[bgadow]

That late model bw set with the clear plastic cabinet might be a prison model. I think the cabinet was designed that way to prevent hiding contraband. They wouldn't require remotes & the warden could brag in the budget hearings that, sure, the prisoners had tv sets, but they were black & white!

I've also seen some awful cheap looking Performance tv's. There was a series of 12" bw sets with the controls on the bottom that were usually tube but I think the last of them were solid state. They looked straight out of the 60s; they got the Performance label along with the rest of the bunch. I seem to think there was a line called Command Peformance; I think I have a brochure for one from the eighties. The General did crank out some higher end stuff, like those blue crt sets. (got a brochure for them, too-maybe one in the same)

I can picture a lot of "old timers" buying bw consoles even later on. I guess color consoles in the late 70s were still $500 for the cheapest models? A bw console might have been in the $250 range? If all you had ever had was bw I guess it didn't matter. I remember in 1979-1980 I was a snotty nosed kid but was invited to a dinner where there was a presentation about NASA. They handed out a book showing how the space program provided inovations for the general public. They showed a picture of a Zenith TV showroom & said that some device or another was being used in Zenith bw console tv sets, as I recall.

I would suppose all of the later bw consoles would have been from the old-line sellers like Admiral, Zenith, Sears, Truetone...I bet Wells-Gardner cranked them out pretty late. You could go through Sams & find some late ones. I doubt anything was offered by the Japanese makers.