It was, I guess, inevitable. That's our long-serving Sharp television before getting placed on a pile of similar vintage tube TVs - tubes! - at the recycling depot.
Perhaps a disclaimer is due: I have no shares in Sharp, and when we replaced our venerable TV the shop had no Sharps in sight. Oh, just checked their website. It appears they don't even produce TVs anymore.
But I want to give the company due credit: with planned obsolescence a fact of modern economic life - the excellent documentary The Light Bulb Conspiracy proved that beyond a doubt - I found it comforting to lug our TV around the world over the years and tune into whatever systems (PAL, SECAM, NTSC, and all the sub-categories imaginable) were on the airwaves.
So why get rid of this gem, which, true to its manufacturer's name, provided very sharp pictures on a square screen up to the very end? Not because it broke; nope, if anyone in the recycling chain retrieves it and hooks it up to a DVD player, it will work just fine. Oh yes, it's also automatic dual voltage 110 - 220.
No, if we got rid of it, it's only because of technological progress: not only has Europe evolved from analog to digital, but in April France is going HD for its "TNT" free broadcasts (some 20 + channels). We could have gotten a cheap decoder, but the images wouldn't have been HD, and the 16/9 letterbox format would have further reduced the image on our square screen. So goodbye DV-5405SPN, we hardly knew ye.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a Luddite, and in certain cases I'm even an Early Adapter. Got a first generation iPad a few months after they appeared. Ditto for this nice MacBook Pro Retina I'm typing on.
But if something works and ain't broke, I'm not going to throw it away for the flavor-of-the-month. Our TV (bought in Oman in 1985) has finally been replaced by a nice HD LED flat screen job, and I can watch my collection of cassettes from the '80s and '90s on it!
Now, what do I do with my 1973 Saba transistor radio (SW, LW, MW, FM - "the best tube radio ever" according to somebody on YouTube)? It still works...