Question about the 1956 Emerson C-502 colour TV

[Aussie Bloke]

G'day all.

Been browsing the http://www.tvhistory.tv site and I came across an interesting colour television set which looks like a rectangular CRT was used. The set in question is the 1956 Emerson C-502:
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1956-Emerson-Brochure1.jpg

I went to the ETF site to find more info on it and according to this pic http://www.earlytelevision.org/1957_emerson.html the tube in the chassis appears to be a standard round tube while the assembled TV beside looks rectangular.

So I was wondering, why does the tube appear to be rectangular shaped in the completely assembled TV when the tube is round on the chassis? Or was the tube for the C-502 actually rectangular?

Am very curious about this TV set.

[David Roper]

The tube in the chassis from the ETF link is obviously round, so maybe the art department was tasked with putting together a picture of a set which had not yet been built and took some liberties. It is possible (though I think unlikely) that Emerson initially intended to use a rectangular mask. I recall a Hoffman set with a 19AP4 which had a rectangular mask. That would seem about equally unlikely, but it happened.

[oldtvman]

looks like a real bad drawing of all the sets in the brochure

[ChrisW6ATV]

They could have really intended to put a rectangular mask on the TV, as in the pictures, even if they knew all along that the CRT would be round. The standard mask shape of all the other round-CRT color sets, commonly called "double-D", was seldom used on black-and-white TVs until about 1949, after which it became universal until rectangular CRTs were available. The double-D shape allows for a larger picture size with the same round CRT than other mask shapes, at the cost of losing picture information in the corners. I have never researched this, but I bet most TV programming in the roundie era was formatted to fit the double-D shape (the on-screen credits, etc.).