A vanished world. How RCA-Victor made color TV sets and audio tubes in 1959, great little movie.

Great movie.

There was a horizontal as well as a vertical hold control that needed occasional adjustments on the old CRT TV's.... it was easily accessible by the home user.

 

High voltage electron beams produce X rays when they hit the screen, so yes there was, but you had to be very close for a very long time to worry about it. CRTs had lead glass faces after awhile that solved the issue.

 

Well, I used that knob quite a bit! No pun intended. What a relief to get a Quasar color tv with a new outdoor antenna. People commented that our picture was better than their cable picture. This was the early 80's.

 

Yes and no. TVs were continually updated with several "generations" and many TVs were eventually scrapped even though they were readily repairable simply because they were obsolete. Getting parts usually wasn't a problem through the tube and hybrid era. In the solid state era by 1985 or so, a lot of the Japanese sets (which were often manufactured in other Asian countries) were scrapped not because a fix was impossible but because parts were unavailable. The government required manufacturers to provide parts for a set number of years but enforcement of this was lax in the seventies and by the early eighties was nonexistent. In fact, many of the manufacturers had figured out how to strategically nonsupply certain parts so that they could point to a warehouse full of parts and say "we have 95% coverage for 90 percent of the sets out there in stock" yet still have a huge number of sets sent to the landfill for lack of the part you needed. The Japanese tended to change board revs a lot more frequently too and to use semiconductors and modules made in one run for one year and never again.

My father repaired cameras, not TVs, but he was very much into electronics and he followed the TV tech journals. We used to get the magazines for TV repair shops and I used to read them as a kid. The industry knew what was going on because a lot of electronics guys were navy or ex-navy and had contacts, and occasionally spouses, over there or from over there and they knew that a certain flyback transformer might be available quite readily in Japan but be "out of stock" here forever. Indeed, a couple guys made good money for awhile by buying up all of certain parts they could find in Japan and sending them here, but soon enough the companies quit selling them surplus or sold them only to the shops over there. Any attempt at direct inquiry to Japan would be studiously ignored unless you went there. (That was true for the camera companies too, and the car companies, as anyone into JDM cars can tell you to this day.) TV repairmen explained all this to the public, they wrote their congressmen, etc, it did no good.

 

That RCA TV I mentioned in an earlier post was in use in our family home for probably 20 years, although the tuner gave use trouble near the end it was still working when it was finally replaced by a color TV.

 

My Samsung is less than two years old and has a dark splotch. So, yeah. Really.

 

I title this screen grab: "Welcome to the Steve Hoffman Forum."

 

For some interesting reading, look at the Philco "Apple" picture tube, which was conceived in the 1950's, but didn't become a manufacturing reality until Sony's Trinitron.

http://www.myvintagetv.com/philco_apple_tube.htm
http://www.earlytelevision.org/apple_crt.html
http://www.earlytelevision.org/uniray.html

 

I always watched TV with my eyes, not my gonads.

 

They probably didn't like watching TV through the back of your head......

 

Those look like comfortable pants.

 

Correct, and color tubes produced more x-rays than monochrome tubes, supposedly. I had talked my parents into buying a color TV in late '66 or early '67, and then that news broke, and my mom refused to have one in the house. So we didn't get our color set until December of '68.

Steve: Thanks for posting the film. I love those old films that manufacturers made for training sales personnel and others. It's a nice "blast from the past" kind of thing for me. BTW, it's interesting how they dressed for work in the '50s as compared to today, isn't it? Very professional looking..

 

Relaxed fit.

jeff

 

Growing up, we had the Doctor, Dentist and TV Repair man's numbers taped to the wall next to the phone. Todays TV's are 100x more reliable than yester years.

 

Early color sets were finicky and extremely expensive. By the 70s I'm sure they were longer lasting and disposable (in that the cost of a new set no longer warranted the repair of an old one.)

 

Thanks to solid state devices!!!

 

Early solid state TVs were not all that reliable, it took a while for reliability of solid state TVs to equal that of the better tube ones. Well made tube TVs were by 1964 or so astonishingly reliable by the standards of the time and most manufacturers went from all tube to solid state in increments-the conversion was gradual and most sets were hybrids. Solid state sets WERE much cooler running and pulled less power, but by the same token tubes worked at high temperatures on purpose whereas heat was the enemy of solid state, and it still is.

It's astonishing how many tube TVs still work when plugged in. I visited a house a year or so ago where a late 1950s Zenith monochrome set with a blond cabinet set. It had a digital converter box on top. I asked the owner if it still worked. He turned it on and it did.

 

Agreed, the late CRTs seemed to crap out much more frequently than the 60's / 70's sets. we had sony and sanyo CRT TVs in the 90's that lasted less than 5 years. nothing like a 35" CRT pile of garbage.
On our 60's / 70's sets the rotary tuners seemed to fail quickly, but nothing else ever did except tubes.
Our first digital tuned TV (an early 80's panasonic) lasted forever.
were the first cable boxes rotary tuners? i seem to remember they were.

 

Some were, others were the multiple button switch type.



Since the digital revolution I've bought a couple of the old cable TV field strength meter/tuners used. They make a decent radio for FM or the VHF aero band and look cool on my desk. Original cost on these was heinous: I paid $20-25 each.

 

Loved the film, it went into such great detail about more than one technology field. Making their own tubes. And if the announcer is to be believed, they really did a lot of QA at all steps of the process. Very impressive.