I have a 19" Sears Medallist II set that I would say is from the early 70s or maybe the late 60s. The set works good, but I have WAY too many TVs! Are these sets of any interest to anyone? I am old enough now that 70s and up stuff really doesn't look old or interesting to me, but you never know what may be fascinating to someone younger. I bought it to use, but simply don't need it anymore and I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm hoping that there is some younger generation of TV nuts out there that see something like this with the fascination that I remember when I was finding 40s-50s sets in the 80s.

Times have certainly changed! I remember older people keeping their old console sets LONG after they had upgraded to color or simply a bigger screen. In the 80s there were a ton of old sets to be found and many were still in use. One thing is, people simply didn't have a TV playing nearly all of the time like many do now, so it took longer to wear one out. If and when it did wear out you could get it fixed. Now I believe that they are engineered to fail within five or so years for and when a TV screws up it gets thrown away with all of the other plastic crap. Why would anyone want to keep any cheap, Chinese, ugly set made in recent decades around if it is broken? Most wouldn't; so a working set from the last of the tube years (70s) may be sort of a rare commodity in 2010, being from the beginning of the throw away/plastic cabinet age. Perhaps virtually all of them got thrown away and I have something cool!! :scratch2:

I think the Medalist line was among the higher end Sears products. Your set was probably made by Wells-Gardner or Warwick (chassis number prefix will tell).

You are right about these old TV's once being in good supply. Starting in the late '80's and continuing into the late '90's, I was finding old tube TV's on a regular basis. The early '90's was when the final round of tube sets were likely taken out of daily service and most of their owners were from an era where it took a lot of hard work to own something like a nice console TV and they didn't throw them out when they stopped working or when something "better" came along. Many of those old sets, especially the solid state sets of the '70's, would last for decades.

Now, we (or, should I say, they) go out and spend $1000 on a Chinese flat panel TV that may die in two years. Then, we (oops, they) find out that the required circuit board to repair it is either NLA or cost as much as a new TV. That's one reason I will not buy a new TV. I can pick up an old TV from the '70's and fix it for next to nothing. It will likely last me for years and I can see just as much on an old TV as I can on a new one.

As far as people from my generation keeping something, such as a TV; well, it's not likely to happen. Heck, the TV wouldn't have to die for most people in my age group to trash it. Just let something "bigger and better" come along and that's all it will take. I wonder how many people are dumping their standard LCD TV's in order to make room for a new 3D set?

I remember the '70s and '80s well, as I grew up in the '70s and remember seeing older console TVs from the '50s-'60s that were still in use. When these sets finally developed serious problems (such as a bad flyback, power transformer, CRT, etc.), they were put out for the trash and replaced with smaller sets, usually 19" portables. The owners usually held on to the older sets for years or decades, even if the TV went bad (they would then use the stereo, which in many cases still worked quite well). The old set was often moved down to the basement, rec room, etc. or used as a stand for the new TV.

Don't forget people who move into smaller houses or apartments and must downsize. These folks may have had large 23-25" color console entertainment centers that still worked perfectly well, but since the owner was moving into a smaller home with much less room, the set had to go; many of these sets may have been given to relatives or friends, but a lot of these consoles wound up on the curb to die a certain death in a landfill. :no: Consider as well (as one VK member in Texas recently mentioned in this forum) that many houses in the southwestern, midwestern and Great Lakes regions of the US are built without basements, so there is very little if any room for anything other than furniture. I had a friend in my old neighborhood who lived, with his family, one street over from us in a house built on a slab, no basement. I can only imagine how crowded it must have been in that house (I never saw much of the inside). They had just one TV that I can recall, a 21" Zenith b&w console in the living room. I also remember them having a pinball machine (the old mechanical type, the forerunner of today's digital video arcade units), but I don't remember anymore where they put it.

As far as people from my generation keeping something, such as a TV; well, it's not likely to happen. Heck, the TV wouldn't have to die for most people in my age group to trash it. Just let something "bigger and better" come along and that's all it will take. I wonder how many people are dumping their standard LCD TV's in order to make room for a new 3D set?

I think this statement says a lot about the current human condition in American society. I think that this mindset could be looked at in regards to age or "generation," but I honestly believe that we have reached a point in time where the ultimate "generation" (50-70 ish) is getting older and want to remain forever young and hip, so they are almost as quick as a 25 year old to push a perfectly good working device to the "obsolete" bin for whatever popular culture finds is the latest and greatest "must have" item. It was their parents who generally had higher moral standards, patriotism, and a superb work ethic that we have not seen since, and unfortunatly their numbers are growing very thin.

So now it seems that people no longer consider much of anything in terms of the hard work that it may (or may not) have taken to obtain a given item, and nothing made these days is really of any use or built of good quality material for use as something else, as was the case of the old B&W console becoming a stand for the new 19" color portable. What I never get is HOW everyone, no matter how poor, seems to have most of these things. :scratch2:

We had a Medalist B/W 19" portable that we got in, I'm going to say 1968. We got it after our 1957 RCA console fried its flyback for the last time (and during Dark Shadows, too!)
It was definitely made by Warwick, as that was the return address on the shipping carton.

So, does anyone think that a 1968-ish 19" Medallist in working and cosmetically clean order would be something that might be of interest to anyone up and coming (or perhaps already) in this hobby, or is it junk? I ask this because to me the set is more or less just another TV cluttering my already cluttered house. I like it because our family actually had one similar to this when I was a child. However my intersets are in older sets right now AND having room to work on them.

I personally think it is worth preserving. Common once, but I haven't seen one like that in person since the 80s.

My wife has been daydreaming about taking a couple days and driving down to Tamarack. This has me daydreaming of meeting up with you somewhere on the road and exchanging a 21" bw Philco table model for a Sears Medalist! But probably just a dream...

Keep dreaming my friend! I have a LOT of stuff here that you may want to take back. My 56 Philco might like a twin! If you have any interest in my very nice 58 Zenith Space Command 24" console at all, please let me know before I am forced to part it out. I just want it to have a good home.

I picked up one of those Sears medalist tv's at an estate sale a few years ago. It was sitting off to the side. They said to take it free, otherwise they were going to throw it into the dumpster. CRT is a little weak , but works pretty decent. Built fairly well and has a voltage doubler power supply.

I think this statement says a lot about the current human condition in American society. I think that this mindset could be looked at in regards to age or "generation," but I honestly believe that we have reached a point in time where the ultimate "generation" (50-70 ish) is getting older and want to remain forever young and hip, so they are almost as quick as a 25 year old to push a perfectly good working device to the "obsolete" bin for whatever popular culture finds is the latest and greatest "must have" item. It was their parents who generally had higher moral standards, patriotism, and a superb work ethic that we have not seen since, and unfortunatly their numbers are growing very thin.

So now it seems that people no longer consider much of anything in terms of the hard work that it may (or may not) have taken to obtain a given item, and nothing made these days is really of any use or built of good quality material for use as something else, as was the case of the old B&W console becoming a stand for the new 19" color portable. What I never get is HOW everyone, no matter how poor, seems to have most of these things. :scratch2:

I am 54 years old and currently have two CRT televisions in my apartment, a ten-year-old RCA CTC185 in the living room and a 15-year-old Zenith Sentry 2 in the bedroom. I intend to keep both these sets as long as they work as well as they do. I also have an eight-year-old Panasonic VCR and a bunch of VHS tapes of 1950s-80s TV shows and movies, as well as a DVD player and a small but growing DVD collection, also of mostly 1970s TV series.

A recent NBC news broadcast featured a report on the last incandescent light bulb manufacturer in Winchester, Virginia, which closed its doors permanently at midnight that night. The same report mentioned that VCRs are obsolete. I don't entirely agree with the latter statement; the machines may well be obsolete from a technology standpoint, but they still have uses today. As long as people still have tapes they can watch on them (and have little or no interest in recording off the air), as I do, these machines will still be available for some time on the used market, and as one half of combination VHS/DVD players.

I don't want a flat panel TV right now. Many if not most of the off-brand sets (from what I have heard and read) are too unreliable. They are junk after two years, when the video ICs molded into the cable linking the panel to the chassis fail, unless you spring for a premium brand such as Panasonic's Viera line, which is advertised to last twenty years with an average eight hours per day of use. I cannot afford such a set and will not buy a cheap FP made by some no-name, fly-by-night offshore electronics company. I have toyed with the idea of getting a Magnavox (Philips) 15" FP (they show up in the ad flyers in my Sunday paper every now and then), but won't go through with that either as long as my old reliable CRT sets are working so well.

I am not the kind of person who has to have the latest/greatest of anything; it's just as well, since I am on disability and cannot afford much if not most of the lastest whiz-bang technology. Everything in my apartment is at least a decade old; I intend to run all of it "until the wheels fall off", as the expression goes. At the rate my RCA CTC185 19" main-watcher TV is going (ten years old with only one repair, and a fantastic picture), and my Zenith Sentry 2 (which still works amazingly well after 15 years, and has had no repairs to date) currently in line to replace it if and when the RCA set goes belly-up, I won't even be thinking of getting a FP TV for quite some time.

I sometimes wonder just how many of us TV people, or just plain realistic and frugal people like Jeff and myself are married. I sort of hate it that most women aren't exactly turned on by a bachelor with a house full of vintage stuff. THEN there is that needle in a haystack that I meet here and there who love old stuff, maybe not TVs, but a woman that likes ANYTHING old (besides men) is cool with me; then again I am not getting any younger.

I think I would be hard pressed to get ANY woman to watch my first generation Dragnet DVD on my 1950ish RCA TC-127 with me! I know that this is far from my original Sears Medallist II topic. It came to mind as I recently met a younger woman at the college that I am attending while re-inventing myself due to the Free Trade Act. I was sort of worried about what her opinion might be of a man with a single level home that contains around 14 TV sets!?!?! Really IMO, TV and radio collecting is no more strange than any other "collectable." Really collecting ANYTHING other than money is sort of a sign of eccentricity when you think about it. TVs just take a LOT of room and probably seem strange when people see them stacked one on top of the other in desperate attempts to save space.

I would venture to say that this is a hobby that a man might want to take up once he has bagged a "keeper", and a home with a garage AND a basement. I think the ideal match for an old TV guy would be a woman who collects refrigerator magnets or maybe salt shakers...........

Hi, I read about your Sears Medalist II 19" tv you wish to find a new home to.
I would like to know if the set is color o b/w. Should it be color would you care to pack it in a box and ship it to me here in Italy? I can pay up to 50$ and (of course shipping expenses (if these are reasonably within 200$).I used to receive others tvs from your country.
I collect late 60's early 70's color tv televisions and all those produced in your country are ,useless to say, my favorite by far!
Thank you very much. You can reach directly to my email address: Tritwi1@alice.it
Best regards
Marco

[QUOTE=Jeffhs;2984396] "I am 54 years old and currently have two CRT televisions in my apartment, a ten-year-old RCA CTC185 in the living room and a 15-year-old Zenith Sentry 2 in the bedroom. I intend to keep both these sets as long as they work as well as they do...the machines may well be obsolete from a technology standpoint, but they still have uses today. As long as people still have tapes they can watch on them (and have little or no interest in recording off the air), as I do, these machines will still be available for some time on the used market, and as one half of combination VHS/DVD players...I don't want a flat panel TV right now. Many if not most of the off-brand sets (from what I have heard and read) are too unreliable. They are junk after two years, when the video ICs molded into the cable linking the panel to the chassis fail, unless you spring for a premium brand such as Panasonic's Viera line..."

I am 48 years old, & I love using my computers, CD recorders, & other digital equipment to enhance my analog habit & use the stuff in conjunction with my collection of records, vintage phonographs, radios, reel-to-reels, etc. My TVs are all CRT sets in the 25-27" screen size. I have 27" Zenith, Sharp, GE(CTC-177) sets from 1995-all work great. I also have two 25" Sanyo sets, 1994 & 1996-again, working great. The Sanyo's seem to have especially beautiful & luscious film-like color rendition(who made their CRTs?). When I do get a flat panel, it will be as large as possible in the plasma/LCD type-60"! And it will be a premium brand too-I won't fool around with junkers. Too bad Pioneer Kuras are no longer available.

I totally agree with Jeffhs & will never give up the good, old, useful equipment so long as it performs well & is repairable. I routinely listen to selected 78s from my collection on my 1921 Victrola X(in oak) & my 1926 Victrola Credenza. In fact, I am gearing up to tearing down these spring motors & doing a complete cleaning & regreasing to get many more decades use out of them. Nothing wrong at all with combining the best elements of "modern" & vintage! Hail Mechanica!

Dennis Forkel

Does this TV have Sears' engineering pinnacle - the Chromix control?

Hey fellow cat lover Einar72. I think the set they are refering to is a monochrome set.

Hi everyone! I am resurrecting this thread as I am once again trying to find good homes for certain sets in my collection. I still have and use this set and it performs well. I can't send it to any foreign country, and frankly do not prefer to trust in companies like U.P.S. or the U.S.P.S. for safe shipment of any television set. I don't think that it is cost effective for either party in a vintage TV transaction to go through the time, trouble, and expense of properly packing and shipping the average old TV. The best situations are when someone is within driving distance and can pick up a set. Anyway, this set is in excellent cosmetic and electronic condition. If you are interested in late 60s, early 70s color hybrid technology, then this will be a great set for your collection. I just can't keep them all and my primary interests are 40's to early 60s. I can post or email a picture if anyone is interested.

I got an email saying that Hiram 11 posted a reply here, but there is nothing. Not sure what happened....

It was spam.....I got rid of it.

OK thanks! I got all excited thinking that perhaps someone was interested in this one.

You're welcome, and I would be interested in such a set by the way. I read through the thread just now. I used to have a similar Sears set and regret selling it.

The trouble with the Chromix control on old Sears color TVs (and similar controls on other makes) was that many people didn't know how to adjust it and/or even what it was for, so the control usually wound up being set to midpoint (b&w or neutral) and forgotten. Today's flat screens (as well as CRT color TVs of the last few years before digital TV) are made such that there are few or no adjustments to be made; just turn the set on, select the channel you want to watch, and enjoy the program, without a second thought to the color controls. In fact, I remember reading somewhere online just recently that the on-screen tint and color controls on today's FP TVs are simply holdovers from the NTSC era, and don't really do that much for the picture; the advice given in that article was simply to leave those controls set at their factory defaults, using the set's preset color settings (on my Insignia 19" FP they are Custom, Vivid, and two others I don't recall at the moment) to adjust the picture to your liking.

The color and tint adjustments on FP sets have their uses, though they don't have nearly the range the old NTSC CRT color sets' controls had. If you set the preset color option of your FP TV to Custom, it is in fact possible to adjust the on-screen tint and color intensity controls for the kind of picture you like. In fact, those controls will also work with the presets activated, albeit with limited range. I'd use Custom for setting color parameters to individual preferences.

The color-temperature control never really disappeared from color TVs, although CRT sets of the '80s-'90s don't have such an adjustment. However, most flat screens probably do have an on-screen menu option for setting color temperature, although the adjustment only has three steps (at least it does on my set) that adjust this parameter by a set amount; it is not continuously variable as the Chromix, et al. controls were. However, I think, as with the Chromix and other color-temperature adjustments on CRT sets, most set owners even today just leave the three-step color temp control set at its default and then forget it. What goes around comes around.

Little curious there, you mention color TV's from the 80's and 90's cant have their color temperature adjusted.. I'm not so sure that is true. They all still have drive and cut controls for the reds, greens, and blues.. And that alone can adjust the color temperature.

Little curious there, you mention color TV's from the 80's and 90's cant have their color temperature adjusted.. I'm not so sure that is true. They all still have drive and cut controls for the reds, greens, and blues.. And that alone can adjust the color temperature.

Brandon, what I meant was that color sets of the '80s-'90s do not have a front panel control to adjust color temperature as the older sets did. However, as I mentioned in my post, today's flat screens (and perhaps a few inexpensive '80s-'90s CRT sets) do have three-step color temperature adjustments as a menu option.

Most TVs that had any kind of color-fidelity (temperature) control had it on the front panel, along with the color intensity and tint. Some manufacturers, notably Magnavox, had only a 2-position slide switch on the back of the set, to turn the effect on or off. Magnavox called their color-temperature control Chromatone. Zenith called their color-fidelity adjustment the Color Commander, Panasonic or Sony (don't remember which) had the "Color Pilot", and so on. These controls could inject a soft blue or red color into a b&w picture, but most set owners found the adjustment too critical, too confusing, or both, so they just left the control set at midrange (black and white or neutral) and forgot it. Some people watched their expensive color sets literally for years or decades (!) with seriously incorrect colors (because they did not know how to adjust the color controls) or in black and white because they did not realize that, on a color set, the fine tuning control must be adjusted exactly in order for the color to show at all. That was why automatic color adjustment schemes (RCA's ACM, Zenith's Color Sentry, et al.) and automatic fine tuning controls were introduced by many high-end TV manufacturers (and later incorporated in all sets) -- to take the guesswork out of properly tuning in a color picture.

These systems, however, often did not adjust colors properly, leaving the viewer to turn off the automatic control and set the color controls manually. General Electric's VIR (Vertical Interval Reference) auto-color system of the '80s was one of the worst in this regard. I maintain the best way to tune in a color picture on an older color set is to turn off any auto-color control scheme your set may have, and adjust the color and tint manually until the picture looks right to your eyes. The viewer is a much better judge of picture quality than the best automatic color control system on earth.

Actually a lot of the better sets from that era had color temperature controls.
My XBR had the choice of Trinitone Low and Trinitone High.
High was factory setting, low added a bit of Red to the mix.

Very good dieseljeep!!!! Chromix = Sears Engineering pinnacle! I LOVE it!! :D

My Sears Medalist has a "One Button Color" push button switch just slightly below the UHF tuner and to the left. I have noticed that something is not quite jiving with the button and I just set the color manually; no big deal. The only problem that I have ever noted with this set is that after a good warm up period the contrast seems to change suddenly. Still a decent color picture albeit a bit duller than I might like when that happens. I wish that someone would get this set from me because it's not really an antique to me the way I see the older sets from the 40s and 50s, but it is a good set and here in the crap/flat panel era the set is growing more and more nostalgic. I would love to see a vintage electronics hobbyist get it and not a Goodwill where it will likely end up trashed. I have a lot of the oddball tubes that manufacturers were using at that time like Compactrons, so I may be able to supply extra tubes for the set. I have no other sets of that era, so I would like to get rid of all of the tubes like that that I have. If anyone has a need send me some numbers and I'll see if I have them.

This set is still around if any new interests have come about. I am glad to know that there are people even interested in what I call later sets. With the advent of the flat screen, eventually anything with a CRT will be nosalgia I guess. I have noticed at least one or two younger people who are into vintage electronics who I guess look at say a 1976 Curtis Mathis, or even something from the 80s as being intriquing the way I saw the then plentiful 50s sets back in the 80s.

I never got interested much in 60s stuff as it was so similar to what everyone had in the 70s and 80s, but the 50s stuff was, along with other things from that era, simply cool to look at and examine what looked like a city at night behind the back cover. Anyway, the Medallist 2 needs a good home before the Goodwill dumpster ends up eating it!?!?!