Speaking of 23" B&W Sets...

[Kiwick]

Originally Posted by dr.ido

I can't find the thread now, but I seem to be remember one of the Italian posters (tritwi?) saying that B&W sets latest longer over there than perhaps anywhere else. That 23" B&W sets were common well into the 80s with some having digital tuning and remotes while retaining a hybrid tube chassis. If anyone has pictures of such a set I'd like to see them.

The latest I've personally seen would have been a batch of early 80s 23" B&W monitors that I found in the early 90s that came from a race track where they were used to display race results from a videotext based system, but they don't really count as they didn't have tuners.

I once read on a British forum that one of the TV rental firms there had a number of customers that refused to pay the increased license charges for color sets. When it was no longer practical to maintain the existing B&W sets they had to supply color sets with the disabled chroma decoders. I wonder if a cheaper B&W TV license still exists and if any are still on the books today.

It was me that said this!

I have a nice 1983 19" REX with a hybrid chassis, remote and digitally controlled varactor tuning, i'll post some pics of it ASAP,

I also found many more but of course i didn't keep them all, the latest hybrid chassis set i found was from about 1985-86

Grundig, Philips, Nordmende and other European makers also still made 23" sets into the mid 80s, they switched to a 100% SS chassis in the mid 70s though, some even had AV inputs!

The very last Italian made 23" set i've seen was a Mivar from about 1990, it had a small SS chassis the size of a postcard!, and, of course, a Russian CRT

The reason behind this is that many European countries had cheaper TV licenses for B/W sets, Italy retained the B/W license until 1992, after this, of course, a trainload of B/W sets went out on the curb, and i did score some really nice 60s ones back then.

[Kiwick]

I also have a wooden solid state 1978 Voxson (italian) 23" tabletop that runs on 12 volts DC! (as well as 110/220VAC of course) it was probably meant to be used on RVs

Thinking about it, i don't think i've ever seen a large screen color set with a 12VDC power input.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by radiotvnut

I wonder if RCA and GE made any large screen B&W sets any later than the early '70's. I do know that RCA built a 23" metal cabinet B&W Lyceum TV for school use sometime in the early '70's.

RCA also made a 25" "Lyceum" color table model set, in the mid-'70s. I saw only one of these up close, when I worked in the A/V department in high school; we had such a set as a monitor for one of our school's four closed-circuit video channels. Our Lyceum set was used on our only color channel at that time, channel 7.

[radiotvnut]

I fixed some 25V steel cabinet CTC68 RCA Lyceum TV's for a guy that bought them at a school auction. They were heavy as lead and had many types of jacks on the back, like what the slightly older 23V CTC39 tube sets had.

[dr.ido]

Originally Posted by Kiwick

It was me that said this!

I have a nice 1983 19" REX with a hybrid chassis, remote and digitally controlled varactor tuning, i'll post some pics of it ASAP,

I also found many more but of course i didn't keep them all, the latest hybrid chassis set i found was from about 1985-86

Grundig, Philips, Nordmende and other European makers also still made 23" sets into the mid 80s, they switched to a 100% SS chassis in the mid 70s though, some even had AV inputs!

The very last Italian made 23" set i've seen was a Mivar from about 1990, it had a small SS chassis the size of a postcard!, and, of course, a Russian CRT

The reason behind this is that many European countries had cheaper TV licenses for B/W sets, Italy retained the B/W license until 1992, after this, of course, a trainload of B/W sets went out on the curb, and i did score some really nice 60s ones back then.

Cool. Smaller B&W sets held on here for a bit longer than the larger screen ones. I've seen a couple of late 80s/early 90s 12" sets that had push button varactor tuners, but were otherwise styled exactly like their turret tuner counter parts. These weren't particularly common and probably sold poorly. I remember them being about $50 more expensive than the last of the more common turret tuner version (which even at this late stage still only had VHF tuners).

I also remember seeing 14" and 19" B&W sets at a discount store in the city in 91 or 92. The 14" had VHF/UHF turret tuners and the 19" had push button tuning (may have been digital, I didn't get that close). Unlike every other B&W set I had seen these were styled like typical black box color sets. I considered this to be quite dodgy as there was no mention that they were B&W and the sets were never on. This was typical of this particular store (which was only there for a couple of months) as the bulk of their stock was fake watches and handbags. I'd like to find one of these sets, but I doubt they sold many.