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This past weekend brought another "spring clean-up" trash day opportunity in a nearby community. Spotted a total of five tube/tube-hybrid sets, but again we're basically talking 60's/70's B&W portables in poor shape. At least this shows that it's still possible to find tube sets out "in the wild" though, so I guess that should be encouraging. Only one of those came back with me; it's a GE SA-chassis 11" B&W portable that *might* actually be kinda cute once it's cleaned up, but we'll see. I swear I've seen a 9" (?) GE B&W before that looks similar to this except that the off-on-volume control is located inside the speaker cone to save space. One thing I did notice is that the visible screen size on this set is rather close to that of the PortaColor. Also, the screws that hold the cabinet back are accessed through the *front* of the set, just as on the early PortaColors. I would also guess that the SA-chassis is the likely parent of the cheap-tacular SE- and SF- series chassis types that continued on through the mid-70's.
The only other 'find' that came back with me on this expedition was that very 70's-looking Zenith shown in the other attached photos. At first glance, what would you make it out to be? A Chromacolor II in an interesting slope-front white cabinet? Looks reasonably high-end too. It doesn't have Space Command, but it does have lighted channel numbers that show through little windows with a black surround, and a click-stop UHF tuner with nice big channel numbers. Even has a sleep-timer settable for up to 3 hours.
But, gee... that cabinet isn't nearly deep enough for it to be a color set. The CRT face also looks too heavily tinted for a mid-70's color TV. Sure enough, it's B&W. The SAMS index pegs it as a 1974 model, which puts it a bit ahead of the curve in terms of having a click-stop UHF tuner. Pretty high-end looking for a mid-70's 19" B&W portable. The only thing that made me pick this up was just the novelty aspect of such a high-styled 70's solid-state "big screen" B&W, but then I started thinking-- you really don't see as many 19" B&W sets around as you used to. 70's/80's 19" B&W portables used to be quite common at thrift stores and such, but now I'd suspect many thrift stores won't even take B&W TV's that are larger than 12", if they accept them at all.
Anyway, it's not a B&W console like the one drh found, but it does seem pretty fancy for a large monochrome set of that era. It does have the typical Zenith metal chassis design though, and a large portion of the circuitry is contained on three plug-in modules. It also appears to be made in USA, unlike most? all? of the smaller-screened Zenith B&W sets starting in the early 70's.
By the way, anyone know what the last year was for a Zenith B&W TV with Space Command?
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