- A Guatemalan family recently traded in a 39-year-old CRT TV for a new LCD screen.
- Samsung accepted the TV under its Eco Exchange program
- Engineers completely restored the set and it is now on display at the Panama City headquarters.
It’s easy to nostalgically mutter “things were built differently back then” when thinking back to your old gadgets. But a Guatemalan couple recently shocked even Samsung with the longevity of their CRT TV, which they recently traded in for a new flat-screen model.
The Morales family purchased their trusty Samsung TV in 1987. After an impressive 39 years of service, the TV was finally having enough trouble to convince them to enter the 21st century with a new flat-screen model.
According to its proud owner Ann Morales, this ever-reliable television has worked flawlessly for nearly four decades. “We watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on this television,” she told Samsung. “We used it a lot, from morning news to evening movies, and it always came on. It was a real workhorse,” she added.
When the family reluctantly purchased the TV through Samsung’s Eco Trade-In program, they began a new journey for the whole thing. Their local store saw its potential as a museum piece and sent it to Samsung’s Central America and Caribbean headquarters in Panama City. Cue a mix of puzzlement and wonder.
Samsung’s engineers were initially perplexed as to how to return the TV to its former 1980s glory – which is understandable, given that many of them weren’t born when it was released. But after some technical research, they managed to restore the whole thing and it now appears to produce a clear image and work like it did in 1987.
Samsung says the TV, which is now on display at its global headquarters in Suwon, Korea, has become something of a local hero, after attracting a lot of attention during its restoration.
A relic of a bygone era
As impressive as this 39-year-old TV is, it’s not breaking any records. In 2011, a working Marconi television from 1936 was auctioned and sold for £16,800 (around $22,900 / AU$32,600), meaning it was still working 75 years after it was built.
Yet both of these examples remain outliers, and the longevity of some CRT TVs often depends on their analog simplicity, repairability, and superior thermal management, compared to modern LCD and OLED displays.
The estimated lifespan of today’s TVs is around five to seven years, or even a decade if you’re lucky. This is partly because LED backlighting can last as little as five years, while many owners find themselves stuck without software updates or support for the latest aspect ratios. There are simply many more problems with today’s televisions and it is often more cost effective to replace them than to repair them.
The ripple effect is that we rarely develop the kind of emotional connections to our televisions as the Morales family reported. “At Christmas, the whole family gathered around this screen; it was like the fire in our modern fireplace,” remembers Ana Morales.
“I couldn’t just throw him in the trash. Every time I saw him, I remembered my first years of work and the joy my children felt. It saddened me to think that his life would end up in a landfill,” she added.
To Samsung’s credit, its Eco Trade-In program (which allows you to trade in old devices from Samsung or other brands, in certain regions) has finally given it a new lease of life. And it’s not the only one: a new trend among TV enthusiasts is to seek out old CRT TVs and keep them alive for posterity.
It’s not just about nostalgia, as many appreciate the talents of CRT televisions for their ability to render video game graphics as they were in their prime. So the next time you see a good deal on CRTs on eBay and are hit with a wave of nostalgia, you might have more competition than you expected.
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