[Bill Cahill]

It's hard to say.. In 1959 Admiral made one neat looking 17" slimline portable that came in some neat color combinations, and, once, I even worked on one with factory installed UHF. Plastic front, and, back covers.
However, negative poits follow:
Low life expectancy picture tube.
Yoke often dis intergrated due to plastic disease.
Cabinet was a shock hazzard.
Front screen got static charge from hv, and, was a shock hazzard. So were the old GE tv's.
On the M4, 5, 6 GE's, plastic mask, with gold paint on GE's got one heck of a hv static charge. Touch that, you got many surprises.....
The Admirals had problems with poor connections on the circuit boards, as did the GE's.
The old top hat rectifiers in the old sets were a problem with high leakage, and, shorting out.
Circuit breakers usually didn't hold up, either.
When they worked correctly, the Admirals received fairly good.
I would pass on any of the early Silvertone console, table model, and, portable tv's from that era up to 1965.
They wre lousy sets, hard to work on, broke down considerably, were dangerous to service, and, broke down often.
Vertical chassis, one side of line on chassis, all hot connections for line, b+ boost, filters, rectifiers, hot line, etc., were in easy access. The tubes were pointed to front of set. You had to reach in a tight area to get at tubes.
Chassis tilted backwards. Then, was a nightmare to get back in.
We HATED those sets!!!!
RCA '59 models had a neat look, but, quality tended to be low.
They performed poorly.
And, the channel selector knob was metal.
On early versions, it went directly on metal shaft. Chassis was one side of line, and, made this a shock hazzard. There was one similar model with a power transformer.
The hump top 14"-17" "deluxe" portables were neat looking, but, were a repairmans' nightmare.
The larger size with a vertical chassis had a power transformer, and, weren't so bad.
Bill Cahill