Re: First Family Color TV:

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Ours was a 1975 Admiral Solid State console. It was bought before I was born, so I couldn't tell any of you what the first show was, but I can tell you that I still use the television to this day.
 
Great Memories

I got my mom a 12" color Sanyo T.V. in 1985. Before that they had Black and White. I got my first color T.V. in 1970, after I moved from Berkeley to San Francisco. I had a room that was 8 feet wide and a king size bed which left 2 feet for the T.V. I had been given a 19" new BW set and exchanged it for a used color model. It was a round screen Admiral, probably from 1963 or so. It was a console unit similar to what Steve described. No remote or anything like that. But the picture was great. I remember seeing Hawaii 5-0 and the reds and blues were so vivid. I was working at my first job out of college, and didn't have a lot of money, I wanted a car more that the T.V. so I sold it and bought my 1969 GTO convertible.

In 1980 I bought a G.E. 19" table top T.V. no remote, but it did have a unique feature: VIR. A signal was broadcast by most stations at the time which reset the tint and color intensity automatically. It was called VIR for Vertical Interval Reference, the signal was next to that black bar which can show if the vertical hold is not set right. G.E. actually won an Emmy Award for that. I think only Panasonic used this feature other than G.E. It did improve the picture, but not much more than automatic color controls which most T.V.'s of the time had.

After that I had an RCA Colortrack 2000 26" square corner monitor. It had a black cabinet and was one of the last T.V.'s to have a separate glass in front of the tube. It also had a ton of inputs/outputs on the rear panel, and was one of the last to be adjusted with knobs, for things like tint and bass and treble. Then came the 1995 Magnavox 32" which I still have. I am looking at purchasing the Sony KD-34XBR960 which is a 34" tube HDTV. Still having a tube makes it somewhat old school in my own mind. I would kind of like to get it before they stop making tube televisions.
 
Our first color set was a 1973 Zenith console. We purchased from my paternal grandmother's cousin who just happened to be the Zenith dealer in town. As a matter of fact all of our electronics were Zenith, imagine that.
 
1968 Magnavox, long console with the record changer under a sliding door on one side, and the radio and TV controls under the other. We also had the 8 track deck that sat on top.

We used it till 1981 when we bought a Sony console and our first VCR. Which my parents used until November of last year, when they bought a plasma.
 
What a great topic!

Being a child of the 80's, this is the set I grew up with, a 1976 RCA Colortrak with three-button ultrasonic remote. A couple lightning strikes in the neighborhood rendered the motorized tuner useless, but that's ok since we used that dandy cable box with the alphanumeric dial. As a kid I put in a lot of hours watching this set, popping the black plastic insert off and playing with the knobs hidden behind the flip-down door! I can remember being woken up in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm to the set running with volume at full blast! Talk about scary.

The pic is from where the set now resides, in the basement collection. The VCR was the first VHS offered on the home market boasting 2 speeds! : ) My dad saved up quite a bit to buy it back in '77. And it still works too-

The replacement was an RCA Colortrak 2000 with Stereo and DNR! What a sleek, well built, gorgeous set. Too bad about the piano keyboard breakage on these models.
 
first color set

We were among the last in our neighborhood to get color, and we waited until cable came...we could only get one station and it wasn't very good. The first color set was a 1970 Magnavox 25" console...Modern. The very same day it was delivered, unknown to us, my Grandmother bought the same set, only the 19" version. Our Magnavox replaced a '56 Sylvania (the first set we owned) and Grandma's replaced a '52 Crosley, also the first one she had. We used the '71 until 1980, when I bought the new version of it and still have that set (it works great to this day).
 
My parents got a 1975 Zenith solid state Chromacolor II as a wedding present. I can remember the picture starting to shrink vertically and having to use vise-grips to turn the channel as I probably had pulled the knobs off.

We got a 1986 Panasonic console to replace the Zenith and I can remember wanting a set with knob tuners (there were still some on display at the appliance store). I still remember testing out the Panasonic's remote control from across the store and being amazed by it. Also one time I put a magnet up to the CRT and boy was mom mad as the color was really messed up. Luckily for me the automatic degaussing took care of the problem the next time the set was turned on.

When I was in High School at my parents' house we used all kinds of old sets I would fix up such as an RCA CTC-39 in the dining room, a Sylvania GT-matic, and an RCA Mural TV in my sister's room. However when I left to go to the university these sets had to be retired to the garage where they still are today as my parents couldn't keep up with the maintenance.
 
Re: Great Start of Replies:

This was a great idea I think that I had to see how many of us could remember this info. Thank you all, for your input and I hope that more will reply as well. It is interesting how there are basically a few Brands that seem to be rather common for people to have purchased.

"BTW" I realize that I forgot to mention that our first Color TV {mentioned} was a 21-inch Diagonal Screen. We had it for about I believe around the early to mid 1980's, when it was replaced by a Zenith System-3 with the Zoom Button on the Remote Control. I also didn't think to mention that the Channels available for our area were VHF Ch-3,5,6,10,13 and the UHF Ch-40.

I gave the 2nd Zenith to some Friend that had it still working until last year, without any problems. This was a Family with 2-Sons and they both kind or hoarded the Remote's, so no one else could fool with them. Anyone who wanted to watch something on that TV, had to ask one of the Son's to change the Stations. They were always like a Kid with a new Toy, the whole time the Family had it for their use.

Peace and Fun Times and Memories, Steve
SactoTeddyBear...
 
My father won a 21" RCA color TV from a yearly valentine contest two local radio personalities my parents listened to in the morning for years. My dad entered the contest for several years and did quite well. Anyway, the mechanical valentine my dad came up with is caught sitting on a side table in the photograph taken for my 4th grade class that year. what was it we first watched on the TV, it was most likely either the Flintstones (probably as it was delivered on a weekday afternoon) or Bonanza. Understandably we kept that tv going for as long as we could. And when it met its demise, my dad held onto the wood cabinet and turned itinto a bookshelf in his office. It held that place of honor until my parents sold the house and moved to a retirement apartment community in 2002. And BTW, February 1964 was almost too much for me--new color tv, which was just like the next door neighborsw' and Beatles Invasino!!!
 
25

My parents purchased this in 1977 12 months after they got married. It had a nasty veneer cabinet, and sat on 4 chipboard legs.

On the top right it had a big power button, with 8 channel selectors below it.

There were then sliding controls for Volume, Colour, Contrast, Treble and Bass.

A big speaker and then a slide out drawer to tune the preset buttons. It was capable of displaying VHFL VHFH and UHF.

Colour TV only came to Australia in 1974, so a Colour TV in 77 was still quite a big deal.

The only channels we got when I was small was ABC and Prime which appeared on channels 2 and 5.

When we moved out of the country we had 5 Channels, ABC, Prime, WIN, Southern Cross and SBS, however all bar the ABC were broadcasting on UHF.

The first program I can remember watching was Saturday Night Disney, with the cartoon castle with the fireworks etc. Thats probably my best summer saturday night memory. Curled up in the beanbag, with the AC on as the Sun started to set, watching Disney. It was the good Disney stuff too, not the computer animated crap of today.

This TV lasted up until 1991 when after repeated repairs the picture would keep compressing down into a tiny line accross the screen. It was replaced with a 48cm Panasonic, which is still chugging along in Mums bedroom today. The picture however is now getting quite blurry.

The manual for the original TV which we no longer have, was filled in the back 10 pages with the virtues of the soon to be available Philips Laser Disc. Lots of big colour pictures etc. I think it took another 5 years plus before the Laser Disc became available domestically.
 
Our first color TV

was this Zenith, which I still have! We got it in '64/'65.

I remember seeing I Dream of Jeannie, Man from Uncle, Gilligan's Island on it. It was our "living room TV", our family evening TV. Cartoons and kids programs were still watched in the family room downstairs in black and white. However, mom would let us watch the Saturday cartoons upstairs as it was warmer in the mornings and carpeted!

Opening the door to make any color adjustments was forbidden!

Interestingly, it had no remote. Our Admiral BW downstairs DID have a remote, a bizarre "sonic" remote that was, not kidding, like 4 little tuning forks inside that would give on, off, step up volume and step up the rotating channel selector. So we were fine with the black and white when we had to be!!!
 
Remote Control Technology

The tuning fork method was also used in Zenith's "Space Command" remote control. I believe that the Space Command remotes actually came out in the late 50's. One disadvantage to this was that if something else made a noise similar to one of the tuning forks, it would activate one of the features on the television. For example our neighbor had one of these Zenith B&W sets with Space Command. Whenever the guy would get up out of his chair with his keys in his pocket the set would either change channels or turn off, or on. It didn't happen every time, just sometimes.
Speaking of Zenith. Out entire family was very loyal to that brand name. We had a Motorola 21" color set in the den for awhile, but never really liked the picture. It seems that the RCA XL 100 sets always appeared to have a green tint to them.
Our last Zenith was a 1996 model, the first year Samsung bought out Zenith. That set went through about 4 power supplies and finally met its demise in 2003 when it caught fire during the middle of the night while we were sleeping. One of the dogs woke us up, thank goodness. The den where the set is located has very high ceilings and the smoke alarms didn't go off as the sensor was in an adjacent hallway. The firemen finally put it out in the backyard. Fortunately, all it did was cover the walls in soot. We now have a Sony Wega 36" that we like very much.
 
In the Netherlands it wasn't until 1968 that Color TV was introduced (the B&W TV's still sold very well!). We got our first Color TV in 1971. It was a 26 inch Grundig, a German brand. The first show we saw was an Austrian series I think called "Der Kurier der Kaiserin", or translated "The Emperess' Messenger". Since this first TV many color TV's passed my parent's house. At the moment they have a wide screen 100Hz Aristona 28 inch (Philips derivate) and an LG 21 inch. And IIRC they also still have a portable Sharp TV.
 
Tuning fork remotes and others

Whirlcool---funny you mention that. If I screamed at the right pitch, it changed the channel! Could only get it to change forward, not back though, and never could hit a pitch to turn it off or on.

There was another bizarre remote technology. There were sets out for a while that had light sensitive "ports" at each corner of the screen. Your remote was essentially a flashlight. When you aimed it at a particular port, it would change channels, etc.

Interesting link here

 
My family got rid of their lemony Zenith Space Command black and white in 1964, replacing it with a Curtis-Mathes 21 inch round tube color set. It was then I learned two new words: Converge and Degauss. The picture the set got was awesome! I'm sure it was a faux RCA, but it had 3 IF stages instead of the 2 you'd get with lower end RCA sets. It was important if you owned one of these sets to keep a stock of 6GH8A tubes on hand, since they were used extensively. I also remember that the beautiful, well-finished walnut cabinet always smelled like maple pancake syrup.
 
That remote control video on the last link was great. Remote control fine tuning? Now THAT was special before the AFC circuitry came into play. What I thought was even stranger was that you had to turn on the remote control amplifier before you used the remote. I wonder how many people just left that on all the time?
Thanks for sharing that!
 

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