Zenith
 

Picked up this interesting '54 Zenith last week.....

A few more pictures. 15G getters look good!

VERY interesting indeed. That was one of a small handful of 1954 Zenith color sets built to demonstrate NTSC. I could probably count the surviving examples on my hands.

I've been hoping to find one for years. If you wanted to sell or to trade for my working CT-100, Westinghouse H840CK15 and or a 1 of 1 Tel-Instrument 15GP22/CT-100 based monitor I'd be interested.

Great find and congrats. ��

Do you have any idea who made the CRT?

Is this the same TV that was described in the technical paper that ETF has?

Word has it, they made their own! That set has to be the rarest set out there.
As I understand, John Folsom in Florida has one. :scratch2:
He has all kinds of exotic sets!

It will really be interesting to see the state of the vacuum of this CRT! Could Zenith have solved some of RCA's problems?

I wonder if this TV has Zenith's beam defection color demods as outlined in the technical paper?

A schematic would definitely be interesting. Does one even exist?

wow....
 

Just wow.... one of the holy grail sets!!!!
Congratulations

How did you come across this set?

https://www.earlytelevision.org/zenith_15_inch.html

https://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/...ual_report.pdf

So Zenith/Rauland's publicity report on their color tube progress is vague and not too promising: They claim to be making a fresh start to a CRT design, distinct from RCA, but their tube looks like a 15GP22, their clone seemingly never made it many numbers - if at all - their R&D budget soon gone? So probably capitulating, using an RCA, like that other giant, GE, appears to have done, to prove to the world that they were fully capable of delivering their own color product!

I found the set on Facebook Marketplace.

Research division was not cut until mid 70s.

How much of that prototype tube was a copy of RCA and how much was different is not clear; and of course, prototype receivers for NTSC testing very likely used RCA tubes.

From what I understand Zenith came up with the electromagnetic convergence system color TVs used after the tubes that used 15G guns were phased out. They also had prototype 23" rectangular color CRTs circa 1954.

Zenith tended to be early to prototype, late to market on tech that they didn't develop completely in house. They had pre-War TV prototypes but didn't sell consumer models until 1948 (VS RCA that sold sets to consumers pre-War and in 1946 as soon as the government would let them resume making consumer products). Zenith had field sequential color that it sold to the medical industry before CBS field sequential broadcasting became a standard and had all electronic NTSC prototypes before that standard replaced field sequential yet Zenith didn't sell color sets to consumers until 1961 when the 62 model year 29JC20 chassis was rolled out.

Zenith didn't want to loose money on tech that wasn't theirs.

Zenith also developed technology licensed for other purposes. I believe they developed some of the first wideband oscilloscope tubes and licensed that to Tektronix. Later they did a lot of the early work on plasma displays. They also designed, made, and used surface wave IF filters in the later years of analog TV. I personally worked on analog IC design for color TV. They had tentative plans to do final fab on pre-implanted wafers, but that was scotched when the estimated $300M capital expense was not supported by decreasing profits in the 70s. However, they continued to use their proprietary designs, made by a third party vendor.

I wonder if John Folsom would let ETF post the schematic of this set?

Given that RCA basically told the world they single handedly invented NTSC (something which I suspect pissed everyone else who pitched in, off), I wonder if Zenith:

a) Licensed electromagnetic convergence to RCA, for a fee, of course?

b) Waited it out, while RCA spun their wheels bashing color over everyone's heads, while Zenith happily sold really nice B&W sets.

c) Was ready to move with their own color set, of excellent design (29JC20).

I suspect had color caught on earlier, they'd have been ready to move. ETF's pdf on the prototype shows they were working on the beam-switch demodulator from the outset.

In short, let RCA take all the punches (and losses), while Zeniths stands by ready to jump in when the time was right.

Yeah, how much money did Sarnoff burn making the 15GP22 work?

RCA was selling color at a loss for years, most sales were at introduction or when 21" came out in late 54. Most makes that had their own 15" set bailed or rebadged RCAs for 21" and the ~3 that did have their own 21" set either bailed from the market by the 1957/58 recession or in Motorola's case just keep selling the same 21CT2 model from 57 till designing a new chassis in 62. Zenith waited to see and waited long enough to see that the 50s were not a profitable decade for marketing color TV.

You mentioned earlier that Zenith waited a bit to get into B&W, too. I wonder how their sales compared between when they had that funky round screen design, vs after they went to a 'normal looking' design. Though I suspect the general public had no idea what a TV looked like and I don't think industrial designers did either, given the number of variants back then..

(Philco, RCA, and DuMont seemed to get it mostly right, though they had a bigger head start than almost everyone else...)

It would be interesting to see actual numbers on how sales compared.

I suspect porthole sales were quite good. There's still quite a lot of survivor Zenith porthole sets out there relative to other sets despite Zenith having issues with high flyback failure in the porthole era (they fixed it around the time they went to rectangular CRTs).
The general public didn't understand aspect ratio or how a TV makes a picture so unless they saw a rectangular and a porthole side by side they might not realize the bigger picture is cropped. Also all sets had significant overscan back then so a rectangular masked CRT with an excessive amount of overscan might look to be cropped the same as a porthole. Zenith also had a Zoom switch that changed raster size from full porthole down to underscan similar to the double D masks on other brands so in the late 40s, when everyone was using the double D mask, a savy customer would say the cropping is no worse in underscan mode plus you can switch to fill the screen for a bigger picture.
Back in the late 40s there wasn't really a standardized way of measuring/marketing screen size and there were limits to how big glass technology would allow you to make a CRT so makers started taking the round CRTs and masking them non-rectangular in various ways to claim they had a bigger screen for the price than everyone else who were also using the same CRT.

Here Zenith claim to have their own 21" rectangular color tube in (mid?) 1954. Any of these 21" demo sets surviving?

Looking closely at the picture, it looks like there is the anode connector on the side of the envelope. It also looks like there is a metal ring near the screen. Did Zenith use the same process of welding the two rings together after the screen and shadow mask are installed like RCA or did they deposit the phosphors directly on the face plate?

Here's a slightly better scan.
https://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_mult...museum_org.pdf
Still not adequate to answer any questions.

The text says "demonstrated" but the picture shows a display with no picture on the tube.

This picture shows a rectangular DuMont tube from the same time frame and similar to the Zenith. Unfortunately the article is all about a round DuMont tube.

https://www.earlytelevision.org/dumont_color_crt.html

Here's a 1952 patent applicatioin (granted in 1955) from RCA for magnetic convergence.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2707248

I recently read 10 years worth of what started as Radio merchandising a.d service magazines. Later they included television. There was one or more articles on the 21” Zenith rectangular tube. Also an article on the 21” Westinghouse tube and IIRC, that tube started life with Dumont. I don’t recall a picture of the tube in action. And, the Zenith logo, The quality goes in before the name goes on, did not come into use until the second or 3rd year that Zenith built tv sets. And when people talk about prices, Zenith had radios that topped ou at over $700 retail.

Issues from 1925 to 1980. https://worldradiohistory.com/Radio_...g_Magazine.htm

This Zenith color set has to have the smallest CRT screen (looks no larger than 12 inches) I have ever seen on a color TV of any make. Was this an experimental color set, not meant for retail sale? I am thinking it must be as, as I mentioned, until now, I had never seen a color TV with a CRT that small. If this TV was offered for retail sale, how many such sets were sold? I would guess this set must have had one heck of a hefty price tag, on the order of $1000 or even more. If this is true, I don't think very many were sold, except perhaps to Texas oil barons or to people who had inherited a small fortune from a deceased relative.

I cannot imagine anyone else being able to afford a color TV at this price. Color televisions were expensive as all get out when this set was new anyway, with very little color programming available; I would guess most people who could afford a set like this watched mostly b&w shows, as the networks probably were not offering much color programming except the occasional special. The only other exception I can think of as I write this is programming from the NBC television network, as they always made a huge point of the fact that they were "the FULL COLOR network." In fact, NBC's Nightly News broadcast was presented in color, five nights a week, and don't forget NBC's signature color peacock, which was shown before each and every color program in prime time.

Local NBC affiliates also showed the peacock before most locally-produced color shows. I live near Cleveland and remember when WKYC-TV in that city would show the peacock before every local program, with a local announcer saying "The following program is brought to you in living color on WKYC-TV." I would think most other cities with NBC-O&O stations made the same announcement as well before locally-produced color shows, as in, for New York, "The following program is brought to you in living color on WNBC-TV." The other NBC O&O's, of course, would use the same basic announcement, using the local affiliate's call sign; for example, in Cleveland, the NBC-O&O always announced ". . . living color on WKYC-TV" before every locally-produced show.