>>Garbage Electric anything>>

Hey the little GE Porta-a-Color I picked up at an antique store for 60 bucks looks and performs like new, I'm proud of this little humble, all-tube set. It's the first version that they made 39 years ago ('66) Certainly as good a picture as a new set of the same screen size made today (that all last about a year and then blow up). I have done absolutely nothing to the set, worked like a charm when I took it home. I just watched Everybody Loves Raymond on it 3 days ago! : )

I have 5 or 6 of the Portacolors, some of which work well. I have not yet investigated the ones that do not. These seem to last pretty well with the only weakness that I have found being carbon tracking in some of the controls on the back. Some of these have 700 volts of boost voltage applied.

When the carbon tracking was cleaned out, these sets began working well.

However, that being said, I also have some early GE B&W portables that look very neat, but were very poorly made. All tubes, including the hot horizontal output and damper were mounted on the PC board. These become charcoal and I have only found a couple that I could even hope to restore.

Contrast this to the B&W Zeniths of the era with all tubes on a metal chassis. These are usually fairly easy to get working very well. Overall, GE quality was very poor in the 1960s compared to Zenith or RCA. I would say the the Portacolors are the exception, not the rule.

Re: Magnavox...I have several Magnavox color sets from '66-'68, all work great except some have weak CRT's. Only problems have been bad resistors in 6BK4 circuit and a disintegrated tube socket due to heat...otherwise seem to be well designed. Maybe are the ones that you had trouble with different chassis?
My sets do have the "chromatone" feature that you mention.

I started repairing televisions for a shop in my home town in 1977 when I was still a teen, most already were 7-12 years old when they came in and saw LOTS of use as the people in my area were mostly middle class with only one color set.
This was a good indicator of which ones would last the longest. Of course Zenith held up the best with RCA following, RCA had that common problem with the power resistor heat buildup under the chassis causing the terminal strip and nearby wires becoming brittle then falling off.
Motorolas were decent too, just not too many techs understood them.
GE sets would get real bad with many hours of use, with the previously mentioned pc board problems.
Magnavox had the brittle board problem also, sometimes you would go to put a new tube in and away it would crumble!
As with automobiles, most tv manufacturers had their best and worst models,
I have repaired a lot of televisions in my time and can say that I really didn't mind working on any of them because that is what I was supposed to do...repair them, not spend time bitching about their inherent weaknesses.
I enjoyed going to work every day and dealing with the customers, handling calls and most of all getting those sets working again!

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Couple of things come to mind.
Either they didnt want to piss with it and just get the customer
for a checkout charge. Or thier a dealer and wanted to sell them
a new set.

You're probably right, but the irony of the situation is that it's the exact opposite when it comes to new car dealers, they make FAR more money on warranty work and general repairs than the sale of the car...you'd never know it by their shoddy backshops though!

Anthony

Exactly Andy,
I had a young tech that I hired on and he was full of attitude! Pretty soon he started hating almost every brand and giving them the "B.E.R."(beyond economical repair)tag.
One day I went through two of the sets that he said were "BER" and found bad solder on one and a bad cap in the scan supply on the other! Needless to say I had a talk with him the next day..
That kind of stupidity can make a shop that strictly services electronics go out of business fast, not to mention it is unfair to the customer who is most likely trying to save money by repairing their old set.
Granted, If the tv was on it's last legs with a weak crt and assorted problems I would never try to nurse it along just for a buck.
In my shop we not only repaired them we also replaced any common problem parts, cleaned them inside and out and replaced any missing doors, etc. So they were more remanufactured than repaired and this worked very well along with the 90 day warranty I gave.

That may be true when it comes to cars. However I speak from
experience when I say that warranty work in consumer electronics
and appliances much of the time is a joke. In most cases the company
will only pay you a fixed amount regardless of the time spent. So
you might make out ok if your looking at a simple repair. If thats not
the case then you can start loosing money real quick depending on
what you run into. In general the process of running a warranty through
the system from start to finish is kind of a PITA within itself. Its necessary
though if you plan to work on units for a new dealer. Just have to take
the good with the bad.

As far as warranty work, When we were a Zenith authorized dealer/service center in the 80's it wasn't a whole lot of fun and you wouldn't get rich either!
Glen is right about the time alotted for a specific repair and the small amount you would get. A tech had to be really good and quick to make just a little money.

Let's face it guys, if nothing ever failed, we would have been out of a job.

Very true, but there are definitely some sets that are more of a pain to deal with than others......same thing applies to cars. One of the reasons the more expensive cars cost more labor-wise is not because that's what the market will bear, but because they are horribly designed from a repair viewpoint....often needing several "layers" of things removed to get to the problem.

In my book there's no excuse for this. Often times things are designed solely for ease of assembly without a thought given to servicing. The hardest design is the simplest one.

Anthony

I can relate with HVAC. Bryant's residential furnaces use glowplugs for igniting the gas. In the 80% units, they aren't too bad to replace. In the 90% (single and two stage) they are a bitch to get at. It takes longer to get it out and put it back in than it does to actually replace the part.

Unless the part(s) are under warranty, I always leave them with the client. I have replaced a few glow plugs. After the furnace is back up and running, I always show the client where the plug failed. In all cases, i show the client the problem. I did this when i did TV repair in the 80's (I was in my teens). To me, showing the client the problem and why I did what I did is the most important thing.

motorola rates right up there
 

i never saw a good picture on any motorola color set the red's were always orange and detail was non-existant. I guess that's why so many old people liked them because of the soft picture.

Early Zenith color portables are a bit soft, but I think that's the 15LP22 tube in them. Or mine just needs a rebuild :(

I know roundies can be fun to get rebuilt - what about early generation rectangulars?

I delt with an Zenith CRT in a Philips with a Tiwanese chassis & as useual the CRT is always crook, The CRT in that one was made in '93.

Were these CRT's made by Rauland?

Magnavox went to shit just before the sale to Phillips. I've seen many that had 1/4 watt resistors where a 1/2 watt was specified. This is the last of the hybrids, and the first solid-states. Oh yeah, the module connectors used to fry too.

I had a Magnovox (or a Sylvania maybe) that was a rock, 27 incher bought in 1988 and lasted 15 years and still had a like new picture and never broke. Was even built in Tennessee. When I gave it away for an HDTV last year it still worked perfectly.

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For a short time, I worked for a place in Milwaukee called Ken Mueller TV on 92nd St, off Capitol. It's gone now. This would have been around 1988 or so.

I kept the floor clean, did deliveries, mowed the grass, did a little sales, very entry level. That crooked old jackass used to make me put on a lab coat with a Zenith logo and pretend I was a tech and go to little old ladies' houses and tell them a line of bullshit to make them buy a new TV. Needless to say, I didn't work there long, and remember vaguely calling him a crooked old fock in front of customers when I stormed out.

Ahhh.....the privileges of youth....

Yeah. The Phillips built Maggies were tough sets. Once the soldering was done....

I soldered a bunch of them.

I saw fires in more than one of the first console Maggie solid states. Now, the 1960's console color chassis were great. Rarely did more than a tube or 2, and an occasion flyback to one. Then, replacement flybacks became very hard to get. Then I started trashing some of the prettiest cabinets you have ever seen...

I remember a wave of Sylvanias that were burning resistors galore in the video sections. D12's I think. I know of a couple of early 1960's GE roundies that are still running. They need some work, but basically look good for over 40 year old TV's One of them was on a maintenance agreement until 1979.

The pre-Philips magnavox solid states seem to have a lot of trouble with the modules. Every one of these I have worked on has had intermittents on the modules.
The Greeneville? Tennessee built N.A.P. magnavox sets do seem to be high quality...we repaired one recently at the shop that just had a bad cap, found it with the ESR meter and it has a great picture again. My parents bought one in about 91 and it is still going great.
It seems like the Mag sets went to pot at the time they started branding them "Philips-Magnavox"...these seem like el-cheapo sets from what I've seen, like they are Funai's or something.

In the mid 90's Phillips moved chassis design from the Knoxville office to Singapore, went down hill with the move and were designed with COST as the driving factor.

Unless the part(s) are under warranty, I always leave them with the client. I have replaced a few glow plugs. After the furnace is back up and running, I always show the client where the plug failed. In all cases, i show the client the problem. I did this when i did TV repair in the 80's (I was in my teens). To me, showing the client the problem and why I did what I did is the most important thing.

I run a small auto repair shop with a couple friends and we make a habit of doing the same thing. Doesnt matter how big or small the part is we keep it to give the customer the option of seeing it. I find that people are more willing to pay the bill, especially the diagnostic fee, if they can hold the source of the problem in their hand. Plus theres no way they can say that you 'didnt do anything' . Especially it the part is hidden in the engine. Even if its just a tuneup, i keep every part till the customer says throw it out.
And from my end on the electronics repair end of it, i brought a TV in for service not too long ago and the small, out-of-the-way-hidden-down-a-one way-road repair shop kept the defective part for my TV (cracked HV boot arcing) to show me exaty what failed. Let me tell you i will definatly go back to them again because they cared enough about my satisfaction to do that for me!

Sorry its off topic, i just had to add my comment :D

Some of the Magnavox TVCR/DVD combos you see in stores ARE Funai. They've taken over Sylvania completely.

I LOVED working on the Panasonic-built Magnavox VCR's. When Funai took over, I stopped doing repairs on them. Phillips sets are no better than anyone else anymore. Thats too bad, too, because, if I owned a company, I would want my product to be of quality, and NOT just getting by. It was a sad day when the accountants took over the manufacturing process.

Off the soapbox.

Around 1981, I would buy Sampo flybacks by the case. The county jail had a load of them. They rarely had other problems, at least for me.

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My vote for worst is the Magnavox T952-T971 hybrid portables. One huge PC board, slide controls and a knack for melting a hole in the back cover next to the horizontal output tube. That piece of junk came out around 1973 and we had a 100% failure rate during warranty period. On top of that it weighed a ton and had a small plastic handle that was prone to break.....

I dunno who makes the transpot in my 1999 Philips VHS, but the picture quality is still excellent now. The Philips incidentally was a replacement for a top-of-the-line Panasonic from the previous year that had rave reviews. I had two of them in series and both were problematic - the Philips has been fine :)

My next TV will probably actually be either a Philips or Toshiba as well - UK spec Sonys are now not so competitive.

90% of today's sets.
The "Teleolcolor" with Romanian components and Polish color CRT's.
The Soviet colour sets - better they the Soviet CRT's (luckly, "Elcrom" could be fitted with "GoldStar" picture tubes

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I really do not miss working on VCR's...it seems like VCR's are fortunately finally are starting to quit being used. I really enjoy old electronics but I somehow have very little nostalgia for VCR's. (except for maybe the old mechanical Beta and 3/4")...VHS units always seemed to have all of those complicated mechanisms with cheap plastic parts, tons of belts and stuff, bad caps, tape oxide shedding.

I agree with Randy's opinion of the Magnavox 952. It was unreliable and poorly made. I still have some slide controls in stock.

But I must vote the Olympic 910 color TV for the all time worst.

The circuit boards were so bad that the material disappeared without even attempting to solder. It needed so many jumpers that it looked hand wired when it left the shop. It came with a bag of parts just to make it work. Once installed, the picture quality was so bad that customers brought them in for service when they were operating up to Olympic standards. The gain was so poor that when the antenna was removed there was no snow or white noise, just a dim glow on the CRT. They never had enough brightness and forget contrast. The picture was a pale washed out blur that looked like you were viewing through an oily piece of paper. When you were finished fixing it, it looked like you hadn't started.

Who is surprised that Olympic was one of the early TV fatalities?

Don

A cow-orker had a phillips maggie that was 'made in the US' according to the back panel. not a bad set, it toasted a horz transistor after a storm once, I fixed it, $5 for the transistor and a few lunch breaks and it's running gain for who knows how long but it's running. Looks better than the RCA CTC-187 that another cow-orker brought in to me.

Anyone know what the common problems are on the 187? It's totally dead and they'd like it to not be. Sounded like it was acting up in the micro area - classic Thompson bad soldering I guess? Where do i start looking? Power supply? Micro? Circuit City?

I love V.C.R.'s!.

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I've noticed the modern JVC, GE, and RCA sets are total garbage. The GE tops at the worst, RCA and JVC sets next. In the US, these sets are either assembled in mexico or china it seems, and the design is just so poor. The CRTs look like crap. The sets I've liked are toshiba flat screens and sony wegas, which have beautiful sharp pictures.

Here in Italy good television sets are long gone! The only maker of high quality tv sets that also sells tvs here is Bang and Olufsen.Another good one is Loewe.Best european brands (Telefunken,Saba,Nordmende,Grundig,Itt Schaub Lorenz...)are long gone. Unfortunately almost every brand (cheap or less cheap) is turning to plasma and lcd technology! What a shame! How can people prefer such products that at the best produce a rather poor picture compared to picture tube based sets?Is it fancy design enough to justify paying thousands euro to buy an lcd or plasma television?

I've got three old 21" round color sets and love them to death but I'd have to be smoking something potent and illegal to agree that any of them even come close to a really nice bright 60" plasma set with 3000:1 contrast showing an HDTV program and at eye level on the wall instead of on the floor. Or even standard definition program for that matter. I'd even pick my 51" crt-based projection set over the roundies if it comes to what I would want to watch a couple of hours of tv on a night, sorry. (And at least it still has real picture tubes in it! : ) I mean it's just like my Victrola, I love that thing too and it's really cool playing my acoustic records on it all day but I'm not going to say it sounds better than my hi-fi with 5.1 sound. But I use the Victrola a ton more than my tvs since I don't have to worry about frying a flyback ; ) ..Frenchy

Not vintage but I think the absolute worst are the newer Philips tvs some of them still branded Magnavox.Just had a 32" in only a year old with a bad flyback.At least they did one thing right.The flyback was putting an excessive amount of voltage on the ABL line due to the shorted internal rectifiers but they had a protection device rated at 35 volts on that line to ground.It is similar to the line device in some tvs that usually fails shorted.Otherwise this voltage would have went directly into the jungle(tv on a chip) ic and fried it.On this particular set it is a surface mount device with lots of pins.No picnic to change.The flyback was really cheap.Less than $20 bucks which was surprisinng for an OEM flyback but the whole set is made cheap.The master G2 adjustment is critical on this set as these sets shutdown if it's not right.What a pain turning it back on again til you get it right.IMO the picture was crap on this set as it was lacking in contrast and sharpness.The color tracked very poorly from channel to channel and just a crappy picture.But this is normal for these sets as I've seen several.Had a Walmart special Sanyo sitting beside it and the Sanyo blew the Magnavox away.What junk!