Last bw only manufacturer?

[ctwolf1964]

I am just curious. Which was the last black & white tv manufacturer to have gone out of business without ever having made a color set?

[old_tv_nut]

I think you should ask for the last black-and-white-only BRAND to go out of business, as it may have been outsourced by then. I can think of a lot of names that never made or sold color, but I have no idea who might have been last - interesting question.

[Steve D.]

Just a thought on this question. I was browsing my 1970 SAMS Photofact annual index. In the back they list all the color tv manufacturers. And in the front they list, of course, all the b&w tv manufacturers they provided photofacts for. I guess you could compare the b&w listings against the color and come up with a few companies based on the dates the photofacts were published.The latest company to produce a b&w and not a color set might be a candidate. I'm not volunteering.

-Steve D.

[Einar72]

Pacific Mercury would be my guess, bu then I remembered the ad. I'd be curious to know if they even had a prototype working well enough to display per the ad copy.

[bgadow]

Yes, this could get pretty deep. Going along with what old tv nut said, there were companies like Arvin which made some bw sets; they sold color sets in the sixties but they were probably made by others. Like a lot of companies they had prototype color sets in the CT100 era. So you get into questions like, did they actually ever build a color set on their own? That they sold in production numbers? It would take a lot of research to have a definant answer. If you don't count the 1954 models you could narrow it down more, with the many companies which quit the tv business altogether in the fifties.