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Originally Posted by Electronic M
I'd probably vote Setchel Carlson followed by Zenith...In the roundy era RCA sent engineers to SC to try and figure out how SC was getting a better picture out of RCA made roundy color CRTs than RCA themselves were. SC also has the advantages of being a 100% hand wired MODULAR chassis where you could do neat things like pull the color module and have it continues to operate as a monochrome set. Circuits were a mix of RCA based stages and their own designs.
It is funny some folks think Sivertone was worse than RCA... most Silvertone color sets were RCA clones the early ones were nut and bolt clones, and as time progressed they started customizing chassis metal board placement and component placement... granted they probably were not using the latest RCA circuits at any given time...so a new RCA that out performed older RCAs probably looked good next to a new Silvertone some years.
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Never seen a Setchell Carlson set myself, so I know nothing about them. The Silvertones, maybe the ones I had were tired and full of bad tubes, but they all had the same "soft" picture quality to them. These were not the straight ahead RCA clones, but the late 60s models. I would like to find one of these now and see just how good I can get one to work with the knowledge and equipment I have now versus back in the 80s as an early teenager who could only do tube replacement and simple troubleshooting. I'm hoping it will change my earlier first impressions of this brand.
I do have a Sears Medalist II 19" hybrid here now that shows a lot of promise for being a great performer. It just needs a bit of tweaking to get to 100%. It has a nice Sylvania black matrix CRT in it with a red that looks really close to 15GP22 red. But that set is from 1973 and probably was designed better than the earlier ones. The PC boards are actually really nice with silk screening on both sides, so it's easy to figure out how everything is connected, and all the module pins are labeled as to their function.