Philco-Ford televisions,...how well engineered were they?
 

Question about Philco-Ford televisions in general,...mainly color sets from 1965 to 1973 before being sold to GTE,...how well engineered were they,and in general,were they reliable sets?

When I worked in a repair shop in the early 80s, Philcos were considered (by us anyway) to be bottom-tier junk, along with Sylvanias and Magnavoxes of the era. Note that we sold Zenith and Quasar so those were mortal enemies. We weren't a "Philco town" so didn't see that many of them for service, but they did come in occasionally.

That said, Shango has a video of a Philco color set that he pulled out of a dump somewhere and I remember being surprised at the level and quality of engineering that went into it. This was back in a day when other brands were selling hybrids still, and this thing was a fully modular chassis and had a pretty advanced switching power supply and SCRs in the horizontal section.

They were a mixed bag. Before Ford they were junky IMHO. Then
they built one of the first hybrids & that was a great chassis right
up there with RCA & Zenith. When they went solid state the B&W's
were very good but the color sets went back to crap. until Sylvania
bought them & they had Syl chassii.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

the ford sets were pretty damn good.roundies had an excellent crt and the chassis was very well built and produced fine pictures right up there with the top brands.our first roundie was a philco ford set.very good performer and the picture was amazing.the hybrid sets were outstanding.early solid state were good but too many bad modules.we would have to go throw several before we got a good one.way too many come backs in central ohio.we had some really bad suppliers here.seems like we got bottom of the barrel parts.the sylvania built sets were good. they had the one piece chassis like the sylvania portable sets.fairly good quality.some had top notch crts while others were not so good.the early philco sets were pretty low level imho.

Back in the late 70's I owned that exact model Philco in Shango's video, it had a good picture but it was a POS. I bought it used so maybe that affected my outlook.

I saw Shango's set, pretty neat design I thought. It reminded me of early microcomputers that use the S-100 bus.

On a related thought, Philco was doing a lot of research in computers in the mid 50's. They even owned their own semi-conductor plant. I have a few early Philco radios that used their own transistors. The first all-transistor car radio was made by Philco for the 1957 Chrysler 300 cars.
The first GE AM-FM portable radio used some Philco Transistors. They were a little larger and had a neat appearance. :thmbsp:

The hybrid roundys circa 1968 were excellent products despite being the most inexpensive full-size color sets that year.

They tend to have unusually excellent convergence and a sharp detailed picture.

Also the first production car I know of with quad rounds. Leave it to Ma Mopar to set standards for most others. I believe Chrysler vehicles were the first to feature lift-up door handles as well.

I must look up that GE radio, I'm always game for checking out unusual designs. :yes:

This gives a nice history and explanation of why transistor car radios came, went, then came back again!

https://www.allpar.com/stereo/Philco/index.html

All of the early transistor radios, including car radios, used germanium transistors. They did work, but were noisy and sensitive to heat.

In the 1960s, better transistors were being developed, and the prices of the silicon transistors had started to come down; by 1963, all of the OEM car radios were solid state.

This is probably the real reason why early transistor car radios got discontinued so fast. Not some grand tube conspiracy (to be honest, allpar tends to bend a lot of car history...). Early transistors pretty much sucked, because nobody really knew how to make a good one, because nobody had really ever made them before. Space charge tubes were pretty short lived anyway...

During the Philco-Ford era, I'd regard the Hybrid Roundie chassis in that era, 1967-1968 to their discontinuance, as their best set. Those while among the cheapest full size Color sets, had a superb picture, and were as dependable as any RCA or Zenith set or anybody's available then. And the best set for the money. :tresbon:

As coincidence would have it, just today Shango uploaded a new video of one of those Philco roundies that he found in the desert someplace. He's going to give it a new (to the set) CRT after cataract surgery. Solid-state tuner and IF, tube everything else. I thought it was curious, as the entire chassis is "backwards" with the HV cage on the left and power transformer on the right.

Maggie and one or two others built them mirrored too.