19" Curtis Mathes from '78...a $1 estate sale find
 

Honestly, I've never been a huge fan of Curtis-Mathes TV's and some of them were the most overpriced, overrated junk that was made; but, when I saw this 19" color set from '78 at an estate sale for $1, I felt sorry for it and adopted it.

I have not pulled the back; but, it looks like it was made by NEC and when I fired it up, it still has a bright raster with good grey scale; so, we know the tube is good. This set is fairly heavy and might turn out to be decent.

I opened it up and it indeed uses an NEC chassis, with lots of cigarette paste.

The TV fires up; but, the vertical is shrunken a bit, the purity and convergence is off, and there are some other issues.

The TV was made in November of '78; but, the CRT is date-coded the 22nd week of '79 and is a 19VJQP22 CM-badged RCA (EIA 274). That tells me that this set most likely got a CRT replacement under warranty.

Oddly enough, this set has "instant on" and this is the newest set I've seen with that feature. I will disable it, when I fix the set.

Howdy, I love your YouTube videos, and I hope you make a repair video out of this TV, would be interesting to see how you go about disabling the "instant on" feature and also how you go about figuring out if a TV has "instant on" or not.

I had adopted a 1974 GTE/Sylvania 25" Console Color TV from 1974 from its original owners and I was wondering if that TV would of had "instant on" or not and how to figure that out.

Look at the power switch. If it's a 2 wire switch It's NOT instant on, if the switch has more wires it's probably an instant on.

The quickest test would be to plug the set into your Kill a watt meter... if the set draws power when turned off, it likely has a instant on circuit that is activated.

jr

So, it followed ya home?