Nice CTC-16 on eBay
 

It's in California. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...165429745&rd=1

Thats a nice set. One thing, with cateract work done and if he set it up and repaired it as good as he says, it will have a picture comparable to a 2005 sony. Properly tuned up 16's will have a picture that will blow you away!

Btw, whats the guy doing there? Fixing a cracked solder joint, or posing for the picture?

That's an all tube or an hybrid set? I saw the starting bid is 1 buck. Iff i oferr 20 bucks, can I buy it?

Thats an all tube set. If nobody else wants it you can have it for a dollar bill, if the seller is honest. Now, getting it to Romania, thats a different story! A very nice set, anyway.

thats looks just like my first color set that i found in the trash down the street from my house when i was 12.the screen was cracked though,but it came with the remote.hella nice set.

Hrr. How I want to get my hands on old color tv.

Be patient. Start with an easy to handle full tube color tv. Try to find someone here in AK who is willing to sell you a working GE Porta-Color for a low price of appr. $20 thru $30 (or for free with a bad crt - I have a spare crt for it on my attic.) And I will take care for the shipping of the tv set to you. (You have to tell me your shipping adress in Romania.) Is this an acceptable offer for you? - Or does somebody here has a better idea?

@yagosoga: spund quite good. Anyway, I just collect old tvs. I don't repair them yet. Somebody alse dose that. GE Porta-Color is an all tube tv?

For heavens sake, you have to learn it! Without the ability to fix a tube color tv in a life safe way it makes no sense to collect old tvs. You should better give it up to collect vintage tv sets if you are not able to understand the schematics and the fundamental basics of color television technology. You won't probably find a well restaurated roundie for a lower price too. And even if you get one, the set might failure the next day and you have to fix it.
For me it is the much more exciting experience / adventure to fix and adjust a non-working tv set than to buy a completely restaurated and excellent working tv set.
You have to be professional in all the recapping and adjustment jobs before you can start to collect such old devices.
The Porta-Color is an all-tube color tv set. I didn't found any transistor on the chassis board. Perhaps the UHF tuner might have a transistor or a high frequency rectifier, I don't know. The schematics don't show the UHF tuner unit.
It was my first NTSC color tv set and I have learned very much about the problems of NTSC color in tube tv sets while fixing it.

There's one transistor in the UHF tunner on a Portacolor. Otherwise, there's a few diodes, but it's an 'all tube' TV.

Did GE use the silly "wack the crystal with the colorburst" setup in anything vbesides the portacolor?

There are some GE and Admiral larger color sets (even 23V" sets) which appear to use a very similar tube layout as the portacolor, so the color burst setup is probably the same.
Now I do like the portacolor but it can be a pain to work on. If you are getting started on tube color TV's a Zenith console would be a better one to start on I think, with a more robust design that is easier to work on.

@yagosga: I consider my preocupation for old tvs as "holly mision". The Romanians treat old tvs like junk (there's are just a few people in this country that cares about old tvs) and I don't want to say again who many old tvs (balck & white, and colour too) I missed. My heart is breaking when I heard about an old tv that was smashed and treated without mercy. I cand meke big sacrifices for myself in order to save old tvs.
Sometimes I couresd my days because I ain't at least 4 years older (I'm only 22).

I'd go for a transformer type TV set too. Safer to work on. Unless you have an isolation tranny handy. I don't :(

If you had access somehow to a good American color picture tube you could import just a chassis. If you were really good maybe you could modify an old NTSC tube color chassis to work with a junker Romanian crt/cabinet. Shipping a complete chassis only shouldn't be much different than shipping a Portacolor.

I don't know how it should work. The older NTSC chassis are designed for 70 degrees crt, but there is no other country in the world (except Japan?) where 70 ° deflection crts were available. The Romania tv's might have 90° or 110° deflection crts. To prepare a chassis for working with newer (always inline) crts is a task for well-experienced people. I'm willing to pay the shipping of a Porta-color to Romania. I think, this is the easiest way for a 22 year old student to collect experience and become able to handle an older set. It is also possible to ship the set to me, and I will check or fix it and then send it to Romania.