Zenith

[Philco123]

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

[Philco123]

A few more pictures. 15G getters look good!

[Electronic M]

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.

[etype2]

Great find and congrats. ��

[Tom9589]

Do you have any idea who made the CRT?

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

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Tom9589

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.
He has all kinds of exotic sets!

[Tom9589]

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?

[ceebee23]

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

[reeferman]

How did you come across this set?

[zeno]

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

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

[NewVista]

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!

[Philco123]

I found the set on Facebook Marketplace.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by NewVista

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!

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.

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by NewVista

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!

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.

[old_tv_nut]

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.