What happened to DER?

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Fidelity Fan

Did Granada Rentals apply their own brand names to some of their rental sets at this time?

In the 1980s "Finlandia" was the house-brand for a lot of Granada rental TVs. The chassis was generally made by Salora, in Finland!

[Restoration73]

think the small set was the Kuba Porta Color, but without the VHF tuner :
http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/kuba_porta_color.html

[Nuvistor]

That looks like the one, there are a lot of valves in that small cabinet, Anyone know how reliable they were with all that heat in a small space?

Frank

[Horris]

One of Granada's mainstay brands was Salora made in Finland. Granada rebadged them and called them Finlandia. They gave a fair picture but were not to reliable.

Dave

[hans]

Did Granada have Tandberg sets also? I have a service manual for the CTV2 With a Granada badge on it.

[dave walsh]

I rented a Granada Finlandia in 1976 ish. It seemed very top of the range to me [the consumer] and superior in style and picture to anything I could have hoped to buy. Although I wasn't that much into classical music, I assumed the name came from the Sibelius work, making the whole thing Scandanavian and exotic. The colour picture seemed marvellous. We never had a breakdown but perhaps we were lucky? BBC2 ran a foreign film series for a while, giving access to things only a specialist cinema in London could show eg Agguire Wrath of God! We had film evenings with people bringing drinks round. Great days.
Dave W

[brunel]

Tandberg TV's were imported and handled by the original A. C. Farnell, Leeds

before they became an international conglomerate.

[Horris]

Granada had 2 models of Tandberg TV's. One was hybrid, the other solid state.I cannot remember the Granada model numbers,

Dave

[julie_m]

I think what happened was that initially, renting was really the only way some people could afford to have a television in their homes. But with increasing demand for sets, they became just another disposable commodity, eventually falling within everyone's price range; therefore the rental model became increasingly unsustainable, as inevitably some customers would have found it becoming more expensive to rent a set than to pay for a nicer one on the monthly, and TVs were reliable enough not to need much attention from service personnel...

[mally1956]

Prior to the local Radio Rentals closing in Brighton (closed1998 i think )I remember chatting with the branch manager ,who advised me they still had a few old customers renting radios ,i vaguely recall the rental was something like 30 p a month !

[Nickthedentist]

It would be fascinating to know what the radios were, and whether they bothered repairing them if they failed.

[julie_m]

There was an item on That's Life sometime around 1983 - 84, probably, it was a long time ago. Anyway, they had someone who had rented a radio from Radio Rentals for like millions of years and it had gone faulty but RR said they did not want to know -- they would stop collecting the rental fee and he could keep the set, they did not want it back, it was his to throw away or get repaired at his own expense; but Esther Rantzen arranged for a vintage radio expert to visit his home and fix the set for him, all for free of course. I do remember the repairer saying it needed a new I.F. valve.

Mind, in those days, I was firmly convinced that valves were Old Hat, and they should have given him a nice modern radio with FM stereo and integrated circuits, not more of those stupid huge power-wasting glass things... ah, the folly of youth, eh...

[Nickthedentist]

Wasn't the expert none other than Gerry Wells?
http://vintage-radio.net/forum/showp...32&postcount=2

[Welsh Anorak]

Hi
That odd Kuba Porta-color (sic) was also known as the Granada Colourette. It featured, if that's the right word, a simple (i.e. no delay line) PAL decoder, with results more akin to NTSC. It wasn't as unreliable as you'd expect, but I suspect that was due to it being used as a second set and not on for too long each time. Not a set that I would have liked to see in a bedroom!

Incidentally, Granda became Box Clever and they still have a few sets out on rental - we are contacted to service them in our area. Usually Vestel flat screens, but we do get the odd CRT set soldiering on after netting thousands of pounds from the (inevitable) old lady who has always rented and wouldn't do anything else.
Oddly the customers are usually either old people with money living alone or houses of the 'wipe your feet when you leave' variety. There are a couple of people who want the latest set every year but not that many.

[gec2110]

Which rental firm put out Viking sets? The one I remember had loads of sliders and knobs as well as a 6 or 7 pushbutton tuner. I know Radio Rentals rented Korting sets.

[Horris]

Viking was the name used by Granada for Tandberg TV's

[Aerodyne]

It was in 1954 (I think) that my Dad rented a 14" set from Radio Rentals. It used a balanced twin feeder and had a five-station channel switch, supposedly ready for ITV when it arrived. It did and the set wasn't, ready that is. Replacement 17" and coax cable!
At the time we started renting the 14" my brother's girlfriend's family also rented, a 9" set. They had a multi-page brochure from RR showing a range of set sizes - the 9" was said to be 'for intimate family viewing'. They got that bit right. My brother married his girlfriend.
Thanks to all who added to this thread.
Tony

[FERNSEH]

It's likely that the five position station switch was the band 1 only Cyldon tuner which was discussed some time ago in this forum.
Weren't all the Radio Rentals TV sets made by the Yorkshire firm MRG.(Mains Radio Grams)?
Getting back to DER. Was the company always part of the Thorn group of companies? That is, created by Thorn in order to distribute by rental the companies' TVs. Or, a company acquired by Thorn.

DFWB.

[FERNSEH]

Reading earlier contributions about this topic on post #22 Dazzlevision informed us that DER was formed in 1939 by Jules Thorn.

From Gracesguide: http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Domestic_Electric_Rentals

In the TV trade we all expected TV rental would no longer be as important as it was in the 60s and 70s but who could have forecasted it that it would have almost disappeared altogether? Today, TV rental must have less than 1% of the market share.

DFWB.

[Nuvistor]

A link to a DER TV advert, looks like 1980's, looks very dated now.

http://youtu.be/EngIPPkEofA