Another 12" Color Tube portable, This one a Teleton in the UK
 

Here's my latest TV set--From around 1972, a Japanese 'Teleton' VX1110 12" Delta-CRT Color set.

By UK Standards--a complete oddball, I used to think back in the day when the occasional one came for repair, that these were of American manufacture, due to the valve line-up, 31JS6A, 17DW4A, 17JZ8 etc. but found they were made by General Corp, Japan...

http://www.radios-tv.co.uk/wp-conten...0/Teleton1.jpg

http://www.radios-tv.co.uk/wp-conten...0/Teleton4.jpg

The pictures above were taken by its previous owner, Mike, (Also a UK based enthusiast) who has done a good job cleaning the set up and making it actually work!

The face reminds me of a Sears badged Japanese set I have but the cabinet reminds me of a totally different Japanese set I've got. The Japs dumped a TON of TVs in the USA market and used our broadcast standards in their country...They also naturally used (and adapted) many of our American tube types (I do find a random euro tube and or jap only type thrown in the mix sometimes).

Their design factors were a bit wacky by US standards too...Some of their control layouts were never seen in domestically made gear, cabinet design, materials, and chassis layout were out there too...Take all the oddest chassis features of the small independent US firms, grab some design influence from europe, add their own touches to it all, smash it in to the smallest box possible, often with the least metal in the chassis possible, add a bunch of card stock insulation randomly, take an odd assortment of Jap, euro and American parts with odd mounting schemes and make a TV out of it. If you work on 3-5 different tube Jap color sets there will be very few US built models that will look unusual to you...

For some reason the European makers that were heavy hitters in our HiFi console and table radio markets never bothered to import that kind of volume of tube based TVs (that or they did and they were such crap that none survived here since you NEVER see them in the states), so these Jap sets are usually the closest we 'Mericans come to working on euro tube TVs.

Well--I think maybe the UK set makers were too busy trying to keep up with demand, the UK only getting color in 1967-1968. either that--or there was some kind of embargo on export--just like there was on Import of any sets bigger than 19" till some time in mid/late 70's...

I doubt UK styled sets would have done well in America--most are rather boring wooden boxes with a tube in! Yours are at least stylish and are more furniture than the things we had at the time.

Here's a British made ITT CVC2 from 1969, Only UK made color set made with point-to-point wiring--

http://thumbs.picclick.com/00/s/MTE0...ry-rare-_1.jpg

It must've worked for a short time, as it looks like one of the tubes went to air, maybe the 17JZ8.
What does the power supply look like, as your sets have to be designed for 220/240 @ 50 HZ.
It looks like the CRT is a low focus voltage type, as the blue gun is in the 6 o'clock position.
It also seems strange to us, that the set only has a UHF tuner, VS the sets, were used to be familiar with. :scratch2:

Looks like Teleton took some cabinet design cues from Hitachi. I had a mid-70s junker console that had a lot of similarities in front.

This one looks like an NEC although at least the HOT is a
Toshiba tube. The tubes are typical US except the 17JZ8
was the common vert osc/amp in B&W sets. May be a Toshiba
chassis also but its been since about 1980 we stopped
most tube repairs. Age has not been kind to my memory !
Never liked working on tube Jap sets. With the exception
of some late hybrids most were worn out in a few years needing
lots of work. Add to that the unservicability & parts problems.
They sat on the incoming shelf along with GE sets the longest.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

The early Panasonic built small screen sets, Penncrest, Bradford and Singer didn't age too gracefully.
Brittle PC boards and tube sockets, convergence cloverleafs and waxpaper capacitors. They really had the strange tube types, 9AQ8, 15CW5, 9A8 etc.
You always had to chase for them, as you didn't repair that many of them.

That is very European styled and would thus have appeal on that alone. The Scandinavian style is very much in fashion for the MCM furniture nuts here. But.... a British set would be a HIT with any of us TV-nutz with that protruding, no-mask CRT. And now, for something completely different.:D

The pushbuttons look just like a set I recall watching when in London, 1980 whilst watching some totally wacky programmes and sipping Tennet's Lager. Four channels IIRC, BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Ch4(?) Perfect to watch the likes of Doctor Who, Red Dwarf or Monty Python -LOL

I recall Channel Master labeling Japanese sets also. Of course, Sears and Roebuck's wicked price-point placed many of these smaller color sets in circulation in our area.

Like Tom said, loaded with cardboard fishpaper. It shielded the lousy ABS plastic case from the tube heat and kept the coins and other crap kids would push into the long vent slots from landing on something energized. After reluctantly working on one, I NEVER thought I was finished:sigh:, like there was something else wrong preventing it from looking good.

And those wacky-ass tubes sure kept us from subbing them to make SURE we were done. Id call out a number and the boss would say: "sounds like a bastard" A lot of those frame-grid euro-types from Amperex and Mullard were actually improvements as described in old issues of the PF reporter.

With small cars, the USA's big 4 took a ham-fisted approach, producing legendary lemons because they could not make money on them. American TV makers did not make too many survivors in small-screen color sets for the same reason. With apologies to Zenith and GE's budget-priced porta-color, Sony kicked their collective bums on that alone!

The Teletons that we saw here were generally pretty reliable. I do remember the 17JZ8 on the 12 and 14" portables did give trouble--probably as they were run pretty hard in a color set.

The 19" sets used a 21LU8, a tube of twice the power ratings of the little JZ8, which didn't give problems as I recall--not that we ever saw many Teletons anyway! Sadly these larger bulbs are not interchangeable, even though pin/pin compatable as the triode-sections are different specs..

Although oddball the sets used top-quality parts, and were well made. The caps are Elna electrolytics or Suzuki oil-filled things, with a few polyprop films around

Nothing shows any burning/discoloration or stress around tube-bases etc, and all tubes are still a good tight fit in the sockets. The HOT in its tin-box on the right with the 3AT2 is a pretty large thing considering the size of set, with a heavily potted overwind.

Power-supply has a Mains-Transformer 'autoformer' style having a tapping at 117V for the tube series-heater string, and a small overwind giving 250V from the 230V input for the main +B. There's a couple of isolated 15V rails and the CRT heaters also from this trans.
In this set--All the tubes in this one were made by Toshiba, although I'll be replacing one or two with some American ones, as I pulled the top-cap off the HO valve, and have botch-repaired it just to keep the thing working. I'll probably replace the luma and CDA output valves as well as the 3AT2 EHT Rec. because I have low brightness--even though the CRT Tests good.

Not sure who made the CRT, The green label in the pictures above has long gone. You're right--The CRT is a low-focus type--but strangely has a razor-sharp picture, just its too dark--a fault I'm chasing slowly. I normally dislike those low-focus tubes, nearly always soft pictures....

I am lucky enough to own an ITT CVC2 exactly like pictured above. The A56-120X CRT was quite soft when I got it, but found a really great one and its made such a huge difference to the picture. One sold just recently on ebay for a completely ridiculous amount, and I have no idea why these old sets are making this sort of money these days.

There's two small issues I need to sort out. I need to replace the A1 pots as they are a little intermittent and do something with the focus-control. It currently as made, has a 'Metrosyl' resistor from the final-anode 25KV down to 6KV focus, this part is varying its resistance and seriously affecting focus, especially during the first 10-30 minutes use.

I have NO idea where I would get a Metrosyl now for this, so will probably end up doing a little redesign and use a more conventional focus-pot...

The collectors over here would probably go potty for a genuine Roundie, I know I would!

9AQ8 = PCC85, 15CW5 = PL84, 9A8 = PCF80....

All European valves! The American numbers are odd to me--the valves most certainly very familiar! Only Japanese set I think we saw with Euro valves was a Sanyo, those were pretty good as I recall...

Zenith had NOTHING to do with the GE-portacolor. If you've ever watched a Zenith 15Y6C15 (their first small screen color set) it is basically a console chassis shoehorned into a tiny cabinet, and puts out a picture as good as any good console (heck it looks better than some consoles). All Zenith portable color sets I've seen were pretty well on par picture quality wise with their console cousins...And almost as heavy! :yikes:
Comparing or lumping together a Zenith portable with a GE portacolor is like comparing a Ferrari to a Yugo...
The jap small screen sets usually fell somewhere between Zenith and GE on picture, but were close to GE on price, and thus were a good initial value.
The jap sets as I understand it were a lot like RCA portables...Good preforming in the beginning, but after a few years an unreliable dog that didn't want to make a picture as good as when bought even with much coaxing.

So--Here's a question....

What would be considered to be the best Tube Type/hybrid color set say from the late 60's early 70's in USA, both for all round reliability and great picture...?

Zenith and RCA

I generally remembered them by the American numbers, fully knowing that they were European sourced.
Motorola was one USA firm that seemed to use a lot of European tubes a lot in the early 60's. They used two 300ma series strings in a series-parallel arrangement. The 27GB5 was an example, along with the tubes previously mentioned.

Agreed........
In the 70's Zenith CRT's were best. The chassis still held
on to a lot of hand wiring til '79 so most rugged of the era.
Between RCA & Zenith they sold apx half the TV's in the US.
They were the two expensive brands til Sony came along.
Other sets that cost as much had a tiny market share. With
those you were buying a cabinet or a slick sales pitch but
NOT electronics or long life.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

I have 16" color and a 14" color Zenith from 1970 and 1972 that I could not part with and they do look pretty sharp. Also have a Sylvania CB35 from 1969 that I did not get to the bench yet. These all are barely hybrids with about a dozen tubes each.

Total agree on the 1968 Zenith 15Y6C15. Liberated one long ago from a friend's barn collection. It was a bit rusty BUT was total cake to get looking great and a guy in tech school "bought" it, never paying for it.

I only compare GE Porta-color as it was a different kind of value set - fewer parts and simpler to repair, and easy-to-get parts. The customer was not expecting much, paying less accordingly. Not to forget the RCA CTC22 15" from 1967, another easy fix set that did not age so well as the Zenith. IIRC Philco, Magnavox and Admiral made their smallest color sets using the 11SP22 and 11WP22 that were in the low-focus ,porta-color league. heck, the Mag may have been Japanese. With Motorola and their cozy relationship with Matsushita, probably had one also. Never saw any of them.

Two 1976 Portacolors I got, then promptly sold recently. Its all too easy to recall the days when I was the low-man on the bench that had to work on them. Just basic TV nothing more nothing less.

The small screen Motorola sets of the late 60's, early 70's were built by Admiral and Sharp. Hybrid sets with low voltage focus CRT's.
The Sharp built sets were the same as the Midland and Wards Airline, but the Motorola sets had better styling. :thmbsp:

The set must have some sort of a simplified PAL processor circuit used, as it still has a tint control. :scratch2:

Yes--Teleton has tint control and uses their own variation of the simple-PAL decoder design with no chroma delay-line They are reputed to work better than the equivalent age Sony non-PAL-D decoders. There's an additional Hue Adj. pot on the rear next to the frame-hold

There was one make of UK set with a full PAL-D decoder that also has a Tint-Control. ITT from CVC1 to CVC9 defo used a tint-control (On the back of dual-standard CVC1 and single-standard CVC2, later relocated to the sliders on the front of CVC5-9 sets) and was a selling point in their advertising, and maybe even later CVC20/30's had one, cant really remember--

Some of those had an 'Ideal Colour' button I recall, which switched over the user-controls to a set of internal presets....

In my admittedly limited experience, RCA TVs have better colour than Zenith. I don't like Zeniths IC colour demod circuit from the early 70s, if you ever have to screw with one be prepared to be annoyed. Everything aside from this critical detail I give the edge to Zenith but I like my colours accurate and find it easier to achieve this on an RCA, therefore if I had to pick a side I would say RCA.

Two of my sets have this feature but with different names; Chromatic Tuning on the Zenith and simply "Auto" on the Electrohome console. I don't have a screwdriver long and skinny enough to reach the presets but no one is going to mess with the controls. They're knobs so almost no one would know how to use them anyway, ha.

Perhaps a Chromacolor CRT would look really good when driven by a RCA chassis...

The chip demods may not have been as easy to adjust, but those sets often had a SS IF system that made up for those chips not being perfect (most I've seen have been fairly good). Good color is very important, but if the image is not suitably sharp it don't matter how good the color is...
If you find a Zenith set with a tube chroma demod AND SS IF. It will look better than an RCA when set up right.

Great observations here.

:thmbsp:The tube IFs of Zeniths using the 6EJ7-6EH7 were higher gain than RCA's tube IF but the Zenith SS starting w/1970 seemed to up the whole game. Experience does bear this out:

My grandparents had a 20X1C38 on an antenna in S. FLA and my fuzzy memory recalls it was a tad bit grainy oven on strong channels. But the Zenith's brightness, focus and stable HV hid that fact somewhat.
I had a 1969 Zenith (16Z8C50) on Storer cable in Dallas and the picture was not as good as some SS-IF strip Zenith sets probably for this reason. Its easier to notice grainy HF video and snow on a 23" set versus a smaller set too:scratch2:

In late 1969, a good friend bought a 23" Zenith with the first Chromacolor CRT, a 12A12C52 chassis.
The picture on that set just knocked me over, it was that good! They ran the set for 14 years, with very little repairs. I did all the work on it, which was very little.

IME--Some Tube IF Strips are outstanding. Some not so good.

The Bush TV125 B/W from late 50's early 60's has a dual-standard 405/625 line IF Strip full of EF80's/6BX6 but the set was let down in my opinion by having a tube UHF Tuner.

--Bung a later type good quality Transistor Tuner in one was a match made in heaven, I swear I could get reception from Scotland if the antenna was right!

Consumer grade Tube gear and UHF if not done well,--well-there you go!..

IIRC, the only set I've seen that used that IF tube, was the early Panasonic built sets. The big heavy beasts, that had a large power transformer, but the tubes were in a series string arrangement. :scratch2:

Thanks for sharing the pictures of the "Teleton!" Cute little Japanese set we likely would never see here in the US! I like these little Color Portables.

That is a really cool little set! I love Japanese color portables, especially oddball ones!