to modern LCDs and OLEDs.
The estimated lifespan of today’s TVs is around five to seven years, or a decade if you’re lucky. That’s partly because LED backlights can go in as little as five years, while many owners find themselves marooned without software updates or support for the latest picture formats. There’s simply a lot more that can go wrong in today’s TVs, and it’s often more cost-efficient to replace them than repair them.
The knock-on effect is that we now rarely develop the kind of emotional ties with our TVs that the Morales family reported. “At Christmas, the whole family would gather around that screen; it was like the fire in our modern fireplace,” Ana Morales recalled.
“I couldn’t just throw it in the trash. Every time I saw it, I remembered my early working years and the joy my children felt. It saddened me to think that its life would end in a landfill,” she added.
To Samsung’s credit, its Eco Trade-In program (which lets you trade in old devices from Samsung or other brands, in some regions) meant it eventually found a new lease of life. And it isn’t alone – a new trend among TV enthusiasts is hunting down old CRT sets and keeping them alive for posterity.
This isn’t just about nostalgia, either, as many prize the talents of CRT TVs for their ability to render video game graphics as they looked in their heyday. So next time you see a cathode-ray tube bargain on eBay and are hit by a wave of nostalgia, you may have more competition than you bargained for.
About the Author
Mark Wilson is TechRadar’s Senior News Editor. Having worked in tech journalism for a ludicrous 17 years, Mark is now attempting to break the world record for the number of camera bags hoarded by one person. He was previously Cameras Editor at both TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, Acting editor on Stuff.tv, as well as Features editor and Reviews editor on Stuff magazine. As a freelancer, he’s contributed to titles including The Sunday Times, FourFourTwo, and Arena. And in a former life, he also won The Daily Telegraph’s Young Sportswriter of the Year. But that was before he discovered the strange joys of getting up at 4 am for a photo shoot in London’s Square Mile.