Last Tube TVs?
 

What were the last fully tubed TV sets to be sold new, and the last sets sold with any tubes in them? I know of at least one Sony B/W portable from the late 60s that was badged 'Solid State', but contained a tube HV rectifier. How many TVs did I pass over in thrift stores years ago, not realizing they had tubes inside?

Well... not totally sure, but the RCA CTC-39 was the last fully tubed console. The CTC-40 had a 3A3 HV Rectifier. I'm pretty sure the Portacolor was the last tubed set, with 1979-1980 being the last year they rolled off the line.

Hello I am sure that magnvox sold tube consoles past the mid 70s... Timothy

My post wasn't totally clear. I meant for RCA. Not sure on the other manufactures. I'm thinking by 1975 all the major brands were solid state. ( at least for consoles) they may have had a few hybrid portables rolling off the line past '75.

GE portacolors were probably the last, also they had a
19" , C-2 chassis IIRC that probably was almost as late.
They were used in many store brands & started at $250.
A real toilet IMHO. Zenith ran the 4 tube hybrid til F-line
1975 as a leader 19". They also had a 14" 1/2 tube
chassis that may have sold in G-line but dont remember.
Most ended in 74-76, people didnt want tubes anymore.

73 Zeno:smoke:

A few of you made comments about tubes being used in consoles, or not used in consoles as they transitioned to transistors. I'm sure transistors was marketed as an improvement in quality, reliability etc.

I'm wondering, among the big manufacturers, they all had entry level sets, and of course the top of the line cruise ships with the largest screen, record players, stereo tuners, remote, wheels, lights, roll out doggie beds, etc.

Was there any real quality difference in the sets, circuit designs, best technology, best AGC, AFC, etc..... Among the more expensive sets.....?

I bought a new 15" RCA B&W portable that was fully tubed in '73 or '74.

That prompted me to look into my 1970 Sony TV-950, never had a reason to open it before. Nope, no tubes. I expected a battery pack inside as there's a "charge" switch on the back, but nothing there either. I'm sure all original external battery packs would be stone dead by now.

The Sony I had was small (about 5") and also had that charge port on it, with no internal battery. I wish I could remember the model number!

I have a Sony KV 1320UB that has a 3AT2 EHT Rec in it, and I also have the externally identical KV 1330UB that doesnt!

They are both from '70/71 ish....

Very last set I saw in a shop new that had valves was in 1981 --It was an old stock item, a 22" ITT CVC-9 hybrid colour set, --although that make/model will probably be meaningless to a lot of you.....

I wish I had bought it now and stored it away!:tears:

I am aware of ITT, but I have never seen a USA domestic product with their name on it.

Mine has an 8" or 9" screen. See it here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacec...57638419636316

IIRC I once had a rotary dial phone made by them.

Capehart was associated with ITT, from the early 50's.
There was a line of replacement tubes with the ITT logo. Mail-order brand and foreign made. :scratch2:

The Portacolor is probably the last real tube chassis TV sold in the US. Some claim to have seen one dated 1980 but I've never seen a photo-probably more like '77. Most companies had hybrids on the market through the 75 model year including RCA, GE, Zenith, Motorola (until Panasonic took over), Philco-Ford (until GTE took over), Admiral.

I have 2 all-tube 9" sets, a Panasonic, & a Singer that was likely made by Panny, that are from the 1969-71 time frame, I'd say..Panasonic stuck w/tubes longer than Sony did, I'm pretty sure.

GE made some 9"/12" B&W sets (SF chassis) almost as late as the porta-colors that were hybrid. I think '74 was the last year that RCA offered any TV's with tubes and '75 was the last year for Zenith. Admiral might have hung on until '76 and we know that GE hung on until at least '77 with the porta-color. I used to have a Sams Photofact from '77 that covered a Sanyo 12" B&W with tubes; but, the chassis might have been out for a year or two before Sam's picked it up. Except for the possible exception of some cheap "no name" imported 9"/12" B&W TV's, I'd say that the GE porta-color was the end of the line for tubes, with most other US companies closing the door on tubes in '74-'75.

I am mistaken; the Sony I had did have a larger picture tube-probably in the 8-9 inch realm. I do recall seeing exactly one Capehart TV-an early to mid 80s 13-inch set with knobs. (Fully solid state, of course)

...

That's interesting to know. Did Sony simply enter the TV market later than other manufacturers?

The only full tubed Sony products that I've seen are some reel to reel tape recorders.

Admiral's 9-inch B&W sets were all-tube (or mostly tubes) in 1974; my brothers both had those sets.

I remember that 60's era Zenith B&W sets used all tubes except for a rectifier diode and a transistorized UHF oscillator in the UHF tuner (which I thought strange, as it seemed at the time transistors were bad at doing high frequencies). I have an RCA from around 1957 that is all tube (of course) except for a video detector diode, a 1N34. But I think these are not what we are thinking of when we say, partially solid state. :D

...

Yeah, even their SECOND TV-The 5-300 series had a HV rectifier, too, I think.

It actually used *three* of the tiny 1DK1s in a HV tripler circuit

jr

That's the thing that I LOVE about this site ! The level of technical knowledge is nothing short of AMAZING..

The 4 tube Zenith chassis was one heck of a good set. In the early 1990's, I threw out several of them (many of which still worked) because I could no longer sell a tube type TV. I wish I had one now:)

I don't think, there's any set that stayed in production as long as the Porta-color. It seems like 11 or 12 years running, with minor revisions. OF course, the last models came out with the high voltage focus CRT.
I tried doing a little research, regarding these sets. It seems like the first set was a HB chassis, which was a 1966 model set. That one uses a 11SP22.
I really don't think, they built them after early 1977. :yes:

Makes me think of the Apple IIe, which stayed in production from January 1983 to December 1993 with some revisions (the biggest one in '87) in spite of Jobs' attempts to kill off the line. These computers were in my 4th-6th grade classrooms and were aging even then. They remained in the elementary wing at least until I finished junior high. Funny how technology progressed so slowly even back then. I'm certainly not complaining about that though.

Heh... I remember that back in the mid-90s. Was always a race to see who got the one with the colour monitor and to pick the best games from the bookshelves full of floppies.

Was also exciting when we were occasionally allowed to use the other computer lab with the powermacs...

Do you know what the lineage is for all the PortaColor chassis numbers? I know of the HB, H4, and HE chassis. Is that the right order, and are there more?

Is there a known lineage of the model numbers too?

I'll try to research Sam's listings again!
IIRC, there's three Sam's folders available for the entire run of Porta-Colors.
Yours is a good question! The last production is the 10HE, covered in Sam's folder #1384-1, dated 3/84.
The information is slightly different, than the models I have. Not by much.
At least, most of the tubes can be bought very reasonable, as they're all dogs that don't have much demand. :D

While we're on the subject of long-lived production, I recall the ALCo RS1 diesel locomotive, which had the longest production run of any diesel - 1941 to 1960! They were very well-made and every railroad had them at one time. :yes:

My highschool still had the ][es in use until around 95 or so. Only one had a color monitor, it was also the only one with a 3.5" floppy drive - I used to use the excuse that my "work" was on 3.5" so I had to have that machine. Towards the end most people were more interested in the Macs next door, so I could camp out on "my" machine as long as I liked. They were on a Digicard network. Each user was allocated a massive 32kb of space. I managed to fit a space invaders clone in my user directory, but most games wouldn't run under the network even if they were small enough. We carried our own stash of games floppies.

When I heard a couple of years after I left that they had replaced the ][es and Macs with PCs I tried to buy the old Digicard server, but I was too late. I knew the kid a couple of years under me that bought "my" machine - lost contact with him, sometimes wonder if he still has it.

The other highschool I had attended was once several seperate schools that combined and as such was a mismash of XT PCs, Mac Pluses, C64s, BBC Micros, a few Apple ][es, and even a few VIC-20s and Microbees.

Up until the mid-00s the primary wing of the local elementary school still had 3 C64s. I was involved in the replacement of one of them (rolling out some PCs to every classroom instead of just the labs), so naturally I took it home... it became friends with my Commodore PC10 and generic 8088 clone... and thus my online moniker was born :D

It is funny because over the years I've occasionally found more 8-bit XT hardware in unlikely places and the PC10 is now tripped out with audio, a CDROM drive, two 20MB ST-512 drives, and I do have an ethernet card I have yet to get around installing...

1977-1978 seems to be the last of the Porta-Color production. Which seems to be the last tube color TV made in the USA.

Should probably move this to off-topic if it keeps going, but as pimping XTs goes...

One of my XTs used to run a Seagate ST-02 SCSI controller and an 80MB ST-296N SCSI hard disk. Still made the cool stepper noises, but it was at least a bit faster. I'd did have an XT ATA card around somewhere that would at least in theory run CF cards, but I never did get it running.

Another ran an Intel Inboard/386. This was a card that run a 386DX-16 on the original 5160 motherboard. Same machine had a 15" Wyse WY-700 1280x800 monitor with matching video card. At the time I never did find anything that supported that cards hi-res graphics modes, but it's hi-res text modes were the best looking DOS text display I've ever seen. Unfortunately that monitor died and I couldn't repair it at the time.

I remember making a special trip to Knoxville w/a buddy who had like $3500 & bought him a then-new 386 machine... This was sometime in the mid-80s. Think it had something called a SUPER VGA monitor.. it was the absolute LAST WORD in computer technology then... Now, any 10-yr-pld kid's Smartphone can do more than that 386 machine ever THOUGHT of being able to do..

A friend of mine was buying a machine like that, and his was to have a HUGE 120 meg hard drive. The year was 1991 or so. He mail ordered it, it arrived destroyed by united parcel smashers. Then it was a nightmare for him getting that mess cleared up, as around $5K was at stake... :no: