Were there any portable roundie colour TVs?

[Aussie Bloke]

Hi all. I was wondering out of interest, during the 1954-1964 period were there any portable roundie colour TV sets made?

Cheers
Troy

[Steve D.]

If you mean a roundie with a handle attached. No. I doubt anyone could lift the thing. RCA did produce a couple of 21" round models that were on rollaround carts with a handle attached to the cart. This was after the auto degaussers came along.

[reeferman]

The closest thing that one would remotely consider "portable" would be classified as a "table model". The first in the RCA line was the CTC-4: check out Ed Reitan's gallery of color receivers at http://www.novia.net/~ereitan/Gallery/CTC4_Gallery.html
Concur with the degaussing. According to RCA's field service literature, the CTC-16 (a roundie) was the first chassis to have auto degaussing as standard on MOST models. But probably not the table models as they were made to sell cheaply.

[bgadow]

I suppose that to have a portable in those days there would have to have been a smaller tube than the standard 21"-maybe a 12" or so round tube. The 21" was just too big and bulky. There was enough trouble engineering a reliable 21" set, and they didn't sell all that great (at least at first) so its seems unlikely that anyone would put the money into designing a portable. But it would be pretty neat if they did!

[Sandy G]

Seems like the 1st "portable" color sets were 19" or so. They weighed a ton & were unwieldy as hell. The 1st REALLY portables were the GE "Porta-color" 10" models of '66 or so. And even they were a bit porky, too. We had a very early one-I remember watching "Batman","Green Acres", & "The Time Tunnel" etc on it. Picture was nothing to write home about, but the lil fella was a trouper & never gave a speck of trouble.-Sandy G.

[mhardy6647]

Well there were "table models". My father (the retired TV repairman) has, to this day, I believe, the metal cabinet and picture tube of a CTC-7 table model. He used it as a test jig in his shop (i.e., he just brought in the chassis for repairs, rather than the whole shootin' match).

[Jeffhs]

I agree with the person who said a color roundie, even a table model with a handle, would be too heavy to be considered a portable. The only so-called "portable" 1960s-vintage color TV I ever saw, and then not personally (it was a picture in a DIY television repair book of the period), was a 19-inch, IIRC, Philco color set with a rectangular CRT. The TV came with a wheeled stand and, although it did sport a handle on top of the cabinet, required two people to lift it (it was much too heavy for one person to lift without getting a hernia, or worse). I'd guess that set must have weighed 80 pounds or more, because of the 19" CRT--and even more if the TV had a transformer power supply.


Sandy G.: How good was the picture on those 10-inch GE PortaColor sets? I never saw one in operation, but I would think that, if one were to connect the set to a good antenna, it would get a fairly good picture even in a fringe area, and even better in a prime area such as the suburbs of a large city. I don't know where you grew up. Was it a fringe area in the mountains? What was your TV reception like in the area?

I wouldn't try using one of these sets on their built-in rabbit ears, however, unless the set was in a very strong signal area, say within five miles or less of the transmitters. I have an aunt who used to live in an extremely strong signal area for Cleveland stations--her house was so close to the towers she could often get good b&w reception using--now catch this--no antenna at all, or with just a length of wire dangling off one antenna terminal for VHF and a hastily-fashioned loop of wire connected to both UHF antenna terminals for those channels.

Of course, for any kind of decent color reception, some kind of real antenna had to be used; her TV worked well for color with rabbit ears on the three VHF network stations, but not so well, IIRC, on UHF (Cleveland only had two UHF stations at that time, late 1960s--channels 25 and 43, the latter having gone on the air just shortly after she got her color set).

Even if the little Portacolor sets worked halfway decently on rabbit ears and UHF loops or bowtie antennas, I'd still use at least a small outdoor antenna or cable in a good signal area. Color TV demands it, which is why eight out of every ten households in this country, even in metropolitan areas near powerful stations, have at least basic cable today. I live in a small town where most folks don't even use antennas on their TVs anymore; most everyone in my town has cable, since this area is over 40 miles from the Cleveland stations. The reception on antennas is fair to poor at best on two VHF stations (5 and 8), the third (channel 3) doesn't reach here at all, but the UHF stations, all but the PBS channel, come in very well, with channels 19 and 61 coming in the best of all.

[Steve Hoffman]

According to my RCA TV ref thingie (you all have one; it sticks out so far it needs to be folded in the middle) RCA had a 19" color model at least by 1964. According to this book it was used mainly in hotel rooms.

[Chad Hauris]

As far as I know, the first 19" (18v") tabletop RCA set was the CTC-19, it used a transformer powered chassis similar to the CTC-31. However it seems like the CTC-19 was not introduced till slightly later than 1964, like maybe 1966. The first true portable RCA color set was the CTC-22, with a series string chassis and about a 15" CRT, which was introduced about 1967.

[Steve D.]

Is that 21" roundie on a wheeled cart a portable? It can be pushed from room to room. Or do we define portable as a set that has a handle and can be lifted
from place to place. Does the set have to be light enough to be lifted by one person, and if so does that mean an average person, male or female? I recall the 1964 Toshiba (also sold by Sears) 16" color rectangular set. It had two recessed handles on each side. So what. The set was extremely heavyand bulky. My vote for the first truly portable color goes to the GE 10" Portacolor. Introduced in 1966 at 25lbs. By today's standards, it was a little bulky and cumbersom, but at the time was a major breakthrough in color tv to go. The Portacolor picture, in reference to a previous post, was ok but not great. I'm not refering to reception problems, but the fact that the tri-color dot pattern was the same size as large screen sets. This made for reduced resolution and sharpness on the 10" screen. The colors also tended toward the pastel. I recall the Portacolor was discussed at length on a previous thread on AK.

[veg-o-matic]

Doug originally posted this (from a Philco ad) a while ago.

Does this qualify as portable? (he asked, innocently )

[Steve Hoffman]

Originally posted by Steve D.
My vote for the first truly portable color goes to the GE 10" Portacolor. Introduced in 1966 at 25lbs. By today's standards, it was a little bulky and cumbersom, but at the time was a major breakthrough in color tv to go. The Portacolor picture, in reference to a previous post, was ok but not great. I'm not refering to reception problems, but the fact that the tri-color dot pattern was the same size as large screen sets. This made for reduced resolution and sharpness on the 10" screen. The colors also tended toward the pastel. I recall the Portacolor was discussed at length on a previous thread on AK.

Steve,

When I was a kid I used to stare at that GE set in our local Broadway dept. store. It was really neat to me. Being only like 250 bucks or something it was actually in the price range of a normal human being. My Dad thought the picture was small and blurry and wouldn't hear of us getting one. Every time I see one on Ebay it all comes back to me. Silly but true.

[reeferman]

Ahhh...... G.E. Portacolor televisions with the compactron tubes. Stop and let me off.

I recall many of the smaller screen sets not displaying the entire broadcast image....they were designed so that the center-most portion was onscreen so that you'd see more detail......think of the way roundies no longer show the word scroll along the bottom.

Anthony

[Jeffhs]

Originally posted by heathkit tv
I recall many of the smaller screen sets not displaying the entire broadcast image....they were designed so that the center-most portion was onscreen so that you'd see more detail......think of the way roundies no longer show the word scroll along the bottom.

Anthony

When roundies came along, TV stations didn't have scrolling news tickers at the bottom of the picture as they do now, so the problem you mention wasn't an issue then. Color TV was so new when the roundies were introduced that people generally didn't care about the slight imperfections in the pictures, as long as they weren't obscured by snow or ghosts. My first color set was a cast-off 1964 Silvertone roundie with terrible convergence, color sync problems, and, near the end, an intermittently blurry picture, but it didn't bother me; I was happy to have a color set, the video imperfections be darned. It made me appreciate the improvement when I bought my first new color TV in 1979, six years after my roundie bit the dust (broken tube socket in the video amp circuit panel), and every new color set I've owned since then, including my present set, an RCA CTC185 XL-100.