Quote:
Originally Posted by bgadow
Well, I did it. I really can't recall the last time I handed over cold, hard cash for an old TV set & it would probably be a long time until I do it again but I'm now the proud owner of a Philco TV-123. It sure doesn't look like much as it sits today but I expect, in time, for it to become a cornerstone of my (shrinking) collection. This was one of the few models on my bucket list.
This was one that Nick Williams found; aside from disassembly & the addition of some rare tubes it's "as found". I was a little taken aback at first when I saw it in pieces but I quickly saw this as a blessing: this makes it worlds easier to move and will allow me to address things in stages. The cabinet is pretty scruffy. I had the pleasure of meeting up with both Al Hagovsky & Nick (et al) and Al spoke highly of Howard's Restor-A-Finish; I plan on picking up a can and giving it a whirl. The best news is that the crt is a strong testing RCA 21AXP22A with a '57 date code. While it would have been neat to me to have an original Sylvania-built crt this is sure nothing to sneeze at.
The chassis looks very clean (though it smells like a mouse house!) Philco seemed to be going for some kind of record judging by the number of caps in this thing. Somebody in engineering must have got a free trip to Vegas from Sprague for specifying all those black beauties! I probably had 2/3 of what I needed on hand but still put in a generous order to Just Radios for the rest. The chassis is marked "Run 1" so pretty early, I guess. I haven't dug around for date codes beyond the crt. I know there were some factory authorized mods installed on some of these but this one appears fairly stock.
I expect this to take quite a while; I'll update the thread as I move along.
PS: If someone smarter than me can knows how to rotate the images, go at it. They're correct on my computer but that's the way they uploaded.
|
As others have said, congratulations on finding this TV, as it is probably fairly rare. I'm sure once you have the set fully restored to as close to original as possible, you will enjoy it, even though you will have to use a converter box ahead of the tuner--unless, of course, you plan to watch only DVDs or VHS videos. Bear in mind, however, that since these early TVs were made long before VCRs were even thought of, you may have horizontal sync problems, the most noticable and the most severe of which may be horizontal pulling at the top of the picture.
BTW, I don't know what the point was of having color TV in the 1950s, as there couldn't have been that many color shows on the air at the time; moreover, most TV stations of that era were not equipped for color telecasting (and would not be until at earliest the 1960s), except perhaps for the stations in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles which were operated by the three (at the time) major television networks. NBC was the first American television network to broadcast 100 percent color programming, but that milestone wasn't reached until the mid-1960s. NBC preceded every color program from 1954 until 1975 with a full-color peacock spreading its feathers on the TV screen, with an announcer proclaiming "The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC."
ABC and CBS used similar color logos when they began color telecasting, some years after NBC did so; CBS' logo had the three letters "CBS" dropping down to the viewing area of TV screens, with the network's "eye" logo to the right, and the announcer would say "CBS presents this program in color." ABC's color logo was composed of the lower-case letters "ABC", superimposed on a large black dot on your TV screen and shown, of course, in color on color TVs. The announcement was "This is an ABC color presentation." Since color TV was so new at the time, these logos were not seen all that much since, as I mentioned, most TV programming, including network shows, was b&w; in the beginning, I am sure only very special programs were telecast in color.