NEW 1964 LINE OF ZENITH TELEVISION SETS

[Homer J Simpson]

[steviefaux]

I had a Zenith badged 386sx. With I believe 2 or 4mb RAM. 10 or 20mb HDD. We couldn't afford anything else. Was in the 90s from the local computer store. I still, to this day, feel he ripped us off.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Zenith was founded by a ham, Ralph Matthews, 9ZN, in 1918. The company name was originally ZN'th, a contraction of the founder's ham call sign, which soon became Zenith.

[duckduck]

When they switched to the showroom I laughed. This is so different from the release of a new OLED TV from Samsung.

It was difficult to understand him. Seems like someone should come up with a ML /AI thing to clean up old audio and/or remove distortion (I am so not the right guy for it).

I loved that he showed the guts of one and pointed out that it had silicon rectification, not tube. Silicon's heyday was still to come. I remember going to a TV repair shop (remember those?) when I was a kid (1970s) and they had a vacuum tube tester on the counter so that the customers could test out their tubes. I think tubes must have been pretty much gone by then in consumer electronics. The Atari 2600 was out in '77 for Christ's sake. Don't know how my folks could afford US$199 for one of those damn things.

It's very much out of step with modern times how he kept on calling the viewers "gentlemen". It was amazing to hear him talk about manufacturing in the US (grumble grumble). A different age, for sure. Thank you for sharing.

[free_electron]

This year we spent millions of dollars on research to improve picture quality.
Next year we will do the same for sound so you can actually understand what is being said.

Right now our sound is that recorded by a microphone that has a loose wire, a marble rolling around on its membrane, placed in front of  a concrete wall with behind the wall the speaker having a sock in his mouth and possibly duct-tape over his mouth

[floobydust]

The crap audio quality is likely from demodulating the film optical sound track, but somebody got rid of scratches, clicks, pops, dropouts etc. so the audio has been processed/restored.

$550 in 1964 is $4,611 today so these console units are super expensive?  16 new portable models for '64 ?! Tuner with 116 gold contact rotary switch! Solid oak!

I've fixed dozens of Zenith TV's when I worked in a repair shop. They were good quality and fine to repair as you could get service manuals but the circuits always had some complicated, cute engineering that could be difficult to troubleshoot. Electronics engineering was weird back then, they did try to keep component count down but sometimes went weirdly complicated to get rid of a few parts. It didn't make sense as the sets have a zillion hand soldered parts, no PC boards yet.

[Electro Fan]

The sound wasn’t too good but how about turning on at least one TV to demo the picture?  And btw, have any that do color?  I think they did but you’d only know if you heard a brief mention of color controls behind a fold out cover.  This guy didn’t quite take it apart but he should have turned on at least one.  Some of the $ millions should have been spent on marketing and sales training.

[james_s]

That console in the post above is color, you can see the three convergence coils on the back of the yoke. I'd love to have an old console like that.

[Electro Fan]

That console in the post above is color, you can see the three convergence coils on the back of the yoke. I'd love to have an old console like that.

Yep, and good catch, but if we were selling color TVs in 1964 and we could show coils, controls, and a TV signal, I think we’d include the TV signal.   

[andy2000]

Yep, and good catch, but if we were selling color TVs in 1964 and we could show coils, controls, and a TV signal, I think we’d include the TV signal.   

The film appears to be aimed at Zenith dealers, not the general public.  It's tricky to film a live TV screen, so I can understand why they didn't even try.

[james_s]

I remember ads for TV sets always said "simulated picture" on them. A photo of a CRT usually doesn't look very good.