1969 Sony Trinitron
 

Here is a Sony KV-1200 I picked up at a yard sale a few days ago for 5.00! It even still has the tag behind the fine tuning knob! Somehow, it also has an extremely bright crt with gray scale as good as when it was new. (maybe the tube was changed?) The phosphor looks lighter than what I remember, ours had a dark gray IIRC...
This one reminds me of the KV-1210 my dad bought back in '69 or early '70. It had the nicer wood cabinet and brushed aluminium speaker grille though.
Still, I can't get over the picture quality on these early sets, it really blew away many of the competitors of the day!
This one has early 1969 date codes on many of the parts so I guess it was probably bought sometime mid to late 1969.
Our set that dad bought had a super picture until about 1977, it really wasn't used that much as it was a bedroom set. Seems that the crt went to pot pretty early for such an expensive tv, was this due to the technology being so new at the time? Or poor quality? Anyone here service these sets back then? My boss at the tv shop I worked in from '77 to '81 wouldn't even take Sonys in for repair, what knowledge I got was on my own as far as repairing them back then.
Our 1969 RCA CTC27 still had a like new crt when we sold it in the summer of '77 and it saw a tremendous amount of use...

Very nice. The one thing I remember about the early Sony sets was that RED always appeared ORANGE to me. Can't comment on the reluctance to work on them. May have been a parts availability issue, much in the same manner that it was difficult for us to secure Seiko and Citizen watch parts in the early 70's.

that set has a new crt.
i have a few replacement sony crt's and the ones from the 80's are lighter than the original.i have a nib 330ab22 from 71 that has a dark faceplate.

Seems like I remember hearing from one of our local TV doctors that getting parts for Sonys was difficult and expensive unless you were an "authorised distributor", in which case they frowned on you selling/working on competing brands. Here in Hooterville, that would have been hard, as RCA, Zenith, Magnavox, were still big articles of faith. People around here still liked the traditional big screen consoles, & all Sony had in those days were dinky tabletop sets-plus they were REAL expensive, IIRC.-Sandy G.

The new crt makes sense as I can't remember any of those sets lasting that long. Was this model the first trinitron introduced into the us market? Did Sony make any color sets bigger than 12" in '69?
I also noticed it uses a 3AT2 hv rect tube...

Actually, though the model number would suggest otherwise, the KV-1210U was the first Trinitron model sold in the USA; it looks similar to the KV-1200U that replaced it except for some cabinet color/trim differences. [drh has one of these 1200's too that I've seen] I would imagine the chassis is similar given that the 1200 still has the 3AT2 HV rect.

The 12" Trinitrons were the first ones that Sony sold in the USA; the 15" and 9" models came out not too much later, but I don't know if they were around yet in 1969. One weird thing-- somewhere around here I've got an old electronics magazine with an article about the "new" Sony Trinitron CRT. I think the magazine pre-dates the introduction of the KV-1210U, but the prototype TV pictured in the magazine is a 9" set and looks like a KV-9000. Maybe Sony didn't think a 9" portable would sell as well as a 12" one, so chose to go with the larger tube for their first product introduction..?

On another note: The Japanese-market version of the KV-1210U was the KV-1310. Evidently the Japanese continued to market TVs using the overall diagonal (in the USA starting in the late 60's, advertized TV picture sizes had to be based on just the viewable area). Note also the use of inch units in the model number. Even these days, I've noticed some Japanese ads (for the Japanese market) for TVs and computers describing screen sizes in inches, even when other measurements are given in metric units...

There was a KV-1210U exactly like the one we used to have at a resale shop near me that I looked at a few weeks ago, but they wanted 25.00 for it and you could barely see the picture.
I was very tempted to buy it as the cabinet was in mint condition but thought that finding a tube would be very hard...
When I told the person that ran the store the crt was weak and needed replacement she got angry with me and said "all it needs is an adjustment" and that I was trying to con her to get the tv cheaper!! Yeah, right... I told her to "adjust" it to where the proper brightness and gray scale should be and I would buy it for the asking price.
I was a lot happier to get the one I have now for 5.00.

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Here in Italy tv screen size is shown in inches. I don't know why. Perhaps because most of the early television set appeared on the market in 1954 (when regular tv service started) were of american origin. I own a couple of the first sony trinitron sold here in 1969/70. They are KV1300 and KV1310. We never had a 12" color sony set! The portacolor sold (and perhaps made) here in Europe only share appearance and the piture tube,yoke assembly and eht transformer. The remaining is of european project. It employs 15 european tubes plus a couple more tubes in vhf unit, two transistors in uhf unit and a transistor in the if sound stage. Quite different! I'm waiting for my european portacolor recently bought at an auction on ebay .Mine is Kuba Imperial but I have a picture on a book and the schematic of the same tv brand C.G.E. (acronym for general electric company). It's fun how also more popular portable b/w sets made by C.G.E. and telefunken during the end of sixties share the same appearance as your G.E. sets. If you like I'll post some photos of my C.G.E. and telefunken sets of that era.

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Wow, 15+ tubes and a few transistors in a portacolor. I wonder if it works any better than a GE portacolor?[/QUOTE]

As soon as I receive it I'll post some pictures but I don't really think it will work better than your american portacolor. It seems it's a simple pal set and the picture tube is the same as your portacolor.

I used to despise those early Sonys, they used a very expensive SCR for Horiz output and were very unforgiving. If there was any problem in the horiz circuits it would instantly destroy the SCR. I'm fairly certain now that if we'd had an ESR meter to check the small electrolytics we could have repaired a lot of them. At the time we tried to use a lightbulb in series with the set, if everything wasn't just right the bulb would come on dim then instantly go full bright as the SCR shorted.....

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Thanks Captain!!!!
 

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The 7" KV-7010UA came first, in 1966 I believe. Only ever seen ONE in the flesh, and it has a really weird CRT with rounded sides like a regular 60s rectangular CRT did. And it was an all-metal cabinet with leatherette sides, and external safety glass (GLASS not plastic)... I have the service manual on it, in USA edition.

Then I'm not sure whether the KV-9000U or the 12" came first. BTW: The first 12" sets were all introduced at the same time in several versions: KV-1200 (cheap black plastic), 1210 (wood case with small speaker above tuner), and 1220 (wood case with big speaker at Left of tube). Then later the KV-1200 (black plastic), 1201 (wood case basic) and 1202 (wide wood w/big speaker). Not sure why they went backwards :scratch2:

The 15 & 17" sets came in '72 with the KV-1510 & 1520, and the 1710, 1720, and 1730R. (The KV-1730R was the first remote Sony).

Charles