Color TV brand popularity - 1960's

[cadman]

I know we have some TV collectors on the forum...

Who I'll probably bore, but thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

The RCA 2000 certainly IS a collector's item. It was RCA's first all solid state set, but also the first that I'm aware of to have digital memory for VHF stations, brightness, color, etc. An amazingly complicated feat...for $2000 in 1969!

For those who don't know, Dumont was the Cadillac of televisions. I'm fortunate to own one and it's built like the proverbial tank. When set prices started to come down and manufacturers found new ways to cut corners, Dumont fell on hard times. Emerson bought them out in the late 50's and you can tell a distinct difference in Emerson made Dumonts by appearance alone. When I was a kid, a local thrift store had a round-screen color Dumont radio/phono combo that was every bit of 8' long. 5 bucks was the price. Try as we might, there was no way that my mom, the clerk and I could even get one end off the ground! I got the money handed back to me and told to take what I wanted off it. If you think that's a shame, you should hear the time I had to gut a mint condition Zenith black-laquer chinese cabinet color Hi-Fi Space Command set because a lady had just bought it for the cabinet half an hour prior at that same store for 50 bucks and was going to have the insides "smashed up". The CRT and all came home intact with me that time.

There were still a couple companies making consoles and large screen B&W sets in the early 80's, but not many. I have a 23" Zenith table model from that era in a steel w/woodgrain cabinet. An odd duck. I read recently that Sylvania had at least one console from that period. -Cory

 

[bwoods]

Wow, what memeories!

My family's first color TV what bought in November, 1964. It was a beautiful Italian walnut wood console (which was a work of art in itself), with speakers on both sides and a gold gallery rail on the top, back of the cabinet. It has a UHF channel selector on it, our previous BW Admiral did not have UHF. Although it did not matter as we had no UHF stations in town, at that time.

The first show we watched on it was Hanna-Barbera's, "Johnny Quest." Beautiful color picture...crystal clear. Some of you, who are as old as I, may remember that Sylvania was advertising its color picture tube with "rare earth red phosphors."

Remember the ad? It was in many magazines and showed a photograph of a picture of a Red Delicious Apple on a competitor's color TV and a picture of the apple of the Sylvania. The Sylvania's apple was bright, natural red. The competitiors looked a darker, more muddy type red.

The set always had a wonderful, detailed picture, when it worked. It was frequented with almost continual problems. We didn't have it quite a year. Tubes burnt out, on-off switch went bad, etc. My dad gave the dealer such a hard time, they gave us an allowance on a brand new 1966 model Sylvania, with rectangular picture tube, which had just come into the showroom. They had just introduced the 1966 models and this was Sylvanias firt rectangular tube set. I believe Motorola had just introduced theirs about a year earlier.

This second Sylvania, also in a beautiful double speaker cabinet, lasted two years and the main transformer windings overheated, scorched and smoked out living room.

My Parents replaced it with a gigantic Magnavox Home Theatre, with a built instereo phonograph and AM/FM radio. (First FM radio we ever had). It was still a tube set. But proved reliable, and lasted until 1983, when my parents replaced it with a GE console. This lasted 11 years, and was still working, but the picture tube had visibly dimmed over 11 years and they finally replaced it, instead of putting a new CRT in (unfortunately).

Below is a picture of my GE stereo TV, which I purchased in 1985. It still is my daily driver and has never been repaired. A testimony to the longevity of GE electronics (just like in my 25 year old GSD2800 dishwasher.)

The picture looks a little washed out, but doesn't look that way in person. It is the flash from the camera.

 

[cycla-fabric]

I can remember when we got our first color tv, it was a 1966 Motorola color set with the rectangular tube and 21" screen. I remember my parents liked the set as the tube offered a larger viewing area than the round picture tubes of the other sets. That was a good set and had good color picture. That set lasted until 1975 it was needing a lot of repairs near the end. Our next set was an RCA XL-100 with the 25" screen and it was on a swivel base with a black glass top, it was a smart looking set. But the picture on it wasn't the best, lacked sharpness to it. I was trying to steer my folks to get a Philco instead as the picture on it was better. The RCA lasted until 1991 and it just died. The next and current color tv which is still going strong is an RCA 27" Colortrack TOL series which for some reason the model was only made for 1 year and then discontinued for some reason. Oh well the set performs well as it is used daily. I am sure when this goes, a flat screen will be the next step. This was a good topic, loved looking at the old ads, as it brings back memories.

Doug

 

[whirlcool]

In 1964 both Zenith and RCA had "select" models with rectangular screens. I believe they were 25 inches. They still offered the oval screen sets too.

I saw a few Philco tv's for sale, usually at larger appliance stores. But while I had seen some homes with Philco B&W sets, I never saw anyone with a Philco color set.

And what I REALLY remember was the partitioned off special "viewing rooms" for color TV's in larger appliance stores. They were like a room within a store. Very low level lighting with the color sets they were selling inside and turned on. When you opened the doors to enter you were hit with all the ozone smell from the operating sets inside. The salespeople made sure all the sets were properly adjusted. I could have spent hours in there. I think most of these rooms were gone by 1973 or so.

Wasn't it 64' or 65' when the FCC mandated television sets come with a UHF tuner?
I remember my mom won a 19" B&W GE portable TV around 1963 and it didn't have a UHF tuner. At the time the only UHF station in Chicago was channel 26 and what they ran on the air most of the time was bull fighting from Mexico. When I installed our first rooftop antenna when the first Zenith set came along we could then get channel 22, the CBS affiliate from South Bend, IN.

 

[passatdoc]

@Allen/whirlcool: I remember seeing ads for tv's in early to mid-60s boasting "82 channel reception", as if this were a major selling point/extra bonus. I.e. until mid-60s, people didn't take 82 channels for granted, it was a selling point on sets so equipped.

We had a 13" inch Admiral portable B&W, must have been bought c. 1963, and it had 82 channels with UHF. Our school lacked a tv, and when there was an important tv broadcast (say, a space launch), I would often lug the tv to school so our class could watch. It couldn't have weighed that much if a second grader could lug it three blocks to school and back.

Our White Front department store (discount retailer mainly on the west coast, went belly up early 1970s) had a viewing room like you described, but it was not enclosed. There were walls on three sides, but this was a huge warehouse style building and the walls didn't reach all the way to the ceiling, they were simply tall enough to block light from lateral sources. As an "open air" viewing room, there was no ozone odor.

 

[whirlcool]

The rooms I am describing were two sides in a corner of a room and two dark glass tinted walls towards the sales floor with a glass door for access. The room also had a ceiling covering it that was lower than the ceiling of the store. It was very dim in there with the only light source being rather dim wall washing lights. Usually there was an air vent bringing in fresh air in the back of the room, but the heat from the tube television sets still made it rather hot in there.

I assume the room was dark to bring out the color on the screens. "Look dear, look how BRIGHT RED her dress is!".

I also saw one of these viewing rooms in the back of the store. They cut out the wall and walled in a section of the back room so you had a flat glass wall facing the showroom.

Another thing, the tv manufacturers really worked on the cabinetry of those sets. They were real wood (in most cases) and carefully finished. I wonder how many people made their purchase decision on how good the cabinet of the set was?

 

[paulg]

Totally agree with Whirlcool

He nailed Chicago's popularity list.
Our first color TV was a 1967 Motorola rectangular. We got it in 1975 only because friends knew I liked fixing TVs. It didn't work.
I couldn't fix it so we had it fixed. After that I fixed it many times but it generally had a pretty crappy pix.
After that I fixed up whatever I could find. We were not a wealthy family. We had RCA, Packard-Bell, Zenith. I'd put a tube in them, get them going for a few years than dump it when something better came along.
I went through two Westinghouse colors. Hard to find. Worked well though.

Sears color TVs in the 1960s were made by WARWICK in Chicago. I knew a bunch of people who had them. Later Sanyo. Warwick (a relative of Pacific-Mercury) was also known for making Thomas Organs (again Sears).
Montgomery Ward TVs were generally made by Hoffman aka Cortron. When Admiral bought Cortron/Hoffman in about 1970, the TVs were sourced by them.
In Chicago I came across a surprising amount of Olympics. They were decent, basic sets.

Yes, B-Woods' GE TV is one of those never-fail designs. Love it. I think the only thing I ever saw go bad on those sets (PC chassis?) was a capacitor in the vertical output (pix shrinks). Other than that they run and run and run and run.

 

[whirlcool]

The Olympic set my parents had came from Polk Bros.

For those outside of Chicago Polk Bros was a quasi appliance store that was large (on N.Central Ave they bought up a bunch of car dealerships and turned the dealer show rooms into appliance show rooms, one building held kitchen appliances, another building furniture, another building washer/dryers, laundry equipment, etc.) they were a forerunner of discounted selling. They bought goods from the manufacturers usually directly by the tens of truckloads thereby passing the distributor (& ticking them off too) and passing the savings onto the customer. Polk Bros lasted all the way up to 1992. They carried just about every major brand appliance you could think of(except Magnavox).

They saw Circuit City & Best Buy coming and wondered how they could compete. So after a fire that burned most of their inventory records they shut down and took the $382 million dollars that they had and set up the Polk Bros foundation which helps inner city kids with educational pursuits.

By 1960 over 80% of the Chicago population had at least one item they purchased at Polk Bros from 1935 to 1960. An amazing feat.

As a footnote they did build a computer center in the middle of their distribution center store. A modern IBM 370 System, I think it was a 168 model. It was in a glass room in the middle of the sales floor. But the owners of the chain (always family held) only put employee payroll on the system and for inventory control of the 17 store chain still used the old tub & index card system.
The family really didn't trust computers that much and when the fire burned down the distribution center (not that old anyway) the computer and all inventory records were destroyed as well. As much as their insurance company tried to help them out recovering their losses, they just could not come up with the proper amount of inventory that was in the warehouse at the time. The loss due to this was around $30 million dollars or so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polk_Brothers

 

[whirlcool]

The Olympic set my parents had came from Polk Bros.

For those outside of Chicago Polk Bros was a quasi appliance store that was large (on N.Central Ave they bought up a bunch of car dealerships and turned the dealer show rooms into appliance show rooms, one building held kitchen appliances, another building furniture, another building washer/dryers, laundry equipment, etc.) they were a forerunner of discounted selling. They bought goods from the manufacturers usually directly by the tens of truckloads thereby passing the distributor (& ticking them off too) and passing the savings onto the customer. Polk Bros lasted all the way up to 1992. They carried just about every major brand appliance you could think of(except Magnavox).

They saw Circuit City & Best Buy coming and wondered how they could compete. So after a fire that burned most of their inventory records they shut down and took the $382 million dollars that they had and set up the Polk Bros foundation which helps inner city kids with educational pursuits.

By 1960 over 80% of the Chicago population had at least one item they purchased at Polk Bros from 1935 to 1960. An amazing feat.

As a footnote they did build a computer center in the middle of their distribution center store. A modern IBM 370 System, I think it was a 168 model. It was in a glass room in the middle of the sales floor. But the owners of the chain (always family held) only put employee payroll on the system and for inventory control of the 17 store chain still used the old tub & index card system.
The family really didn't trust computers that much and when the fire burned down the distribution center (not that old anyway) the computer and all inventory records were destroyed as well. As much as their insurance company tried to help them out recovering their losses, they just could not come up with the proper amount of inventory that was in the warehouse at the time. The loss due to this was around $30 million dollars or so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polk_Brothers

 

[philr]

Joe, the RCA 2000 did also cost 2000$!
I'd kill to get one of these! (OK, maybe I'd kill a fly or something like that!)

Seriously,
I've been wanting one like this since I saw it in an ad in an old LIFE magazine (I collected them when I was a kid, the ads in these LIFE magazines probably caused my addiction to Frigidaire appliances too!)

In the last few days I have been searching (again) for an early RCA TV set with a remote control. There's an old 19" RCA color TV in a local ad but it's a portable set without a remote, and it's priced above what I want to pay for a portable tube TV.

Open the link to see one with the doors closed!

http://www.atomicindy.com/2009/04/mid-century-modern-renovation-weekend.html

 

[nanook]

Great Memories and Info from All

There was no question that Zenith made the best (mechanical) TV tuner. Their Super Gold Video Guard Tuner could run circles around the competition. And Zenith's reputation for reliablity was well-deserved. But for all the hoopla surrounding "hand wired chassis" vs. printed circuit boards, hand wiring had their set of issues too and as pcb technology matured along with transistors, was able to beat hand wiring for reliablity, etc. An unfortunate mistake Zenith made was deciding to design their own color demodulation circuit, rather than licensing one from RCA - as other manufacturers did. And as such the color redition of Zenith color TV's was always inferior to almost all others. Too bad, as in other respects their sets were quite nice.

 

[jetcone]

Wow

I remember seeing that RCA 2000 come out and thinking it was so futuristic! Like out of "2001 A Space Odyssey" all white design.

I wished we could have owned one too. We had just bought our first color set in 1968, an RCA and it had the best color I have ever seen, even to this day. Vivid. The Tonight Show was the most colorful program I remember from back then.

 

Our neighbors had the first color set in the neighborhood,it was a Zenith. In our area it was Zenith, RCA, and then neck and neck was Sears and GE since we lived in a GE town. Mom didn't like the sound on either the GE or the Sears,to tinny she would say. So we got an RCA for the sound. That set lasted until I went off to college and then they got one with remote controls.

I still have the cabinet, Dad turned it into a storage cabinet when it died.

 

 

[daveamkrayoguy]

DaveAMKrayoGuy's G&G's A/V:

I think one of the last TV sets I remember seeing my grandparents own was a fairly large-screen Panasonic, though it was a table top model complete w/ the rabbit ears & it was a Black & White, replacing a much smaller B&W, which might have been an Admiral or a Zenith!

Naturally, they were very much a lot more used to TV being black & white as opposed to color more than the rest of us, and this was in the late '70's so I don't think they have ever owned another television set since...!

There was even a jack on the side of the set for an ear-plug, which they let me try w/ a plug normally used for their transistor radio; an AM-only, no less! Although Gramps listened to some multi-band one-speaker "boom-box" of its time, capable of Police (maybe like a police scanner) & even short-wave broadcasts, along w/ the standard AM & FM settings, and a few more I'm probably forgetting; it ran on "D" Batteries as well as AC & probably also featured a jack for that ear-piece, too!

-- Dave

 

[tolivac]

When I look at the advertisements for these TV's I also think of the TRANSMITTERS that broadcast to them-that is my work.RCA was the biggest maker of VHF and UHF TV transmitters and radio transmiiters as well.Next is Harris-Gates-Now its primarily Harris.RCA has gone goodby.DuMont built transmitters in their earlier days-never worked on a DuMont transmitter.Used to have one of their BW TV's-great set.In a TV transmitter site-you hear the roar of the transmitter blowers.Visual stages in a TV transmitter run VERY HOT so high speed blowers needed to cool the tubes and their cavitys.You smell faint hot metal-again the hot transmitter parts.And in the winter-some of that transmitter heat is used to heat the building-feels so good on very cold days or nights!Now--solid state stages in transmitters replace tubes-they run cooler-but you still have the blowers to keep them cool.Just not as loud.Digital transmitters still have some tubes--Klystrodes.These are hybrids-a tetrode tube and a Klystron.They are very efficient-but expensive-and they require X-Ray sheilding because of the high voltages.37Kv!I do have some old RCA,Gates and Harris supply catalogs-same with other manufactuerews of broadcast gear.And a collection of transmitting tubes.A few of these tubes came from TV transmitters and their radiators show evidence of the heat.When you watch the meters on a visual stage of an analog transmitter-they go high when the transmitter is sending a dark or black picture-max modulation and power.Its especially entertaining with transmitters running on lo band channels(analog)they used internal anode glass tubes-the anode would glow bright red or orange during the dark scenes-you could tell right away by lookimng at the transmitter! and some had mercury vapor rectifiers for the power supplies-the rectifiers glowed bright blue-white during dark picture-miss those days!

 

[bwoods]

Those are nice (and cool) memories, Rex. That would be exciting work!

Speaking of X-rays, remember in 1966/67 when it was discovered that General Electric TV's were giving off X-rays? If I recall, it was a misaligned anode in GE's high voltage rectifier tube (before the days of solid state rectifiers being commonly used in home tvs.)

It caused quite a stir among the public. It was the first time most people realized that, even properly operating color TV's, produced "soft" x-rays from the face of the CRT. This knowlege was a by-product of the news about GE tv actually producing a stream pf hard rays from the side of the set where the high voltage rectifier was.

Even my seven grade teacher was talking to my class about this. I don't remember the purpose of her talk, but she was probably warning us not to sit too close to the tv.

 

[whirlcool]

The link at the bottom of reply #1 of this thread takes you to an article where GE color tv sales dropped after the radiation scare and the government made the manufacturers put in a circuit that would blank the screen & sound if the voltage got too high. That was to prevent this from happening again.

I always liked the Zenith pictures. I thought the colors were "cooler" than the RCA sets which had "warmer" color rendition.

There is a guy in Villa Park, IL (a western suburb of Chicago) that has been selling console televisions on Ebay for quite some time. These sets are usually in primo condition and go for rather low prices. Plus some of his proceeds go to a local animal shelter.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/RCA-27-Colo...470?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item53e9f3eba6

 

[ptcruiser51]

RCA 2000

A neighbor of mine had one of these. He said the black bars on either side of the screen were for window glare or too much lighting in the room. Come to think of it, most people had the lights shut off when watching TV. Even back in the 50s with the dim picture tubes. Hence the invention of "TV Lamps". Don't get me started, I still have and use one!

 

[westie2]

Our area it was RCA's then Zenith from early on.  We had a Hoffman black and white set from 1952 that was going strong when in 1957 we got our first color RCA.  We had a cousin that had appliance store that my folks got the Hoffman from and the RCA.  We had a tall outside tower with the rotor on it installed when we got eh first tv as our closest stations were 90 to 150 miles away.  Since we were about the first in the area to have color we always had  a housefull over when a color program came on.  The RCA had to be degaussed every month or so and sometimes for the snow conditions of the screen we had just black and white instead of color.  The Hoffman went to my mothers mother.  I got a Sweet 16 RCA on a stand in 1962 for Christmas.  The RCA color set was replaced in 1966 with a Zenith set and the color was great on it that set died about 1994 and was replaced by another RCA.  My folks also got a couple of RCAs for the kithen and their bedroom at that time.  These are still working.  After we moved my mother here I got her a Sony tube flat screen to fit in the space in her livingroom.

 

Myfirst color was a old Sylvania my wife and I got free from a lady she taught with in Houston in 1973 up until them used the Sweet 16.  In early 1978 the color set went out and we went to Foley's warehouse on Gulf Freeway really looking for the Sony  19 inch tricon sets but the salesman showed us the Sharp and also the guts of each tv to show us that they both had the 3 gun tube and thqt at that time Sharp made both tubes and the sharp was 1/2 the price of the Sony.  That set lasted us until 1995 and about 6 family moves.  We bougth another Sharp 30 inch and it is still working.  Last year our kids got us a 47 inch Vizio flat panel.  10 years ago we bought a 19' Westinghouse for our bedroom and still going strong.

 

[whirlcool]

How many people had to upgrade their antenna system when they got their first color tv? The antenna on our house got a great B&W signal but it was woefully inadequate for color. Lots of snow, ghosting,etc. Finally we had a perfect picture. Our house was slightly lower than the adjoining houses and the TV signal used to bounce from both of them before hitting our antenna.

I learned a lot about antenna design then. I learned what each kind of element does, ghost rejection, reflectivity, frequency length etc. [this post was last edited: 11/10/2011-15:14]

 

[westie2]

Yes we had to get a super good antenna with the RCA and then a bigger better one for the Zenith one they got.  Right after that time I was married and had moved to town and had cable we got 9 stations then Oklahoma City 3 stations, Lawton 1 station, Witchita Falla 2 station and Amarillo, TX 2 stations.  All were ABC, CBS, NBC just different news and weather and on Friday nights late different programs same onSundays.