tims roundscreens

[colortrakker]

Originally Posted by Carmine

Now can you please explain how a Re-Max real estate ad fits in with a burning, wrecked car?

Well, all right. The spot takes place on the set of an action movie being shot. The actress is selling her house, and for comic relief the agent flies over the scene in his hot air balloon to tell Actress (wearing the NTSC-accurate red in the first screenshot) that he sold her house. Whatever.

roundscreen - Zenith, Admiral and Motorola gave their sets names too. Zenith, if I remember, named their sets well into the '80s.

I get the feeling that as nice as your Asbury looks, the pictures may not be doing it full justice. Impressive, indeed.

[roundscreen]

Hi ak
carmine That is a vary good question. sorry i do not know. i was too busy messing around with the camera.
color trakker. someone should bring back putting names on tvs. Do they still make all wood cabnets? i haven't seen one in a long time.
steve- i checked out your site and that wingate is a vary good looking tv. the ct100 is awesome. your whole collection is awesome. the sets and screen pictures .How do you get such good screen shots with flash on?
My camera is a 1 yo cannon power shot A300 paid 340.00 with the tax.
dirt cheap. been working vary well. does eat battries when u use flash.
but most of them do. When i resize the pictures some detail is lost.
Here is some more eye candy. this is a rca i found in the trash. ctc20
the cabnet is water damaged on the top. i wish i was better at repairing the cabnets. Have alot of them that need refinishing. the chassis is clean. yes the crt has been changed. the old one was shot. It looks funny with the dark green screen. the old one is more blueish.

[Jeffhs]

Roundscreen,

First, welcome to AK. I've been a member here for about 18 months, give or take, and can say there is a very fine group of antique TV and radio collectors in these forums. I've gotten a lot of help finding troubles in some of my old sets from the guys here, so I can recommend AK highly, in its entirety.

I had a Sears Silvertone roundie in the early 1970s. It was an old set one of my neighbors in my hometown had had sitting in his garage for some years, but after I got it home (thank goodness I only lived one street over from where this fellow was, because the set was in a metal cabinet, had a round glass 21FJP22 CRT, and weighed at least a ton), I managed to get it to work halfway decently after a couple minor "repairs" under the chassis. I put the word "repairs" in quotes because these, I blush to admit, were not true repairs (I've been working with electronics, TV, radio, ham radio, etc. since I was eight years old--I'm now 48) and heaven knows I should have known better, but the thing was I didn't have a replacement handy for the circuit breaker at the time, so I jumpered across the old one. The on-off switch was bad as well; I jumpered that too, and simply used the line cord plug as an on/off control.

The set worked--well, not perfectly (the convergence was way off, and I didn't have a dot/crosshatch/bar generator at the time as this was my first in what eventually evolved into a long string of color sets), but I was thrilled anyhow at having at least gotten this thing to make a color picture on the three (at that time) VHF network stations from Cleveland. It continued to work well the next three years, surviving a 20-mile move and being carried up three flights of stairs when I moved (the first time) in '72, but in the latter part of 1973 I managed to ruin the video amp/output circuit board while trying to replace a defective video output tube (6AW8). I did not realize that the replacement had one slightly bent pin, and I was pressing down on the tube to put it in the socket; suddenly I heard a sickening crunch and watched in horror as the tube socket clunked to the bottom of the set.

I used a 1961 Philco 19" b&w portable TV the next two years until I moved back to my hometown in 1975. (A 12" Sharp portable I had also had since 1970 had bitten the dust some time earlier; just what went wrong with it I don't remember anymore, as it has been well over thirty years since it went bad and I got rid of it.) I left the Silvertone roundie behind for the home's owner (my dad's second wife who divorced him in '75, when we left and went back to my hometown) to deal with; not knowing anything about old televisions, she probably put the thing out for the trash eventually.

That Silvertone was, as I said, the first in a very long string of color TV sets I owned from then until now. Most of them (in fact, every one except the last three sets I have owned) were trash-day finds; I managed to get every one of the older sets working--again, not perfectly, but well enough to watch on the antenna in our attic.

Times change, however, and in 1979 I decided I wanted a new set, so I bought a Zenith 13" portable, which worked well for the next three years; then I bought another 13" Zenith with one-knob electronic tuning. That set still worked when it was replaced by an Emerson 19" color set (rectangular tube and electronic digital tuning) in 1989. The Emerson was replaced by a Zenith 19" table set which I still have, and in fact the Zenith works exceptionally well even now, despite the fact it was made in 1995, roughly the middle of the period when Zenith's quality was taking one heck of a nosedive and was headed fast for rock bottom (some time before Gold Star acquired the company and made an utter shambles of it--grrrrrrrr!).

I moved again, of necessity, into a small apartment in a small northern Ohio village in autumn 1999. I did not take either small portable color set with me, but bought a new RCA CTC185, which is in the living room in my apartment today and makes a beautiful picture, especially since the cable system in this small town was rebuilt from the ground up last spring.

Say what you will about the quality of RCA's late '80s-'90s TVs, but my set has not given me one bit of trouble (except for the RF antenna port snapping off the tuner PC board after I'd had the set a few months) since I bought it nearly five years ago. I was kinda' upset that the warranty did not cover the cost of the repair, but....that's the way it goes, I guess. What's important is that this TV makes a very good picture on cable (this is the first TV I've ever owned with a dark-tint inline CRT and automatic color controls--the picture looks like a picture postcard on every station) and works whenever I turn it on, no problems whatsoever (knock on wood).

Again, welcome to AK. As I said, this is a grand bunch of folks, all willing to help out fellow members with any problems they may have. I for one look forward to seeing more of your posts in the future.

Kind regards,

[Steve D.]

First, Carmine, I think RCA still offers a couple of wood (wood grained hardboard?) style cabinets.
I guess naming models got to be a bit corny or old fashioned some years back. My CTC 5 "Wingate" for example was named for an RCA engineering executive.

Roundscreen, I'm glad you enjoyed my site, Thanks for the kind comments. From the looks of the fine off screen pictures you provided, I don't think you need much advice on picture taking. I took the CT-100 Rose Parade pix using a borrowed digital camera. I had no idea what I was doing. Just dimmed the room lights and shut off the flash. The picture tube provided the light source. The other off screen
pix were shot by a friend using the same technique. I'm currently shopping for a digital camera to update my web page.

Steve

[roundscreen]

Thanks jeffths. The people in ak are great. They have so much knowlege in electronics and It is an honor to be here. You kinda started out the same way i did. the first set i worked on was a 1962 19" b-w zenith my dad gave me. the switch was bad so i solderd in a jumper. Wish i still had that set. it ran for many years. In 75 i bought a rca 19" xl 100 color. the only thing i did to that set was clean the tuner and That set got alot of use. Sold it in 86. Oh the crunch of a pc board. sends a chill up the spine. I did that to a rca roundie. man was i pissed. i did fix it but it diden't last long so i used the set for parts. When i bought my house in 79 i started building my collection.
now i have about 40 working sets and way to many parts sets. Please don't get me wrong i think rcas are the best sets ever made. next in line would be zenith. look at how many of the old ones we get working. and they work vary well.

[old_tv_nut]

Regarding set names - I didn't work in that department, but I think at Zenith they used to refer to an atlas for town names, and then do research on a long list of names that had been used by other manufacturers to make sure they hadn't been used already.

If there's someone else from "big Z" on this forum, maybe they can straighten me out on this.

[Carmine]

If there's someone else from "big Z" on this forum, maybe they can straighten me out on this.

UH, did I miss something? You worked for Zenith? Man, get ready for a bunch of questions!!!

[roundscreen]

Old tv nut what department did you work in? how long?

[old_tv_nut]

OK folks, slow down and don't get your hopes too high.

I have been at Zenith since 1975 and I'm still here at the reorganized Z/LGE. However, I worked in the advanced development department (now R&D), so I can talk theory about the old sets, but have little knowledge of what was in actual designs. My initial work at Z was analog integrated circuit design for chroma demods. The guy next to me worked on the color oscillator section, and together we came up with a reference design for a one-chip color section. Then product development took the result and adapted it to actual product design.

Before Zenith, I worked at Motorola, starting in B&W TV, then for a while on a video player (EVR, developed by CBS labs and the famous Peter Goldmark)that never made it in the market, and then in R&D on analog IC design.

These days, I'm into "technopolitics", representing the company in standards-setting bodies like ATSC and ITU, pushing adoption of digital TV technology.

So - don't expect much from me in terms of "what was in chassis number xxxx" - I'd have to find a source just like anyone else.

old_tv_nut

[andy]

---

[Steve D.]

Andy,

Seems to me that you got it exactly right. Much as Thomson aquired the RCA name for marketing purposes, that's where LG and Zenith stand. I can't speak for Old TV Nut, but I assume there is no free standing Zenith engineering dept. as we knew it. There are LG badged and Zenith badged receivers designed for different market segments and price points. Some are probably clones, I suspect the Zenith name still has some profit potential to the LG corporation, especially in the U.S. When the LG name becomes more established down the line, the Zenith logo will quietly be phased out.

Steve

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Steve D.

Andy,

Seems to me that you got it exactly right. Much as Thomson aquired the RCA name for marketing purposes, that's where LG and Zenith stand. I assume there is no free standing Zenith engineering dept. as we knew it. There are LG badged and Zenith badged receivers designed for different market segments and price points. Some are probably clones, I suspect the Zenith name still has some profit potential to the LG corporation, especially in the U.S. When the LG name becomes more established down the line, the Zenith logo will quietly be phased out.

Steve

Steve,

I think the Zenith lightning-bolt logo on sets made by LG for the North American market already has been retired. I've seen LG-manufactured sets with the LG logo (not Zenith's once-famous lightning bolt) advertised in Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. flyers in our Sunday newspaper, so I think we can safely conclude that most if not all vestiges of the Zenith Radio (later Zenith Electronics) Corporation have faded into oblivion.

[Steve D.]

Jeff,

Point well taken. I still see Zenith products along side LG products in our So. Cal Best Buys and Circuit City stores. This includes plasma, direct view sets, DVD players and some VCR's. I don't know how much of this is stuff left in wharehouses or is still being produced. Old TV Nut could probably answer this question.

Steve

[old_tv_nut]

Zenith exists as marketing and an R&D department, no manufacturing or consumer product engineering. I already told you a little of what I do in R&D - the rest is that old cliche' - if I told you, I'd have to shoot you.

[bgadow]

Got a sales flyer in the last couple weeks from a local independent tv/appliance store. They used to be a GE/Zenith dealer but now are associated with "BrandDirect" which I guess gives them some buying power, and now they carry all kinds of brands. On the front page of the flyer is a Zenith console tv, " 25" Traditional Console TV, comb filter, color temperature control, SEQ Front Surround, Tri-Lingual Menu System, Only $599" Has the "Z" logo. Next to it, for $200 less, is a table model Toshiba 32". Take your 200 bucks and buy a tv stand!