Earliest manufacturers to abandon mechanical tuners

[radiotvnut]

I know that some cheaper color TVs retained the standard VHF and UHF mechanical tuners until 1993, when the closed-caption mandate went into effect and many of these sets were cheaper Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese imports, but Zenith and RCA still offered sets with mechanical tuners at least until the late '80s and possibly the early '90s (especially Zenith).

With that said, I was wondering about companies that dumped mechanical tuners early on. Two that come to mind are Sony and Magnavox. I recall seeing one 12" Sony commercial-grade set from about '82 and it still had rotary tuning, but I don't think I've seen a consumer-grade Sony color set newer than about '78 that had mechanical rotary tuners.

NAP (Magnavox, Sylvania, and Philco) was another one that seemed to have dumped mechanical tuning before most others. Today, I brought home a 13" Magnavox that uses a 13C3 chassis. It's from November of 1985 and it uses rotary tuners, but that's the newest NAP set that I've seen with that type of tuner.

I'm sure the reason Zenith and RCA kept the mechanical tuners for as long as they did is because they had a huge senior citizen following, and a lot of older folks were more comfortable with mechanical tuners. When I was selling used TVs in the '90s, I had a few older customers who told me, "I want a TV with a regular tuner because I might mess up one of those with buttons on it."