Latest Find! Toshiba 12" Color Portable
 

This weekend, I scored a Toshiba 12" Color Tube Portable set, from about 1970-'71. It's a heavy little thing, needs a good cleaning, but is complete except for the VHF Built-In Antennas, which do me no good anyway! It has a raster and sound, needs tuner and control cleaning very badly, but I haven't even looked inside yet. More later, as I get around to working on this one. As found picture attached!

Nice find!

Sweet! I got a Toshiba portable this weekend too, but it's a mod set with varactor tuning from 1980. I'd love to see the guts of this one.

I have a set of service manuals that likely covers it. Once you find out what chassis it has I'll try to look it up.

Not a big Japanese TV fan, but I like it. Is that a slider for the tint on top?

The only ones, I worked on at the time were "Sears" branded. They had less tubes in them than the earlier models, as more circuits were solid state.
The Toshiba's were probably the same. :scratch2:

Toshiba 12" Color Portable
 

I have a couple Sears 15" Color Portable sets, quite a few tubes in them, but they both are Sanyo. this is my first Toshiba color of any kind, and I worked on a couple, similar to this one, over 35 years ago. I was thrilled to find this set, all small color portables are hard to find, but the Japanese sets even less common, in my opinion. I don't know exactly why I find them so fascinating, but I always have! Even "back in the day" when one would come through our shop, and most would gripe about it, and we all knew the "pains" of them, but I still wanted to play with (read: work on it:), even then! I also remember finding a 15" Sanyo color in the dump, when I was around 12 or 13! I hope to have a few minutes to open this one, soon, and take some pictures, check the CRT, etc. More to follow later, stay tuned!

Toshiba Color Portable, TINT Control
 

Yes, its a slider for TINT, cool looking, isn't it? The COLOR level control, is a pot., below the pull-on-off-volume control, barely noticeable. Four more picture controls, are behind a flip-open door, lower R/H corner, below the tuner, speaker grill. Inside it are: Horiz. & Vert. holds, Contrast and Brightness pots, plastic knurled shafts, no knobs on them.

The Japanese sets had a refreshingly different approach to design, that could be nice or a pain depending on what broke and how. I've got 2-4 waiting turns on the bench.

Quite uncommon--Any Japanese color set in UK with tubes.

I can only recall the Sanyo and the Teleton. The Sanyo used Euro valves often dual Euro/USA number marked, the Teleton completely American numbers, some Compactrons no known Euro equivalent tube.

There may have been more, but those are the only two I ever saw, probably as we got color so late on. Some places didn't get color till the 70's!

NEC, JVC/Nivico, Panasonic, Toshiba and Sanyo all had tube sets here in the 60s - Sanyo and NEC doubly so, with Sears-badged NECs, and Sanyos rebadged for Sears and Channel Master. Sharp had some B/W sets, but I never saw a color, so I can't confirm.

The NEC sets had a huge power tranny - I used to save them from junker sets for a ham friend. They also had troublesome tapped power resistors that would corrode the connections right off. Clean up the connection, re-solder, and that was all it took to fix the set.

The JVCs I saw were botched jobs, with the UHF tuners being really oddball monstrosities. It was like the set was made first for the Japanese market, and a UHF tuner added on hastily to market them in the states.

Great catch! Congratulations.

[QUOTE=Findm-Keepm;3172757]NEC, JVC/Nivico, Panasonic, Toshiba and Sanyo all had tube sets here in the 60s - Sanyo and NEC doubly so, with Sears-badged NECs, and Sanyos rebadged for Sears and Channel Master. Sharp had some B/W sets, but I never saw a color, so I can't confirm.

[/QUOTE

I had one of those little buggers years ago. There is another Sears branded one posted
here last year. Same set, Low voltage focus tube. Picture quality same as an early
port-a-color GE set. There are only about 5 transistors in that set, the rest are tubes.
If I remember right, it keeps the filaments warm when turned off...... Still very nicely
built on the inside. Well worth keeping.

.

They had a little better picture than the first Porta-Colors. The Toshiba CRT had a finer dot pitch. The 11WP22 equipped Porta-Colors were about equal.

Awesome find! I have a Sears branded one, unfortunately it fell off of a shelf and sustained damage to the top trim piece across the top of the cabinet front section. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it now....

Well--If you were not the other side of the world, I would make you offer for it.
--I need a good 12" delta CRT...

PM me, with the price an if it still works and the CRT condition.
I'm planning to take a trip to Chester the bank account molester sometime in the near future. :D

An update on my little Toshiba Color Portable!
 

A week ago, I was able to get it to this point! The picture looks a little better than the camera shows. I had to give a serious shot to the CRT, being an Instant On set, the CRT was way dead! So, it won't be permanent, but for occasional (short) use, it will do. The only real repair, was a flakey 3.58 Crystal I replaced, and a weak 6GH8A. I'm sure the little CRT is pretty much un-obtainium!

I forgot to take pic's. of the chassis, will do soon, and post!

Lookin good!

Looks great! Especially for a tired CRT :) Nice job man!

Looks great! Especially for a tired CRT Nice job man!

Thanks, Mark! I thought it turned out pretty well, I know this would definitely have been thrown away, right after the Estate Sale, so better the way it is, as a rescue, rather than landfill! So hard to find these little color portable tube / tube hybrid sets!

At the risk of disparaging a domestic manufacturer - that picture looks much better than a porta color:) for that era

I agree these little gems are impossible to find anymore.

You get what you pay for, and I don't think the Japanese made a cheaper color set than GE's Portacolor at the time.

It works with issues in the color section, last time I powered it up. Can't say if it falling did anything else to it. I'll have to test it out. I paid 40 bucks, you can have it for 30.

How hard can that be really?

These days you usually get less than what you pay for. Wealthy plus powerful usually equals mean.