GE PortaColor; eBay seller says NOT color!

[kx250rider]

I just saw this one... A 1980 vintage AB-C chassis Porta-Color on eBay. Seller says "Black & White GE"! Would someone like to inform this guy that it's color???

http://cgi.ebay.com/9-GE-Black-White...QQcmdZViewItem

This is trippy, because it's usually the other way around... And I can't believe the gray scale could possibly be that good as to fool him

Charles

[yagosaga]

This is not a Porta-Color but a solid state GE portable:
http://www.rwhirled.com/portacolor/GE-AA.htm

Eckhard

[blue_lateral]

Theres probably no color because someone still needs to solder all those @##$#@#@@ rivets.

John

[kx250rider]

Originally Posted by yagosaga

This is not a Porta-Color but a solid state GE portable:
http://www.rwhirled.com/portacolor/GE-AA.htm

Eckhard

Yeah; I guess they had dropped the "PortaColor" badge by then. I still call them PortaColors because of that horrible 10" tube. Not as horrible as the 60s PortaColor 11SP22, but almost. (10VAHP22?)

But he still thinks it's a B&W set


Charles

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by Kaye-Halbert TV

But he still thinks it's a B&W set

Perhaps he is color-blind.

[colortrakker]

From the radically revised descrip: "It belonged to the family of the man who designed its innards, so it's personal."

So how does the seller not know it's color with all that background?

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by colortrakker

So how does the seller not know it's color with all that background?

Already he know that it is color: "9" GE ColorTelevision Set...". But now the set is from the 1960s: "You'd be hard pressed to find a small 9" color television set dating from the late 60's in this good a shape..."
With the next revision it will be from the early 1950s...

[3Guncolor]

I wonder if it works. Now that it's listed as a color GE. Seems odd to me with the antenna information and the history of the set they would say it was B/W and then change it to color.

[JCFitz]

Originally Posted by blue_lateral

Theres probably no color because someone still needs to solder all those @##$#@#@@ rivets.

John

I remember those as well as the 19" and 25" EC and EM chassis series that had them on modules.Amazingly other than the rivets they had very few actual component failures.I have a tv almost exactly like that one except mine has woodgrain in the knob area and the woodgrain goes left to right instead of front to back like the one in the picture.AB-F chassis manufactured 1983.The funny thing is someone gave it to me with a intermittent problem that cured itself.Would play for a while and then picture would start jumping and vertical deflection would go and it would blank out the picture.Did that for about a week and I didn't work on it as I was working on other sets.Then 1 night it played all evening and didn't do it.It's still playing fine after 2 years sitting on a shelf near my computer and gets played every night.The color is great and it gets better reception with its built in rabbit ears on the local UHF stations than my Zenith Advanced System 3 will on any antenna I've tried on it.This tv gets WMDT 47 better than the big tv will WBOC channel 16 .47 is weaker and harder to get where I live.It gets channel 16 clear as a bell.But it seems like a lot of the old mechanical tuner tvs outperform electronic tuners on weak signals(indoor antennas) especially on UHF.

[Eric H]

There's another one of these for $19 BIN
http://cgi.ebay.com/Small-GE-Color-T...QQcmdZViewItem

[compucat]

Originally Posted by Eric H

There's another one of these for $19 BIN
http://cgi.ebay.com/Small-GE-Color-T...QQcmdZViewItem

That's a good price but with that one poor quality photo, you can't tell if the rest of the set is in good shape. So many small sets have broken antennas and they are hard to replace. Radio Shack's so called "replacement" antennas rarely fit anything. Also, I seem to remember the tuning knobs on the later versions of that set always felt rather flimsy. It is a cool set, though. I would like to have one.

[jpdylon]

I think its cute

I don't think it would survive the trip here though...

I grabbed the one. Just got it yesterday. It is a neat little TV. January 1981.

It works fine as is. When I got it, it definately had "screwdriver drift." The green screen was maxed out with retrace lines, and the vert. size was on max as well. Redid grayscale and focus. No adjustments for the drives, they're automatic. And whomever took it apart last to mess with everything also took the schematics that were stored in the back cover.

It did do something weird however: The color control had no effect, but it was at the proper intensity, so I figured I'd troubleshoot it later on. An hour after being on, I heard something make a quiet snap, and it suddenly began working. Odd. Been working fine since.

Sharp focus, but has the same dot pitch as the striped phosphor portacolors, so its limited there.

No separate AFC switch, but when you push the fine tuning knob in to adjust, it turns it off, and when you release it, turns it back on.

[yagosaga]

Does this set has a vertical hold control, and where is it?

It doesn't have a verical or horizontal hold control, it's also automatic on this set.