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Originally Posted by julianburke
You have to be real careful when buying anything vintage anymore esp on Ebay. Many people don't know what they have so they tout it as something really special. If you want to get a real kick try typing "salesman sample" in ebay and see what you find! If it's small such as a child's toy, it's a salesman sample!! 90% (or better) of all the salesman samples are bogus.
In 1969, RCA made a 9" B&W TV in a little wood console case used for kitchens and bedrooms yet it is almost always touted as a salesman sample. Yeah, like salesman carried this stuff with them-most products were sold out of a catalog.
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Have you ever noticed how many radios and TVs offered on eBay are described as "parts sets", when many times all that's wrong with them is the line cord is shot or there's some little easily repaired problem, such as a bad tube? I'd say most people who list TVs, radios, indeed, anything electronic on eBay really know nothing (or very little) about the stuff, so if it doesn't work (for whatever reason) they just list it "for parts" and leave it at that.
I've seen pictures on eBay of those little 9" RCA "mini-console" TVs in wood cabinets (never actually saw one up close, though). They were cute and probably sold fairly well as second or third sets, but I agree with you; it is very unlikely that RCA salespeople actually carried them around in their cars or trucks. "Salesmen's samples" was probably just a popular advertising term at the time which didn't mean a heck of a lot, like so much advertising jargon used these days.
I doubt as well that any true CBS color wheel would show up on eBay, as most of them (what few may have been in use) have been, by now, donated to museums. The CBS color wheel system was one of the first attempts at color conversion of monochrome TVs (aside from those cheap $8.00 "color converters" which were nothing more than sheets of plastic or glass tinted with the three primary colors, which did not work well at all); as such it, and the control circuitry that connected to the set, would be quite rare today. I'd expect a true CBS color wheel listed on eBay (or Craigslist, for that matter) to start with a bid of at least $1,000. The color wheel under discussion here probably is not worth much more than a few dollars, especially if the colors are not accurate.