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The picture quality on even the very early sets can be astounding. The CT-100 has a legendary good picture, thanks to it's wide gamut color phosphors and superior color demodulation. That would have been in 1954.
But... these early sets were complicated and finikey. From what I've heard, perfect convergence and purity was difficult on the CT-100. The 15GP22 was an excellent tube for what it was, but it was the first of it's kind. It was dim compared to later tubes as well.
It depends on what you mean by "high quality". The CT-100 chassis has better color demodulation circuits than almost all modern sets (they changed to a cheaper, easier demodulation circuit on the CTC-4) But, these early sets weren't super reliable. When new, the CT-100 would have needed to be maintained regularly to keep in good performance. Same with some other early color sets. Huge numbers of tubes, piles and piles of paper capacitors - the components at the time were being pushed to their limits to get the glorious color picture out of a set.
The CTC-2B set uses pretty much the same chassis as the CT-100, but with a newer 21" tube. This would be capable of a larger, brighter picture, better convergence and purity, and still have the wideband color demodulation circuits. Probably a high water mark in terms of technical aspects. I know of one AK'er who has rebuilt one of these chassis, and has it producing an amazing picture. But, once again, when new, this set would have been hard to keep running for a long time. Excellent, high quality picture - but not "set it and forget it", it would still require regular repairs.
For "high quality" in terms of excellent picture and minimum downtime, I would probably look ahead to some of the later round sets. Zenith entered into the color market a bit later, and built sets with their legendary build quality. By the time Zenith got into the game, plastic capacitors were appearing, components in general were a bit better, and color TV was becoming mature. I'd say that for reliability, one of these old Zeniths would be hard to beat.
RCA has some good sets in this period too - the CTC-15 was a good, solid chassis. 16 as well. Probably not as reliable as the Zenith, but still, pretty good.
Remember - when color first came out, it was really, really expensive. The early sets are built extremely well. But the components that they had then just weren't as stable as modern parts. The paper caps in the CT-100 and similar sets were OK when they were new - but nowhere near as good as the factory capacitors in, say, the CTC-15. An early set rebuilt with modern components is going to be very reliable. I can't say the same for when the set was new. TV failure/repair was pretty common back then - and the color sets hd a lot more things to break.
So... it depends on what you're looking for when you say "high quality"...
-Ian
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