Zenith TV Model# SC1923W

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Carmine

It's funny that you consider this set to be "early color"... What would you do if forced to watch this:

Carmine, don't sell the roundies short. Your Zenith has a much better picture than a 1964 Silvertone roundie I had in the early '70s. My set had a picture badly out of convergence, and at the end (a year or so before the video-output tube socket broke out of the video PC board in 1973 ) I had hum bars in the picture as well, not to mention so-so color sync. I admit, it wasn't the best color picture on earth by a long shot, but this was a set I got from a neighbor in my hometown who had had the set in his garage for years, so I considered myself lucky to have gotten the TV to work at all.

IMO, the picture you show on your set (using rabbit ears as an antenna--you must be in a prime signal area for Detroit stations) isn't so bad, even by today's standards, although today's dark-tint inline tubes are brighter and have better contrast than even the best roundies had 35+ years ago. Roundies may not have produced the best pictures on earth, but they were all that was available in the '50s and '60s until rectangular tubes were introduced. There were also roundie b&w sets in the fifties (Zenith's Great Circle sets with the Glare-Ban Blaxide reflection-proof CRTs come to mind, as well as a 16" Majestic b&w round-tube set I got from my aunt in 1969 when she moved), but the rectangular tubes did produce better and brighter pictures as the technology improved.