Bentley Portable
 

I picked up one of the nearly free 5" Bentley portables on eBay.

Three of the pots were frozen, but freed up with a lot of force. Once free they seem to stay free.

It has a fairly decent image. It's a little off-center.

It has no DC restoration.

Now, what to do with it?

John

A friend of mine has one of these that he bought years ago at a yard sale for a buck or two. Then, he had to buy a wall wart to run it on AC. He had it in his work shop, connected to analog cable via a 3.5mm to "F" connector adapter.

I also seem to remember them selling new for $50 (or less) back in the mid-late '80's.

The last one I saw for sale was at the SA, about a week before the DTV transition, and they wanted $25 for it. Had it been $2.50, I would have bought it. It's that sort of crazy "out of touch with reality" pricing that keeps me out of that store.

I have a few 5" sets that I never use; but, I'm still hanging on to them since they are an important part of TV history. At least I can still use them with a DTV converter or analog cable (until they do away with that). One day, I'm going to obtain one or two of the small handheld TV's.

convert it to color with a color wheel!!!

About 25 or 30 years ago they were giving those away for looking at a time-share vacation properties. They didn't come with a power supply. Instead there was a form packed in the box where you could order a wall-wart and battery pack for $30.00 . A real rip-off.

Yeah, I don't have the wall wart. I ran it off of D cells. I think I paid $8 for it. Shipping was more...

Color wheel sounds like a great idea! A small screen should make it much easier to deal with the mechanical aspects.

Now you need to find the crummy Bentley super 8 projector that looks identical to your set. Those things loved to shred film. As far as I know, it is the only projector modeled to look like a portable tv.

Somewhere around here, there is a portable slide viewer that looks like a portable TV. My Mother bought it, sometime in the '80's, so she could view old family slides without having to pull out the slide projector and screen.

I remember seeing these for sale second hand a lot at the flea market in the 1980's...they couldn't have been that old then.

These MAY be a curiousity someday, as the Madman Muntz sets are today-"What are the barest minimum & cheapest of parts you can make a TV with & still have some measure of commercial viability ?"

I picked one up at the recycling center. It was very clean and worked like new, but I had a hard time giving it away. I think, over the years, I've seen more of the film viewers than the TV sets.

My Father won one of those in a sales contest - I remember we took it to the beach (or something) and it ate up the batteries within an hour. I don't think it saw any use after that.

I wish I had known you wanted one, I passed up a few of them this last year.

A color wheel using a small set like this would be cool but how about even smaller, say a color wheel from a DLP set and a 1.5" Panasonic B&W or even a micro sized Viewfinder CRT from a Camcorder.

It might be a little tough to find the Sync circuits on those little sets.

I also thought a Mechanical TV made from an old Hard Drive would be interesting, you could even make it Color by using three LED's, way beyond my capabilities however.

Makes you wonder when you compare one of those "Last-Gasp" 5" sets to a quality 5 incher like one of the Sony 5-303 series-The Sony weighs about umpteen times as much...

Unfortunately, the little B&W Sonys and Panasonics have no DC restoration, either. I find that to be much more of a problem with actually watching a small TV set than not having color.