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Originally Posted by Whirled One
You're right about the "Lyceum" sets; that was the name RCA put on sets intended for such markets as schools/education and (I think) industrial markets. [There was also an RCA "Mural TV" line for hotels and hospitals and such; wasn't that name originally used on a line of custom-install sets..?]
Yep, 1985 would probably be the last year for a "real" RCA set before GE took over everything. I don't know what year GE farmed out all of their TV manufacturing to Thompson though. In any case, I'm sure it's not a Thompson set. Cool find though-- it's not often that you see one of those fancier Lyceum sets with all the extra input jacks..!
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I worked as a volunteer on my high school's A/V crew in the seventies (1972-75). We had a CCTV system which used an RCA Lyceum TV (25-inch, IIRC) as a control-room monitor when we put our first color channel in the system. Good set with a great picture, even from our old Sony AV and CV-series VTRs (we didn't get our first VCR in the CCTV system until just before I graduated in 1975), but I don't think it was ColorTrak; I remember it had two small push buttons near the VHF channel selector panel. I think one of them may have been for AccuTint, though I'm nowhere near sure of that after all these years (it's been over thirty years since I graduated).
The Lyceum series definitely was genuine RCA, which didn't sell out to Thomson until the mid-1980s (RCA sold the NBC television network to GE in 1986). The NBC television network has not been the same since,
but that's another story for another thread.
New RCA TVs (made during the Thomson era) have full automatic color control systems, with contrast/color tracking, etc., but the system is no longer referred to as ColorTrak. I have a Thomson-built RCA manufactured in 1999 which has such a color correction scheme, but there is no name associated with the system that I know of. Today's RCA CRT TVs have a fully-automatic color control system they call Advanced Color View, which I would imagine is the third generation of the former ColorTrak system.
However, I have read in this forum that the early ColorTrak control systems (and those used in other makes of televisions, like Zenith's Color Sentry) were not very good; in fact, in many cases the set owner could do a better job by turning off the automatic system and adjusting the colors, etc. manually. There were several models of GE televisions made in the '70s with a system they called VIR, for Vertical Interval Reference (a term which was then and is now gibberish to most set owners). This was a system which read a special signal the television networks sent in the vertical blanking interval, and used that signal to lock in proper flesh tones, which are the most difficult colors for any color TV to reproduce accurately. If your picture's flesh tones are correct, so will be the rest of the picture. However, VIR did not work nearly as well as GE had hoped (not all stations/networks carried the signal the system keyed on, and I don't think the VIR system itself was that accurate), so after a couple model years it quietly disappeared from all GE TVs.
The modern color correction systems used in Thomson-built RCAs work much better. The system used in my set (CTC185A7, model F19261) is excellent; I haven't had to readjust the on-screen color controls in quite a while (years), even with my old VHS tapes and DVDs.
I think we have finally reached the era of set-and-forget color TV, not a moment too soon. Say what you will about Thomson, but at least they got it right as far as making their sets darn near fully automatic is concerned. They also finally got it right as far as the tuner goes when they started mounting the tuner separately from the rest of the chassis, rather than using an on-board design. My set has an OB tuner which I had to have repaired two months or so after purchase, when the RF port snapped off the tuner PCB; the technician repaired that and also resoldered every ground point around the tuner--the TV has worked flawlessly ever since, almost seven years now. The set even has its original CRT and makes an excellent picture on the cable system in my town. The Indians baseball games are broadcast in HD in Cleveland over the air and on cable. My set, even though analog using a digital cable box (Comcast cable), shows a picture darned nearly as sharp as HD. You can thank the station, and a local cable channel called Sportstime Ohio, for that as they are using state-of-the-art digital equipment to broadcast the games in as high definition as the current state of the art allows.
IMO, there's hope for Thomson yet.
The only thing I can't figure out is why it took them so long to correct the tuner issues.
