The same lady who gave me the Emerson that I talked about in another thread a few days ago came up with two more 12" B&W TV's - a '78 RCA and a late '70's Centurion (rebadged Sampo).

The CRT in the RCA was very weak and the fine tuning gear is broken in the tuner, as well as it having the wrong UHF knob and a beat up case. I rejuvenated the CRT and it looks OK, as long as the brightness is turned all the way up. I left the tuner alone and the only channel it works on is channel 3. That's OK, since it will likely be used with a DTV converter, anyway. I will say that RCA B&W TV's that look like this must be among the most common 12" B&W sets made. This makes the third one I've found in the past year and I've given away and sold many of these over the past 20 years. I have a '77 and this '78 model that uses a single board chassis with a plug in stand up IF module. My '81 model has a newer style single board chassis.

The Centurion says on the rear label that it was distributed by Aim stores; which, I've never heard of. It has a decent picture; but, the audio is very weak on some stations and other stations only have a lot of garbled sounds and loud buzzing. With no signal, it makes the normal rushing noise in the speaker. I suspect that the audio is either out of alignment, a coil is defective, or there's a bad cap. I've seen this same set under the TG&Y and Sampo brands.

http://i538.photobucket.com/albums/ff341/radiotvnut/2010_0902sampo0006.jpg

http://i538.photobucket.com/albums/ff341/radiotvnut/2010_0902sampo0005.jpg

http://i538.photobucket.com/albums/ff341/radiotvnut/2010_0902sampo0004.jpg

http://i538.photobucket.com/albums/ff341/radiotvnut/2010_0902sampo0003.jpg

I have one of those GE's you talked about with the BX model number, it's practically mint.

Want it?

I have one of those GE's you talked about with the BX model number, it's practically mint.

Want it?

Yes, thank you very much!

PM on the way.

That's just like the TG&Y set you gave me last year.

"Aim" stores sounds like a regional chain of discount stores in the southern US. I never heard of them until now myself. The Cleveland suburb where I grew up had, for several years in the mid-'70s, a Zayre department store, but I'm not too familiar with the chain and where the rest of their stores, if any, were located. The store closed in either the late '80s or early '90s. Haven't been back in my hometown in years except to get a haircut now and then, so I don't know what, if anything, is in that store's former location. The last I heard, there was a Gabriel's store there or near there. It might have taken up residence in what was the former Zayre department store; I'll have to look the next time I'm in the neighborhood.

I had a 12" black-and-white portable TV in the mid-'70s branded "Kenco." This set was marketed by the former Kennedy and Cohen department store chain in the 1970s; it was manufactured, IIRC, by an offshore company called Broadmoor. It was an excellent set while it lasted (made a very good picture using only a monopole VHF and loop UHF antenna in my area at the time, some 33 miles from the Cleveland TV transmitters), but something, I never did find out what (maybe a power resistor?), shorted out just three years after I bought the set. This was one of those sets with almost the entire TV on one circuit board, which I didn't like because circuit boards get brittle with time. In 1978 I bought a Zenith 12" b&w solid-state portable that lasted 22 years, and was still going strong when I got rid of it (space limitations) shortly after moving here. I suspect someone must have seen it near the trash barrels in back of my apartment and grabbed it; well, whomever that was, I hope he or she got some use out of it because, as I said, the set had lots of life in it even then. TV was still analog in those days, so whomever got the set could have used it on an antenna. It worked (somewhat) on its built-in antennas here (this is a near-fringe area for Cleveland television), but I could not get OTA channel 3, the NBC affiliate in Cleveland. I did not try the set on cable.

I don't know what ever happened to that Zenith. For all I know, it may still be in daily use on a converter box, and still going great guns. I've often said (and I believe very strongly) that it's hard to kill a Zenith, and my little SS portable is tangible proof of that; in fact, I believe that TV was darn near indestructible--unless, of course, someone were to drop it or heave a rock at the CRT. The "chassis" of this set was one large PC board, but since it was solid state there wasn't much heat inside the cabinet; that may very well have contributed to the TV's long life while I had it.

I had a 12" tube type Broadmoor B&W set from the '70's that was made in Taiwan. For a cheap off brand TV, it had a good picture.