Once I get back to editing and releasing what I've been recording I recently picked up a couple of Setchel Carlson TVs that make the PCB based RCAs in that film look like low quality sets.
It's not hard to connect theses sets to a Roku box, DTV tuner, etc and use them with modern signal sources. The video I ran on this set here was basically played off youtube on a PC that was connected to the set through an adapter box. Getting the TVs to work in the first place especially early color sets of the 50's is where it takes real skill.
Great work in demonstrating this old set from the year of my birth. With roundie tubes you would of course miss part of the picture compared to viewing on a standard black and white set. What would the over the air picture be like in terms of colour fidelity and quality in areas of poor or difficult reception when these sets were brand new?.
This response touches on a lot of deep rabbit holes. Both of my parents weren't born yet when this set was built (though 1 was born that decade) so the following is based on my experience as a 90's kid with 70's-90's TVs, and my experience running these sets on my own home low power transmitters (this video the set was picking up my transmitter off rabbit ears) and what I have read about the early days of color. When they shutoff analog it was early in my collecting and I had 3 working vintage sets...A 1971 Zenith color and 2 50's B&W sets. Generally speaking all TVs will develop snow issues as signal gets weaker (better antennas can mitigate this up to a certain point), if the station was broadcasting in color then snow will be in in color too (the proper period term for color snow is confetti). Generally once a signal gets extremely weak, color sync will be the first thing lost, though the snow may be bad enough before then to prompt the user to manually turn color off for better viewing. Tube TVs have a 'Color Killer' that looks for the color sync pulse and shuts off the color demodualtors if it's absent. In the 50's-70's stations would turn off color and run the sweep at slightly different B&W frame rates. By the 80's so much of the programming was majority color (and to help early digital time coding programming automation systems) stations started transmitting color burst on monochrome shows and running the color sweep rates on monochrome shows (which were only ~1/1000 different). Generally in weak signal conditions if there's enough color signal to sync to, tint accuracy will still be pretty good, but snow will mess with color intensity on a solid colored surface, and produce confetti small random dots the wrong color. Color broadcasts in the tube era weren't necessarily of great quality as well. Network feeds had problems with distortion of the color signal from frequency dependent phase delay, and it took them some time to develop reliable equalization circuits to seamlessly compensate for it. Local stations often didn't have their cameras, film chains, VTRs and network feeds calibrated perfectly so it was common to need to tweak tint and color level from station to station, when a station was switching from live local to network or recorded media, or from show to show (different cameras in different studios)...Sometimes even on a single show there could be noticeable difference when switching between cameras occasionally. Generally the stations in the bigger cities (Chicago, NY, LA, etc) had a better budget and did a better job of maintaining consistency from show to show and station to station....Solid state gear in the 70's onward greatly improved consistency as well. Also the quality/accuracy of color picture the end user got varied quite a bit based on the skill of the end user. Some people didn't really get the color user controls on their TV....Heck the TV departments of some stores sometimes didn't get it, or didn't stay on top of it as shows changed throughout the day. One of these sets could look incredible, or kind of lousy depending on the circumstances... At the end of the day if decent signal could be pulled in from the antenna and the user had a decent understanding of the user controls most station side sins (at least the ones they wouldn't get an FCC fine for) could be compensated for in the TV.
It's more of a chroma demodulator problem...Some time after the 2018 resto I did on it a problem developed where sometimes on brightly colored objects the demod puts the wrong color before and after it...The on a still image I can eliminate the issue by turning color down till it's monochrome. There may be RF multipath (a transmitter elsewhere feeds it) and or fine tuning issues contributing to this. The fine tuning most prominently the color carrier level drifts for ~20 min after warm up requiring fine-tuning touch-ups for the first 20 min on. If you compare the beginning to the end you can see the issue seems to develop gradually after power up.
@@tomcarlson3913 Cool, thanks for the info. I have been out of the tv service ver since they went transistor and shops started going out of business. I was an in-home tech back in the day. By the time I got my own shop, sometime in the early 70s, shops started going out of business. That is when I changed careers. Now I love restoring these old sets when I can find them. Haven't seen a tube set of any kind here in the Arkansas Ozarks in the past 8 or 10 years. I'm still looking though.
I literally watched 5 minutes of that video on my computer last night, then realized I had to watch it on the RCA, and then realized it would be a good video.
Wow, where is this "time-machine" living room at? Had a big wooden French provincial RCA years ago with a CTC16 and 21FJP22 round picture tube. I could fix anything that went wrong by myself with a Sam's Foto-Fact folder on it. Great set that sounded good, too with two 6" X 9" speakers in it. T/Vs were better by the pound back then, and this set was a Gawd-awfully heavy piece of furniture.
Technically a bedroom somewhere in Waukesha county Wi. The 21CT55 is over engineered and over built. The cabinet and CRT alone weight what a 60's roundy would, and the 37 tube chassis makes it small TV/stereo combo heavy. Those CTC-16s are nice sets. I've had 4 come through my hands and kept the most deluxe/cherry/cool looking example, my remote Stockholm combo. I think I included a brief shot of it near the end of my second video.
Interesting to see that film on a period set. I think that the narrator was trying to tell us that RCA sets were of good quality 😄
Interesting video film, thank you Tom,
Worked on many ctc5,7,and 9 chassis
If only companies still cared about quality.
Once I get back to editing and releasing what I've been recording I recently picked up a couple of Setchel Carlson TVs that make the PCB based RCAs in that film look like low quality sets.
Boy does that set get a good picture! It is indeed just like a day in the past! What a treat seeing it!
Nice set Tom!!
Great picture. It has a little 'bleed' which only indicates there are a lot of hours on the CRT but other than that? 1955 RCA Quality!
The bleed is a chroma demodulator related issue. If I turn the color off it vanishes.
As a Brit these round screen US Colour sets really interest me.
hello b Reautiful RCA , brazil
Love this tv want them to come back with built in freeview and smart with Netflix and stuff
It's not hard to connect theses sets to a Roku box, DTV tuner, etc and use them with modern signal sources. The video I ran on this set here was basically played off youtube on a PC that was connected to the set through an adapter box. Getting the TVs to work in the first place especially early color sets of the 50's is where it takes real skill.
Great work in demonstrating this old set from the year of my birth. With roundie tubes you would of course miss part of the picture compared to viewing on a standard black and white set. What would the over the air picture be like in terms of colour fidelity and quality in areas of poor or difficult reception when these sets were brand new?.
This response touches on a lot of deep rabbit holes.
Both of my parents weren't born yet when this set was built (though 1 was born that decade) so the following is based on my experience as a 90's kid with 70's-90's TVs, and my experience running these sets on my own home low power transmitters (this video the set was picking up my transmitter off rabbit ears) and what I have read about the early days of color. When they shutoff analog it was early in my collecting and I had 3 working vintage sets...A 1971 Zenith color and 2 50's B&W sets.
Generally speaking all TVs will develop snow issues as signal gets weaker (better antennas can mitigate this up to a certain point), if the station was broadcasting in color then snow will be in in color too (the proper period term for color snow is confetti). Generally once a signal gets extremely weak, color sync will be the first thing lost, though the snow may be bad enough before then to prompt the user to manually turn color off for better viewing. Tube TVs have a 'Color Killer' that looks for the color sync pulse and shuts off the color demodualtors if it's absent. In the 50's-70's stations would turn off color and run the sweep at slightly different B&W frame rates. By the 80's so much of the programming was majority color (and to help early digital time coding programming automation systems) stations started transmitting color burst on monochrome shows and running the color sweep rates on monochrome shows (which were only ~1/1000 different). Generally in weak signal conditions if there's enough color signal to sync to, tint accuracy will still be pretty good, but snow will mess with color intensity on a solid colored surface, and produce confetti small random dots the wrong color.
Color broadcasts in the tube era weren't necessarily of great quality as well. Network feeds had problems with distortion of the color signal from frequency dependent phase delay, and it took them some time to develop reliable equalization circuits to seamlessly compensate for it. Local stations often didn't have their cameras, film chains, VTRs and network feeds calibrated perfectly so it was common to need to tweak tint and color level from station to station, when a station was switching from live local to network or recorded media, or from show to show (different cameras in different studios)...Sometimes even on a single show there could be noticeable difference when switching between cameras occasionally. Generally the stations in the bigger cities (Chicago, NY, LA, etc) had a better budget and did a better job of maintaining consistency from show to show and station to station....Solid state gear in the 70's onward greatly improved consistency as well.
Also the quality/accuracy of color picture the end user got varied quite a bit based on the skill of the end user. Some people didn't really get the color user controls on their TV....Heck the TV departments of some stores sometimes didn't get it, or didn't stay on top of it as shows changed throughout the day.
One of these sets could look incredible, or kind of lousy depending on the circumstances...
At the end of the day if decent signal could be pulled in from the antenna and the user had a decent understanding of the user controls most station side sins (at least the ones they wouldn't get an FCC fine for) could be compensated for in the TV.
@@tomcarlson3913 Thanks for your very comprehensive answer Tom.
Beautiful old tv set. Does it have a convergence problem?
It's more of a chroma demodulator problem...Some time after the 2018 resto I did on it a problem developed where sometimes on brightly colored objects the demod puts the wrong color before and after it...The on a still image I can eliminate the issue by turning color down till it's monochrome. There may be RF multipath (a transmitter elsewhere feeds it) and or fine tuning issues contributing to this. The fine tuning most prominently the color carrier level drifts for ~20 min after warm up requiring fine-tuning touch-ups for the first 20 min on. If you compare the beginning to the end you can see the issue seems to develop gradually after power up.
@@tomcarlson3913 Cool, thanks for the info. I have been out of the tv service ver since they went transistor and shops started going out of business. I was an in-home tech back in the day. By the time I got my own shop, sometime in the early 70s, shops started going out of business. That is when I changed careers. Now I love restoring these old sets when I can find them. Haven't seen a tube set of any kind here in the Arkansas Ozarks in the past 8 or 10 years. I'm still looking though.
I've seen this documentary before but it is way better on a 21CT55!!
I literally watched 5 minutes of that video on my computer last night, then realized I had to watch it on the RCA, and then realized it would be a good video.
Wow, where is this "time-machine" living room at? Had a big wooden French provincial RCA years ago with a CTC16 and 21FJP22 round picture tube. I could fix anything that went wrong by myself with a Sam's Foto-Fact folder on it. Great set that sounded good, too with two 6" X 9" speakers in it. T/Vs were better by the pound back then, and this set was a Gawd-awfully heavy piece of furniture.
Technically a bedroom somewhere in Waukesha county Wi. The 21CT55 is over engineered and over built. The cabinet and CRT alone weight what a 60's roundy would, and the 37 tube chassis makes it small TV/stereo combo heavy.
Those CTC-16s are nice sets. I've had 4 come through my hands and kept the most deluxe/cherry/cool looking example, my remote Stockholm combo. I think I included a brief shot of it near the end of my second video.