Some more magazine scans of early color in Australia.

[dr.ido]

The cover of the April 1972 issue of Electronics Australia. It doesn't mention what the set is, it may be a mockup.



The "Color and you" article has suprisingly little detail for a technical magazine. It does have small picture of an Australian made Philips KV692. I've never seen one, I'm not sure they were ever sold to the public. Prior to seeing this article I thought the first Philips sets in Australia were K9s.



The cover of the June 1972 issue. The set is described as an unbranded prototype.



It looks almost identical to this UK Philips G25K500 pictured here:

http://www.oldtechnology.net/colour.html#philipsdsg6

These aren't color, but I though I'd include them anyway.

AWA "Deep Image" 25" sets on the final stages of the production line in 1965.



An ad for the console version of the set above.

[Sandy G]

Never have understood why it took y'all SO long to get "Colour TV" down there...Or so many other places...It's not like Oz was some 3rd world shithole w/no infrastructure or anything like that..And you see articles/mags like this, & you'd think they just invented the wheel...By '72, color TV was a reasonably mature product, no big surprises left in it, except figuring out how to make them cheaper & cheaper....

[Hawkwind]

I'm sure the images are nice, but I only get white boxes with red X's...

[NowhereMan 1966]

Interesting that they offered a color TV to operate on a 32 volt DC farm power system. IIRC, there were many 32 volt appliances made, even washers and air conditioners.

[caddisgeek]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Never have understood why it took y'all SO long to get "Colour TV" down there...Or so many other places...It's not like Oz was some 3rd world shithole w/no infrastructure or anything like that..And you see articles/mags like this, & you'd think they just invented the wheel...By '72, color TV was a reasonably mature product, no big surprises left in it, except figuring out how to make them cheaper & cheaper....

Dont forget we didn't get commercial FM radio down here until mid 1980!

[dr.ido]

Originally Posted by NowhereMan 1966

Interesting that they offered a color TV to operate on a 32 volt DC farm power system. IIRC, there were many 32 volt appliances made, even washers and air conditioners.

That's actually a B&W set from 1965.

I've seen the 32VDC option mentioned for a lot of stuff in my old (60s and earlier, it seems to have disappeared by the 70s) magazines, but I've yet to find any 32VDC gear. I've only ever found the odd 32V lightbulb. I've seen one 32VDC tube radio. All the tubes had 32V filaments, from memory it used vibrator power supply for the B+. It was a complete wreck though, someone plugged it into 240V mains (alternative connectors weren't widely available, the remains of every 32VDC installation I saw used standard mains connectors).

I've never seen a 32VDC TV. I haven't really been to any areas remote enough that 32VDC systems were common. I only ever saw remains of them in Coober Pedy long after town power was available. They didn't get TV at all until the 80s (a friend of mine used to send weekly boxes of VHS tapes up there to a few people who had bought TVs and VCRs before broadcasts started). By the time I got there anyone everyone either has mains power and used standard sets or if they were further out had 12VDC portables powered by car batteries.

[Carmine]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Never have understood why it took y'all SO long to get "Colour TV" down there...Or so many other places...It's not like Oz was some 3rd world shithole w/no infrastructure or anything like that..And you see articles/mags like this, & you'd think they just invented the wheel...By '72, color TV was a reasonably mature product, no big surprises left in it, except figuring out how to make them cheaper & cheaper....

I think it has been mentioned before, but color research was handicapped by marauding bands of kangaroos, which were strongly attracted by their hyper-sensitivity to the combination of scan rate and color test bars.

These rabid kangaroos would often use their strong feet to kick-in the doors of research labs when the engineers were away consuming comically huge cans of beer. Once inside, prototype sets were ruined, setting research back again and again. Below is a rare photograph captured by a brave security guard...



By the early 70s, it became legal to shoot rabid kangaroos and sell the meat to the newly established American steakhouse known as "Outback".



Once the kangaroo population began to decline around the research labs, things began to progress as normal once again.

[Kiwick]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Never have understood why it took y'all SO long to get "Colour TV" down there...Or so many other places...It's not like Oz was some 3rd world shithole w/no infrastructure or anything like that..And you see articles/mags like this, & you'd think they just invented the wheel...By '72, color TV was a reasonably mature product, no big surprises left in it, except figuring out how to make them cheaper & cheaper....

Well, i think the main reason is that domestic TV manufacturers were lobbying against the introduction of color TV, I don't know much about the Australian electronics industry, but the Italian industry's way was to build fancy modern cabinets around their bulky decade-old handwired B/W tube chassis... they wanted to spend none of their money on R&D, and they saw color TV as a threat rather than an opportunity

So when color TV finally came, they were blown away by Philips, Telefunken, Grundig and so on... today, the only surviving Italian TV manufacturer is Mivar.

[fsjonsey]

Originally Posted by Kiwick

Well, i think the main reason is that domestic TV manufacturers were lobbying against the introduction of color TV, I don't know much about the Australian electronics industry, but the Italian industry's way was to build fancy modern cabinets around their bulky decade-old handwired B/W tube chassis... they wanted to spend none of their money on R&D, and they saw color TV as a threat rather than an opportunity

So when color TV finally came, they were blown away by Philips, Telefunken, Grundig and so on... today, the only surviving Italian TV manufacturer is Mivar.

Aren't b&w sets still common in italy? I had a teacher who got his montessori training in Bergamo, and he was surprised how many tube sets were still in daily use there.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by dr.ido

That's actually a B&W set from 1965.

I've seen the 32VDC option mentioned for a lot of stuff in my old (60s and earlier, it seems to have disappeared by the 70s) magazines, but I've yet to find any 32VDC gear. I've only ever found the odd 32V lightbulb. I've seen one 32VDC tube radio. All the tubes had 32V filaments, from memory it used vibrator power supply for the B+. It was a complete wreck though, someone plugged it into 240V mains (alternative connectors weren't widely available, the remains of every 32VDC installation I saw used standard mains connectors).

I've never seen a 32VDC TV. I haven't really been to any areas remote enough that 32VDC systems were common. I only ever saw remains of them in Coober Pedy long after town power was available. They didn't get TV at all until the 80s (a friend of mine used to send weekly boxes of VHS tapes up there to a few people who had bought TVs and VCRs before broadcasts started). By the time I got there anyone everyone either has mains power and used standard sets or if they were further out had 12VDC portables powered by car batteries.

I've also heard that here in the U.S., the farm standard was also 32 VDC, I think in the UK, it was 50 VDC. Usually you had a windmill charge up a bank of batteries along with a backup generator. I think I saw someome mention, I think it was this site, that they made 32 VCD appliances well into the 1980's here and he even saw a Zenith System 3 set (1978 - 85) that would run on 32 VDC.

[Kiwick]

Originally Posted by fsjonsey

Aren't b&w sets still common in italy? I had a teacher who got his montessori training in Bergamo, and he was surprised how many tube sets were still in daily use there.

Well, most 70s and 80s Italian made B/W tube sets used modern mylar capacitors and were extremely durable, many are still in regular use, older or poorer people tend to hang onto them as long as they keep going

these sets are usually 60s designs "updated" with varactor preset buttons instead of turret tuners, a few also got electronic tuning and remote control!

[3Guncolor]

As far as I know Zenith never made any sets that ran on 32 volts. I know in the 70's they had some 12 volt BW models.

[bgadow]

That was kx250rider who had worked on a 32v Zenith, a CCII I think he said?

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by bgadow

That was kx250rider who had worked on a 32v Zenith, a CCII I think he said?

I know I saw mention of a 32 VDC Zenith here, thought it was a System 3 although even a Chromacolor II would have been quite modern for a 32 VDC system.