Sylvania's Halo-Light .... Who Remembers? (1 Viewer)

[Jefferson]

Those are cool, but I prefer the ones that looked like a big piece of furniture, and also had a hi-fi set that pulled out, like my grandparents had. Is it a stereo? Is it a television set? Is it a big cradenza?

 

[Peter Kline]

Since we're reminiscing, when I was 7 or 8 my next door neighbors had a Philco tv. It had a 3" screen with a magnifing glass in front of it. Good for only two people at time to watch. In the mid-50s I used to stop by a tv store every day after school and stare at an RCA Color tv in the window. In 1958 my uncle bought one and it was a special treat to go to his house and see Living Color. The set wasn't too sharp and the colors tended to bleed. It probably need weekly adjustment.

 

[Matt Stryker]

You can also see the Predicta in Toy Story 2; when they watch the taped episode of "Woodys Roundup" thats what they're watching it on.
Awesome looking sets. And yes, I've seen the white dot .

 

[Steve Schaffer]

I was born in 1950, and to celebrate my dad bought our first tv, a 17" Admiral Radio/Phonograph/Television combination in a huge cabinet with doors on the front and a slide-out radio/record changer.

There was a row of adjustment knobs behind a little door under the screen for contrast, brightness, focus, horizontal hold, and vertical hold, with on-off volume and channel knobs on the left and right of the little door. By the time I was 4 years old I knew how to adjust all the knobs and became the remote control.

We only got 3 channels KRON NBC channel 4, KPIX CBS channel 5, and KGO ABC channel 7, out of San Francisco via a roof antenna. We lived in Fairfield, CA, 45 miles from SF and 6 miles from Travis AFB where my dad was stationned.

There was a little white dot which lingered on the screen for a minute or so after the set was turned off. The set would put out a small puff of acrid smelling smoke from the back and die about every 2 years. My dad would yank out a huge wax paper covered cylinder bigger than a toilet paper roll and replace it to restore operation. I think he "borrowed" these from spare parts for radar sets on base.

We had that set until 1958 when it was replaced by a 21" RCA b/w set which was much better and much more reliable. That beast wasn't replaced until we got our first color set in 1968, a 21" RCA with the newly available rectangular screen (color sets had round tubes masked at top and bottom for many years) and Automatic Fine Tuning--a major advance at the time. It was a huge Danish Modern console and cost $795 at a time when a fully loaded Cadillac could be had for $7000.

Our first Sony was one of those tiny 5" b/w "tummy tvs" that my mom got in 66.

 

[Philip_G]

man these stories don't make me feel bad about the 45" mitsubishi I dropped 1600 bucks on

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Does anyone here have the DVD with the very last Howdy Doody episode? It's shown just about EXACTLY as it was originally broadcast, and preserved on color videotape (I don't think they even had helical scan yet; I would love to see whatever monster machine recorded it!) Even on a new set it looks almost good enough to be a live broadcast- I'd love to hook a DVD player up to a vintage TV and watch it that way!
(Funny how the technical quality of TV gets better but the networks show less regard for picture quality by putting crap all over the screen!)

 

[Jack Briggs]

Oh, Jesse, don't get me started on that score.

After our 1964 Admiral color set, our parents sprung for a 1971 Admiral color console just in time for me to enjoy the Apollo 14 mission on it. But I spent all that time in my sister's bedroom, watching the mission unfold on the little Sony.

It was in 1978, long after I had already left home and even gotten married--we all make mistakes--that my parents finally purchased the set I told them to get: a 19-inch Sony. My father was absolutely enamored of it.

I still think about those old black-and-white sets from my childhood. It's almost frightening to think that one can measure his life in milestones marked by televisions. Those things really do play a big part in our lives. But, then, this is Home Theater Forum.

 

[Jefferson]

Jack, I've never heard it put so well. It is still a family "anecdote" that when i was 5 years old, i distiguished my two grandmothers by which one had the color tv.

 

[Andy_S]

I'm 27 and I remember the dot. The first TV I can remember was one of the big counsel ones. It was in color. We also had a smaller b&w one that had a built in radio (Flip a switch and it shut off the TV and turned on the radio). Neither had remotes.

 

[JasenP]

No one has mentioned the TV accesories yet!
Coathangers with aluminum foil shaped "just so" after months of testing other foil designs. It picked up channel 41 so we could watch "The Wolfman" on Shock Theater!!!, all I had to due was stand next to it.
Later, we had a little box that controlled the motor that moved the roof-mounted antenna. It had little stickers on the dial so you could mark what position gave the best reception for a particular channel.
You see, cable television came nowhere near our house until 1987. And my Mother wouldn't have one of those "gawdawful damn satellites" in her yard.

 

[Peter Kline]

I remember having my firend hold the indoor rabbit ears to get better reception. Unfortunately, he was along the of side the set so he couldn't see! (Eventually we moved the tv to another position). Ah, the days when airplanes flying low would interfer with reception - even in NYC.

 

[Jack Briggs]

And I remember how mangled rabbit ears would get after excessive fiddling with them. I even broke off a few rabbit ears inadvertently.

Thing is, as I bide my time between when I cancelled cable and before I subscribe to a DBS service, I am amazed at how much better some of the OTA signals I'm getting are compared with the overly compressed, overly processed garbage I saw on so-called "digital" cable. What with a library of more than 400 DVDs, as well as the call of the Internet, I'm just not in a hurry to get the dish.

Back to those Admiral sets, the color ones. What amazed me at the time was that the picture looked about the same on both of them, even though one was purchased in 1964 and the other in 1971. Admirals used RCA tubes. And the ones we got, believe it or not, were "tuned" (i.e., calibrated) by a man in the electronics shop at the wholesale hardware distribution firm for which my dad worked! (The firm was a major distributor for Admiral products in those days.)

The pictures on both sets had a distinctly greenish cast to them. Color TV didn't blow me away in the 1960s. But when my sis' brought home that little Sony in December 1970, I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It made watching television so pleasurable--the colors were so deep and rich, and the contrast so striking.

My first television--i.e., the first one I purchased for myself (albeit, for my then wife as well)--was a 15-inch Sony in 1977. It was a superb set. Breathtaking for its day. And the damn thing cost--discounted, no less--$500!

If any consumer electronics commodity has offered more for less over the years, it's the good ol' television.

 

[RobertR]

If any consumer electronics commodity has offered more for less over the years, it's the good ol' television.

I'll say! Today's models are incredibly cheap in constant dollars compared to sets of yore! I remember having to fiddle with the horizontal and/or vertical hold a LOT with the vintage 21" Motorola my parents had. I can't even remember the last time I had to do that with a modern set.

 

[Steve Schaffer]

There was a period in the early to late 60s when something like 80% of color tvs, of all brands, were actually entirely RCA chassis.

From 54ish, when color was first introduced, until a the late 50s-early 60s, only RCA and Magnavox made and marketed color sets. Most other makes, like Admiral, Philco, etc. did not even offer color tvs.

About a year after Bonanza debuted on NBC, suddenly virtually everybody was selling color sets, but the vast majority were actually RCA chassis--You could tell by the identical placement of the control knobs on many different brands--Tuning knob at top of a panel on the right side of screen, with small pull-on twist for volume knob just below it. Low on the right were 3 knobs for color tint and brightness, with others for contrast, hold, etc. behind a small door below the 3 knobs.

Within a few years, most biggies like Zenith and Motorola were making thier own chassis.

Anybody remember the first Motorola "solid state" (no vacuum tubes) sets with "works in a drawer". This had a bunch of printed circuits in a drawer that slid out from the right side of the screen for easy servicing.

By this time the law required all sets to have UHF as well as VHF tuners. Since UHF had channels 14 thru 69 vs only 13 for vhf, they did not have "clicks" at first but tuned with a stepless knob like an old radio. This made fine tuning or picking out an individual UHF channel much more difficult than with VHF.

Motorola solved this by having 5 mechanical preset buttons for UHF like the old car radios had.

 

[Peter Kline]

RCA was the prime manufactuer of the color tubes since it was their patents. When other companies saw that color tv was catching on they either licensed or developed their own designs. I think.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Those UHF tuners were a pain! The TV I grew up with was a 19-inch Zenith that had a 'free-wheeling' UHF dial; channel 44 had some great cartoons but my parents thought we didn't get that channel, finally I fiddled with it and got it to come in! We always had to put it on channel 6 to watch channel 5, then when we moved to the Sacramento area where there IS a channel 6 that came in on channel 5!
Our "second" TV that we kept in a spare room was a 13-inch RCA, which had a UHF dial that clicked really LOUD on each channel; since my parents didn't like me watching too much TV and most of the stuff I liked was on UHF (independent stations, before Fox, UPN and WB!), I'd turn the dial slowly with 2 hands to minimize the amount of noise it made when changing channels and getting caught watching TV when they didn't want me to
The Zenith died and it was replaced with a 25-inch Heathkit that my dad put together himself; while it was bigger than the Zenith it had to have channels manually programmed in and my dad didn't care about the weird UHF stations so I still watched the RCA most of the time. One time the TV got 'zapped' in a power outage resulting in channel 3 (the NBC affiliate) being wiped out from the tuner, so we had to watch it on the smaller TV until a couple years later my dad put in a new tuner.
After getting got our first VCR in 1985, it turned out the Heathkit would not let the VCR's signal go through so we had to get a new TV! We got a 26-inch RCA with stereo and A/V jacks, and it was a miracle that I could finally get any available UHF station just by punching in the channel numbers! (BTW a couple years after having this TV we got a free trial subscription to the local cable service and found the broadcast stations were WORSE than through the roof antenna, plus they didn't even carry every station we got, and NONE of the cable channels were in stereo so we had it taken out!)
BTW was anyone else ever asked the question "Do you get channel U"?
Another addition, but it bears repeating- I used to watch at LEAST 2 hours of TV a day, but that has now dropped to ZERO- I don't even have an antenna hooked up right now. Everything I watch on my 40-inch Mitsubishi is on disc.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Yet another random thought- anyone remember Spacephone? It was built into Zeniths in late 70s/early 80s and let you talk on the phone through the TV. I never actually saw this in use though it was advertised a lot. Sounds like it would be a pain if it muted the TV sound every time someone called.

 

[Jack Briggs]

Steve: The control-panel layout of the vintage RCA chassis you describe is identical to that 1964 color Admiral my parents bought. JB

You know sumpin? Because we associate so much of the commercial television programming with garbage, I think there's a tendency sometimes to disparage the televisions themselves. Not here at HTF, of course. But, really, televisions are remarkable--interlaced scanning and all.