Conrac monitor model RHB19

[zenith2134]

So I have this heavy old studio monitor from October 1975 which still works really well. A search on the net turns up nothing about this model. It's got all the bells and whistles a crt monitor can have, very high quality and tons of controls. The convergence is on a panel on the top of the front of the unit which made a touch up of the corners real easy .
I have a feeling this was once a well known monitor but I'm not sure.
Right now using external sync on composite via an adapter plug and the pic is very good. Has an underscan feature too .

Inside the entire unit is on three slide out modules- high voltage, horizontal, and chroma.

Tried contacting Conrac Corporation weeks ago and never heard back. So much for supporting their legacy products (you suck)

[cbenham]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

So I have this heavy old studio monitor from October 1975 which still works really well. A search on the net turns up nothing about this model.

Here is my Conrac search link for eBay. Lots of manuals near the bottom of the page.
http://www.ebay.com/dsc/Business-Ind...=1&_nkw=Conrac

Good Luck,

Cliff

[old_tv_nut]

Can you post some Pix?

Conrac was the premier studio rack-mount NTSC monitor in the years between RCA and Sony. The SMPTE "C" phosphor specs are named after Conrac, who supplied CRTs made with a reserved batch of phosphors so that all of them would be identical.

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

I have a feeling this was once a well known monitor but I'm not sure.

Conrac was a very big name in monitors in the 1970s, including for places like airports with their arrival and departure displays (all black and white at that time, though). I worked on dozens of those monitors into the 1990s. As of less than two years ago, there was still one in San Francisco Airport that has been running 24 hours per day since perhaps 1979, with some capacitors replaced but its original CRT (unless it was replaced before 1984, when I started supporting that monitor).

[wa2ise]

Back around 1979 I used to work for a stupid little medical equipment company that specialized in devices that would convert still video images into images on Xray film. Essentially a camera that looked at a video monitor inside a metal box. The fancier ones used Conrac monitors which we modified. We once did a special job using a Conrac QQA high res B&W monitor which we changed the big CRT to a 5 inch flat face monitor. This place got me started in my video and TV career, but as the boss hated me I left to go to real companies like RCA. But the boss I had at Bell Labs years later made this boss look good...

Later on this small company made color cameras, using a sequential color wheel and a B&W monitor fed sequential RGB. I think some movie studio used one of these machines to get computer graphics onto high res movie film. Not at real time though. Maybe ten seconds per frame.

[grimer]

[zenith2134]

Hey Pat, how's it goin

Yes that's the one...i'm gonna snap some pics of it in operation soon...and by the way it was a gift from him..very generous.

[rcanewvista]

My father worked at Conrac for a few months around 1984; shortly before they closed down. They had a large plant in Duarte, Ca- after it was closed the site was redeveloped as a Walmart But the funny thing is that Conrac used to have a huge towering sign that can be seen from the nearby freeway- which still exists to this day. Walmart kept the sign frame and changed the name.

[holmesuser01]

I worked in TV from 1976-1986, and our master control rooms were loaded with Conrac monitors. I never had issues with any of them, and they ran 24/7!