While I certainly understand everyone's point of view on this, I did ask for everyone's opinion on the first practical color roundie. By the time the rectangular screen sets made it to market, the typical color set required about as much maintance as the typical monochrome set of that era. In other words, they were reliable, and therefore, practical.

Yes you did say "roundie" and I overlooked that. I read the bold title print, so excuse me.

My vote is for the Zenith 29JC20. One fine set!

That may have been the first fully solid state colour chassis in the USA but over here in the UK we had the Thorn 2000 chassis (sold under various brand names) available in 1967 for the start of our colour service. Used rather less power (about 250W) than the 400W or so for a hybrid chassis. In the UK we had the problem of dual standard 625/405 sets until 1969. The system switching was often complex and unreliable and gave many early colour sets a bad name.

http://www.oldtechnology.net/colour.html#hmv2000

IIRC one of my ~50% tube Zenith hybrids is 315W, and some of the all tube sets were ~350W...The early tube color sets tended to be more power hungry.

My 21-CT-55 draws 525w from the wall, the cord gets warm if you run it for very long. :)

In early color TV, a 1962-1964 Zenith roundie in high end chassis would be my nod for practical daily driver. No PC boards, far more reliable than RCA and engineered for reliability.

The shock wore off after a few seconds. I remembered the CTC2 is peppered with tubes, and I reckon the 2B isn't much different.

475 watts is a Merrill's draw. RCA had gotten kinda chintzy by this time, apparently. My 9TW333 has a beefy 16 gauge cord like one of those clocks you could plug a percolator into, yet it draws about 350 watts max.

I run my CTC10 and CTC11 as daily runners. My 11 has a Cataract and not so great emission but my 10 is great. I must admit I use the 10 more.

The 475 watt figure for the CTC-2, and the 525 watt figure for the CTC-2B are both apparent power; you're being billed for less. IIRC, the power factor for a CT-100 is about 0.85 or so.

I'd use my blonde CTC-16X.

I would have and many vintage Zenith owners WILL wish that someone gets those specs and starts making them because they are nearly unobtainium and the spools are brittle and broken on many sets. If the slug freezes in a brittle spool it is DONE!

I have a 1964 Zenith metal cabinet job that a while back was familiar to this forum due to both that and a popped resistor under an arching (to the point of ruin) HV rectifier socket.

I finally found a coil and a socket, but it wasn't easy. And understandably there weren't a lot of enthusiasts with spare chassis wanting to sell off vital parts. Someone finally came to the rescue with the rectifier socket and for the record, the resistor isn't even necessary. Can't remember why to explain, but a very reliable source told me to run a jumper where the resistor was and all would be well. And it was. :thmbsp:

I still have the set, but the project got put to the side by the acquisition of a new woman and all of her (MANY) belongings. No room to pull a TV chassis, so I shifted my interests to restoring old test equipment like Heathkit C3s, Sprague TelOhmikes, and Solar stuff. The type that test for leakage at full rated voltage. Great, if not essential for people doing what we do here at VK and NO a modern DVOM with capacitance WILL NOT tell you the condition of any capacitor; only the uuf or uf value with it's 9V battery.

Don't want to go off topic so yes the set sits waiting for it's day in the sun of the right buyer. It works pretty good. Needs a little convergence work and I run it on my Variac with a milli ammeter hooked up to the cathode of the horizontal output tube to keep an eye on the current. I don't want to lose a flyback! The current gets a little higher than I feel good about at full wall potential, so I need to replace a few caps in that circuit and all will be fine.