The same lady who gave me the Emerson that I talked about in another thread a few days ago came up with two more 12" B&W TV's - a '78 RCA and a late '70's Centurion (rebadged Sampo).
The CRT in the RCA was very weak and the fine tuning gear is broken in the tuner, as well as it having the wrong UHF knob and a beat up case. I rejuvenated the CRT and it looks OK, as long as the brightness is turned all the way up. I left the tuner alone and the only channel it works on is channel 3. That's OK, since it will likely be used with a DTV converter, anyway. I will say that RCA B&W TV's that look like this must be among the most common 12" B&W sets made. This makes the third one I've found in the past year and I've given away and sold many of these over the past 20 years. I have a '77 and this '78 model that uses a single board chassis with a plug in stand up IF module. My '81 model has a newer style single board chassis.
The Centurion says on the rear label that it was distributed by Aim stores; which, I've never heard of. It has a decent picture; but, the audio is very weak on some stations and other stations only have a lot of garbled sounds and loud buzzing. With no signal, it makes the normal rushing noise in the speaker. I suspect that the audio is either out of alignment, a coil is defective, or there's a bad cap. I've seen this same set under the TG&Y and Sampo brands.
09-02-2010, 05:43 PM
Threaded Mode