Earliest manufacturers to abandon mechanical tuners
 

I know that some cheaper color TVs retained the standard VHF and UHF mechanical tuners until 1993, when the closed-caption mandate went into effect and many of these sets were cheaper Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese imports, but Zenith and RCA still offered sets with mechanical tuners at least until the late '80s and possibly the early '90s (especially Zenith).

With that said, I was wondering about companies that dumped mechanical tuners early on. Two that come to mind are Sony and Magnavox. I recall seeing one 12" Sony commercial-grade set from about '82 and it still had rotary tuning, but I don't think I've seen a consumer-grade Sony color set newer than about '78 that had mechanical rotary tuners.

NAP (Magnavox, Sylvania, and Philco) was another one that seemed to have dumped mechanical tuning before most others. Today, I brought home a 13" Magnavox that uses a 13C3 chassis. It's from November of 1985 and it uses rotary tuners, but that's the newest NAP set that I've seen with that type of tuner.

I'm sure the reason Zenith and RCA kept the mechanical tuners for as long as they did is because they had a huge senior citizen following, and a lot of older folks were more comfortable with mechanical tuners. When I was selling used TVs in the '90s, I had a few older customers who told me, "I want a TV with a regular tuner because I might mess up one of those with buttons on it."

Interestingly for all of RCA and Zenith's clinging to turret tuners for Senior and Discount specials, they were also among the first to offer varactor tuned sets. The first Zenith flatchassis CCII sets in 1972 offered varactor tuning on remote models (one of my Avantis is exactly that), and the 1969 RCA 2000 model offered varactor tuning for VHF.

The big 2 of TV knew how to offer enough variety to appeal to both the tech hungry well to do and those who were cheap or old-fashioned.

The 1971 40BC50 Zenith had a modified solid state Gold Video Guard tuner with varactor tuning.

A GE appliance salesman ( factory ) told me it costs more to use a mechanical clock than to use a digital clock. But the cheapest GE ranges still had them.
This was to create a step, please cheap buyers including apartmens & condos.
They also came with only one oven rack. Story there !
Same with TV's IMHO. If you look at Zenith & RCA the chassis is otherwise near identical so its easy to please them all. Some folks are just cheap to a fault.
After seeing a set with a comb filter & saying how great it is but wont pay
an extra 5$ for it. These same people wouldnt pay a dime to watch the
Statue of Liberty take a leak !

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

In 1987, Dad was looking for a replacement 13" color TV to replace the tube set in our motorhome that no one would work on because it had tubes in it. At one store, they had a 13" Emerson with regular tuners for $149.95. The next model up had 12 or 14 buttons and was varactor-tuned set, with no remote, and I think it was $189. The one up from that was remote and cable ready, with a red LED channel display, and I think it was $229. Dad bought the cheapest one, which was fine for the RV. However, when he started alternating the set between the RV and his bedroom, where he had cable, he started having regrets about not buying the remote control, cable ready set. I think he would have liked the latter much better, because he could get all the cable channels on it and he wouldn't have had to get out of bed to turn off the TV.

Here in Britain mechanical rotary tuners mostly went out in the late 1960's/early 70's when new TV's were UHF only & had push button tuners, the exceptions were the early Sony KV 1300's & 1800's that had rotary UHF tuners, also some cheap black & white portables had rotary UHF as well... Up until 1955 all TV in Britain was on 5 low band channels & many sets were fixed tuned to one channel, when ITV fired up in 1955 new TV's would have rotary tuners with 5 low band channels (1 to 5) & 8 high band channels. (6 to 13) Some TV's had the channels on the tuner out of sequence, we had a TV were channel 4 (BBC) was next to channel 8, (ITV) on the other side of 8 was 5, also 1 & 9 was next to each other, this was for viewers in London & Belfast where BBC was on channel 1 & ITV on channel 9. The set makers did this so you only had to click once to change from BBC to ITV as they were the only 2 channels you could get back then...

Here in Brazil, from the early 70's the rotary tuners fell out especially on color TV, and for 80's almost none have rotary turners, except for some B&W (most B&W sub it for a continuous potentiometer varactor turner at that time).

Here in the US Zenith did something similar in the 1950s with channel arrangement. Any single city would never have stations on adjacent channels so they'd skip every other number then put the skipped numbers on the other half of the dial. Adjacent cities would have adjacent channel numbers so if you lived in the fringe area half way between say Chicago and Milwaukee and could get stations from both cities on a tall antenna with a rotor you could tune through the Chicago half of the dial, rotate the antenna to Milwaukee, tune the Milwaukee half of the dial, rotate back to Chicago and repeat.

I once used (in a hollyday - it was an tv in the room of the apartament of the host) a Romanian export version of a 'Sport' portable tv. I had rotary tuner. Since it could recive Romanian tv station, I doubt that it was U.S.A. export version, but I wonder what coutries in Europe still used this kind of tuners in the '70's and '80's.
Romanian made tv sets stoped using rotary tuners in the '70's, with the adevent of the hybrid sets.

We had a Zenith F chassis when I was growing up that had a "slidey" varactor tuner. It had a square knob that you slid up and down the entire front of the set to select the channels. I think it had VHF and 2 UHF positions. Same guts as the one-knob and remote sets of the same era, but I have never been able to find a picture of the set we had.

That set was in E & F lines. It came in remote or manual, 17 & 19"
14 position selector you could set to any channel in any order. The
number tags either had a hole or not for band switching.

Zeno

Note: My brother gave my family a 17" Sony Trinitron Color TV set for a Christmas gift, in 1977, a 1978 model. Apparently the last of the knob tuned Trinitrons when 17" was the biggest commonly sold by Sony in the USA.