How expenisve was a black and white tv set in late '70's and early '80's

[Telecolor 3007]

I've read (includig here) that trhough allmost all households had a color tv by the mid - late '70's, color tv sets where still expensive and remained so up untill the '80's. But having a black and white set as the 2nd set was also expensive or was cheaper?

[Eric H]

It depends on size, but a typical 19" B&W set in the early 70's was usually somewhere around $100 to $150 depending on quality and features. That was still a lot of money at that time.

[Telecolor 3007]

So it was hard for a family in 1974-1978 to get a second tv set in the house?

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007

So it was hard for a family in 1974-1978 to get a second tv set in the house?

Depends most people by the early 60s had a monochrome set. If in the early 70s a family bought it's first color TV and didn't or couldn't trade in their existing monochrome set then they would keep that older monochrome set as a second TV.

There were probably also cases where a family started with a cheap mid 50s portable someone had before marriage, upgraded to a 21-23" monochrome console a few years later when married and on better financial ground, and a few years later in the late 60s early 70s upgraded to color without ever trading anything in and ended up with 3 working TVs.

Some color sets were cheap IIRC in 1968 a base model portacolor was around 200 and the cheapest roundy (a metal cabinet Philco) was something like 50-100 more than the Portacolor.

Working class folks back then often were craftsmen and tinkerers and in addition to the option of buying second hand TV (trade ins, sets elderly people going in to nursing homes were selling off etc) they also might know enough to take a set from the trash and fix it to use as a second set... Many members here got their first set off the curb and made it work.

[zeno]

We were a Zenith dealer & sold Admiral also in the '70s. A basic 12 inch
Zenith sold for $120. Upgrade models were $10 to $30 more. RCA would
have been the same, only Sony cost more. All others ran from about $80
& up. A 14" Zenith color ( tubes) ran $300 IIRC & when they switched to
13" solid state a little more. A FAR superior set by 10 times IMHO.
Typical family had a 23/25 inch wood console as the main set & maybe
a small B&W or color. If you were well off you had a den set of 19" or 25"
along with a 12-19 inch color bedroom set. The kids got 12" B&W or
some other hand me down set for there rooms. Its pretty amazing how
the prices stayed level during the 70's. Eventually pressure from Japan
& Korea drove prices down. With all solid state sets it was hard to
build a bad set. Even GE, Admiral, Sharp etc came out with good sets
after making mostly junk in the tube days.

enuf fer now
73 Zeno
LFOD !

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by zeno

... Its pretty amazing how
the prices stayed level during the 70's...

The 70's were a time of general inflation, so the steady price of color TVs represented a steady decrease in real cost. As black and white became a commodity, they were the first sets to move production out of the US.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by zeno

...With all solid state sets it was hard to
build a bad set...

Witness to this was Consumer Reports, going from critical comparison of brand reliability to a general opinion that reliability was good for every maker's solid state models.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007

So it was hard for a family in 1974-1978 to get a second tv set in the house?

Not really, but for the most part, most had one color TV and if they had a second or third set(s), most often, black and white. I had a 12 inch RCA in my room and if the color ever needed fixing, it did double duty as a backup set. Some other families might have had 2nd color, most often 17 or 19 inch vs the 23 or 25 they have.

Well, at that time, a small 9 to 12 incher, you could have for $100, sometimes on sale for $75 or $80, Mom got the RCA for me at around $80 ot $88. Bigger sets like 17 or 19 inchers, maybe $120 to $150.

[bgadow]

Everyone I knew in that era was middle-class. Most had a 25" color console; the only person I knew with just one bw set was my grandfather who could well afford color but was cheap. (He eventually upgraded to a 15" GE color set in the early 80s.) One aunt/uncle had a pair of 19" Sylvania Supersets instead of one console.

About 1980 another aunt/uncle were remodeling and they had an early 60s GE bw portable that they gave us for Christmas. This was put in my sisters room; a few years later someone gave me a late 60's GE color table model (23v) which was junk, really, but it was better than nothing and gave me bragging rights! I remember eyeballing a 19" Zenith bw portable at the local dealer in the early 80s. I think it had been there a while as I asked about it and the owner knocked the price down significantly, from around $189 to $139 or something like that. When I bought my first new set it was a 12" bw Midland from Western Auto, the same $69-89 price that you could get just about everywhere from various brands in the 80's.

While color consoles were considered very expensive you could often get them financed and some areas had rent-to-own places like we have everywhere now.

[JohnCT]

My experience is the same as Zeno's.

I can't recall selling a B&W console in the 70s, but we sold a lot of B&W portables for kitchens, dens, or bedrooms. I remember early 70s RCA tube 12" B&W selling for about a hundred dollars, and 15" with an impact type remote for about $150.

John

[Colly0410]

Up to the 1970's most working class people here in England rented their TV's, often with a coin meter on the the back, my parents were like this. In 1972/73 they bought a Sony KV 1800 colour set that cost nearly 300 pounds, they also received a free Elizabethan T12 black & white portable that I still have. When going colour here you had to pay for the TV plus a colour TV licence that was more expensive that a black & white licence & had to be renewed every year...

[nasadowsk]

I always found the UK's TV license a bit funny, and the fact that color cost more, even more bizzare. Like it was sucking extra signal out of the air, or something like that...

Anyway, my parents got a 19" RCA portable in the early 70's, it sat on the shag rug in the family room for years. Red rug, dark brown wall paneling. Once the trophy collection on there ran out of room and the ceiling had to be raised a second time (!), the rug and paneling went away. We have no pictures of the original ceiling - the raised one with my dad's record caribou on it is the oldest I know of, and that's old.

Poor TV cooked on that rug.

The color went out around '82 or so. Around '86, they replaced it with another RCA. I remember being so amazed that it came on instantly, that I just stood there turning it on/off with the remote the first day we got it. Was a Colortrak 2000. Eventually died from that weird tuner issue

My grandma on my mom's side had an old tube color RCA (25"). Had a wavy picture - HK short? The panel where the speaker was pulled open for the color, hold adjustments. Popped a few 6GH8s, a 6BK4, 3a3s, a flyback, and a few other sundry tubes. No idea what chassis it was (I want to say 38).

The one on my dad's side had a Zenith.

You can guess which one lasted longer.

Trinitrons always commanded a premium. They were never cheap sets.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by nasadowsk

I always found the UK's TV license a bit funny, and the fact that color cost more, even more bizzare. Like it was sucking extra signal out of the air, or something like that...

Anyway, my parents got a 19" RCA portable in the early 70's, it sat on the shag rug in the family room for years. Red rug, dark brown wall paneling. Once the trophy collection on there ran out of room and the ceiling had to be raised a second time (!), the rug and paneling went away. We have no pictures of the original ceiling - the raised one with my dad's record caribou on it is the oldest I know of, and that's old.

Poor TV cooked on that rug.

The color went out around '82 or so. Around '86, they replaced it with another RCA. I remember being so amazed that it came on instantly, that I just stood there turning it on/off with the remote the first day we got it. Was a Colortrak 2000. Eventually died from that weird tuner issue

My grandma on my mom's side had an old tube color RCA (25"). Had a wavy picture - HK short? The panel where the speaker was pulled open for the color, hold adjustments. Popped a few 6GH8s, a 6BK4, 3a3s, a flyback, and a few other sundry tubes. No idea what chassis it was (I want to say 38).

The one on my dad's side had a Zenith.

You can guess which one lasted longer.

Trinitrons always commanded a premium. They were never cheap sets.

A good friend of the family had a son that lived in the UK. They had a color TV that they rented. I guess, they reasoned that there was an advantage to it instead of owning it. The rental covered the maintenance as well as the TV tax.
The BBC does not depend on advertising revenue, as I understand it!

[Mad-Mike]

I grew up from the early 80's till the late 90's. I don't think 2 TV's became commonplace until the late 1980's. First person I knew was a rich family member in the late 1980's.

Our first second TV was a J.C. Penney (RCA) B&W TV that I had my Atari 2600 hooked up to in my bedroom when I was eight in 1990, I got it from my half sister, daughter of said rich family member. It was replaced by a Trinitron that got hit by lightning and then a brand new Zenith in 1993 whose tube went dim by 1998.

[DavGoodlin]

The last BW TV I recall unpacking for a customer was a 19" RCA model AFR-XXX, 1981. I think it was discounted to $130.

Around the rural area where I lived , many folks bought GE out of loyalty to a local furniture-appliance store. They started selling Magnavox about '78 , around the time I began working for the repairman that rented space in part of their warehouse. Ready to retire, he hated solid state and referred all those to another shop. He was hanging his hat on keeping all the pre-SS GE, Magnavox and RCA tube color sets going for his customers.

I saw many GE monochrome sets there but usually those folks had another brand of color set, when asked in a H.W Sams way "what else needs fixing". I even saw a console BW or two, and those people lived on hilltops where a GE could pick up more than 1 channel. MX-MY-AY, AB, AC -chassis

Neither brand they sold was really outstanding if using an antenna. If you lived in one of the bad locations, many would get Zenith or RCA for the "big tv".