What where the best color tv sets in the '50's beside "R.C.A", from techicall points of wiew.

If you are talking purely technical (theoretical) aspects with service/reliability not being a factor, one might suggest sets possessing "I" and "Q" demodulation coupled with a 15GP22 crt. If you are speaking of ease of service and reliability, I don't think ANY set would be a candidate.

I especally want ot know what other sets besides R.C.A. had also good picture?

I especally want ot know what other sets besides R.C.A. had also good picture?
I think it depends on the adjustments rather than in the technology. Again and again I read in old books and also here in the forum that the early Kinescope crt's have low brightness so you have to wait until evening or you have to dim the room to watch tv.
In a German history book for the development of color tv, Walter Haas, "Farbfernsehen - ein Geschenk unseres Jahrhunderts" (Color tv - a gift of our century), written 1967, I read in a passage about a German foreign journalist in New York 1964, who had trouble with his color tv receiver:
"... It lasts a long time until the licenced t.v. serviceman arrived. 'You need a transformer', he said, while he fetched the beer from the refrigerator. 'Remember the poor people', he added, 'which bought a color tv receiver in 1956. They have to sit in dark rooms. When lovers switch off the lights at that time, they want to see color tv..."
I think the old tv sets are made worser than they really were. With a good and fresh crt and well adjusted circuits there is also tv watching with daylight possible. Here is a comparison with a 1968 PAL hybrid set with a strong Permachrom tube (A66-120X). Remember, the 21APX22A is nearly 50 years old.
The minor sharpness and color fringings on the ctc-5 depends on artefacts while converting the PAL signal to NTSC.
But to avoid a wrong impression: I have a robust NTSC signal source without any drift in the color carrier. The contrast range of the PAL y-signal is larger than in NTSC, therefore I get a contrast-richer picture here than in the U.S.. My PAL to NTSC converter is a 30-EUR-cheap one from the U.K., which only converts the color carrier frequency and lower the video response down to 3 Mc. Color programs in the 1950's weren't as natural as today's programs. Fleshtones aren't reliable enough because of camera technics, and tv-servicemen hadn't the experience in adjusting a set like those in the 1960's or 1970's. What I'd like to demonstrate is to show, that the possibility of true living color reproduction was almost given in the 1950's.

yagosaga, that is an excellent demonstration!

The first color roundie I ever saw work anywhere near right was my CTC-11. I was amazed that color was really that good during the Kennedy administration. I need to work on the -11 some more now since my CTC-5 actually looks better than it! No, you can't watch these sets outside in the sun-what crt set can you do that with? I find these sets plenty bright. But, oh, they have to be set up right! A thoroughly screwed up color picture isn't too common on, say, a 70s Zenith Chromacolor II or an RCA XL-100. But on a tube set there are just so many adjustments and variables that things can really be thrown way out of wack. Thats the fun of these sets, bringing them back into line.

@yagoaga: seems your "R.C.A" haves some a proble with the blue color.

@yagoaga: seems your "R.C.A" haves some a proble with the blue color.
Yes, you are alright. The colors seems not enough "balanced", I will check it. Thank you for your observation.
Do you have a digital camera?
Can you post some photos of color tv sets of your own country?

@Yagosaga. As soon as I can I'll send it to you. But don't exepct to see any roundie or unlese hybrid set. First color tvs where manufactured in Romania in 1983.

@Yagosaga. As soon as I can I'll send it to you. But don't exepct to see any roundie or unlese hybrid set. First color tvs where manufactured in Romania in 1983.
Yes I know. I don't expect "Roundies" in Romania. But it is interesting to see what technics you have had. Were the sets imported or manufactored in the country?
Are you the same guy with whom I communicate in the last months, I remember you had a “Nordmende” Color Prasident with a weak crt?

@yagosaga: At the fiest models, "Teleocolor 3006/3007", the transzistors where imported from the former G.D.R., some capacitors where Romanians, the picture tube where "Toshiba" (Japan), "Videcolor" (France), "Unitra" (Poland).
You're that guy from Germany, who owns an "Telefunken" PALcolor 708T and 740T, an "Grundig", an "Metz" Capri Color 6285 and some more old tvs.
My "Normende" haves an "Telefunken" picture tube. Someone tryed to adjsut it, but tghe set haves a small electric problem.

And that problem prevents me from adjusting the blue color.

[QUOTE=bgadow]yagosaga, that is an excellent demonstration!

The first color roundie I ever saw work anywhere near right was my CTC-11. I was amazed that color was really that good during the Kennedy administration. I need to work on the -11 some more now since my CTC-5 actually looks better than it! No, you can't watch these sets outside in the sun-what crt set can you do that with? I find these sets plenty bright. But, oh, they have to be set up right! A thoroughly screwed up color picture isn't too common on, say, a 70s Zenith Chromacolor II or an RCA XL-100. But on a tube set there are just so many adjustments and variables that things can really be thrown way out of wack. Thats the fun of these sets, bringing them back into line.[/QUOTE

Fixed a CTC-10 back in '73. :D Got her for 10 bucks. Recapped it and replaced the horizontal output,hor oscillator, rectifier and focus tube. Great picture :) Ran it for three years. It was a lot of fun.

Eric

Many years ago I worked in a tv repair shop and I saw a lot of earlier "round" sets from the 60s when they were still in common use.

RCA had the best engineering and probably the best picture to my eyes, but the Zenith sets were built with outstanding quality. Motorola and Zeniths were still hand wired which in my opinion was much more reliable than the circuit boards RCA and most others were using. And if the customer accidentally dropped a Zenith chassis to the ground it was likely to survive unlike most others. But in the earlier years of color, I did not think Zenith used as good of demodulator as RCA and the Zenith picture just did not look as natural to me.

Admiral did not have very good color system either, noticably worse then others to my eyes. Always a reddish tint mixed in the whites.

Generally the biggest weekness of General Electric was in their IF amplifier stages which contribututed to smearing in the picture.

Silvertone, Curtis Mathis, and Airline were basically junk. Motorola developed their own chassis but the others based on RCA but using cheaper parts. And you could see it in the picture quality.

Fixed a CTC-10 back in '73. :D Got her for 10 bucks. Recapped it and replaced the horizontal output,hor oscillator, rectifier and focus tube. Great picture :) Ran it for three years. It was a lot of fun.
Eric
What kind of crt has it? Is it a Permachrom one? Is it a 110 ° deflection crt? - In Germany we have color tv since 1967. The best tube (hybrid) color sets were built in 1968-1970. Before that time the crt's were weak and the chassis were overloaded. The second generation with the 90 degree deflection Permachrom-crt's was the best. I never saw a bad or weak 90° Permachrom crt like the crt's of the years before or after them.
After 1970, the manufactores changed to 110 degrees crt's. That was too much for tube-based sets. And 1973 came the change to solid state, with many problems too. The first reliable sets after the end of the 1960's appear at the end of the 1970's.
With respect to my comparison of the ctc-5 to a Permachrom-PAL set: This was only a demonstration. For daily use I would drive the set with lower contrast control and brightness. Otherwise I'm worried about lifetime of the color guns in the crt.
The only full tube color tv set in Europe was built by Philips in Krefeld in 1964, the 21KX100A with the K4-chassis, and it was destinated for export to Canada. It is the only European "Roundie". Some K4's survived and one can find them in U.K., the Netherlands, Germany and in Austria, as far as I know.

RVonse, thanks for your comments. It's valuable to hear opinions from someone who has seen a lot of these sets. I suspect that there was variation from set to set of the same make due to variations in tube characteristics in the high-level stages (video output, color demods or color difference amps), so judgements based on a fair-size sample are important. The '67 Magnavox I recently bought from Doug Harland shows variations when substituting the video out, and when you look at the circuit you see it's running nearly maxed out with very little degeneration, so you would expect max gain (contrast) to vary from tube to tube. Similarly, with the RCA X-Z demods and the following 3-triode common-cathode matrix to make R-Y, B-Y and G-Y, the matrix gains depend on the tube dynamic impedances as well as the common cathode resistor.

@yagasoga: sometimes, at tv sets that are having protection glass, when you take a picture from the screen the image can turn blue because of that protection glass.

@yagasoga: sometimes, at tv sets that are having protection glass, when you take a picture from the screen the image can turn blue because of that protection glass.
Maybe. When I looked from the top on the screen, the picture is green-blue colored. But in this case here I think it's a question of color balance (B-Y vs. G-Y). When I have fixed the horizontal high current problem I will do the color adjustment job. But this are all minor effects. I'm thankful that the set is working properly.
What's with you? Do you have any possibility to get an American set? For me, my first U.S. set was a General Electric Porta-color. Shipping to Europe was not expensive and the set was cheap too ($30), and I have collected my first experiences with U.S. television sets. Try to manage it and collect your experience and you can do the next step. Do you have a NTSC signal source in Romania? A SECAM to NTSC converter?

Do you have a NTSC signal source in Romania? A SECAM to NTSC converter?

Most newer DVD players can be configured to play NTSC or PAL. Usually a "setup" menu item. Then you'll need a TV modulator to put the DVD output on a TV channel. American TV sets expect the video to have max RF energy on the sync tips and minimum on peak white, AM mode. The sound is on a 4.5 MHz FM subcarrier.

RF modulator are on ebay:

http://search.ebay.com/rf-modulator_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8

Good experience I had with the Jensen modulator. U.S. modulators have Channel 3 or 4 output, European have UHF output. But it is much better to choose a VHF output, color is not drifting away with this.
I don't know the powerline voltage, perhaps a transformer for 115 VAC is necessary (minimum 500 Watts for old tube tv's, for a Porta-color 200 Watts are enough). And 75 Ohms to 300 Ohms transformers are neccesary too for old tv's. These are the "basics" for operating U.S. tv sets.

@yagasoga. Gettin' my hands on an U.S.A. all-tube color tv is one of my big dreams. But I need $$. How much was the shipping to Germany?
A dumb guy throu in about 1993 an b & w metallic "Zenith" from the '50's, modified to work in the Romanian sistem.
We don't have any N.T.S.C. sistem in Ro. The majority of the D.V.D.'s work only in P.A.L./SECAM. My "vinatge" V.C.R. ("Panasonic" NV-630PX) plays/records in N.T.S.C. 3.58.
Off topic: where I can find some old cheap cells phones like these (in good condition)
www.samlaren.org/telefon
http://www.rigpix.com/mobphoneana/mobphoneana.htm
I own an 1994 "Nokia" 2010 in working condition (the battery is broken, and the only battery I found was Made in China-maybe you know where I can find one).

after the introduction of the ct100 most manufacturers bought and installed rca chassis in their few color offerings.

as a young tech in the sixties, I vividly remember (no pun intended) the color on such shows as bonanza, the virginian, saturday night at the movies as all having color quality that would make your jaw drop. In most cases i don't see that same quality of broadcast today. just quantity

Many of today's shows are dark looking and do not catch the eye. Many of the 60s shows use almost cartoonish color, to show off your new color set, and it is a pleasant effect. I haven't watched much of Bonanza but it helped sell a lot of color sets, I think. RCA used it a lot in advertising and I saw an old home movie, taken by a distant relative in the early 60s, showing off their color set. The show they picked to show snippets of were Bonanza, Disney & the Tonight show. Color was a big deal! Today I get the feeling that some tv producers just don't give a hoot. There are exceptions, though off hand I have trouble coming up with one! Well, there is that weird kids show on CBS Saturday morning...

i totally agree with rvonse. i dont think that any set had anything up on the rca color sets as far as picture quality. zenith always had orangey reds as did the motorola sets. rca had the most natural color and best overall picture quality.

If I recall correctly, Star Trek won an Emmy for their lighting (if nothing else!). Talk about yer lollipop color! LOL

Anthony

i totally agree with rvonse. i dont think that any set had anything up on the rca color sets as far as picture quality. zenith always had orangey reds as did the motorola sets. rca had the most natural color and best overall picture quality.
As a kid hanging around the dept. stores' TV departments while my mom shopped I remember that the RCA sets always looked the best to me. The other sets always looked "off" colorwise. Of course maybe the sales guys had an agenda or something and did it on purpose, I dunno. Strange what we remember...

The colours where more real back then because they used tubes!

the ct-100 is supposed to have best picture due to rare earth phoshpors not in any other set. Yagosaga has some awesome pictures and tech info!!! Older sets can give accurate color rendition, as long as you have patience to work out all bugs in set & have good equipent for all convergence/setup adjustments.

:D :D :) :)

So where can one see these Pictures and tech info? thanks!
Frenchy

Slight reverse to what you said - The CT-100 had non-rare-earth phosphors which matched the NTSC specs. The major difference form modern sets is the "true green" Willemite P1 phosphor. For this reason, the CT-100 color rendition is "standard" but rather dim. Later, with the introduction of sulfide green (more yellowish) and then rare earth reds, the pictures got much brighter - but compensation had to be made in the color matrix in the receiver, which cannot be accurate over the full range of colors due to the non-linearity of the CRT ("gamma"). (Generally, to get the correct flesh tones, saturated reds get brightened and cyans get darkened, and hue errors get pushed to less critical colors like purples and magentas.)

Present cameras may have been pushed towards being suitable for "SMPTE C" standard phosphors (which include sulfide green and rare earth red) to some extent, even though they are used for NTSC sources. In the PAL specs, they got out of this mess by specifying NTSC electrical matrixing for the R-Y and B-Y, but camera characteristics (including any electrical matrixing before gamma correction) for slightly different sulfide green and rare earth red phosphors. The result is that colors are reproduced correctly, but some saturated cyan colors are outside the reproducible range. for example, the Newport cigarette package. (But of course, that can't be advertised on TV in the US anyway.)

Now HDTV specs everywhere are following esentially the PAL procedure, but with again slightly different primary colors. The result is that color in HD is much more predictable and correct than in NTSC. The HD specs have even been adopted as "sRGB", a default color space for digital still cameras

Slight reverse to what you said - The CT-100 had non-rare-earth phosphors which matched the NTSC specs. The major difference form modern sets is the "true green" Willemite P1 phosphor.
The 21AXP22 has the same wide gamut phosphors with that very greenish green. While red and blue here in the PAL countries look the same, the green of the PAL sets looks more yellow-green than green. I didn't noticed that our green is yellow-green before I got the ctc-5. The photo here shows the difference between both greens. I can see the difference on my LCD-TFT display and hope you can see it too on your display. But the green of the 21AXP22 looks more saturated than displayed here in the photo.
Another observation I made was that the 21AXP22 shows green-blue colors which weren't displayed on a PAL color tv set. On a PAL set these colors were grey. These green-blue colors are not a result of a hue failure, they are really true. But the PAL sets couldn't really display them.

Thanks for the picture. I am viewing on an LCD computer display also - I have not tried to determine the exact color of this LCD green, but I would guess it is close to the modern phosphors.

By the way, the blue has migrated over the years from the original NTSC blue to something more toward violet - this has the effect of moving yellows toward green, since they must be complementary to the blue to make white. I t also makes possible more satureated magnentas. This is also compensated correctly in the PAL and HDTV standards.

This is the opposite direction that the CBS color wheel system used - they used a more cyan blue, because its brightness would be a greater part of the white brightness and therefore reduce flicker.

Running an NTSC-proper tube from a converted PAL signal should exaggerate the difference between orange (tan) and red (rouge) parts of the faces, because the red and green primaries are more different from each other than the PAL signal is matrixed for.

Some early projection TVs went back to P1 green because it does not saturate at high current densities the way sulphide phosphors do. The result could be disturbing if the receiver matrix circuits were not changed back to NTSC also- hard to adjust the hue without having some part of the skin look either purplish or greenish.

Like RVonse, I used to work in an (independent) tv shop (in the late '60's) and saw a lot of everything. The good, the bad, the ugly. The only point I disagree on was the subject of Zenith demodulators. Their "sheet beam" circuitry, I feel, were the best (and most reliable) in the industry. To me, nothing else would give the pleasant colors of a Zenith roundie. But there again, it's just my opinion. Phil