Yes and no they were to expensive But the ones that did have them complained about lack of color and other things back in these times they were 1,000 dollars vequivalent to $11,000 back then a TV so they stay with black and white which was only 300 bucks so folk didn't even really get to enjoy these because nobody had them for real
Just found out about these RCA's as one of the first Color TV's, having come out in 1954.. Amazing you people that have the tenacity and creativity to dive into such a nightmare of a project and dig out the gold!! Congratulations!! This is pretty awesome!!
I read the book David Snaroff president of RCA. He eas very much involved with the technology and when it came to technical questions about the RCA color system he was very knowledgeable. He deserves credit for bringing color tv into our homes.
Completely amazing, great work! You saved a piece of history, one which saw the broadcast world change, slowly, but still change. A very significant set there! Just knowing that TV cost probably close to what someone would have paid for a nice used car or other important thing. Creating the factory composite modification is just icing on the cake. That you were able to find NOS parts is that much cooler. Thanks for showing this restoration, and for saving a small piece of history!
My parents had a B&W 1958 TV that ran through the 90s with a VERY clear picture, so obviously, even a color TV from 1954 must have looked awesome to the few who could afford it back then. You put in so much work on this television and did a great job. I'm so glad I'm able to see a 1954 color TV the way it looked back then, or at least very very close to it!
Ah, what an adventure! Well worth the wait, for sure. I know I'm not the only one that is glad to see the final product. You went way beyond what some would do by making it 'like-new' with such attention to detail. You both have completed that chapter with a bang.
When I was a kid I remember old color TVs had a problem staying in the right colors. People's faces would slowly go from flesh tones to green. You had to constantly adjust the colors, or live with people turning green. Sometime around 1970 color TVs had automatic fine tuning and the color of people's faces stayed the same throughout the whole show.
One can certainly see that the engineers who designed this receiver intended to have the colors *knock the socks off* of anyone who decided to watch this lovely set! However, in those days, I don't think the designers of this set took into consideration potential safety hazards regarding levels of X-radiation exposure for the service technicians who did field repairs and in-shop servicing.
This was built in the time that they had X-ray machines in shoe stores so you could see your feet inside your shoes. Also during this same time period in the 50's, you could buy admission ticket to watch nuclear bombs being tested in the desert.
@@dougfisher1813 Yes, I believe they called them "shoe-fitting fluoroscopes." Probably wouldn't have used one knowing what I know now. It would have been *really cool* to watch a nuclear test in the desert, as the plume way high up in the air made such a *beautiful* glow!
X-ray concerns were not considered a problem in 1954. Precautions first came along with the Shunt regulator a GE 6BK4 that had a lead shield in their first Color TV Sets circa 1961.
I recall 32 tubes in this set. I never worked on one. By the time I got into color TV the chassis was the CTC-11 model.when I left the company, RCA the CTC-62 was the latest XL-100. During my TV fixit days I worked on 8 to 10 color Tvs a day for 10 years. Today I know nothing about the new TV sets. I went into teaching Color TV repair to RCA service techs, then I took a position at Sarnoff Labs as a research tech until I retired and taught in the Physics Dept. At Swarthmore College.
What a beaut! Its unfortunate I probably won't be stopping by to see you guys this year. Hopefully next year I'll be able to come by and see you guys and the CT100 fully restored.
That is one good TV set. These old TVs are far much better than today's smart TVs. They are much louder. I have LED Smart TV's, and the sound on the modern TVs are not as loud as the old ones. We have one TV in the room which we had to have a soundbar attached to it, to make it louder, well we had a soundbar until my stepdad passed in 2017. I just want to go back to the vintage TV's and VCRs. Plus the smart TVs rely on Wi-Fi, which we have like 10 or 20 devices connected to Wi-Fi, and thats when my internet became slow and sluggish since we only have one router in one of the bedrooms. Again, excellent work Spats.
To be fair, your smart tv is very shallow front to back because of the flat panel where the old CRT TVs had depth to spare. You need excursion to get good "tone", and tiny flat speakers that fit in modern TVs just don't move that much air.
This is really amazing! What amazes me the most is that you did this all by yourself! I fail at replacing belts;-) The picture also is amazing, especially since the set is over 60 years old!
Fantastic work! I really enjoyed seeing this project come together. So honored to have gotten a shout out in the credits. I wish I had done more. I think I only offered a couple of suggestions on cabinet part fabrications. This is truly a historical document of the CT-100 and will hopefully inspire others to resurrect them should more of them surface. Great job!
The picture you achieved on your CT100 restoration looks way better than I remember on an original CT100 set from 1955 that I saw as a little kid. A neighbor was an exec at the RCA plant in Camden NJ and he had one on loan. Maybe it was an early R&D prototype because I believe these sets were mass produced in Bloomington, Indiana. Although I was thrilled to see any color image on a TV, even as a kid I could see it wasn't very good on a live broadcast of a TV game show. Colors did not at match at all from one camera to another and the quality of the color was nothing like what I had already seen in movie theaters. Yours looks great - better than the one at the early TV museum in Hilliard Ohio. In 1957, another childhood friend's parents bought a 21 inch RCA color set and it looked much better than the 15" CT100 but still not as good as yours. Beautiful work and admirable persistence.
You are very kind, thank you. My father told Spats and I the story of his first experience with color TV, it was in Conneautville PA. His neighbor bought a CT-100 the moment they went on sale, and then of course traded it in when RCA offered. My father said he and his friends would stand on the guy's porch and look at it through the front window. I can tell you in my 44 years on this planet, I've seen amazing displays of tenacity, love, and care in the restoration of many items... and Spats probably topped them all. The people we talked to, those who we credited in the video for their help.. it's been more than just a TV restoration... it's been a journey, and the people we have met along the way have made it worth it a hundred fold. Everyone from a six year-old who has never seen ANY type of CRT, to a 95 year-old who remembers seeing his very first TV of any kind, there have been many people interested, and we have been fortunate to have connected with them all through this one little ole TV. Thanks again.
@@HarleyBadger - Do you know the reason(s) that RCA essentially recalled the CT-100s? That is not a rhetorical question because I don't have any answers - just guesses.
@@S955US84 Sort of "simple economics" in a way. People rushed to buy these initially, and then just kind of stopped. There was little color programming at the time, and a big-ass black and white TV was cheaper than this small-screen, and people sort of lost interest because of the lack of color programming. RCA was insistent upon color... quickly lowered the price by more than half, almost nobody bought them, RCA soon finished the much-larger 21" color CRT, so they offered to take the CT-100s back and give the customers the 21 at no charge.
Re. .....US84. I'm from the UK and I read that the BBC experimented with NTSC colour tv in the mid to late 1950's but decided to wait for a better system to come along for the reasons you described, poor inconsistent colours, often drifting and not very true to life especially in less than perfect reception conditions.
Awesome TV, congrats! I knew a rich kid while growing up (late 1970s) who had a 1950s era color TV and he said he made his own tubes to get it to work. He was so rich I believed him!
One of the few consumer sets ever made that used full bandwidth IQ colour demodulation and true NTSC red phosphors, that's why the colour is so rich and accurate.
I have a memory of early color tv. 1956 my family went over to a neighbor In the San Fernando Valley Smelling of lemon and orange trees. He was well off and bought a $3,000 color tv I was 5 years old to young to remember the tv brand. We watched a color cartoon of Jerald Boing Boing 10 minutes long. My dad was so excited and amazed my family talked about the experience for years afterward. Until my dad bought his own color tv in about 1965. In those days my family used to drive 2.5 hours to see a freinds RCA. to watch Bonanza in color. I remember the ooz and Ahzz. Such a nice video. I have a 1948 piolit 3" tv not working.
I'm 77 & was 8 in 1954! Since my family only had a b/w, t.v. from 1950, we couldn't even think of buying a color set, since there were practically no color shows on then! I do remember seeing an advertisement for an RCA 'color' t.v. in '54 or '55, showing one of the few 'color' shows on, i.e. "Howdy Doody", but who wanted to spend $600, to see it?
Just found your channel. I noticed that there are so many vintage appliance channels, but so far I have only seen one vintage room air conditioner channel. You should have at least one to round out your collection.
Awesome to see it all together and working so wonderfully. The composite input is really a nice mod. Ah Animalympics the thing that most Americans would have seen on NBC, if the 1980 Olympics. had happened for us. If you want to show off the convergence of the set, you can always play Lisberger's 1982 project Tron on the set:)
The audio was certainly loud and clear at 19:03! I like that modification, it certainly does deserve it. I've enjoyed every minute of this restoration. Nice job! Oh hell yeah! Back to the Future on the CT-100. Man, the colors are fantastic, I'm sure even more so in person.
Me da mucho gusto la experiencia que tienes y el valor de grabar estos tesoros y el proceso para reparar y darles manteniemito , no he encontrado un vídeo en.español , parecido
Great job of restoration. I can't help but wonder what happened to the thousands of TV repair shops that eventually closed their doors forever. All the NOS parts that got trashed due to obsolescence.
You did an amazing job on this, even for such a big project with all those hurdles! BTW, at 8:35 did you notice the spelling error on the vertical transformer? It made me do a double take :-)
...Not merely restored. But also MODERNIZED! (Albeit up to 1980s technology.) Imagine if some dudes were crazy enough to put TWO speakers in that grill (and miraculously make them work properly). THAT'S how high-fidelity that one speaker is! XD
Yeah I mean really, I can sit here and listen to this YT video with ten grand worth of HiFi, or walk into the next room and switch on the set... and I can tell you for certain, the set sounds even better in person than recreated through UA-cam.
I had a November 1953 CT-100 from Oregon that I got in working condition. The tubes in it were lab models and we're not even given their common names yet. Killer picture! Sold to Danny Gustison in the early 1990s for $2,500.00. Oh well, gone now.
I can just imagine selecting channel 4 at 11.30pm to get Johnny Carson broadcast straight from the Empire State Building to my set wirelessly and without monthly cost !! He was on from 1962 to 1992, beginning from when this set was only 3 years past it's 1959 tube replacement. This set was probably set aside before Johnny ever wore a plaid suit or had white hair.
And my grandmother thought she was miss goody goody two shoes when at last her and grandpa got their first color set around 1974 as a Christmas gift. When they their very first television around 1951, for around 500 dollars (an atrocious amount of money at that time) the whole family would gather around the set, and remembers sometimes the children from the next door neighbors house would line up on the front porch or stand on the sidewalk and watch through grandma's front window to get a view. That's how big a deal a tv set was. Now, picture how wide their eyes you be in 1954 three yrs later seeing a color set.
I've found an old advert for this set from a company called Barker Bros., and it sold for around $1,000 in 1954 which is the equivalent of about $11,000 today!
Ref. missing knobs and switches, would it be possible to make a silicone mould (just cheap stuff in a tube) of any repeat knobs you require, then fill with epoxy resin, which is far cheaper per pint from marine supplies places? A lick of paint to finish, and although it won't be perfect it would be pretty fair.
That was absolutely beautiful inside and out and the performance was just unimaginable considering how bad some of the later sets were as they cheaper out. And thanks for the LSD inspired cartoons near the end. Now I'm just guessing but I would say a paid restoration like that would be around 5k in 2022 money?
Sorry I'm going to ask a dumb question - haha! I am suprised with how flat the screen is, I do not know much about electronics but I *thought* I underestood CRTs enough to know why they aren't flat. Maybe not. I assume there is a simple explanation?
Yep! The reason is this.. since this is such an early color picture tube, the shadow mask is flat, and suspended inside the bell of the tube. The glass face is still rounded, but it's behind flat safety glass.
@@HarleyBadger Thankyou for your reply. Yeah though I wonder how it focusses on a flat plane? The convergence looks a little off but that might be unrelated.
The convergence is fine... our cameras were very finicky about recording video, but it looks fine in person. The convergence is electrostatic and has much more complexity to it than a regular magnetic convergence adjustments.
The color fidelity looks great and no distortion! I’m curious, why did color TVs exist in 1954 since it would be another decade before the first “in living color” shows debuted?
NBC and ABC were running several hours of color programming a week in 1954-1955, CBS a bit less, since their parent company was still mad over the FCC chosing NBC/RCA's color standard. You're thinking of when the networks switched the majority of their programming to color, which was the mid '60s, but there were a lot of regular color shows for a decade before that
Excelente adaptación, y si que vale la pena ponerle entradas de AUDIO y VIDEO por que estas señores si son ABUELAS televisiones y de muy buena cálida y pesadotas siiiiiii 👏👏👏👏👏👏👍😁😃👍👍
I was born in 1948 and the first color TV I saw was in 1962. I was working as stock boy at a W.T. Grants store. I wanted to buy one on time from the store but the store manager wisely turned me down. As I recall the cheapest TV was $475 and I was making $1.25 an hour.
The blue cable, at 4 min. that looks like the delay line? Never seen the internals of a CTC2 before. What a slug of iron is that power transformer. Alone it must be 30% of the chassis weight.
Can the picture possibly have been this good when it was new? It looks to me very much the same in picture quality as the last of the CRT tellies that came through.
The short answer is yes, and possibly better than even later models as they simplified the color demodulators for cost reasons, but the early color chassis used all the available chroma bandwidth. My dad had a CTC9 that we ran until 1978 and the picture and color on that TV was spectacular, as good as the CTC68 XL100 that replaced it. The XL had a much brighter image and better focus (it had a 2nd anode voltage of 34KV), but the color wasn't any better and perhaps not as good as the 9 had.
@@ohger1 That really is astonishing. I always come back to thinking of the relatively slower progress of other technologies, however, compared with us in Europe this was breathtaking. I believe we (in the UK anyway) had only recently got bread off rationing, and most people thought fridges were a commercial premises device that wouldn't be available domestically for decades, though they soon started to become extensively available. Our cars were positively prehistoric compared to your spaceship cars, while you were getting automatic gear boxes, radios and power steering. I appreciate that American people live to work whereas we work to live - you work so incredibly hard, and with such dedication, while Europeans expect and receive free healthcare, 6 weeks minimum of paid leave a year, plus up to 2 weeks for Christmas and New Year, Easter and a host of other Bank Holidays (as we call them). We work a 35 hour week and complain about that. So we will never compete with America, and I couldn't be so dedicated anyway. I lived in America for 2 years and only then realised just how much you throw yourselves into your work, and continual progress and innovation, and am grateful to live in a world with such wonderful people alongside us. Bless your dear hearts my cousins, and enjoy the benefits of your hard work.
Just watched Animalympics on my ITT Trimline CP3204 or 2342 that I found in the loft of a warehouse, CRT's are so much better for colour/strobe effects. It says "West Germany" on the tube, It's from at least 1980, Maybe even earlier.
Never worked on anything quite this old. What's the deal with macrovision? I assumed problems only occurred whilst attempting to copy macrovision stuff. Does it cause artifacts on older TV's regardless?
Amazing restoration work. Just a comment. Your greens don´t look right. Maybe increasing the green screen a bit higher. Or maybe the issue is in the color demod circuit. Also I noticed that color bars look really different when changing channels, so fine tuning may have something to do with it.
For the first people to own one of these way back when it must've seemed like pure magic.
Yes and no they were to expensive But the ones that did have them complained about lack of color and other things back in these times they were 1,000 dollars vequivalent to $11,000 back then a TV so they stay with black and white which was only 300 bucks so folk didn't even really get to enjoy these because nobody had them for real
Just found out about these RCA's as one of the first Color TV's, having come out in 1954.. Amazing you people that have the tenacity and creativity to dive into such a nightmare of a project and dig out the gold!! Congratulations!! This is pretty awesome!!
For an original first commercially available tv, I think the color looks great !
Truly stunning! This is the best picture I've ever seen from ANY CT-100. Great work!
Certainly a lot of work there. Great job in restoration! Thanks for sharing this.
I read the book David Snaroff president of RCA. He eas very much involved with the technology and when it came to technical questions about the RCA color system he was very knowledgeable. He deserves credit for bringing color tv into our homes.
Rewatching this video after a few months.. legend, we need more people like you
Completely amazing, great work! You saved a piece of history, one which saw the broadcast world change, slowly, but still change. A very significant set there! Just knowing that TV cost probably close to what someone would have paid for a nice used car or other important thing. Creating the factory composite modification is just icing on the cake. That you were able to find NOS parts is that much cooler. Thanks for showing this restoration, and for saving a small piece of history!
Glad you enjoyed it! And thank you!
My parents had a B&W 1958 TV that ran through the 90s with a VERY clear picture, so obviously, even a color TV from 1954 must have looked awesome to the few who could afford it back then. You put in so much work on this television and did a great job. I'm so glad I'm able to see a 1954 color TV the way it looked back then, or at least very very close to it!
Beautiful Television! I restore and collect vintage vacuum cleaners! Some of my favorites are Hoover, Kirby and Electrolux! Great job guys!!
Ah, what an adventure! Well worth the wait, for sure. I know I'm not the only one that is glad to see the final product. You went way beyond what some would do by making it 'like-new' with such attention to detail. You both have completed that chapter with a bang.
When I was a kid I remember old color TVs had a problem staying in the right colors.
People's faces would slowly go from flesh tones to green.
You had to constantly adjust the colors, or live with people turning green.
Sometime around 1970 color TVs had automatic fine tuning and the color of people's faces stayed the same throughout the whole show.
One can certainly see that the engineers who designed this receiver intended to have the colors *knock the socks off* of anyone who decided to watch this lovely set! However, in those days, I don't think the designers of this set took into consideration potential safety hazards regarding levels of X-radiation exposure for the service technicians who did field repairs and in-shop servicing.
This was built in the time that they had X-ray machines in shoe stores so you could see your feet inside your shoes. Also during this same time period in the 50's, you could buy admission ticket to watch nuclear bombs being tested in the desert.
@@dougfisher1813 Yes, I believe they called them "shoe-fitting fluoroscopes." Probably wouldn't have used one knowing what I know now. It would have been *really cool* to watch a nuclear test in the desert, as the plume way high up in the air made such a *beautiful* glow!
Wow thank you for sharing something fascinating this 80's kid didn't know!?! 😯
X-ray concerns were not considered a problem in 1954. Precautions first came along with the Shunt regulator a GE 6BK4 that had a lead shield in their first Color TV Sets circa 1961.
I recall 32 tubes in this set. I never worked on one. By the time I got into color TV the chassis was the CTC-11 model.when I left the company, RCA the CTC-62 was the latest XL-100. During my TV fixit days I worked on 8 to 10 color Tvs a day for 10 years. Today I know nothing about the new TV sets.
I went into teaching Color TV repair to RCA service techs, then I took a position at Sarnoff Labs as a research tech until I retired and taught in the Physics Dept. At Swarthmore College.
What a beaut! Its unfortunate I probably won't be stopping by to see you guys this year. Hopefully next year I'll be able to come by and see you guys and the CT100 fully restored.
Great restoration job! Such beautiful color and performance!
Thank you very much!
You have a very rare specimen, only about a hundred of these still exist, and even fewer are in anything resembling working condition.
That is one good TV set. These old TVs are far much better than today's smart TVs. They are much louder. I have LED Smart TV's, and the sound on the modern TVs are not as loud as the old ones. We have one TV in the room which we had to have a soundbar attached to it, to make it louder, well we had a soundbar until my stepdad passed in 2017. I just want to go back to the vintage TV's and VCRs. Plus the smart TVs rely on Wi-Fi, which we have like 10 or 20 devices connected to Wi-Fi, and thats when my internet became slow and sluggish since we only have one router in one of the bedrooms. Again, excellent work Spats.
To be fair, your smart tv is very shallow front to back because of the flat panel where the old CRT TVs had depth to spare. You need excursion to get good "tone", and tiny flat speakers that fit in modern TVs just don't move that much air.
best movie ever to test out any TV ! excellent effort on that classic unit
Very good looking RESTORATION. A beautiful piece of television history. The overall look is very original.... 💛
Awesome job on the restoration of this vintage TV. There's just something special about vintage electronics
This is really amazing! What amazes me the most is that you did this all by yourself! I fail at replacing belts;-)
The picture also is amazing, especially since the set is over 60 years old!
Thank you very much!
Fantastic work! I really enjoyed seeing this project come together. So honored to have gotten a shout out in the credits. I wish I had done more. I think I only offered a couple of suggestions on cabinet part fabrications. This is truly a historical document of the CT-100 and will hopefully inspire others to resurrect them should more of them surface. Great job!
Those suggestions helped us fix it though! And thank you!
@@spatsbear awesome! So happy they helped!
The picture you achieved on your CT100 restoration looks way better than I remember on an original CT100 set from 1955 that I saw as a little kid. A neighbor was an exec at the RCA plant in Camden NJ and he had one on loan. Maybe it was an early R&D prototype because I believe these sets were mass produced in Bloomington, Indiana. Although I was thrilled to see any color image on a TV, even as a kid I could see it wasn't very good on a live broadcast of a TV game show. Colors did not at match at all from one camera to another and the quality of the color was nothing like what I had already seen in movie theaters. Yours looks great - better than the one at the early TV museum in Hilliard Ohio. In 1957, another childhood friend's parents bought a 21 inch RCA color set and it looked much better than the 15" CT100 but still not as good as yours. Beautiful work and admirable persistence.
You are very kind, thank you. My father told Spats and I the story of his first experience with color TV, it was in Conneautville PA. His neighbor bought a CT-100 the moment they went on sale, and then of course traded it in when RCA offered. My father said he and his friends would stand on the guy's porch and look at it through the front window. I can tell you in my 44 years on this planet, I've seen amazing displays of tenacity, love, and care in the restoration of many items... and Spats probably topped them all. The people we talked to, those who we credited in the video for their help.. it's been more than just a TV restoration... it's been a journey, and the people we have met along the way have made it worth it a hundred fold. Everyone from a six year-old who has never seen ANY type of CRT, to a 95 year-old who remembers seeing his very first TV of any kind, there have been many people interested, and we have been fortunate to have connected with them all through this one little ole TV. Thanks again.
@@HarleyBadger - Do you know the reason(s) that RCA essentially recalled the CT-100s? That is not a rhetorical question because I don't have any answers - just guesses.
@@S955US84 Sort of "simple economics" in a way. People rushed to buy these initially, and then just kind of stopped. There was little color programming at the time, and a big-ass black and white TV was cheaper than this small-screen, and people sort of lost interest because of the lack of color programming. RCA was insistent upon color... quickly lowered the price by more than half, almost nobody bought them, RCA soon finished the much-larger 21" color CRT, so they offered to take the CT-100s back and give the customers the 21 at no charge.
@@HarleyBadger "...as late as 1964 only 3.1 percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set." WIKIPEDIA
Re. .....US84. I'm from the UK and I read that the BBC experimented with NTSC colour tv in the mid to late 1950's but decided to wait for a better system to come along for the reasons you described, poor inconsistent colours, often drifting and not very true to life especially in less than perfect reception conditions.
A fascinating piece of history. And such a beautiful collection.
Wowzers congratulations on a museum worthy restoration.
Many thanks!
Awesome TV, congrats! I knew a rich kid while growing up (late 1970s) who had a 1950s era color TV and he said he made his own tubes to get it to work. He was so rich I believed him!
One of the few consumer sets ever made that used full bandwidth IQ colour demodulation and true NTSC red phosphors, that's why the colour is so rich and accurate.
Fantastic job with the finish on the cabinet, and electronics. You did an amazing and neat job with ALL THOSE RESISTORS.
I have a memory of early color tv. 1956 my family went over to a neighbor
In the San Fernando Valley
Smelling of lemon and orange trees. He was well off and bought a $3,000 color tv I was 5 years old to young to remember the tv brand. We watched a color cartoon of Jerald Boing Boing 10 minutes long. My dad was so excited and amazed my family talked about the experience for years afterward. Until my dad bought his own color tv in about 1965. In those days my family used to drive 2.5 hours to see a freinds RCA.
to watch Bonanza in color.
I remember the ooz and Ahzz. Such a nice video.
I have a 1948 piolit 3" tv not working.
I'm 77 & was 8 in 1954! Since my family only had a b/w, t.v. from 1950, we couldn't even
think of buying a color set, since there were practically no color shows on then! I do
remember seeing an advertisement for an RCA 'color' t.v. in '54 or '55, showing one of
the few 'color' shows on, i.e. "Howdy Doody", but who wanted to spend $600, to see it?
The RCA CT100 cost $1000 in 1954 when the average annual family income in the USA was $4200.
In 2024 dollars, it would be over $11,000.
Can't wait to see more old TVs while we're all stuck at home.
Beautiful ! Thanks for the trip back in time .
Randomly popped in my recs. Amazing work! And cute costume haha
WOW! Look at that gorgeous ribbon cane mahogany veneer cabinet.
Just found your channel. I noticed that there are so many vintage appliance channels, but so far I have only seen one vintage room air conditioner channel. You should have at least one to round out your collection.
Awesome to see it all together and working so wonderfully. The composite input is really a nice mod. Ah Animalympics the thing that most Americans would have seen on NBC, if the 1980 Olympics. had happened for us. If you want to show off the convergence of the set, you can always play Lisberger's 1982 project Tron on the set:)
The audio was certainly loud and clear at 19:03!
I like that modification, it certainly does deserve it.
I've enjoyed every minute of this restoration. Nice job!
Oh hell yeah! Back to the Future on the CT-100.
Man, the colors are fantastic, I'm sure even more so in person.
Yup and thank you!
Haha, and you are welcome.
Hahahahahahahaha lol XD that was sure a nice blow from the rear of Harley Badger @ 19:03.
@@kraig8812 Harley looked proud of it, too!
@@dynatrak Hahahahahahaha! XD
Great CRT restoration video! Really enjoyable to watch, very nice demonstration of performance in the end. Thank you for the upload.
I love the colors of these old sets.
Great Restauration.
Rdga
Wow. Good job to everyone that helped!
Westinghouse was first to market an NTSC color receiver in late December 1953. The CT-100 was offered for sale in March 1954.
Me da mucho gusto la experiencia que tienes y el valor de grabar estos tesoros y el proceso para reparar y darles manteniemito , no he encontrado un vídeo en.español , parecido
Excelente trabajo ¡¡¡¡¡....un televisor que tendría en mi casa y lo usaría bastante seguido.
It takes a ton of patience to "bear" on a project like this! Well done!
Awesome set ! Great work on restoration it !
I literally became attached to your channel just because of a Whelen WPS siren you showed back in 2009.
This is AMAZING! Thank your for sharing!! Great job!👏🏼
the colors look so natural
Good job Spats and Harley!
great job,thanks for sharing.
Congrats!!
You should share this restore with Paul Carlson of "Mr. Carlson's Lab"... You did amazing work here !!
Great job of restoration. I can't help but wonder what happened to the thousands of TV repair shops that eventually closed their doors forever. All the NOS parts that got trashed due to obsolescence.
I've still got a ton of RCA original parts from the 50s and 60s. Trying to give them away as I'm closing this year.
i think that cartoon fried my brain. im suing!
Wow this unit in good working condition can fetch a pretty penny in an auction.
You did an amazing job on this, even for such a big project with all those hurdles! BTW, at 8:35 did you notice the spelling error on the vertical transformer? It made me do a double take :-)
At least he didn't need a new horiontal transformer.
...Not merely restored.
But also MODERNIZED! (Albeit up to 1980s technology.)
Imagine if some dudes were crazy enough to put TWO speakers in that grill (and miraculously make them work properly). THAT'S how high-fidelity that one speaker is! XD
Yeah I mean really, I can sit here and listen to this YT video with ten grand worth of HiFi, or walk into the next room and switch on the set... and I can tell you for certain, the set sounds even better in person than recreated through UA-cam.
I had a November 1953 CT-100 from Oregon that I got in working condition. The tubes in it were lab models and we're not even given their common names yet. Killer picture! Sold to Danny Gustison in the early 1990s for $2,500.00. Oh well, gone now.
I can just imagine selecting channel 4 at 11.30pm to get Johnny Carson broadcast straight from the Empire State Building to my set wirelessly and without monthly cost !! He was on from 1962 to 1992, beginning from when this set was only 3 years past it's 1959 tube replacement. This set was probably set aside before Johnny ever wore a plaid suit or had white hair.
What an amazing picture!
beautiful job! Realy enjoyed this video.
Did they broadcast anything in color in the mid 50's?
Yes, but very little. The sets were too expensive for most people. .
What a stable image!!! good colors and no black spots!!!!
And my grandmother thought she was miss goody goody two shoes when at last her and grandpa got their first color set around 1974 as a Christmas gift. When they their very first television around 1951, for around 500 dollars (an atrocious amount of money at that time) the whole family would gather around the set, and remembers sometimes the children from the next door neighbors house would line up on the front porch or stand on the sidewalk and watch through grandma's front window to get a view. That's how big a deal a tv set was. Now, picture how wide their eyes you be in 1954 three yrs later seeing a color set.
I like that there's a fursuit in the thumbnail :3
41:29 Wait, is that your fursuit?
Sure is :3
@@spatsbear I love it
I've found an old advert for this set from a company called Barker Bros., and it sold for around $1,000 in 1954 which is the equivalent of about $11,000 today!
Ref. missing knobs and switches, would it be possible to make a silicone mould (just cheap stuff in a tube) of any repeat knobs you require, then fill with epoxy resin, which is far cheaper per pint from marine supplies places? A lick of paint to finish, and although it won't be perfect it would be pretty fair.
Awesome work!
Great job Spats! It’s sweet to see it fully working again after all these years! Do you have any plans on displaying this upstairs?
We are finishing the basement so the room it is in will be the TV/VCR/Stereo/Fan displays. The CT-100 will be in that room proudly displayed there.
A job well done
That was absolutely beautiful inside and out and the performance was just unimaginable considering how bad some of the later sets were as they cheaper out.
And thanks for the LSD inspired cartoons near the end.
Now I'm just guessing but I would say a paid restoration like that would be around 5k in 2022 money?
is it still there in usa analog tv transmiters??for this old tv???
What a beauty 😍
Man, I wish I can get my hand on a CT-100 !
Increible trabajo de restauracion. Cuanto vale ahora esta joya? Muchas felicidades
Удивительно хорошее изображение у телевизора,для тех лет
А что такое стоит справа от телевизора на 31-58 ?
Sorry I'm going to ask a dumb question - haha! I am suprised with how flat the screen is, I do not know much about electronics but I *thought* I underestood CRTs enough to know why they aren't flat. Maybe not. I assume there is a simple explanation?
Yep! The reason is this.. since this is such an early color picture tube, the shadow mask is flat, and suspended inside the bell of the tube. The glass face is still rounded, but it's behind flat safety glass.
@@HarleyBadger Thankyou for your reply. Yeah though I wonder how it focusses on a flat plane? The convergence looks a little off but that might be unrelated.
The convergence is fine... our cameras were very finicky about recording video, but it looks fine in person. The convergence is electrostatic and has much more complexity to it than a regular magnetic convergence adjustments.
100% Done! Yea!
We had a 1961 RCA Vic that did not put out as high a quality color picture as your '54 model does!
How's the hunt going for finding a new tube for the 1978 RCA XL-100 TV?
I will have to ask Spats because honestly I have no idea which TV you're referring to lol
Just AMAZING!
Lovely job!!!!!
The color fidelity looks great and no distortion! I’m curious, why did color TVs exist in 1954 since it would be another decade before the first “in living color” shows debuted?
NBC and ABC were running several hours of color programming a week in 1954-1955, CBS a bit less, since their parent company was still mad over the FCC chosing NBC/RCA's color standard. You're thinking of when the networks switched the majority of their programming to color, which was the mid '60s, but there were a lot of regular color shows for a decade before that
@@11sfr Fascinating! Thanks for that history and for your enlightening me.
Nice, I love this!
Excelente adaptación, y si que vale la pena ponerle entradas de AUDIO y VIDEO por que estas señores si son ABUELAS televisiones y de muy buena cálida y pesadotas siiiiiii 👏👏👏👏👏👏👍😁😃👍👍
I believe all the CTC-100 chassis were made at the RCA factory in Bloomington, IN. Was yours?
I was born in 1948 and the first color TV I saw was in 1962. I was working as stock boy at a W.T. Grants store. I wanted to buy one on time from the store but the store manager wisely turned me down. As I recall the cheapest TV was $475 and I was making $1.25 an hour.
I wonder what it was like to have a colour TV in 1954?
Restoration that would make shango066 jealous.
28:48
I would tell you to run some old video of an early color program, but there was next to no color programming available when this set was manufactured.
Fantastic!!
The blue cable, at 4 min. that looks like the delay line? Never seen the internals of a CTC2 before. What a slug of iron is that power transformer. Alone it must be 30% of the chassis weight.
Correct. That is the delay line.
Can the picture possibly have been this good when it was new? It looks to me very much the same in picture quality as the last of the CRT tellies that came through.
The short answer is yes, and possibly better than even later models as they simplified the color demodulators for cost reasons, but the early color chassis used all the available chroma bandwidth. My dad had a CTC9 that we ran until 1978 and the picture and color on that TV was spectacular, as good as the CTC68 XL100 that replaced it. The XL had a much brighter image and better focus (it had a 2nd anode voltage of 34KV), but the color wasn't any better and perhaps not as good as the 9 had.
@@ohger1 That really is astonishing. I always come back to thinking of the relatively slower progress of other technologies, however, compared with us in Europe this was breathtaking. I believe we (in the UK anyway) had only recently got bread off rationing, and most people thought fridges were a commercial premises device that wouldn't be available domestically for decades, though they soon started to become extensively available. Our cars were positively prehistoric compared to your spaceship cars, while you were getting automatic gear boxes, radios and power steering.
I appreciate that American people live to work whereas we work to live - you work so incredibly hard, and with such dedication, while Europeans expect and receive free healthcare, 6 weeks minimum of paid leave a year, plus up to 2 weeks for Christmas and New Year, Easter and a host of other Bank Holidays (as we call them). We work a 35 hour week and complain about that. So we will never compete with America, and I couldn't be so dedicated anyway. I lived in America for 2 years and only then realised just how much you throw yourselves into your work, and continual progress and innovation, and am grateful to live in a world with such wonderful people alongside us. Bless your dear hearts my cousins, and enjoy the benefits of your hard work.
lol, wtf was that at the end? I thought your voice was in sync with a cartoon on the TV! Jesus, I was not expecting that! 🤣
I would install a couple of computer fans in the mesh aluminum just for cooling exhausting the heat out..
How much X-rays does this set produce? This was before the safety features were added, right?
The same amount as any other TV under normal operation.. The X-Ray thing is mostly a myth and scare tactic.
1954? With color?
Yaaas
Just watched Animalympics on my ITT Trimline CP3204 or 2342 that I found in the loft of a warehouse, CRT's are so much better for colour/strobe effects. It says "West Germany" on the tube, It's from at least 1980, Maybe even earlier.
Never worked on anything quite this old. What's the deal with macrovision? I assumed problems only occurred whilst attempting to copy macrovision stuff. Does it cause artifacts on older TV's regardless?
Amazing restoration work. Just a comment. Your greens don´t look right. Maybe increasing the green screen a bit higher. Or maybe the issue is in the color demod circuit. Also I noticed that color bars look really different when changing channels, so fine tuning may have something to do with it.