Value of GE Portacolor Sets

[colin4014]

I have a little UK market PAL S. Kuba portable set from 1969 in storage. I have never been inside it as it never get used but is in working condition. Even new these things never produced a great picture due to the low res tube and simple PAL decoder.

I have often wondered if it is a Portacolor clone? If it is it will be the only US Colour set to ever reach the UK market!

Must pull it from storage soon and have a look?

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by colin4014

I have a little UK market PAL S. Kuba portable set from 1969 in storage. I have never been inside it as it never get used but is in working condition. Even new these things never produced a great picture due to the low res tube and simple PAL decoder.

I have often wondered if it is a Portacolor clone? If it is it will be the only US Colour set to ever reach the UK market!

Must pull it from storage soon and have a look?

I think there was pictures of the Kuba portacolor on this web-site sometime last year. It looked like the cabinet, CRT, Yoke and the convergence were GE made. The chassis was pure european design.

[Jeffhs]

The VHF tuner and one control appear to be missing on this set. Is Europe's television system all UHF, with no need for VHF tuning in sets marketed there? Also, which control is missing on this set? Can't be one of the color controls, unless this set had a color-fidelity control like the ones on certain brands of US televisions of the 1960s-'70s.

Edit: I took another look at the set's control panel and saw a legend, "UHF-VHF", above the missing control's mounting hole. Could certain models of this set have had a tuning range switch to select UHF and VHF tuners, for areas that may still have had VHF TV stations? I am thinking that there may have been certain models of this set which had both tuners, for use in areas with stations in both tuning ranges.

However, I also wonder why there would have had to be a manual switch on the front of the set for VHF-UHF tuner switching. American NTSC analog TVs had a switch on the VHF tuner that activated the UHF tuner when the former was set to "UHF" or "U", the position between channels 2 and 13. Did this idea never occur to European TV manufacturers, or was there a law in Europe that for some reason prohibited such an arrangement, meaning of course that a manual range switch on the front of the set was mandatory? If the latter, I can't imagine why such a law would even be necessary. The VHF/UHF tuner switching arrangement on American and Canadian NTSC CRT TVs made more sense, IMO. I'm surprised it did not become a worldwide standard long before Europe and most of the rest of the world switched to DTV.