View Full Version : Sylvania with the Slide Viewer on eBay


Eric H
12-08-2009, 09:14 PM
http://cgi.ebay.com/Sylvania-Model-CFNP-20-BTColor-TV-Slide-Theatre_W0QQitemZ130350910214QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH _DefaultDomain_0?hash=item1e59850b06

leadlike
12-09-2009, 09:08 AM
I meant to post about these-there was an ad in Life magazine that described how it would scan in the slide and display it on the crt. Was this a flying spot scanner, or a color video camera assembly doing the slide scanning job?

Having taken quite a few Kodachrome slides, I can tell you that nothing will do them justice like a slide show will. With a good projector, it feels like you can just step into the image. Somehow, I don't think the Sylvania could quite do that.

FWIW, in the area of home flying spot scanners, Kodak made a movie film scanner around the same period that would transfer 8mm and super 8 film to video in real time. In the PAL universe, Normende also made a similar unit. Neither sold very well.

kx250rider
12-09-2009, 10:44 AM
It was a monochrome flying spot scanner, and three dichroic mirrors with three phototubes. Quite a machine! I've worked on a couple of those, and wish I'd had the space and musculature to deal with keeping the last one I had. It weighs about 3x what a normal 25" color console of the time did.

Charles

leadlike
12-09-2009, 11:30 AM
Quite the device! That really is about as good of a film to video image as you could get at the time without a telecine tech and their racks of gear.

Here is a link to the Normende super 8 unit:

http://super8wiki.com/index.php/Nordmende_CCS

there used to be an article online where you could see one of these opened up, but that seems to be long gone. Somewhere, I have some boxed super 8 cartridges that were to be used with these machines. The takeup reel was in the machine, and when you were done, the film would snake back up into the cartridge.

edit: I just remembered the Kodak's model#: VP-1 and VP-X. So between the Sylvania, Kodak and Normende, those were the flying spot film scanners available to the consumer during this period. Amazing that there were this many.

Hawkwind
12-09-2009, 08:41 PM
...


http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c49/Hawkwind02054/OldColorTV/Sylvania_Color_Slide_Theater_9_1968.jpg

ChrisW6ATV
12-09-2009, 11:27 PM
The cassette recorder was itself relatively rare in 1968.

Kiwick
12-10-2009, 04:55 AM
The cassette deck is a dutch made Norelco (philips) and is probably used as a sync recorder to drive the projector, i don't know about the US but this kind of tape recorder sold in millions after the mid-late 60s here in Europe, and is still a very common find today, i have 4 examples of this particular model alone!

DaveWM
12-10-2009, 01:47 PM
that is pretty darn cool.

Reece
12-12-2009, 07:45 PM
Philips developed the cassette. I remember seeing the first ones in Europe in the mid to late 60's.

Jeffhs
12-15-2009, 12:13 AM
Hawkwind's scan of the Popular Science article on the Sylvania slide viewer TV brought back memories. We never had one of these or any kind of color set, for that matter (my folks always had b&w TV), but I remember seeing the article in Popular Science back in '68, when the unit was first introduced.

BTW, I wonder -- how many of these sets were actually manufactured and marketed in the US? :scratch2: If one of them is in the Smithsonian (as another poster mentioned), I would think this was a very limited-production set, kind 'a like the RCA 2000. (Talk about "when they're gone, they're gone"!)

BTW (2): Today's DVD players, which will play video CDs from the new DVD camcorders as well as audio CDs and, of course, standard DVDs, probably operate on the same principle as did the Sylvania slide-viewer TV, the only difference being the updated technology. What goes around comes around. I wonder if DVD players with this capability (most of them have it) were modeled after the original Sylvania system.

Kiwick
12-15-2009, 05:12 AM
Kodak's videoCD was another video slide format

I'm just wondering if there's any point in building such a complex expensive machine just to display regular dia slides on a TV screen when a simple cheap projector would give you a much better, larger picture.

Jeffhs
12-15-2009, 01:32 PM
That's a good question. The only thing I can think of is Sylvania made these slide viewer sets for the novelty of it (since no other television manufacturer in the '60s had anything like it) and for a select market--folks with lots of money and room (this console looks like it must be about five feet long). As I mentioned in my last post, there were probably very few of these sets made, which explains their rarity today. They probably sold for at least $800 when new.

BTW, what was it about this particular console that made it so much heavier than most standard 25" consoles of the late sixties? I can see how the cabinet could add a hundred pounds or more to the total weight of the set, but then again, most '50s-'60s console cabinets were made of real wood, which is heavy as the dickens. As to the set's added electronics (the Kodak Carousel slide projector and video processing systems), however, I can't see them adding any more than ten or twenty pounds at most to the weight of the entire TV. Therefore, I'd say the cabinet of this Sylvania set is what makes it at least twice as heavy as most other sets of the period, even three-way entertainment centers. The only sets I can think of in the latter category that might be at least as heavy as the Sylvania we're discussing here could very well be the Magnavox 3-way stereo-theatre consoles of the mid-to-late 1960s with TV, AM/FM stereo radio and phonograph. I've seen pictures of these consoles; they are at least as big, if not bigger and heavier (!), than the Sylvania set, although I think the Maggie combos may have been longer.