There's was ever made round picture tubes with "in-line" shadow mask, or the "in-line" shaow mask was reserved only to the rectangular picture tube?

I'm almost certain there are no round inline color tubes...by the time the inline technology began to be used in larger size picture tubes (70's) the round tube would have been old fashioned and obsolete already.

IIRC, the Portacolor was the first inline gun set, though it had a regular looking dot pattern, not a stripe one like later tubes have.

I wonder what the advantages of inline are anyway, and if they even apply to round color tubes, i.,e., do they just help convergence at the edges?

Round tubes do, BTW, have an up and down direction to them :)

What do you mean by up and own direction? You mean the image is movin' un and down?

With inline guns AND a line screen, there is no purity adjustment needed in the vertical direction - this becomes an additional degree of freedom for designing the self-converging yoke system.

The Up and Down refers to the preferred position of the blue gun in a delta tube, due to the vertical component of the earth's magnetic field. A tube designed for use in the northern hemisphere should be turned upside down for use in the southern hemisphere.

"A tube designed for use in the northern hemisphere should be turned upside down for use in the southern hemisphere."

If I learn nothing else today...that will do!

<<<IIRC, the Portacolor was the first inline gun set, though it had a regular looking dot pattern, not a stripe one like later tubes have.
I wonder what the advantages of inline are anyway, and if they even apply to round color tubes, i.,e., do they just help convergence at the edges?>>>

I think it just simplifies the convergence since they are at least all on the same horizontal plane instead of 3 distinct 2-dimensional points. Less circuitry involved in getting all of them together at all points on the screen. Probably same magnetic circuit controls the vertical convergence on all 3 guns. I think.....

A tube designed for use in the northern hemisphere should be turned upside down for use in the southern hemisphere.

He he he - I have a lot to thank the dodgy late 80s one-hit wonders, Breathe, for... I read an article on them in Smash Hits, where one of them stated "if you turn a TV upside down, it'll go green". I duly tried it (well, you would wouldn't you, at 13 y/o!) and they do. A b&w TV goes all squashed if you turn it upside down (like a widescreen effect), or fat if you turn it on its side...

Funny the things you remember!

Hehe - yeah, the same thing is true of computer monitors too. The fun thing about computer monitors is that they have a degauss circuit that you can use whenever you want... Turn a computer monitor on it's side, and all the colors get screwed up. Degauss it and they return to normal. Now turn it right side up, and the colors get screwed up again. Do this to a coworkers computer monitor, and see if they figure it out that it needs to be degaussed. Most people have no clue what degaussing does, they just know that it makes the color go all wonky for a couple seconds.

-Ian

For some unknown reason the color on my mother's monitor went nuts overnight.....she thought I had messed with it! I hit the degauss button it and snapped back to normal. Go figger.

But getting back to the original topic, am surprised no one has mentioned the Apple tube so far (no, not the computer)

Anthony

I thought about that, and all those other experimental color tubes of the 50s, but I'm too dumb to know off hand which were roundies and which were rectangular, and too lazy to look it up! I was waiting for someone smart & motivated to bring it up!

I believe most or all of the experimental tube types after the shadow mask was introduced were rectangular, except the Chromatron, which had a rectagular image area inside a much larger circular face.

See
http://www.earlytelevision.org/chromatron.html