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  #31  
Old 11-19-2005, 10:07 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Chad Hauris
A round color tube is a "19V" tube, it has a 19 inch diagonal viewable area. (some of the very late model round tubes are labeled with a 19V" designation)
This is theoretically the same viewable area as on say a 19" Zenith solid state Chromacolor set using a 19V" rectangular tube.
Uh, but the "19V" only refers to the diagonal of the viewable phosphor area on the front of the tube. It has nothing whatsoever to do with viewable area of the tube, or, for that matter, the typical image size shown on the screen. These are all entirely different geometric measurements, and it's easy to demonstrate the lack of relationship between them. There seems to be some confusion here in this thread.

For example, in my living room I have an old 21" roundie (19"-viewable) color and a modern 27"-viewable square-cornered rectangular set. The 27" set of course produces a rectangular picture. The roundie has the typical pumpkin-shaped mask of its ken. If I measure the height of the mask on the roundie, I see that the picture it produces is almost exactly 16 inches in height. Now I make the same measurement on the 27" set. It too produces a picture almost exactly 16 inches in height! Since both are NTSC sets, the images they produce (including non-visible areas) will have the same height/width ratio. Therefore, if both TV sets were adjusted so that the raster perfectly fit that 16 inches of visible height, and were tuned to the same program material, objects shown on both sets would appear exactly the same size. It doesn't matter that the "roundie" has a much smaller diagonal than the 27" rectangular set. The face of the 27" set also has a significantly larger viewable area as well. However, the *size* of the images they show is the same. It's just that the roundie cuts off the corners (as well as parts of the sides), so it displays a less *complete* picture, but it's the same *size*.

Here's another quick experiment which demonstrates the opposite comparison. Take a look at the attached picture. Using a paint program, I've drawn two circles of the same size, labeled A and B. Keep in mind that the "diagonal" of a circle is the same as its diameter. On circle A, I've drawn a 4:3 ratio rectangle in which the width fits just a bit outside the circle. On circle B, I've drawn a 4:3 ratio rectangle that fits just inside the circle. Obviously, rectangle A is much larger than rectangle B. If you were to measure the area of the intersections of the circles and rectangles, you'd still find rectangle A to be larger, though not nearly as much larger as the height/width of the rectangles would suggest. So, it's easy to see that a "19V" roundie (when masked to a 'pumpkin' shape) will produce images that are both larger in height/width as well as square area compared with the "19V" rectangular tube, despite the fact that both have the same viewable diagonal dimension.
[NOTES: These are "theoretical" diagrams for illustrative purposes. In reality, most color roundie sets are maksed such that the usable height of the image is maximized a bit (to get a larger image size) at the expense of width-- note that with a 16 inch picture height, the 19:16 resulting image ratio doesn't match the 4:3 ideal. So "roundie" sets usually actually cut off parts of the sides as well as the corners. Also, most 19" rectangular sets are actually rounded-off rectangles and as such have a somewhat larger image size than the CRT face would indicate; i.e. the rectangle would actually extend beyond the circle a bit if I were to really draw it like rectangle B.]

Okay, I think that's enough geometry for today.
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  #32  
Old 11-19-2005, 12:35 PM
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  #33  
Old 11-20-2005, 06:17 AM
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I suspect the almost universal adoption of the pumpkin shape mask in 1949 was an answer to Zenith's porthole design. It's obvious from the visual aid above that the same tube appears much larger with the pumpkin mask (or none) than with a rectangular mask and, of course, size matters. Philco's 7" sets are the only ones I'm aware of that retained the 3:4 rectangular mask in 1949-50.
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  #34  
Old 11-20-2005, 02:40 PM
frenchy frenchy is offline
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So a 21 inch roundie is basically the same as watching a 27" tv with a mask put around it that carved off the corners, interesting. Shows that these were actually pretty darn big as far as screen size, especially for those early days. A person's face would appear larger on one of these than the standard rectangular 25" sets that prevaled for so many years after that.
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  #35  
Old 11-20-2005, 10:33 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by frenchy
So a 21 inch roundie is basically the same as watching a 27" tv with a mask put around it that carved off the corners, interesting. Shows that these were actually pretty darn big as far as screen size, especially for those early days. A person's face would appear larger on one of these than the standard rectangular 25" sets that prevaled for so many years after that.
I suspect that they would all produce a picture about the same size as the 27" Whirrled One describes.

The original 25" rectangular tubes from the 60's became "23v" when the viewable area law came about. New 21" roundie tubes became "19v" Still the same tubes. In the 70's they came out with "25v" tubes, and called them 25" sets again. They were the same size as "23v" tubes, but with squarer corners. A modern 27" has even squarer corners than a "25v" from the 70's.

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  #36  
Old 11-21-2005, 12:55 AM
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Seems akin to HDTV. RCA was the leader, and most people would rather buy an RCA set than anything else. So RCA had the market, and with such a new technology, smaller companies were probably afraid to try. Also the lack of color programming. Now-a-days, good quality HDTV programming is hard to find. Rarely do you see everything at 1080i, as most of the time movies and shows are upscaled to 1080i. It looks like crap to me. The national HDTV PBS feed had beautiful 1080i, and looked amazing. But in my area, this was the only 1080i. Now on the networks they broadcast multiple channels at 480p, including my local PBS, ABC, WB, CBS, and NBC. The best HDTV I've seen is sports events and Discovery HD. Movies still are lacking unless shot with HDTV cameras or it's a 1080i film transfer.

With this said, it's the reason why I have no HDTV set yet, as the average run-of-the-mill computer monitor I can get for $25 is what I use coupled with an HDTV tuner. It's honestly better to buy an HDTV tuner with both off air and a satellite tuner like directv. (Cable tv is crap in my area, so much so that I usually pretend it doesn't exist)

This was probably the case years ago, but HDTV monitors are so simple to design and build that the chinese monkeys in the sweatshops assemble them for a total cost of $5 per set worth of labor. Since now we have cable, satellite, and off air HDTV broadcasts, it's more sensible to make monitors than actual TVs with ATSC tuners. Most people subscribe to cable or satellite HDTV if they do have an HDTV set. The major cities are the only ones with decent 1080i content on the off air networks, and the rest of us are stuck with cable or satellite for HDTV content that warrents an expensive HDTV.

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  #37  
Old 11-21-2005, 01:05 AM
jroberts500 jroberts500 is offline
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Does anybody have one of those Westinghouse rectanguler color sets from '57? Was it available to consumers?
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  #38  
Old 11-21-2005, 05:12 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jroberts500
Does anybody have one of those Westinghouse rectanguler color sets from '57? Was it available to consumers?
See ad below:
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File Type: jpg Westinghouse rect. color ad - 1959.JPG (70.8 KB, 39 views)
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  #39  
Old 11-21-2005, 09:12 AM
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As seen on the ETF Color TV database, there is 1 surviving 22" rectangular Westinghouse. It lives somewhere in California.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/color_database.html
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  #40  
Old 11-21-2005, 09:53 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blue_lateral
The original 25" rectangular tubes from the 60's became "23v" when the viewable area law came about. New 21" roundie tubes became "19v" Still the same tubes. In the 70's they came out with "25v" tubes, and called them 25" sets again. They were the same size as "23v" tubes, but with squarer corners. A modern 27" has even squarer corners than a "25v" from the 70's.
Yep! I would think all of those would produce essentially the same size picture. Same goes with the 18V, 19V, and 20V progression of rectangular sizes that Andy mentioned. Even 13V rounded-corner rectangles have became 14V square-cornered rectangles. Somewhere in my archive of old Consumer Reports magazines there's a diagram they published that showed the progression (up to that time) of TV picture shapes; I think it accompanied their first review of the then-new 23" B&W consoles in the early '60's. [The 23" B&W rectangular CRTs had less-rounded corners than the 21" rectangulars that they replaced, much like the 25V versus 23V rectangular color tubes. At about the same time, the 17" size common in B&W portables was replaced with the 19" (the 'old' 19" size; this was later replaced with a 'new' 19" (19V) size about the time the "visible area only" rule came into play). ]

BTW, does anyone know when the first TVs with flat screens were introduced..? Zenith had those *gorgeous* 14" FTM (Flat Tension Mask) computer monitors back in the late 80's (those have to be about the *best* fixed-freq 640x480 color VGA monitors ever!), but as far as I know, Zenith never made a TV using those tubes. [It would have made for a hideously expensive 14" color TV at that!] Also, while the face of the tube on those monitors is ruler flat, it looks like the phosphor surface on the inside those monitors isn't quite flat, but just slightly concave (!). The first time I saw one of those back when they came out, I figured it was an optical illusion just becuase I was used to seeing curved-face CRTs, but even today those Zenith FTMs still look slightly concave to me.

Then there's this cute li'l Magnavox (Philips) 14" color TV that I found at a thrift store several months ago. It was made in 1987, and has a square-cornered CRT with a face that is pretty near flat, but not quite. It's much flatter than a typical 27" CRT, but that might be in part just because it's a smaller tube. [This set appears to be a sort of "fashion-design" cube-shaped portable; the cabinet is made of salmon-colored plastic with black trim, has a green LED display for the channel indicator, and has a full-function remote that tucks away into a pop-up storage well on the top of the set. I think it's even cuter than those Zenith 9" cube sets that were available in various colors.]
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  #41  
Old 11-21-2005, 11:55 PM
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  #42  
Old 11-22-2005, 11:19 AM
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That was a very good advertised price on that Westinghouse. They must have been a pretty crappy set for so few to have survived. I would have to say that the old Westinghouse stuff I've seen was all sub-par. I would add that I have yet to see ANY Westinghouse color set beyond the first one. I know they sold them up through the end of the sixties; seems like someone would have come across one by now.
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  #43  
Old 11-22-2005, 01:49 PM
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I don't think Westinghouse had very many dealers carrying their TV sets back then. Even Westinghouse B&W sets seem to be scarce. I used to look at new TVs in the stores frequently in the late 50s. The only color sets I saw then were RCA and Silvertone. Frequently seen B&W sets were RCA, GE, Zenith, Motorola, Philco, Magnavox, and Silvertone.
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  #44  
Old 11-22-2005, 11:41 PM
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=== Now-a-days, good quality HDTV programming is hard to find. Rarely do you see everything at 1080i, as most of the time movies and shows are upscaled to 1080i. It looks like crap to me. The national HDTV PBS feed had beautiful 1080i, and looked amazing. But in my area, this was the only 1080i. Now on the networks they broadcast multiple channels at 480p, including my local PBS, ABC, WB, CBS, and NBC. The best HDTV I've seen is sports events and Discovery HD. Movies still are lacking unless shot with HDTV cameras or it's a 1080i film transfer.===

CBS in Los Angeles has no subchannels so everything they do in HD looks great. And ABC does subs but they are 720p which is barely affected by that and still looks great. All the big network primetime series that are not 4:3 format are NOT upscaled, they are shot in HD. So to me, usually the quality is the content of the shows, not the presentation. (I'm talking over the air here, not cable etc.)
As far as movies being film transfer, I don't know what you are expecting, yes they are transferred to 1080 or 720 but film is film and it has to be transferred as they have always been. Someday they will convert to digital HD cameras but the film transfers still look fantastic when there's no degradation from subchannels. I'm sure the technology for transferring is way better than the old 4:3 days. Anyway the result is certainly tons better than SD or dvds. Personally I'm waiting for HD dvds to come out : )
The one station out here that actually DOES look like crap to me is the main PBS station, they only have one subchannel but they must be giving it a ton of juice because it drags down the HD channel into motion-pixelization-land. NBC is better but not much. I'd prefer they had just gone with 720 and end up with a slightly lower-rez pic but with way way less degradation.
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  #45  
Old 11-23-2005, 12:35 AM
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I have one of the Westinghouse b&w tv's. I haven't started working on it yet, so I don't know how good it is. The power supply was unusual, it uses two 5U4's. I like the way it looks though, it is a metal cabinet sitting on a wooden swivel base with metal legs. Here is a pictule of the model from an advertisement (mine is black, and not the red pictured).

Last edited by Adam; 09-13-2009 at 10:38 AM.
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