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Old 2nd Feb 2006, 10:59 pm   #1
ianj
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Default Earliest shop-available colour set

I'm the owner of my Nan's old Philips G6 dual-standard colour hybrid tv-- it was bought in 1968, and cost £394 .....................to put that into perspective, in 1968, you could buy a brand new Morris Minor for £554, on the road........!!

As these were SO expensive when new, plus the high cost of the colour licence, there couldn't have been big sales, or rentals, of colour sets, could there? We didn't get a colour set until 1976, and that was a Peto-Scott dual standard valve set which was rented from Mr. Lansdown's shop in Churchfield Rd. Acton, West London........................

Who were first in the UK market? Were they any good? Were several manufacturers announcing sets simultaneously in 1967?
ianj

Last edited by Mike Phelan; 8th Jan 2008 at 9:48 am. Reason: Added missing apostrophes
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Old 2nd Feb 2006, 11:10 pm   #2
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

Probably not much help, but we entered the colour era in 1973 and it was with a large Baird branded beast from Radio Rentals. It was a hybrid chassis and the meantime between failures was about a week!
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Old 2nd Feb 2006, 11:35 pm   #3
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

My own GEC 2028 is dated 27 Aug 67 and was just over a year old when I bought it. The first owner could not find anyone to repair it. Evidently, it was not very reliable during the one year guarantee period.
It was replaced by a Toshiba C2080B in 1980.

DFWB.
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Old 2nd Feb 2006, 11:44 pm   #4
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

As far as I can make out from various sources, the First was the G6 and next was the BRC2000. Then in a very short space of time, the Pye Hybrid Chassis and then the GEC2028/GEC2030,The Baird 700 series and the very rare ITTCVC1.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 12:32 am   #5
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

My Dad worked for English Electric and I remember going to a demonstration of (I think) a GEC colour receiver long before it was publically available. It was certainly spectacular in those B&W days. I can't put a date to it, though.
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 8:48 am   #6
Mike Phelan
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

The first one I ever saw was indeed the G6 - G25K500. It had the colour-killer button and tuning indicator, later dropped from the D/Std G6.
The first one we installed anywhere was a Baird 700, with the nice antique style doors and burr walnut veneer - one of these acts as my hifi cabinet now. Wish I had kept the Baird.
When I went to British Relay, there were G6s, GECs, CTV25s both Decca and Bush, and of course the Pye.
During the boom we bought Zanussis, Luxors, Grundigs, and Swedish K70 Philips. The UK would not get enough sets.
The Zanussi had a thyristor line output stage and indestructible print, which was handy when one of our field engineers used to rebuild complete stages on the print side with 2 watt resistors, usually the wrong value.
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 1:23 pm   #7
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

Hi everyone,

Just a few old adverts that I thought you would like.

Best regards

Mike .
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 2:46 pm   #8
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

Looking at those adverts, I'm amazed at how small they are ( apart from the deliberately small ones ) especially the one with Eamonn Andrews. I can only recall huge beasts in wooden cabinets with doors, about 1968/69.

Slightly off topic, does anyone remember the Sinclair Microvision TV ( not colour )? I remember adverts in "Practical Wireless" in 1966, "The set that stole the show" it used to say. Don't think it lasted long, like a lot of Sinclair stuff.

Why does everything come back to 1966?

Best regards

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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 6:24 pm   #9
Brian R Pateman
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

With reference to the B&O advert................

....................The technology might have been beautiful but the things were fuller of dry joints than the G11!

(I always liked the G11 though).
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 8:11 pm   #10
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

In the June 1967 issue of Practical Television there is an article entitled 'Colour is coming'. It includes black & white (!?) photos of several of the new colour sets including Decca CTV25, Bush CTV25, Baird 700 and a Philips G6.
However the caption under a Bush CTV25 reads ''The first UK production set, claimed Bush when this model appeared. With Paldao cabinet and foldaway doors it retails at 310gns.'

So I guess Bush were claiming to be the first.

Mike
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 8:38 pm   #11
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available colour set

Hello,
The first colour television receivers that I sold from my business were the MK1 Bush CTV25, The Thorn 2000 chassis, The Philips G6, The Pye dual standard chassis and the later 691/697, The nasty impossible to service in the house nightmare DECCA CTV25 and the GEC 2028.

The GEC was the best of sets and gave very few problems, mainly what I call 'monochrome' faults, such as boost caps and the usual odd tuner faults.
The BUSH CTV 25 suffered from line output faults usually caused by a transformer with a tar insulated overwind operating at 25kv....[ One of these sets burnt down a Granada television rental showroom]
The G6 was a cracker of a set but at 500 watt power consumption suffered from all the usual line output stage problems but looking back were on the whole reliable.
Another easy to service set was the Pye series.These again suffered from line output stage problems and CDA board problems that were overcome by stand off valve holders.
The Thorn 2000 was a super set let down by a disastrous range of electrolytic capacitors that went o/c and s/c at the drop of a hat. They were all over the many boards but if you were willing to sit down and replace them all with better quality components, you were rewarded with a very reliable set.
I HATED THE DECCA CTV25. It was a huge console set with doors, weighed a ton, had short leads that did not allow operation of the massive chassis while withdrawn from the cabinet, cooked EHT overwinds every 18 months and nearly drove me to jumping off Battersea Bridge! I had 5 customers with them, two of which were well known television personalities of the time. I shudder thinking about those horrors.

My first 'full time' colour tv was the 22" MURPHY CTV22D dual standard set that I purchased at the trade price of £330 plus purchase tax in January 1968. It used a solid state EHT quadrupler assembly and a valve shunt stabilizer. It was the first set to use an IC for colour processing, and after a bad start of boost cap and 3rd harmonic tuning cap failure, ran without problems for over 10 years.

I would add that all of these sets gave first class pictures of good colour quality. They took a while to set up but were well worth the effort. I used to take great care with the grey scale, and customers loved to watch as I pulled out the massive convergence box from the G6 and set it up on my BUSH TPG55 generator which I still have in full working order.

On the whole, the sets were reliable and customers didn't mind having the odd service call to keep their sets working. Colour television amazed everybody, including the engineers that worked on them. Having started in the trade with single and 2 station 405 line black and white sets, it still amazes me today! Happy days!

Regards JOHN.

Last edited by Mike Phelan; 8th Jan 2008 at 9:29 am. Reason: S&P + a bit of white space added
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 10:22 pm   #12
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

The Philips G6 must be similar to the continental Philips K6 in 1967. Did Decca CTV25 and Bush use the same chassis? In the South West England Vintage Television Museum I have found some photos of these sets. But much more interesting for me are documentations of the chassis and the schematics.

Last edited by Paul Stenning; 3rd Feb 2006 at 10:24 pm. Reason: Off-topic question removed
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 11:21 pm   #13
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

Although Bush and Decca both made a CTV25 they were different designs. I suppose the name CTV25 was a rather obvious one; they were both Colour TV and both used the A63-11X 25" CRT.

There were inevitably some design similarities. They both used 25kV EHT overwinds with GY501 rectifier and PD500 shunt stabiliser aka xray tube. This arrangement was used on almost all first generation UK colour sets, the notable exception being the Thorn 2000 with its revolutionary solid state design.
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 11:24 pm   #14
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

Hello Yagosaga and welcome to the forum. The CTV25 BUSH and the DECCA CTV25 were completely different designs from different makers.

The Bush set came from RANK BUSH MURPHY, part of the Rank film organization, and was a well designed receiver.

The DECCA set came from the DECCA RECORD COMPANY makers of the Decca radar systems.

The later Decca Bradford chassis was a superb set, very easy to service unlike the original CTV25 that had a large chassis with seperately mounted controls and tube. The leads were too short to allow any form of house service.
The pictures on both sets were of the very best. Both sets were large and very heavy requiring 2 people to remove the set to the workshop, should that be necessary!
Regards. JOHN.
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Old 3rd Feb 2006, 11:47 pm   #15
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

The Bush CTV25 was our first colour TV set which we had around December 1967 - I dont remember much about it apart from being quite big .
This link shows the chassis:
http://home.att.net/~pldexnis/CTC2_h...sh_CTV-25.html

I dont know if many survived.. but theres a space waiting here for one
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Old 4th Feb 2006, 10:41 am   #16
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

Thank you very much for your replies. We had 13 different brands of colour tv sets in summer of 1967 in Germany. Four of them used a "unified chassis", i.e. the same chassis, but with different housings.
It is a one-horizontal transformer high-voltage chassis with a PL505/509, PY500, GY501 and PD500, the shunt regulator. (Nordmende, Telefunken, Siemens, Blaupunkt).
The other brands used two transformers, one for line deflection, the other for high voltage (Loewe, Graetz, Saba, Kuba, Grundig).
Philips used one transformer with PL509/PL504 and shunt regulator.
In the U.S. Westinghouse was the first in 1954 with a colour tv set in the shops, RCA followed. In Germany, the selling of colour tv sets in the shops started on July 1st, 1967. When I was a thirteen year old boy in 1973, I start to collect and fixing TV sets. My first colour tv set was a Saba T 2500 E color with 24 tubes. It takes me one year of repairing before I got the first light on the screen, and it was before my parents could afford a colour tv set. Colour television sets were rather expensive in that times.
Today I have three sets of this first generation in my collection, two of them in working condition, the third is working, but not very reliable. All of them have the A63-11X.
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Old 4th Feb 2006, 9:48 pm   #17
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

The very first colour tv set that I can remember was back in 1968/69 whilst staying with relations in Worthing. It was a GEC dual standard and the picture did not look very impressive to me. After that the next colour set that I saw was a toss up between the RBM A823, Philips single standard K70 or the ITT/KB CVC5.
Down in West Cornwall BBC1 and ITV did not go to colour until 1971/72. By then all colour tvs were 625 single standard and our first colour set was the horrible Pye CT205 which we had on rental in 1973. After only a few days it went up in smoke and in the few years that we had the thing it spent more time out of action than working.
If only our first colour tv had been a Decca Bradford or ITT/KB CVC5.
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Old 5th Feb 2006, 10:01 am   #18
Mike Phelan
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

All of what said is true, including the fact that (some) older colour sets give better performance than newer ones. Not the hybrid Pyes - they all have noisy chroma!


The first set we actually owned was a 19 inch BRC2000, bought from a part-ex customer. Then a K70 followed.

Later, I bought, refurbished and resold lots of ex-rental G6s, K70s, K80s, K9s, Korting 54660s.
Our sets at home progressed from Korting, Kuba Florence, Grundig 6010 - the two latter I managed to stick a Teletext decoder on to!
The Kuba chassis went into a Baird 700 cabinet, and I replaced the awful sound stage and speaker with a TDA2030 and RS speaker.
Later a BRC9600 and B & O hybrid. Then I built a Forgestone with many mods such as a Teletext decoder and Nixie tuning display - all stuffed into the Baird 700 cabinet. This soldiered on without even having the back off, for about 10 years!
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Old 5th Feb 2006, 11:43 am   #19
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

Hi, Our first colour set was a Decca Bradford rented from Granada. I remember it smelling really hot and "new" for ages! I used to switch it on and look through the vent slots; the PY500 lit up like a light bulb on at switch on - the things that amuse you when you are 12 !

The second set we had (I still have in the spare bedroom) was a Marconiphone 19" fitted with the Thorn 8500 chassis; it gave sterling service as the main set for about 10 years - in all that time the only thing I had to do was to readjust the ref osc and replace the tripler (poor focus).After a long storage it's now back in occasional use, but I have to admit the tube is past its best now!

On the subject of the Pye 205, I worked for a local TV rental shop in 1979/80 and they had hundreds of these sets on rental - they would have been 5/6 years old by then, and we were rebuilding them as fast as we could - solid state cda board, the lot!
We had a few smallish burn-ups but no more than any other set of the time, what about the timebase board on the Gec hybrids!?
If I remember correctly, a resistor in the HT feed to the PL508 frame o/p valve would go LOW resistance and the VDR would combust if the owner was out of the room or put up with the increased picture height a big hole in the board soon resulted

Last edited by Mike Phelan; 8th Jan 2008 at 9:41 am. Reason: Misplaced commas and various S&P items
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Old 9th Feb 2006, 6:17 pm   #20
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Default Re: Earliest shop-available Colour set

All this talk of dual-standard colours has encouraged me to get the old G6 out of mothballs! It's not in the best of states, but it seems to all be there excepting the colour knob and the legs (G25K500) and some valves. The good news is I have a brand new (!) LOPT for it picked up from the dump many years ago when Telefusion were clearing out their stock room! So that's an incentive.....
It amazes me now how on earth the manufacturers expected the sets to work at all with all those valves, system switches and wirewound pots - but they did and I know a lot of hybrids made it well into the eighties in the hands of Joe public.
I shall keep you informed on the resto - I look forward to seeing a G6 picture again to decide whether it really was the best colour I've seen or is the memory playing tricks?

Glyn
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