[Arran]

I started calling Zenith "The Order of the Big Black Dial" or "Brand Z" mostly as a joke. On the alternate radio forum there is thread after thread started about "Brand Z" models and it's so prolific some just refer to the model number and not even the make, which I thought was very presumptuous. Since this is the Philco Phorum I thought we should have a way of discussing them with glorifying the brand even more.
To answer your question, are they overrated?, well it depends on the year. A lot of people think it's a high quality brand because the majority of their experience with Brand Z involved TV sets from the 1960s and 70s like the Chromacolor II, in that era they were well engineered and well above average. However from the mid 30s to the early 1940s Brand Z wasn't really a premium brand, maybe one step better then a Crosley, some models were better then others but the points Ron made are true for most.
They had a reputation of putting style ahead of substance, they would use fancy, sometimes gaudy cabinets and gold paint on the chassis, but do so at the expense of using better power transformers or a better front end design. Eugene MacDonald was fundamentally a used car salesmen first, so his thinking was oriented towards marketing, and marketing has a lot to do with selling an impression, not substance. Even the big black dials that people rave about, the vast majority of those were on painted tin plate, some were on celluloid with white lettering only, but only the high priced models had the reverse painted glass dials.
Prior to the war Zenith didn't really have a presence in Canada unlike G.E, Philco, and RCA, so those brands always had more of a foothold North of the border. Because of this I always tended to look at them more objectively. The appeal seems to be much along the lines of a Catalin radio, nice to look at but it's still just a 5 tube AC/DC in the back.
Regards
Arran