Someone gave me a Porta-Color!

[Eric H]

Went to work this morning and found this sitting on the engine of the car I was working on!

A coworker found it in his attic, now he's lived in the house for 20 years but only recently found this so it hasn't been used in 20+ years and it was filthy.

I broke all the rules and just plugged it in, would you believe it came on with a full raster! after cleaning the tuner I was able to tune in a station, just barely because I only had a piece of wire for an antenna.
CRT is nice and bright with perfect grey scale too.

It has a few cosmetic issues, broken antennas and a 1" hole in the rear vents but overall not bad.

Anyone know what model and year this one is?

[jpdylon]

Wow, how cool! That looks like a very early model. Not sure about the year but its before 1970.

I don't know if its just the camera, but it looks bigger than a 10" screen.

[Eric H]

Well I got it home and hooked it up to a DVD player.

A few issues, a slight hum in the speaker but no actual audio, very weak color, vertical is a little stretched and tends to roll, also the fine tuning is gummed up and inoperative.

[jpdylon]

I have lots of compactrons if you need any for this set.

[polaraman]

Eric,

Save yourself....give it back!!!!


polaraman

[Whirled One]

Cool! Looks like you got one of the first-year models.

Some tell-tales that it's a fairly early Portacolor are that it has the tuner knobs arranged vertically and the 5 smaller controls are arranged in a vertical row along the right-side, with color markings on the tint and color knobs. Also it has the version of the cabinet with the visible screw-heads in the front.

[Note that some later Portaclolors also have one or more of these distinctions, however.]

You should noticed that it has a dot-phosphor screen with rather large-looking dots for that picture size.

[Eric H]

Hi Whirled, I figured from looking at your Site that this is an early model,
possibly an M213BWD.

Yes, the dot pitch is horrible!