General Electric Widescreen 1000

[AlanInSitges]

They were barely visible when new. The shop I worked in as a kid had the pleasure of servicing one of these for a long-time customer, who had gone to the big city to buy it since we were a Zenith town. It was very novel at the time; the only similar size picture on the market was the Kloss Novabeam, which was much more expensive and was a front-projection set.

I remember going on the first (of many) service calls and my boss laughing out loud when we realized it was just a small picture tube hooked to a 25" chassis. The complaint was horrible color, blue faces, saturation going up and down like crazy. It turns out the set had the VIR "control room in your TV" feature, and none of the local stations were broadcasting a VIR color signal, so it was just randomly picking color/tint levels. The fix was to turn off the VIR feature.

[dtryon]

I actually owned on of these GE big screen sets. Fortunately it was mine second hand but it didn't perform all that bad. I was used to the fact that actually all the projection sets of that time didn't operate well in a well lit room. They all needed to be in an as dark as possible room. To say they were just 13" portables with a lens is not doing the set justice. The CRT's used in these sets were certainly not common 13" CRT's. The glass was much heavier and they ran at 40K volts. They were a bit scary at times to work on. Looking at the CRT straight on was nearly unbearable as they were that bright at the source, certainly not something you could watch. The HV trippler was an odd thing, very big in size. One reason these sets probably all but vanished was because of the trippler, they went bad often and after a few years couldn't be found. I also worked on all the Advent Video Beam sets as I was a tech for an Advent dealer. These sets were better quality than the GE and maybe a bit brighter but they also suffered from lack of brightness and were at least 3 times the cost of the GE. After all they were driven by 4-5" CRT's, one for each basic color. Even with special screens they were still hard to see unless they were in a dark room. One advantage to the GE's was that they worked well in a bar or club situation. The rear of the screen couldn't be touched nor could the projection adjustments. The front projection units at this time usually sat on the floor leaving them susceptible to tampering causing them to be out of alignment and the special screens they used couldn't be touched without causing permanent damage. I think some of the members are jumping to a bit later time when comparing them to sets in the late 80's to early 90's. Just a few thoughts from someone that was there.