Hey Ceebee, It's great to have a collector from down under on our forum!

That is a hard question to answer, I enjoy restoring pre-1960 RCA Color, and each set has a special part of the evolution. CTC 2: The first set sold to the public. CTC 2B: The first 21" (The 15 " was never meant to be produced) CTC 4: 1st reduced tube count full-scale production. CTC 5: Further circuit reduction (too much !) 1st set under $500.00 CTC 7: First all-glass tube, practical and reliable design. CTC 9: Improvements on CTC 7 design, many of these sets ran well into the 1970's.

I enjoy the history...RCA lost money making these sets but in the end they helped the product evolve. It was my intention to have one of each in working order (I do). I have a few doubles that I will be getting rid of.

If there is anything I can do to help with your restoration efforts, please let me know.

mmm..and which one do you actually watch at nite....my first colour set (a philips K9 from 1974) ..one of the last with a delta array tube, produced far better colour than anything I see these days...is still my favourite to watch anything where colour is important.

This is no wonder. Philips and a few other brands improved their video section. Even the first Philips colour tv sets had a much more contrast richer and brighter picture than most of the others.
Do you have any hybrid color tv sets in Australia or were they all solid state?

we did have some late Decca hybrids....non solid state audio sections.

but they didn't stay on the market for long.

When I first read about my CTC-5 "Special" being the set where they first went with the inferior narrowband color decoding, I was disappointed, like I had the 'turd' or 'dog' of antique color tvs...but then figured out that this same not-as-good type of decoding was used for almost all TVs after this point, so I think the Special gets sort of bad rap in this respect it doesn't deserve. CTC-16s etc had the same non-I/Q decoder. Hell, did they ever go back to full IQ decoding even to the modern day other than a few isolated sets?