Color TV brand popularity - 1960's

[whirlcool]

You know, when I was researching more stuff for this thread, I came across several adverts for televisions that could accept 83 channels, in 1951! The first UHF station went on the air in Portland, OR in 1952. I wonder why it took so long to get UHF factory installed? Chicago didn't get it's first UHF station until 1964 and a lot of people couldn't receive it for lack of a UHF tuner. But they sold set top UHF adapters which work like the modern ATSC converters of today.

The GE B&W set my mom won had a VHF tuner knob on the upper right of the control panel and on the bottom of the set there was a round plate that said "UHF Tuning". But there was no knob. This would have been in the 1961-62 time frame. So I assumed that if you wanted UHF the dealer installed a UHF tuner for you.

I remember when UHF started in Chicago as I noted in a previous post. What I didn't mention was the detent style UHF tuner didn't come till later. The ones in the 1960's were like tuning a radio by hand. And the stations were VERY narrow in terms of where you could tune it to get it right.

And finally yes, televisions of the 60's were not nearly as reliable as the sets of today. You periodically would see the television van in front of somebodies house on the street. We were fortunate, we never had to have any of our sets taken in. But we did have rectifier tubes replaced from time to time. And then the service guy went out to his truck and brought in a soldering iron and replaced something (I was too young to understand what he was doing) and no more blown rectifier tubes. I used to watch the guy work, ask a lot of questions and then I'd watch him run color bars and convergence patterns on the screen. Finally if the service guy would come, I'd get shooed out of the house so I wouldn't be a bother.
But usually the service guys would answer my questions with an explanation of how things worked.

And sadly recently I have come across a lot of stories on the internet about how some guy somewhere was an independent television repair shop and dealer and could no longer make enough money to keep going on. But most of the guys who came to the house back then were usually in their 40's or so. So I imagine they'd all be in their 80's or 90's by now, long retired. Does anyone anymore do in house television repairs?

 

[lordkenmore]

Does anyone anymore do in house television repairs?

One of my neighbors does--or did. But it's limited. I think he only does warranty work. And I don't think he's a real TV repairman. The repairs are basically swap out a circuit board and pop in a new board.

A fast Google search turns up repair services that claim in home service. One service even apparently is ONLY in home, and claims lower prices due to lower overhead. (This could make sense, since the business could be located someplace cheap, and wouldn't have to be set up to be ready to receive customers.)

I wonder how well repair people do these days. So many people treat electronics as throw away items. Over the years I've seen several repair shops close down.

 

[rp2813]

The first UHF station went on the air in Portland, OR in 195

Allen, might that have been KPTV, Channel 27?

 

This clock (in need of repairs and cleaning) sits atop my 1950 Admiral 10" set. 

 

[whirlcool]

Yes, Channel 27 in Portland started in 1952.

It was also the first television station in Portland, too. I wonder why they didn't get a VHF station earlier?

http://www.stumptownblogger.com/2011/11/kptv-was-the-first-commercial-uhf-tv-station-in-america.html

 

[MikeS]

UHF History

UHF has been around since television broadcasting became serious business in the USA after World War II. (In fact, CBS' ill-fated "spinning wheel" color system would have required broadcasters to use the UHF band.) By the early 1950's, most areas of the nation had VHF stations; though most television set makers offered UHF models for $20 to $30 more than VHF-only sets, few buyers sprung for UHF.
Ironically, FCC Chairman Newton Minnow--of "vast wasteland" fame--took matters into his own hands and changed the television landscape: Rather than allow the free market decide the future of UHF, he proposed that all new sets have both VHF and UHF capability as standard. With a push from the Kennedy White House (and a threat by Minnow to convert seven major cities to UHF broadcasts), Congress passed the All-Channel Receiver Act. By 1964, all new sets had built-in UHF tuners for channels 14 to 83.
The Receiver Act not only helped the growth of educational (public) television and independent (non-network) commercial stations, it was a boost to the third-ranked ABC Network. By 1970, thanks to UHF, ABC finally had affiliates in every major American city, paving the way for ABC's ratings success of the late 1970's.
Of course, with cable, satellite and digital broadcasting, the entire television landscape. Whether for better or worse, I'll leave that decision up to you.

 

[whirlcool]

When I was a kid, I used to travel around with my parents quite a bit. I was always anxious to see what channels were available in the cities we visited. They were always 2 to 13. Until around 1964 I came across a channel 22. I was shocked. How could this be? How could they receive it? And then we got our own Channel 26, then a year or two later a channel 39.

I used to think of UHF as being those "strange" channels. All the good stuff to watch was on 2-13. But then I found out as you have stated that some cities had their major network affiliates on UHF. The "good stuff" on UHF? No way (as I used to think!).

How times have changed.

 

[petek]

Somewhere back I read about the big gains in Japanese tv's was the obvious difference in their advertising. Companies such as RCA in particular heavily advertised their after sales service (a negative actually). The Japanese companies heavily advertised their reliability, aka little to no servicing ever required.

 

[mixfinder]

Monkey Wards

Our family's first television purchased in 1952 was an Airline from Montgomery Ward.  We had one UHF station, channel 29 that didn't come on until 10:00am.  Through out the years the TV had a knife under the tuner to hold it in adjustment, the back was off and almost monthly we pulled dead tubes and tested at the grocery store buying replacements from the drawers underneath.  If the problem was more than we could solve we called Harry Wattley from Harrie's TV.  He was a tall, rotund and irracisible charactor.  We were all shushed out the room for fear of offending him.  In 1964 our neighbor who was manager of the Wards catalog office convinced my mom to bring home a color TV to use over the Christmas break and we could return it afterwards, no questions asked.  It never went back.  Through out the years TVs have become less expensive, better quality and last much longer without attention.  Frankly I wouldn't have a clue if anyone even repairs TVs anymore.  My first TV was a Magnificent Magnavox, and so was the second.  After the divorce I bought a used Magnavox with we replaced with a Panasonic HD flat screen in 2006.  The Panasonic has stereo speakers and hits those rich base tones like a console stereo used to do.

 

[ptcruiser51]

Wowser!

I take one step away from this discussion and off it goes!

My mom was from Wilkes-Barre, PA, my dad from Scranton, PA. They migrated to NJ during WW2. We often went back to visit on vacation through the 1950s and 1960s. W-B/Scr is located in a big, elongated, hollowed-out valley. To this day, there are big microwave towers beaming TV/Radio transmissions down into it. I can remember TV's with that "extra" dial on the side that everyone used. 22=WCAU (CBS), 28=WBRE(NBC), I forget ABC (16???). Anyone help me out here? I don't recall any VHF stations at all.

Radio signals were equally spotty. Auto/home receivers were static-y and fading in and out. Forget FM, they might have been broadcasting from Mars.

What a treat to visit nowadays and have scores of stations to tune in!

Fading memories here, no offense at correction.

 

[whirlcool]

Everyone who bought a color tv in the 60's had a reason for choosing the brand that they did. Do you know the reason why you or your parents chose the brand they did?

My parents looked for quite some time at various stores and different brands. Everywhere from a small service shop down the road to a very large appliance store miles away. They finally narrowed it down to two sets:

Admiral & Zenith. Both sets had about the same picture quality and were about the same price. Both had the rectangular screen. So my Dad finally chose the Zenith as "with kids in the house I can see that Admiral pull out control panel being slammed in the set repeatedly and sooner than later it'll fail". BTW, Admiral offered that pull out control panel for 3 years, 1964-1967. When their sets got remote control the pull out panel went away.

 

[tolivac]

UHF-for the broadcaster-its more expensive to use-You need more transmitter power to cover the same area.UHF broadcast is "line of sight" as UHF frequencies are.UHF TV broadcast antennas use both mechanical and electrical "Beam tilt" so listeners close to the broadcast station tower will get reception.TV broadcast antennas are made up of "bays" individual antenna elements made up into one unit.For the UHF ones-the lower bays are actually tilted out from the antenna mast-physical beam tilt.VHF doesn't have this problem.When I lived in Wash DC area-the lowest power UHF station was running 55Kw visual transmitter power.(one 55Kw klystron stage)this was the standard output power for that type of Klystron tube.Becuase of circuit losses-you have to run up to three times more input power to the stage-since it has to be linear-broadband-the tube is conducting all of the time.The largest UHF station in that area had a 220Kw 5 Klystron monster-the first Harris 220U they built.This thing pulled over a MEGAWATT at dark picture.Their cheif engineer(CH#20)described how all of the streetlights on River Road Bethesda would go out when they went dark picture.PEPCO put in a separate substation for them--69Kv to 13.8Kv and at Ch20's building they have a VERY large 13.8Kv to 480V transmformer.For VHF-esp low band-less transmitter power is needed-these run 25-35Kw and use conventional triode or tetrode transmitting tubes.These transmittrers are more efficient.Smaller size and less power.Hi band VHF runs 40-60Kw.the losses start going up here.But much less than UHF.And to top it off-VHF is easier for you to receive and tune.But today-----Low band VHF frequencies are to be auctiuoned off by the FCC to other services.Modern digital TV uses Hi Band VHF and UHF.Digital transmitters can be lower power than analog ones.But they still have to use the linear stages to pass the RF modulated by the digital pulse signals.22Kw serves us OK here in place of the 220Kw monster-to see these HUGE transmitters is quite something!Knew some folks that used to run Wash DC Ch20's transmitter.and most TV transmitters have a built in spectrum analyser for tuning their visual stages-its like an oscilloscope-but shows a bandwidth curve instead of an impression of an electrical waveform as an oscilloscope does.TV service techs-when they used to fix TV's used a spectrum analyser to tune the TV's video IF stages-just like tuning the RF stages in the TV transmitter.I have had to do these things-can be sort of fun if all goes well."Shape the curve" as its said-the ideal visual bandwidth curve is sort of like the shape of a loaf of bread!

 

[ironrite]

Brand Reason

Growing up we had a Packard Bell B&W set. It seemed like it was always getting repaired. My parents had the same hesitation that color sets were not perfected. My oldest sister and her husband got a Zenith color portable console, with remote, in the mid 60s and it was fun to see color shows. Still the parents didn't think the picture was that great. My brother in law's sister bought the same model of TV. The BIL had fun taking his remote over to their house, hiding it and then kept changing channels and volume. Made his sister think something was wrong with their new set. My oldest nephew was a baby at the time, just learning to crawl around. The bells on his shoes would also cause the Zenith to change channels and volume.

Finally in 1967 my parents saw my aunt's Sylvania set. They liked the color and picture. It had a more natural look to the picture. My parents bought a Sylvania in the Fall of 1968. Cabinet was a consideration. My mom picked a French Provincial model, with remote, for the living room and my dad got a wood tone, metal cabinet portable for their bedroom. Though the picture was good, it seemed like the Sylvania was also being repaired a lot. First thing I recall watching on it was the presidental election.

Also, does anybody remember a commercial that was broadcast around 1966-67. It was for Wink soda. There was some buzz a couple of weeks before the commercial as the drink was so tasty (something along those lines) you would see color on your B&W TV. I remember watching it and the Canada Dry logo was flashing green and red on our old Packard Bell. It was only run once that I recall.

 

[whirlcool]

I don't know how you could get color on a B&W set as there are no color phosphors on a B&W CRT. Maybe Tolivac could explain how that commercial worked.

There are still a few companies around that will repair/restore old color sets.

And yes, I do remember those self service tube testing machines in drug stores. I used them to test tubes for my short wave radio I had at the time. I think those were around until the late 70's when they all disappeared.

Around 1975 a guy down the street from us had a Zenith round screen color set that a relative had given him. It didn't work. He figured that there was a bad tube in it that was causing the problem. So he took out all the tubes and took them to the drug store to test them. Almost every tube was bad. So he spent a couple of hundred bucks on new tubes for it. After he installed them the set came on. But to his horror, the picture was not good. It was very green and very dim.
No adjustment would work to correct it. So after all that it was the picture tube that was bad. He said he needed to put a tube brightener on it. But he never did. That set sat in his garage for years and years. At least til I moved away. I'm willing to bet if he is still alive, that set is still sitting there.

And in the 70's a lot of manufacturers stopped using wood on their cabinetry and started to go to plastic! So if you see a set that looks like the cabinet is made of carved wood, chances are it would be molded plastic! Usually after a few years the finish on the plastic chipped or flaked off revealing the plastic underneath!

 

[passatdoc]

early cable

I remember the tube testers in the drug stores! Never saw anyone use them, and my parents certainly didn't know how to pull apart a tv and test the tubes. That said, I don't remember any B&W set ever needing any service. We simply adjusting vertical and horizontal hold and usually got it to work. Adjusting the UHF dial was a bit of an art, though.

Grew up in San Diego with very hilly to mountainous topography. San Diego in the 1960s had local stations 8 (KFMB-CBS) and 10 (KOGO-NBC), with ABC aced out of the market by the two-channels-per-market FCC rule. ABCs solution was to broadcast from Tijuana, Mexico: Channel 6, XETV. They cranked up the power and it had the best reception of any station in San Diego, though studios were in Tijuana. The only other local station was Channel 15, an educational (later PBS) station with studios at San Diego State College.

Reception of Los Angeles stations (2-CBS, 4-NBC, 7-ABC, plus independent channels 5, 7, 9, and 11) were dependent on where one lived in San Diego. When I was between 2-5 years of age, we lived on an elevated mesa-type area known as Clairemont, and could pull the LA stations with ease using a rooftop antenna. When I was five, we moved closer to downtown, but on the bay side of a hill, with the hill being to the north and blocking signals from LA. The coastline of California is not straight, it's curved, so signals from LA go straight across the water to San Diego---unless a hill or mountain is blocking them, which was the case for us.

As a result, we had cable very early, maybe 1965. It carried all of the San Diego PLUS Los Angeles stations, crystal clear reception. Well worth the whopping $5 a month bill. A year later, my parents remodeled their living room, and one of the improvements was an audiophile stereo system (MacIntosh amp and tuner). To pull in the classical music stations they loved, the rooftop antenna was upgraded to a rotor antenna, with a 360 rotary control so you could maneuver the antenna just right to increase FM signal quality.

The rotor antenna was also run into the den where the color tv (won for free in a Lions Club raffle....) was hooked up to cable. We had an A/B switch so we could have either cable or antenna input into the tv, plus a second rotary control was placed on top of the tv.

The reason to extend the rotor antenna to the tv room was as follows: during prime time and sometimes on weekends, the SD and LA network channels ran the same programming. There was some big court case involving cable tv in which local advertisers sued a cable company for offering identical programs from two different markets: some of the viewers would watch the out-of-town channel and not see the local advertisers. The court held that local advertisers had a right to "force" viewers to see their ads, and the FCC allowed (or ordered) cable companies to BLOCK out-of-town channels when the local network affiliate ran the same program. I.e., when Bonanza was on NBC on Sunday night, you could watch it on San Diego's channel 10, but channel 4 from LA was blocked for the same time block.

The problem was that the cable company often forgot to UNBLOCK the distant channel after the identical programing ended. So say a network station in LA wanted to run a late night movie after prime time network programs were finished. You'd see the movie listed in the local newspaper and TV Guide listings, only to find "snow" when you turned to channel 2, 4 or 7. My guess is that the blocking had to be done manually and was not automated. With a rooftop rotor antenna, one could often rotate the antenna and pull in the LA station that was blocked on cable. Not always, and sometimes the picture quality lagged, but sometimes it was the only way to watch a movie when they forgot to unblock the LA stations. The independent stations 5, 7, 9, and 11 were not affected by the blocking issue.

I don't know when the blocking issue finally died, but it was still alive and well into the late 1980s. When I first moved to south Orange County, our cable company carried two channels from San Diego (we are half way between SD and LA), but as I understood it, there was a limit of TWO channels that could be imported from San Diego. People would watch them to get local San Diego news, etc. By that time, SD had all three networks (Ch 6 is still in Tijuana but is independent) plus PBS plus I believe two more independents on UHF....but we only received TWO of them, the NBC and CBS affiliates.

 

[whirlcool]

I remember seeing some homes having antenna rotators on them. I think one neighbor that had one said he used it to receive blacked out sports games from other cities.

From what I remember, the first time I saw cable it was usually in mountainous areas. The first one I saw had the normal channels and then one channel just showed an analog clock. That's all it showed all day and all night long. Then I saw another cable system that had a Clock, Barometer & Temp gauge and I guess they were on a turntable of some kind because they would rotate around the lens of the camera.

I imagine that in cities with mountains, ghosting would be a big issue. Then cable may have been a god send for those markets.

One thing I noticed when people were upgrading to color television the sales person never mentioned that you would have to upgrade your antenna too. I wonder how many people found that out after the fact? After my Dad went back to complain about poor reception the salesperson sold him a tv top set of color rabbit ears. That was even worse than the antenna we used for B&W so he took it back. Later that year I spent my own money and put up a nice antenna made for color. That worked beautifully.

 

[rp2813]

Tubes and Testers

We did some tube testing at the drug store and maybe even at a local grocery store (if memory serves me) when I was a kid, but we lived very close to United Radio and TV, which was an independent electronics supply store and had a whole bank of tube testers, so it made more sense as a one-stop shopping option.

 

While we were able to isolate the occasional bad or weak tube, most would test OK.  I still have a box of tubes in the garage that are presumably good, and likely were components of a 1951 Capehart 13", a 1962 Airline 21" (B/W) and its companion multiplex stereo/phono console, or various GE clock radios.

 

When I had all of the capacitors replaced on my 1950 Admiral 10" round CRT set, I brought that box of tubes with me to the repair guy.  He advised that tubes rarely ever go bad and he didn't touch a single tube on that chassis.  The TV works fine, presumably with the majority -- if not all -- of its original factory tubes.  There could be variations in values from one tube of the same type as another, and switching out, say, a good 5U4 with another known good 5U4 could be enough to improve or resolve a minor horizontal issue a given set might be experiencing.  

 

The bottom line is that most 50's TV sets, particularly the early 50's ones, were replaced because they had problems with capacitors, not tubes, and often weren't worth repairing due to cost and the fact that larger screen sets were desirable and affordable.  This is why sets like my Admiral deliver a fine picture with their original CRT's.  They were commonly replaced rather than repaired, long before the end of their CRT's useful life,  by a TV with a screen that was twice as big.

 

[cadman]

For info on the B&W commercial that produced colors, look up the Fechner Effect. A lot of people saw this spot but I understand it was only shown in limited markets and only a couple times. -Cory

 

[chromacolor]

I worked in my Uncles TV Sales/repair shop in the late 70's and got to go on many house calls. On new sets of that era, the best picture was a Zenith Chromacolor. A close second was a Sylvania GT-matic, but their picture tubes were NOT long lasting. RCA's to me.. always had a so-so picture. Those GE's with the VIR were the biggest piece of crap to hit the market. GE was NEVER good quality in electronics. The "General" liked to design everything "on the cheap" The VIR system did win an Emmy, but like was stated in an earlier post.. not all stations used VIR. Also stations tended NOT to adhere to quality control, so if they were misadjusted, that's what the VIR system played back.
The biggest piece of junk.. that ALL repairmen hated... Motorola! (which always confused me because they were expensive, and an "engineers" set. built like tanks)
but ya.. they never had a color set with a decent picture, and they broke if you looked at one cross-eyed. Motorola sold out to Panasonic in 1974.

 

[cfz2882]

Quasar

weren't the motorola sets branded"Quasar"after panasonic bought them?-still U.S.
made and still motorola models with a different name...?

 

[chromacolor]

Sort of....
On Motorola color sets, the Motorola branded tube sets were ALL junk. Then they got in the "solid-state" game early and those sets were branded "Quasar *by Motorola" The picture quality wasn't as bad as those on the Motorola tube chassis sets, but the Quasars used HUGE modules that were trouble-prone and expensive to replace. They called this "works in a drawer". We repairmen called it "junk in a drawer" after 74 they used up the stock and were mostly made in the US, but I think by 1976 they were rebadged Panasonics.

Curtis Mathes sets were never that good and mostly were rebadged NEC sets. They had a great gimmick tho. They had the longest warranty and in advertising used the slogan "expensive and darn well worth it". In reality they were expensive because you paid out the ass for that warranty.

Since I'm a TV nerd, another brand that was expensive and pure junk during that time-frame was Magnavox. Magnavox purchases were usually made by the lady of the house, because they had the most beautiful cabinets on a console set. Expensive cabinets and the junkiest "innards" in electronics.
There are exceptions to every brand out there. I'm sure a few of those troublesome sets ran for years, and some of the top ones probably cranked out some lemons, but for the most part, for reliability, you always went with Zenith or RCA.