'65 Sylvania roundie steel cabinet color TV

[Jeffhs]

I had a 1964 Sears Silvertone 21" roundie color set in a metal cabinet, with provisions for screw-in legs, in the early '70s, a trash find in my old neighborhood around 1970. It didn't work really well (convergence was off and I didn't have a generator to reset it, the picture developed hum bars, the color sync went haywire, etc.), but I used it for three years until a circuit board cracked. I missed it for quite a while after that (was watching b&w TVs, of various makes except Magnavox, until I found my next Sears color set in the trash in the mid-'70s) but when I bought my first new color set in 1979 I realized how much of a difference a modern set can make. The picture on my 1979 Zenith color portable (on the attic antenna in my home at the time) was much, much better than either of the two second-hand sets I'd had previously. I bought a Zenith 13-inch portable with one-knob varactor tuning some four years later; the picture was as good on that set as it had been on the '79 portable. I had these sets for close to 20 years, then I moved and bought a new (at the time, late 1999) RCA CTC-185 XL100 19" table model, the TV I have now as a daily watcher. The picture on this set is excellent! I have Time Warner basic cable (broadcast channels only), and I swear the picture on my now decade-old RCA (and a 14-year-old Zenith Sentry 2 in my bedroom) are better than any of the color sets I had owned previously.

I was thinking tonight as I watched the evening news how much TV has changed since I got that 21" Silvertone roundie in 1970, and am glad I don't have that set anymore. Not that I don't like vintage TVs -- my basement was full of old trash-picked sets 40 years ago, and goodness knows I enjoyed working on them and actually getting a few of them to operate well -- but since I now live in a small apartment, I no longer have the room for such things. Anyway, I got to thinking how much more stable color TV signals are today, how much more reliable the sets are since they are (and have been since RCA's first XL100s) solid-state, and again, I found myself actually happy that the old days of tube TVs and analog signals are behind us. Digital TV had problems during the transition (and still does in some areas), but I think it is actually better now than it was when all television was analog. Remember when UHF first appeared in the US, and all the reception problems some areas had, even areas in supposedly prime-signal locations for VHF? And who can forget the problems a lot of viewers encountered with weak signals, etc. when color arrived?

One of the best things to happen to TV, IMHO, was the arrival in the '70s and '80s of cable in cities and their suburbs. With today's DTV standard, many viewers have such problems getting decent reception using a converter box and an antenna that they have given up on outdoor or rabbit-ear antennas altogether, turning instead to the cable with its rock-solid, stable signals. Even if a viewer cannot afford the high rates most cable companies charge for digital or expanded basic cable, basic (what I call "bare-bones" basic) cable service, at least in my area, costs under $20 after the initial installation, and with all digital broadcast signals converted to NTSC for viewers with older analog sets, there is no need for the viewer to rent a digital converter box unless he or she actually wants the extra channels -- and most of the programming shown on cable movie channels, to say nothing of older TV series from the '90s back to the '50s, is now available on DVD. I'm saving a lot by having gone that route (downgrading to basic cable and watching older shows on DVD and/or VHS), which is important to me since I live on a fixed income, and simply did not want to pay through the nose for expanded basic any longer when it exceeded $50 per month.

[peverett]

Cable is not the blessing it seems. You are at the mercy of a monopolistic company that will do whatever they can to drain your wallet. I have had three analog channels stolen from my analog cable package and moved to an area where I would need to pay more to see them again. Did they discount my bill? Of course not!. This is theft, the same as if Ford came and took back one of the wheels on my truck and did not pay me for it.

Another issue is how cable treats the local broadcast channels. My over-the-air reception of these with DTV(when the weather is ok-most of the time) is far better than my cable signals for these.

Now, the phone companies(and I am sure cable also) are trying to kill broadcast TV. I am completely against this!!. In fact, I would like to see broadcast TV send some of the channels now seen only on cable/satellite over the air via the DTV sub-channels, reducing the cable/satellite monopoly.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by peverett

Cable is not the blessing it seems. You are at the mercy of a monopolistic company that will do whatever they can to drain your wallet. I have had three analog channels stolen from my analog cable package and moved to an area where I would need to pay more to see them again. Did they discount my bill? Of course not!. This is theft, the same as if Ford came and took back one of the wheels on my truck and did not pay me for it.

Another issue is how cable treats the local broadcast channels. My over-the-air reception of these with DTV(when the weather is ok-most of the time) is far better than my cable signals for these.

Now, the phone companies(and I am sure cable also) are trying to kill broadcast TV. I am completely against this!!. In fact, I would like to see broadcast TV send some of the channels now seen only on cable/satellite over the air via the DTV sub-channels, reducing the cable/satellite monopoly.

I don't follow you. Why would your OTA reception of broadcast TV be better with DTV than it is over the cable? I would think it would be the other way around. Cable signals, after all, are not affected by weather; on the other hand, a good thunderstorm, rain, or snow can mess up DTV reception royally. I've had cable for years, and the only time I ever saw my cable TV reception ruined was a couple of years ago, when my cable operator, Time Warner, was converting its systems to digital. I remember trying to watch the NBC news one evening, but didn't see more than five minutes of the program if that much--the picture was dropping out every few seconds, and it did so for the duration of the entire newscast. There are occasions when certain channels on my cable are distorted or downright unwatchable, but that's almost certainly due to technical problems at the head end; moreover, it doesn't happen all the time. If it did, TW's phones would be ringing off the hook with calls from angry subscribers, wondering why their cable service is acting up--after all, the subscribers would point out (and they would be right), they have cable to get better reception than they presently get with an antenna. Most people do not understand how cable TV works, but the cable company almost always puts a disclaimer in their literature sent to subscribers at the initial hookup stating that there may be occasional interruptions in transmission due to weather, service outages due to power failures, and other problems beyond the control of the cable operator. The subscriber does not need to know one thing about how cable TV operates to understand this; the only ones who wouldn't understand it would be young children, people who cannot read, or who have mental problems that keep them from understanding even simple concepts.

I'm not following you either on your second point, that the telephone companies are trying to "kill" broadcast television. The phone companies' business is telephone and, nowadays, Internet service, not television, unless you are referring to AT&T which now offers U-Verse television service or Verizon with its FiOS system, both of which hard-wire the user's TV into the wall and do not use satellites or copper coaxial cables.

However, I don't see how these services can or will do away with broadcast TV. The FCC made a huge mistake just under a year ago when they ended NTSC broadcast television in favor of all digital; their reasoning was that they were going to auction off the old analog TV channels for use by public service (police, fire, etc.) and cellular telephone services, claiming the airwaves were too jammed after communications failures during at least one major disaster (Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana five years ago). There are still far too many people who still get their TV reception over the air, with a TV antenna, so the FCC would be making another huge error in judgment if they decided to do away with OTA TV--after all, many people feel that they do not want to pay through the nose for cable or satellite.

[AUdubon5425]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

...their reasoning was that they were going to auction off the old analog TV channels for use by public service (police, fire, etc.) and cellular telephone services, claiming the airwaves were too jammed after communications failures during at least one major disaster (Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana five years ago)...

The problem after Katrina was that the different civil authorities had no way to talk to each other, several systems were totally incapacitated and batteries could not be recharged. If anything crowded the airwaves it was the out-of-town agencies - not berating them, but think about a couple of hundred different police/fire/spca/etc. departments coming down all with their own radios.

Today, all of Louisiana's police and fire departments are on a trunked relay system. Most of the channels in the new trunked system are in bands already allocated for 2-way communications. They have also retained their old channels as emergency backup.

In short, any disaster or civil emergency will "clog" the airwaves. The implication that the extra bands would alleviate such situations is bunk. That's like sandbagging your house now because it may flood next March, or moving everything to the basement because you may get hit by a tornado one day.

[yagosaga]

Thank you for these excellent photos!