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Originally Posted by Whirled One
... the 'buttons' are invisible when the TV is off. When you switch on the set (either by pressing the "OFF-ON" part of the strip, or via the remote control), a green backlight comes on behind the keypad, thus revealing the rest of the control buttons.
By the way, is there any way to actually use the Teletext function of these sets these days..? Were there ever any videocassettes recorded with the Zenith-style Teletext signals in the vertical-retrace interval in the years before Closed-Captioning became popular..? (I know that the Teletext system used on these sets is different and more complex than the seldom-used "Teletext" mode that's part of our current Closed-Caption standard)
Zenith's promotional description of the Teletext feature is somewhat amusing from today's perspective. For example: "Zenith Digital gives you a subscription to the ultimate TV magazine via World System Teletext. Teletext is an electronic newspaper you read on TV. Get the latest sports, news, weather, or business information at the touch of a button." Zenith also offered an optional thermal printer as an accessory. "Prints Teletext 'pages' while you see them on the screen. Recipes, coupons, news stories, or any Teletext broadcast can be printed and retained for future use."
Well, we can do all that and more today, but it doesn't involve the TV.  Well, not unless you're using a WebTV or similar device. |
Neat, I guess the one I saw was an earlier model. That's good because your set has menus and no door to break off.
Zenith made a lot of strange (poor) decisions and I guess this was one of them. If they had been smarter, they might still be with us. My last Digital set was a 46" projector. It had a lot of nice features such as being able to route the output of your cable box to you VCR. Amazingly, it had no way to turn off the internal speakers despite having external speaker jacks and a built in Dolby surround decoder. This also made it impossible to use with an external amplifier even though it also had line level audio outputs.
The last time I saw any teletext in the US was probably 10 years ago on TBS. Even then, it was no longer being maintained (all the pages were out of date and the time wasn't even correct). You can't record teletext on video tape because the resolution isn't good enough.
Teletext was (and still is) very successful in the UK and Europe. You may laugh, but it really does all the things in that ad and it did it 10 years before the web even existed.