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Old 06-11-2009, 02:49 PM
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tritwi tritwi is offline
zenith mad
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Florence (Italy)
Posts: 125
Hi! Philco color sets here in Italy were initially made by Salora then Blaupunkt. They started with the well known FM100 chassis driving PIL tubes. They were quite reliable. I couldn't say the same for Radiomarelli and its cousin Magnadyne (Seimart). Since they are italian brands they were quite popular even if people having to invest a huge sum of money for the first color tv was more oriented to german brands (Grundig, Telefunken and Saba, just to name few). We had very few hybrid color tvs and most of them were located in areas where you could receive color programs from foreign countries. We in Tuscany could receive Secam programs from the near Corsica, while in the north of the country the channels from the near Switzerland (Pal) and Telemontecarlo (Secam) could easily received. Most of the early color tvs sold here were from Philips and were multistandard. A friend of mine gave me a beautiful and rare Braun FS1000 hybrid color television but I was a kid and I completely destroyed it... It had two transformers in the horizontal/hv stage and one of these (the one who generated the high voltage) was shorted. I remember this tv was really huge and had a white cabinet. Here in Florence there also was a company who used to buy and modify tv sets from Zenith so we had few (useless at that time) color roundies and bw sets. On some bw models he used to make its own cabinet and install a Zenith chassis inside. They had a completely european appearance but were Zenith in the circuitry. They were also branded Zenith or more commonly Radiobell and Bell Telephone.
Amongst the most popular italian brand are Indesit , Brionvega ,Rex/Seleco and Mivar. Brionvega have a special (in my opinion not deserved)fame for their design. In the pictures above few of my sets
Attached Images
File Type: jpg DSC000099.jpg (68.1 KB, 28 views)
File Type: jpg e2fb_1[1].jpg (19.6 KB, 24 views)
File Type: jpg cc78_1_b.jpg (19.7 KB, 29 views)
File Type: jpg Radiobell.JPG (14.1 KB, 26 views)
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