Passing time & happened upon this one, in Arizona. C.1970, solid state competitor for the Portacolor.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=3638&item=6177458288&rd=1

I have one of those. I bought it off of Kamakiri last year. It has an instant on CRT, which I plan on modifying so it isn't. This TV is actually smaller than the Portacolor, only 8.5", has a delta gun CRT, full DC restoration, AFC, automatic chorma, and automatic tint. Dot pitch on this set is really fine too. Mine was made sometime in mid 1972.

It has an instant on CRT, which I plan on modifying so it isn't.

I hear ya. I didn't then (in the '70s, when instant-on first appeared in TVs) and do not now like instant-on either. Besides wasting electricity, these sets could create fire hazards if anything shorted in the filament circuits. Personally, I wouldn't want an instant-on TV keeping its tubes warm while I was sleeping or away from the house, but then again that's why most of those sets had a switch somewhere to defeat the instant-on circuit when it wasn't needed or wanted. The other thing I never cared for with instant-on was the habit the instant-on diode across the set's on/off switch had of shorting whenever lightning hit near (or, heaven forbid, on) the power line the set was connected to. Since this diode was in fact in shunt across the switch, when it shorted it effectively locked the switch on. The only way to turn the set on and off with a shorted instant-on diode was with the AC cord, by plugging it into and pulling it out of the socket, respectively.

One of the best things TV manufacturers ever did, IMO, was to eliminate the instant-on feature once and for all by, IIRC, the late seventies or early eighties (I'm not sure exactly when). One other thing some people did, if they knew how to do it and where to look, was to simply cut the diode completely out of the circuit, even if said diode was still good (certainly if it was shorted). This removed the instant-on feature without disturbing the normal function of the switch (or restored the switch function if the diode was bad). Of course, when TVs went to completely solid-state circuitry as they are today, the sets are practically instant-on (I say practically because of the warm-up time for the CRT filaments, which usually is not too long--my set's picture usually appears in well under a minute after I push the power button), with no need whatsoever for power-wasting instant-on circuitry. Today's sets are never completely off anyhow, even with the power switch off (because of the remote control receiver and probably memory retention circuitry for the tuner and on-screen controls), but there is no problem with fire hazards (and very little added impact on the owner's electric bill as well--the set won't use that much more power than its maximum rating, or perhaps, even likely, the power used by the remote, etc. is figured into the total current draw as shown on the back of the set), since the memory-backup systems and the remote receiver use so little power. I don't know how much off hand, but I think it would have to be well, well under one volt DC.

BTW: I'll be darned! I thought that little set looked familiar. I remember seeing it in one of Kam's posts a while back (before you bought it from him, of course), with the same color-bar test pattern on the screen as appears in your pic of the set. Hmmm. :scratch2:

Passing time & happened upon this one, in Arizona. C.1970, solid state competitor for the Portacolor.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=3638&item=6177458288&rd=1

My heavens, Bryan, where do you keep all your old TVs? Every time I log on to AK, or so it seems, you have another set (sounds like Doug with all his Zeniths). Your basement must be huge.

Ya know, I kinda like that lil cutie! I wonder who actually made it, the photos show clearly that it was made in Japan.

Anthony

It was made by Sanyo.

I won the little Sears set on Ebay. It appears I was the only bidder. :banana: I am just nuts about small screen sets and this one looks great. I bet the chassis is tightly packed. Small transistorized sets of that era usually are. Anyway it will be fun to work on.

Congrats Compucat! Here is a pic of the insides. It is packed...

This started to make me wonder. Does anyone know what is the smallest color TV to utilize a delta gun CRT?

i have a 250xb22 which is about 7"
it has a small neck like an inline but is a delta gun.
it is from a hitachi set

Congrats Compucat! Here is a pic of the insides. It is packed...

Good golly! What have I let myself in for? I knew it would be packed but that is something else. It has been about twenty years since I worked on a set that had wirewound pots for convergence. I think I might disable the instant on when I get it. I only have one set so far that has it, a 9" orange Panasonic from the early '70s. There are both tube and transistor versions of this same set. Mine has tubes but I don't like to leave it plugged in as I don't want to heat damage the pc board. Tubes and pc boards are a bad combination.

Thanks for taking the time to open your set and show it to me. I'm always interested in such things.

Well, the little Sears set arrived yesterday. It is in great condition albeit a bit dirty. I was surprised to find even the antennas are straight and not broken. The cord is good and all the knobs are there. This was a well cared for TV. The set works about as good as new. The convergence is as near perfect as one could expect. The chassis must have very low hours. Perhaps this was a bedroom set. The chassis is fairly clean and there are no obvious signs of previous service. I could not find a date anywhere but it looks like early Seventies technology.

There is a very slight reduction in vertical height which leads me to believe there might be a cap going bad in the vertical section. I was wondering, should I recap the sweep and high voltage circuits as a preventative measure? I know this set is fairly new as vintage goes but since I have to disassemble it for total cleaning, I thought a selective recap might be a good idea. It is a great find, well worth 18 bucks.

I would just try to adjust the vertical height control a tad. No need to re-cap if you don't have to. It's pretty packed in there. I have posted my opinion on this before, but I think re-caps on newer stuff (mid 60's and on) is a waste of time and money. Unless it is a specefic cap that failed I believe "If it aint broke don't fix it" Cool set by the way!

I had the same problem with mine when I got it. It had just a slight bit of vertical reduction. Tweaking the V. Height fixed it, and that little TV has been working great for almost 9 months now with no problems.

"If it aint broke don't fix it" Cool set by the way!

You got that wrong, it should be "If it ain't broke we can fix it anyway" ARG ARG ARG ARG ARG (Tim the Toolman sez so)

Anthony

I have been using the set for a few days now and I notice the hue changes from one program to the next or between the commecial and the program and channel to channel. Is this normal? I seem to remember color TV in the seventies being this way. This Sears set is great but it is very Portacolor like in its color consistency.

I have been using the set for a few days now and I notice the hue changes from one program to the next or between the commecial and the program and channel to channel. Is this normal? I seem to remember color TV in the seventies being this way. This Sears set is great but it is very Portacolor like in its color consistency.

Well, I dunno if it is the set or not, but I do remember back in the 1970's, there were times the color quality did vary, usually on the smaller, indie UHF stations and smaller market stations around the Pittsburgh area. I noticed this quite a bit on stations like WSTV/WTOV channel 9 out of Steubenville, Ohio, the Youngstown stations, Channel 6 from Johnstown and the then new, WPTT Channel 22. I remember at that time the cable system carried the out of town stations and a lot of us kids used to watch them for the cheesy afternoon movies and old reruns like Lost in Space and so on. The set I used back then was a 1970/71 23 inch Zenith color TV, Boyden model which I still have.

Sometimes I was over at a friend's house and watched all that good stuff too, he had a color TV from around 1966, can't remember the model or brand but it had a retangular picture tube, it wasn't a roundie.

I have an RCA color set, 19", bought new in 1999, that shows very good pictures on cable in my area. Haven't had to readjust the color controls in months, even when watching DVDs or VHS. I am over 30 miles from Cleveland (45 miles from the stations' transmitters, which are located in a southwestern suburb of the city), and get fair to poor reception with an antenna; the only way I can get decent reception here is on cable (Comcast digital).

I have no idea what the color quality of Cleveland's first commercial UHF station, WUAB on channel 43 (then independent, now NE Ohio's UPN affiliate) was (the same for WVIZ, Cleveland's PBS channel 25, which signed on in 1965), as I didn't have color TV when the station first went on the air in 1968. This station now has the most powerful transmitter (five million watts ERP) of all TV stations in NE Ohio, surpassing even that of CBS channel 19 (3.7 megawatts, IIRC). The CBS affiliation was switched from channel 8 to 19 some years ago; now, folks west of Cleveland have trouble seeing it without cable. I think 43 should have taken the CBS affiliation when it had the chance to do so, as it had already installed its fabulous 5-megawatt ERP transmitter shortly before the network switch was announced; 43 would have then had the opportunity to service the entire NE Ohio area with a CBS signal everyone could receive equally well, whether on an antenna or cable (the network offered it to them, but for some reason they passed on it, leaving 19 to pick it up :dunno: ). But I digress.

Color quality and reception problems are a thing of the past with today's solid-state TVs and cable systems, at least in the larger cities. Some smaller cable systems in small towns have problems keeping color balance even between stations (the problems with videotape lip-sync and other problems, which may include color balance, at some smaller stations notwithstanding, like CBS channel 16 in Salisbury, Maryland, that Bryan mentioned in one of his posts). The auto-color balance systems in today's TVs are set up, supposedly, to eliminate or at least minimize color variations between channels; some of them, such as RCA's system (now called Advanced Colorview in the newest sets, but I always considered the system in my set as an updated ColorTrak even though it might not actually bear any resemblance at all to the original ColorTrak system), do a decent job of it, but the simpler systems used in other makes may be little more than warmed-over versions of the preset color controls switched in by a push switch on the front of the set (as were common in late-'60s-'80s Magnavox, RCA, etc. sets; Zenith chose not to use any such preset system in its early sets [though my 1995 SMS1917SG 19" Zenith does in fact have a picture-preference switch which enables either preset or custom color adjustments, selectable through an onscreen menu], which may well be one reason why pre-GS Zeniths always have such great pictures). For these, the only solution when the color goes out of whack is to readjust the tint control. In fact, I wouldn't even bother with that preset button, as it simply switches in controls which were set at the factory, not on a broadcast signal, but using a color bar pattern from a generator. In older sets and today's receivers as well, the quality of the picture on your screen is no better than that of the signal the TV set receives at the antenna terminal, no matter how much or how little automatic processing the signal encounters on its way through the set to the CRT.

also we tend to forget that's how sets were "back in the day". Altho I would think that set would have some type of color correction, maybe not. Auto color started popping up in 1972 and was pretty much refined by 1980. Most sets today have an "auto" feature which we are so used to we don't even notice it anymore. I remember one type of auto color system that I considered somewhat of a joke, was GE's VIR system which I think was introduced in 1979 or 1980. Its pitch was that when turned on it would set color per broadcast signal from the station so you would see color the way the station meant it to be seen. I remember these sets new on the showroom floor and even at that late date there was a HUGE variation between stations and the sets had a better picture with this feature turned OFF.

From your description of it, GE's VIR sounds to me like most other attempts at completely automatic color balance in color TV--it was close to if not in fact a complete flop. I don't know what part of the vertical interval reference signal the VIR system used, but whatever it was and however the system used that signal it must not have done a very good job. GE must have realized this eventually, as VIR disappeared from its TVs a short while after it was introduced. Again, as I mentioned in my last post, the best way to compensate for color variations between programs, scenes or channels, IMO, is to switch off the auto-color button or auto color circuit (if your set has either system) and manually adjust the tint and/or contrast controls until the picture looks right to your eyes. Some sets, such as many late-model Zeniths (and most RCAs made in the last ten years or so, including current production of course), have the contrast control circuitry arranged so that the contrast control actually adjusts the color balance and contrast together; this makes adjusting for pleasing color balance much easier than trying to strike a balance between brightness, contrast and color, as was necessary with older color sets which had no auto color systems.

Last night (and again just before starting to write this today), as I thought about the statement I made in my last post that Zenith did not choose to use auto-color systems in its mid-to-late-1970s vintage color TVs, it occurred to me that the company did in fact incorporate a feature it called Color Sentry in those sets. The company claimed in its ads for Zenith color consoles of 1976-78 that this system adjusted the color, brightness and contrast of the picture 30 times every second. "Think of it as a control room in your set", the ads proclaimed. The feature disappeared from Zenith TVs a few years later and hasn't been seen in any of the company's sets since then--certainly not in any Zenith-branded GoldStar sets I am aware of.

As with GE's VIR system, I don't know exactly how Color Sentry worked, but again, it is entirely possible that the sets produced much better pictures with this feature switched off. In fact, I think it's safe to say that most people who had Zeniths with Color Sentry (or any other brand of TV with an auto-color button) didn't know what the button was for, or even that it was there in the first place. Many non-technical TV viewers, then as now, did not/don't even bother to read the manual; once the set was/is installed, these folks just use the set and never bother with the color controls or anything else other than the on/off switch, channel selector and volume control. These are the folks the various auto-color systems were designed to cater to, but the systems really weren't that good, so they eventually disappeared from most sets. My own 5-year-old RCA "XL-100" has the auto-color control's defeat switch hidden in a multi-layer on-screen menu (the auto-color system is enabled by default). I know it's there, but I'd be willing to bet, if I were a betting man (which I'm not), that most ordinary viewers do not. Today, installing a CRT-based TV set entails little more than unpacking the set from a box, hooking it up to an antenna or cable system, plugging it in and watching it, with little or no regard for (or even awareness of) any on-screen menus which the set may or may not have. (Installation of plasma and LCD sets is much more complicated, but that's another story.) Heck, many people don't even know how to change the batteries in the remote when they go dead! As long as the set works, that's all that matters. I have known people who will watch a color picture in which the colors are completely wrong or even missing; they don't seem to notice the difference, as long as the set produces a picture. Many people will even watch a color TV whose picture is so dim they have to watch it in the dark; this was common in color TV's early days, when color CRTs were very expensive to replace (and the sets themselves were expensive as well; these were the days when TV sets and other appliances were repaired and held onto thereafter for years when they developed problems, not put out for the trash at the first sign of trouble, or even when the CRT goes, even if the set is only a year or two old, as is commonplace nowadays).

The so-called "automatic" systems were intended to take critical picture adjustments for contrast, brightness and hue out of the viewer's hands, but as it turns out, the best color adjustment system still is the manual kind, where the viewer adjusts the controls until the picture looks natural to his or her eyes. The most difficult colors for any color television set to produce are flesh tones; get these right and, supposedly, the rest of the colors will be correct as well. Any automatic color system, no matter how sophisticated, is no substitute for the human eye and personal preferences.

Say what you will about the quality of today's TV sets, but IMO, one of the best things color TV manufacturers ever did was to eliminate those automatic color systems. As I stated in my last post, the quality of your TV picture is only as good as the signal your set receives. The GIGO principle applies here: garbage in, garbage out. Conversely, if your local TV stations and/or cable system deliver a really good signal to your set, so will your TV's picture be excellent--if the TV has been set up properly in the first place. Often the problem is with the cable system, if you have cable; small systems sometimes do a poor job of balancing signal levels, etc. but again, if your TV has been set up properly, it isn't the set's fault. Again, the GIGO principle applies. Regardless how good a TV set is, if it is fed a poor signal, it will display a poor picture. Many people have been disappointed when they try to use a wide-screen TV with rabbit ears. The wide screen will often show up snow, interference, etc. which may have been barely noticeable on the older set the widescreen replaced. This is why most TV technicians will tell widescreen TV owners to use either a good outdoor antenna or cable/satellite as a signal source for their new sets. Standard 4:3 aspect ratio color TV requires a very strong signal to operate properly; this goes at least double for 16:9 widescreen plasma and LCD sets. The larger the screen, the more pronounced any interference or other artifacts in the picture will be.

Seems to me a fair analogy of the older sets without any sort of color/contrast regulation and today's models is about the same as a car with a manual transmission and one with an automatic!

You kinda had to "drive" the tint etc controls, now you can pretty much leave them alone (no blooiming or vertical roll ferinstance)

Anthony

I agree that any auto color system is a bad idea if you want the most accurate color possible. The worst system I ever saw was what Sony did in the 70's. They combined the auto color and auto fine tuning into one switch. You couldn't turn on the AFT without the auto color. To make matters worse, these Sony sets usually produced a massively over saturated picture when the auto color was turned on. I actually disabled the auto color on my KV-5100 so I could use the AFT.

VIR was a good idea, but it never caught on and it sounds like it was poorly implemented by the TV stations. The basic idea was that the TV station would broadcast a line with a known signal on it. The TV would then adjust the color and tint until this signal matched what this reference should be. This is better than auto color which just distorted the color decoding so that flesh tones wouldn't look too far off even with the tint misadjusted slightly. VIR assumed that the TV station was handling their color properly and that the hue errors were happening in broadcast, or in the receiver. The problem is that if the TV station's reference is off, your set would misadjust itself. If the TV station was doing its job in the first place, auto color wouldn't be needed. Other than GE, I have seen a few Sony TVs with VIR.

As I recall the VIR signal was inserted at the network headend so all the repeater stations could rebroadcast the correct ( well at least the original )signal. So if you had a local program usually (at least in my area ) there was no VIR. So most of the time on the GE sets I saw it really was a waste of time. I think the Vertoical interval is used now for Closed captioning and rating information. There may still be some form of ref. signal for the networks affiliate stations though.

Closed captioning is down a little from where VIR was in the blanking interval. CC is on line 21 (the last line), VIR was on line 19.

My aunt had an earlier GE console with VIR. Didn't look much different from any other set except that the color seemed kinda washed out. Cousin had a Sears set with VIR (real high-end one from the early '80s) that looked a little better but it still had less color than it should have.

The main set we had through the 80s was a GE VIR tv; I never saw it as being anything special. The color seemed to be alright, but the overall picture never had the look of a good Zenith of that era. You can't blame the General for trying, they were using the old playbook of the American consumer electronics industry, the one that came up with magic eyes & motorized push-button tuning back in the late 30s (when nobody REALLY needed to buy a new radio) which is to say, gimmicks sell. In the waning days of the American TV manufacturer's nobody REALLY needed to buy a tv (everyone already had one) so better find some gimmicks to move those sets! VIR, with it's green light shining to let you know it was flipped on, with it's advertising with the little picture of a tv tower, the ads that pointed out that GE actually won an Emmy for coming up with VIR-all great gimmicks. Right up there with "the STAR system" & Colortrak &, if you are easily impressed, "Solarcolor II"!

Heh! I fogot about Solarcolor. (Admiral) I also forgot how bad Sony's system was in the 70's. My parents had a 26" console with the above described wonderful feature. You kicked on that switch and it was like the color went on MAXIMUM and the contrast went to minimum. Don't forget how hyper-sensitive the Luminense electronic eye was! Also their electronic tuner was a real bitch to set up and tune. Actually as auto color systems go, Zenith's Color Sentry was actually pretty good. I have it on my 1979 System 3 which I have on as I'm typing this. The color is fantastic and the electronic eye works as it should. That system actually did "correct" the picture, unlike the "Chromacolor" button which was actually a factory default and disabled the sets controls from all the little kiddies. Also in my opinion the early 70's Zenith's and RCA's with the auto tint feature REALLY sucked. I never saw one that didn't screw up the picture when turned on. Also concerning those GE's, we sold those as a secondary brand and it was the first time I saw numurous sets break while on the showroom floor. We seemed to have yolk problems in the batch we got.

I forgot about Sony's "Lumisponder". The way I remembered it working was that under anything from total darkness to normal light it would turn the contrast all the way down. Then when bright light was shining directly on the sensor, the contrast would suddenly go to maximum. It was completely useless.

....the ads that pointed out that GE actually won an Emmy for coming up with VIR-all great gimmicks.

Lemme tell y'all a little sumpthin 'bout Emmys, they can be "purchased"....a friend of mine who worked for WNEW Channel 5 news in NYC back in the 60's has an Emmy. You know how he got it? He paid for a special category which no one else was in (he invented it) and of course they gave it to him as there was no other competition. Don't know if this still goes on, but I could see GE possible creating a category for their VIR and then "winning" it. Go Tex Antoine!

Anthony

VIR was a reasonable idea if it was used as intended - inserted once at a monitoring point and then carried through the whole chain. Unfortunately, some stations started inserting it locally and using it to monitor their part of the chain - so all the preceding distortions were reproduced "perfectly" on a VIR set.