Color TV brand popularity - 1960's

[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.

 

[bwoods]

On Jamie's comments on the GE VIR. If the station had the VIR misadjusted, you just touched the VIR button and turned the ssystem off, The set then behaved like any other set with the up front user adjustable controls.

My 26 year old GE Stereo Color TV, part of their "Command Performace Series" is still my daily driver, and has never had a repair, attests to the fact of the ability of GE engineers. It also speaks highly of those on the General Electric assembly line in Portsmouth, Virginia. Recall that Zenith used to have the most reliable TV's, per consumer surveys, (which Zenith proudly proclaimed in the ads touting "hand wiring" over printed circuit boards (before they changed). In the late 70's GE's reliability went to Number 1 and even surpassed Zenith's.

Here are some neat photos from my 1965 General Electric Color TV/STereo sales brochure.

I apologize for the quality. I don't have a scanner and just took some flash shots.

 

[bwoods]

and another...

 

[cfz2882]

that timeline sounds about right-the 19"quasar solid state color i was given was
made in '75 and had the same copperish plating on the chassis panels and framework
as period motorola sets.
Speaking of plug in modules,a 1976 RCA solid state color i had in the mid-'80s
had a vertical steel chassis frame that modules plugged into,it was kinda ill-
designed in some ways as RCA had placed some elecrolytic capacitors,transistors
and other heat-affected parts right above hot running large resistors and power
transistors!This TV could have used a cooling fan LOL.TV was still had a power
transformer and was very heavy for a plastic cabinet 19".Performance and stability
were not all that great,but set was 9yrs old when i got it-Ex motel set with an
am/fm radio built in.

 

[bwoods]

and some info....

 

[bwoods]

Roundies

Am I the only one, or do any of you miss the roundies?

Maybe it was a matter of pride. Back in the early sixites, everyone knew you had a color TV, just because of the round picture tube. I think the round tube had sort of a charisma, or maybe better an "ambience", of its own,

I really missed my family's roundie Sylvania purchased in 1964, when it got replaced with a 1966 Sylvania rectangular.

 

[supersuds]

Quasar II?

Does anyone remember something called "Quasar II" by Motorola? We had one that was new about 1973 (after the color Heathkit my dad had put together in 1967 was stolen, to our relief -- it was always shorting out).

The Quasar II did NOT have works in a drawer. I remember being disappointed by that, as I'd seen the ads. As it turned out, it ran until 1986 with the only repair being a new tube. It was solid state except for one large tube (don't know what it did) that stayed on all the time so you'd get a picture as soon as you turned it on. It may have needed replacement more than once. Oh, and I think the channel knob stripped, but most of them did back then.

 

[norgeway]

Motorola!

In my opinion, Motorola was as good as it got! Especially the three channel stereos!

 

[rp2813]

How appropriate for those GE ads have the image of the weekly "GE College Bowl" quiz show on their sets.  I think that's supposed to be Allan "Here's the toss-up" Ludden pictured, but the show did have another host at one time or another IIRC.

 

[112561]

Bwoods, I wish I could have gotten the GE books from our dealer, I hate to think of where they went! I have three GE color sets, one is a three inch, one a thirteen, and the other is a fifteen or thereabouts. I also have a nineteen inch black and white stereo combo, The Custom Decorator. I love GE anything, regardless of whatever their quality practices were.

I also notice the painting in the one television picture is by Dick Van Dyke! The stereo console has the GE Tonal 1 "wrist action" floating pickup. Fantastic! I had a tube GE console with that changer. Idiot I am, I got rid of it.[this post was last edited: 11/13/2011-06:26]

 

[whirlcool]

A friend of mine had that same GE tape deck that was in that GE console pictured above as a stand alone unit. It actually sounded pretty good.

When I was in HS (65-69) when visiting friends houses I always looked in their living room to see if a round screen was in there. I was interested in television even more than washing machines! Sometimes the set was turned on. Most of the time the picture was adjusted for over saturation of color, or contrast turned way too high. I wondered why people couldn't adjust their color sets properly. You could tell that a lot of the time the picture was adjusted by looking at the grass during a football game which resulted in too green a picture. But get too close to the set and you'd be told "don't touch that thing, my husband has it set just the way he likes it.".

I definitely didn't like the round screens. It always seemed to me that the picture was somewhat cut off. We went from the rectangular Olympic B&W console set to the Zenith rectangular set so thought that's the way it was supposed to be. I do remember my parents holding out for the square screen.

Then my mom had a friend that had a 63' Zenith (roundie). One time we visited and I saw a new Admiral 19" portable set sitting on top of the Zenith set (around 1965). I asked the woman why she has a B&W set on top of a color set? She replied that she watches "her stories" while ironing and house cleaning and she bought that B&W set to watch those since her stories were B&W. She said she didn't want to "use up all the color" on the color set when she was watching shows broadcast in B&W. At the time I was taking a electronics course in HS and we covered basic television technology. I really wanted to laugh, but I bit my tongue and kept quiet.

And how many times around that era were you watching TV with a group (like the rest of your family) and someone say "That picture is too red" then immediately someone says "No, it's too green!" You usually heard that when shows with "Color by DeLuxe" were showing.

The neighbors we knew that had a Motorola had a 1966 set. This was before "works in the drawer". It was one of the more BOL models. Square screen small wood case and spindle legs. It looked like it got a good picture. The guy there told my dad he bought it because of Motorola's long history with electronics. I never knew what happened to that set after 1969 since I went off to college and those people moved while I was away.
By the mid 70's the Quasar sets were "Assembled in the U.S. from parts made in Japan". The link tells the rest of the story. They were the first to release a solid state set in 1967.

I never knew anyone with a Sylvania set. But when we moved to Houston a lot of people I talked to down here said that Sylvania had a good reputation. But when I was ready to buy another set I looked for places that sold them. I couldn't find even one. I didn't see my first Sony until 1975 or so.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar_(brand)

 

[chromacolor]

I remember the "Quasar II". It was a bit odd because the first generation Quasars were solid state, and then the Quasar II came out which had some tubes. They did still have some modules in the drawer, but were a vast improvement for reliability than the first generation sets. What Motorola/Quasar did was not uncommon because the other big players came out with all solid state models around 1970, then went to "hybrid" sets which contained some tubes till around 1974, with most major manufactures going all solid state around 1975.
Those solid state sets on a vertical chassis could be troublesome with bad connections, but were designed for in home servicing. We repairmen usually had to lug those HEAVY old consoles into the shop if it wasn't a tube issue, hence the manufactures new designs.
Almost all US manufactures were dead and gone by the late 80's, and appeared in name only.
RCA sold to GE in the late 80's, which then sold off to Thomson Electronics (a french company) which Thomson contined to own until recently and now sold to a Chinese company.
Zenith went bankrupt and was taken over by Goldstar (now known as LG)
On a sad note, LG wanted to kill the Zenith name, so in the 90's they put out sets with known defective picture tubes (lasting no longer than 3 years) and killed of the Zenith name after that.
Sylvania was originally owned by GTE (the phone company) then went thru a ton of mergers before being absorbed by Phillips which had also taken over Magnavox early in the game.
Curtis Mathes never designed their own sets by the mid 70's and were outsourced.
Japanese sets continued to kick our ass in quality and which led to most all US manufactures being done by the late 80's.
On a sad note, even Sony went down the tubes by the late 90's. They couldn't afford to continue manufature in Japan, and killed off the ONE thing they had going for them which was the Trinitron tube. (when the patent ran out)

Electronics did the same thing as the appliance manufactures.. as the years went on, they existed in mame only with all the mergers, so a consumer never really knew that the RCA they bought in 72 was NOT the same RCA they bought in 86. etc etc.....

I have a soft spot for the "roundies" and still own 3!

On a side note... Motorola did put out some impressive stereos, but the manufaturer that wins the top prize for the most expensive, best stereos of that era would have to go to Magnavox.

 

[passatdoc]

roundies

A wealthy great-uncle who lived in West Los Angeles had a roundie RCA or Zenith, but I never saw it work. Either the set wasn't working, or else there was no color programming on the day we happened to visit. The first time I actually SAW live color television was in a hotel lobby tv in c. 1962 (Huckleberry Hound Show). Later the same year, our Y Indian Guides tribe met at the home of a wealthy banker member, and when the meeting adjourned to refreshments time, a few of us wandered over into the den where his mom and sister were watching "The Virginian", my second live color tv viewing experience. These sets must have been roundies since they were in the early 1960s.

The parents of my friend around the corner had a roundie Zenith in their bedroom, complete with four function Space Command remote control. They could control hue and saturation with the control, as well as volume and channels. I'm guessing they bought it in 63 or 64. What I remember about it even then was that I didn't like the way the corners were cut off in terms of viewable picture. Our sets at home were still black and white, but I appreciated being able to see what was happening in the corners. We entered the color era during the winter of 67-68 with a 19" table top GE rectangular tube model, won in a Lions Club raffle.

 

[whirlcool]

Motorola was also big in the stereo and auto audio segment in the 60's. I remember a lot of friends having Motorola AM/FM radios in their cars, some even with a reverb unit which made the sound seem like it was on springs.They were huge in the CB radio market. But you know, I have even seen a Motorola 8-Track radio/8-track player that was quadrophonic!

They also made (or marketed) transistor radios that were quite popular. So they had a huge name in the electronics market.

I think that Japanese televisions really took over the market around 83-84. That seems when a lot of american television companies folded, or were taken over. There even was a lawsuit over the fact that Japanese companies were "dumping" color televisions over here to get market share. Dumping is a term used for selling something in another country with a price below what it is being sold for in their own country.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-20.html

 

[bwoods]

We can thank Jack "Neutron" Welch for getting rud of General Electronics. He wanted a larger market for GE X-Ray and sold/traded the rights to stick GE and RCA logos onto Thomson Consumer electronics manufactured products, in order to get Thomson's share of the world X-Ray market.

As I am a GE sharehlder, I get their annual reports and their Consumer Electronics business was making a nice profit, even with high U.S. labor cost, in 1985 and 1986 when Welch pulled the plug.

The Portsmouth Virginia plant was cranking out console and portable TVs with a passion. Unfortunately, even by this time, the GE phones, portable radios, cassettes, etc. were being made overseas, though.

That left Zenith, on its own, as the only U.S. manufactured set. And, as Jamie told you, that didn't last long.

He did the same thing, in 1983, with GE HVAC, which had the largest U.S. market in heating and cooling and set the industry standards with the Weathertron line. Why did he sell it. In his own words, he said "I didn't like HVAC." Trane was THRILLED to get GE's HVAC business and snap[ed it right up from Welch. Dropped thier design for heat pumps, which was inferior to GE's, and started sticking their logo on GE Weathertrons.

Some say that Welch sold GE HVAC, to get enough money to buy RCA. Of course, once he bought RCA he split up its divisions and sold them. Two world superpowers in consumer electronics, GE and RCA, down the drain. It ended the circle that began when GE, in a deal with the U.S. Government started RCA (about 1919).

I could on and on about how the egomaniac Neutron Jack destroyed GE, as well as RCA, but my blood pressure is getting up thinking about it, so I'll save that for another posting, hehe.

 

[passatdoc]

Japan has a larger presence before 83-84 in the black and white portable market. They made a SONY B&W portable with a 5" inch screen by the early 60s. The family who own the Zenith also owned a Sony portable. They had a weekend home/ranch in the eastern San Diego County mountains. They would bring the TV along mainly to keep in contact should there be an emergency or something. The only channel was Channel 6 (ABC) from Mexico. I think they were able to pull in Channel 6 using the single rabbit ear antenna.

The model below appears to be later than the early 60s, but the basic size and layout of controls was the same. They later made a color model which I remember seeing in the dorm room of a (very wealthy) classmate in college late 1970s.

Sony built an assembly plant in San Diego in the late 1970s and that seemed to ramp up their sales. The first tv we <span style="text-decoration: underline;">bought </span>, as opposed to winning in a Lions Club raffle, was a 19" Hitachi table top, 1972. That model died 1979 and was replaced by an MGA (Mitsubishi) 19" table top, which soldiered on into the mid-1990s, when it was replaced by a 26" Magnavox. That set began making strange noises earlier this year and has been replaced by a 32" Vizio HD with WiFi---they love watching Netflix now!

 

[bwoods]

GE 1965 Price List

Loo at the prices for GE's 1965 "Ultra Color" tv sets in the lower right corner. This price list was dated July 22, 1964.

I don't know what the inflation factor is for conversion of 1964 dollars to 2011, but lets say is was as low as a factor of 5 (probably actually higher than that even). That means their top-of-the-line set, at a suggest retail of $825, would take the equivalent earning power of over $4000 today! Even the net price to the right on the chart, for the dealers, was $636.

I believe my parents paid $600+ for their first Sylvania Color set in November 1964. I was with my dad and remember him trying to talk the salesman down in price. It was the top-of-the-line Sylvania console. I do remember the salesman telling my dad not to move the set around and don't run the vacuum cleaner underneath it because it would "magnetize" the picture tube. That must have been in the days before automataic degaussing.

 

[whirlcool]

I think automatic degaussing came around 1965 or so. And even with that the when the service guy came to the house he'd always degauss the screen as the last thing he'd do before leaving.

Yes, I heard a lot of people talk about not letting the vacuum cleaner get too close to their color TV. My cousin used to hold a magnet up to the color CRT and watch all the color being drawn to where the magnet was. I thought, ah ha! You could bend the electron beams with a magnet. Fortunately, the set had automatic degaussing on it.

Most of the sets we saw for most brands in 1964 sold for $500-$650 or so. The lower price was for a set in a wood box with simple legs, the $650 figure was for a full fledged console with a speaker on each side of the screen, plus tone controls.

When my parents bought the color TV they also bought a Zenith console stereo. It had external inputs and outputs even a headphone jack. So I could listen to records while the rest of the family watched TV. That was the reason they bought separates rather than a all in one console. I had seen those huge consoles in stores, but only knew one friend of the family that had one. It was also a Zenith.
But from what I was told, those went for about $1200-$1400 back then. I think my parents paid $650 for the television set and $449.00 for the stereo.

One relative had bought a nice GE stereo console in 1966. It sounded pretty good but cheaply made. Everything was plastic, including the knobs on the radio/amp. After just a few years all the silver trim paint started to flake off.

The 80's was the era of corporate raiders. Buy a company that may be in trouble cheap, sell off it's divisions for a tidy profit and then kill the name. Or keep the name but use only very cheaply built products under that name. I think this was where "Reaganomics" started and greed became rampant as it is today.

But when companies start to sell their owned assets they don't realize that when they do this the company is worth less. Then if they try to get financing for something it's much more difficult to get a loan. Then eventually they'll sell off all their assets and become a "paper only" company that's virtually worthless.
American Airlines is headed in this direction now.

And with all this talk of the trade deficit, we are hearing that the U.S. has to stop consuming so much because so much is imported. They forgot that if products were made here like they used to, we wouldn't have such a trade deficit. And the job situation wouldn't be as bad as it is today.

 

[chromacolor]

The Demise of RCA

RCA was always a large,greedy company that ruled with an iron fist. CBS developed a color TV system first. (early 50's) However, it broadcast at a different refresh rate, and was a spinning wheel system. RCA had so much money invested in B&W that they spent vast sums of money and tied up the courts and won with their color system. Most manufactures got out of the color game when the big guns at RCA entered with color TV. The ones that remained had to pay licensing fees to RCA for years, and their sets were nothing more than RCA "clones". Zenith and Motorola were a few that spent years developing their own systems.
What did in RCA? The CED Videodisc system. They spent years and millions to bring that to the market. By the time that format hit, it was a joke. VHS had a stronghold on the market. The videodiscs were large, used a stylys, and of course, you could not record with them. They were a husk of a company when GE took them over, to sell off and tear them apart.
Whirlcool.. you are correct that he 80's were the death knoll for corporations. However.. consumers are so conditioned to buy new and cheap, that most products are now considered disposible. I have a handfull of TV's that range from the late 40's thru the 70's that still work. They were made to be repaired and had company pride.

 

[whirlcool]

You are right about new and cheap. Instead of individual parts, most things are made out of "assemblies". This means that if a part goes bad it's not unit repairable. You have to replace the entire module that it was connected to. Then it's no longer economical to repair the product, it may be cheaper to just toss it and buy a new cheap one again.

You could tell back in the 60's the smaller appliance shops that carried color TV were proud of what they sold. You could tell the enthusiasm in their sales pitch.

I was talking with my sister today and asked her if she ever knew of anyone with a Philco or GE color set. She said her husband's parents had a Philco color set as their first one. The original GE Porta-Color sets are highly collectable.

I remember those videodisc systems by RCA & Pioneer. The first time it died most people say it was because there weren't enough titles on the market, the second time there was a bunch of titles, but everyone was VHS oriented by that time. From what I remember the RCA system used a stylus of sorts where the Pioneer system used a laser reader on the disk.

The 70's televison repairmans case.... (On Ebay now, there are more photos of what's inside this case on the link.)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/RCA-Color-T...pt=Vintage_Electronics_R2&hash=item20beacb76f