GE Portacolor II needs help

[joe111671]

A little fiddling and it seems like it's going to work. All the controls are touchy so they'll need to be cleaned. The brightness and contrast controls seem reversed, they have the opposite effect of what they should, but I can't complain about that.

If it holds up, I'll use it sparingly. I've only been able to find a couple pictures of these but never saw one with a picture.

[bgadow]

Originally Posted by joe111671

A little fiddling and it seems like it's going to work. All the controls are touchy so they'll need to be cleaned. The brightness and contrast controls seem reversed, they have the opposite effect of what they should, but I can't complain about that.

The General spec'd some of the worst pots on the Portacolors & similar sets. Every one I've had, including the later AA/AB and the larger C2/CE had very flaky controls.

I'm very impressed by that picture; I didn't know that CRT was capable of it!

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by bgadow

The General spec'd some of the worst pots on the Portacolors & similar sets. Every one I've had, including the later AA/AB and the larger C2/CE had very flaky controls.

I'm very impressed by that picture; I didn't know that CRT was capable of it!

The original portacolors have a tendency to grow tin whiskers and short out their own pots... after a heap of troubleshooting on one that had a dead IF I finally figured out it was the AGC pot and adjusting it with some contact cleaner brought it back.

[joe111671]

Originally Posted by zeno

Agree with that. All these early GE SS sets were plagued with HOT, FBT
yoke & vert problems.

Zeno, any theories on why they had those issues? It makes me wonder if was bad design, or inferior parts. I also wonder why they scrapped it and kept making the tube chassis after this, when they performed better than the tube ones.

I found an ad that featured both versions, the SS model was $20 higher. Was 20 bucks enough to keep them from selling well?

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by joe111671

Zeno, any theories on why they had those issues? It makes me wonder if was bad design, or inferior parts. I also wonder why they scrapped it and kept making the tube chassis after this, when they performed better than the tube ones.

I found an ad that featured both versions, the SS model was $20 higher. Was 20 bucks enough to keep them from selling well?

I'm not sure there's a tube portacolor in that ad... The set says "68% solid state" the tube portacolors only had one transistor in the UHF tuner... unless they are doing some decietfull advertising BS and counting SS diodes against the compactions, and even that doesn't seem mathematically possible, I don't know how they could come up with %68 solid state.