(For us older DU'ers) Your first color TV?

Since my Dad's first career was as a TV/radio repairman, and he kept doing it on the side, we were one of the first families in our neighborhood to get a color TV, and it was similar to this one:




Took a half-hour to "warm up," gave us radiation burns if we sat too close, and the dial (yes, a dial!) went "clunk clunk."

I was talking to my Dad, and asked him if I had described back then, this color TV:



Or a big-screen TV, he would have said I was nuts. :-)

However we had a larger color tv... with cable.

dad had to go out and buy a Zenith. My brother still has the busted B/W. :hi:

...for a few years there, we had a polarized plastic sheet stuck to the front of the b&w tv that 'simulated' full color. Actually, all it did was saturate everything in rainbow stripes and make the picture virtually unwatchable. It was sold as a cost-effective alternative to expensive color tvs and many people, my deluded father included, bought one. I think he immediately knew he'd been hornswoggled but, never being a man to knowingly admit a mistake, he insisted that it was 'just as good' as the real thing. I put my myopia and astygmatism down to that damned piece of plastic.

Except my father was too cheap to spring for the rainbow colored one. Ours was a cheap knock-off that was Blue on the top and green across the bottom, and like your father would swear "you can't tell the difference".

We always had a b&w set. Then again, a lot of the programming when I was growing up in the 60's was black and white. We had a tenant downstairs who had one of those plastic sheets to put over the set to make it look like color. Heehe. I used to watch the soaps with her sometimes and I remember that if the people were in just the right position they looked okay, but one move wrong and they'd have a green face or something. What a silly invention!

while everybody and their dog had long ago got colour. I was a deprived child. ;)

We had Black and White until my sister was born in 1978. It was a 19 inch Zenith.

It was also a Zenith. :) The b&w TV that we had been using went into the room my sister and I shared, and we were the only kids on our block to have a TV in our room. :D In fact, that b&w TV in our room is where I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon live. :)

How are you feeling today? :hug:

:loveya:

About the same. :( This crud will probably take several days to run its course.

:hi: :* Thanks for checking on me. :D

we need you to recover fully, the lounge naughtiness has taken a dive of late. ;)

I'm sorry you're poorly, and of course I check on you. I think of you a lot. :hug:

(I'm not afraid to kiss a sick 'Chick) :*

:loveya:

Sort of looked like the one in the photo.

or Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color when Tinkerbell would splash color on the screen.

Bonanza's map was a bore, but seeing those colors on disney was great! :D

That picture looked just like ours, but I think we had an RCA tv

That Disney choir singing "The wonderful world of color..." :-)

The Disney Channel used to show those old "bumpers" but they don't anymore. :-(

My father got promoted to salary at GM and this was one of the first thing he bought.

...it was one of those big, TV - stereo consoles. I can't remember the brand and it would have been bought at Grants or Sears.

use the "horizontal hold" button from time to time when the picture started skipping? Hehehe. I remember that. And how when you shut the TV off there would be this little circle in the middle that would take a while to fade away. And those old sets weighed a TON!

Sometimes Dad and I would have to haul a TV from some guy's house to our home, and those console ones were THE worst.

And the several times we took them up flights of stairs... :wow:

We'd have to remove all the tubes and visit the TV repair shop to have them tested. Funny, it was always the same damn tube that failed, but Pops wouldn't buy a second one "just to be safe". Tube testing was always a Saturday morning project, so it the TV failed early in the week we were just out of luck.

LOL. You're right, it was always the same tube. My dad was pretty handy so he would buy the tube and change it himself. But like your dad he would only buy one at a time. :D

But it was a Zenith. And I think it was gray.

Nice and compact so it was easy to move about.

It sat on a tv table and it weighed a ton.

A small GE portable. My father got it to watch the lunar landing. The color had a green tint and they broadcast the landing in black and white. :shrug:

Makes for a good family story. :)

There was a central antenna that everyone in the development hooked up to. The cable box was attached to the TV by a cable and had approximately 20 channels. It was pretty cool to kids who had only had 3 channels before.

and it is still my primary TV! I remember watching the amazing Franz Klammer run in the 1972 winter Olympics on it. That thing has never been in the repair shop once in the 34 years we have owned it -- it is a champ that still has a great picture with true color. The only problem is that it is a push-button on/off -- no remote -- so when I am curled up in bed on a cold night watching TV, I have a very long paint pole I use as my "remote" to turn the TV off. :D

I don't remember the brand. But I was amazed by the colour, watching High Chaparell (a western at the time). Of course there were discussions on the amount of colour adjustment for skin tone. So lots of tweaking the reds and hue.

And I never had one until 1985 when I bought a used one at the age of 30.
My brothers, sisters and I were the remote controls. We still have flat spots on our heads from it.

get a color TV, and I had never seen color TV. My sister was friends with the girl who lived there, so one night when "The Wizard of Oz" was shown, we went there to watch it. When the movie changes from B/W to color, right after the tornado, we were like, "Ooohhhh!" It really was amazing the first time, but the novelty of it wore off soon. That was about 1966 or 1967, I think. It wasn't much longer until we had our own color TV, and then B/W sets looked like antiques.

color set until 1976. :hi:

we got one in the late 1960s, but I just don't remember exactly when. I also remember on The Wizard of Oz, not realizing that the Wicked witch's face was green until I saw it in color. And she always scared the s***t out of me, until I turned 9 or 10.

The very first thing I saw in color was the Lawrence Welk Show...and, boy, that was a lot of color. :D

Then I think our first color was an RCA and yup it had dials that went clunk clunk. Or since I usually watched the local independent UHF channels (even back then I couldn't stand much of the big network programing I guess :) ) it was more like - ticka,ticka, ticka


But on the B&W we actually had a remote control for a while. It came with cable...yup that's right we had cable with a remote control. The remote was a big box about 8x5x4 inches with three rows of buttons and a dial to select which row you wanted and a Big Thick black cable that went from the box to the TV. For years I thought that's what 'cable tv' meant (that you had a box like that with a cable attached to your tv, i guess that's not actually that far off :) )

I was probably about 5 or 6.

The first show I watched in colour was Tom & Jerry. Interestingly, the CTV anchorman, who I loathed for some reason, was green for the first few weeks. :D

front room in 1966. She also bought a "portable" color TV for what we referred to as the TV room. There was nothing portable about that TV. It weighed a ton...

Zenith's were great TV's. They lasted forever. In fact my father finally replaced that one with another Zenith in 1985. I "inherited" it when we sold the house after Dad went into the nursing home. I used that particular TV until we moved to Ireland in 1997. I gave it to my nephew for his basement.

In fact, when we returned from Ireland a year later, I tried to get that TV back, but Ed refused. It finally bit the dust in 2002. Ed replaced it with a big-screen.

I can remember the first time I watched TV PERIOD . If it wasn't so mind numbingly BORING I would tell you about what happened in the program (early 50s soap opera called The Edge Of Night)

Boy was I pissed!!

:grr:

I was about 2 or 3. I don't really remember it, except the old b&w one was in mom & dad's room after we got the new one.

We got the first in about 1972. It was kind of like 2-color process. I still have a B&W that I keep in the library.

I bought my first color TV around 1969 or1970 when I was around 24 years old.

It had a 13 inch screen and it cost nearly $300.00 dollars. I bought it because a male friend told me that guys would like me more if I had a color television.

And strangely I remember it...and I remember seeing Nixon leave on the copter...

I was 23, still living with my parents, and working in a record store (remember records?). The employees got a special deal to purchase color TVs directly from the manufacturer for something like $175. We'd always had B&Ws until then.

growing up in the late 60s/early 70s. It died eventually, and I felt like we were on the cutting edge when we replaced it with a Sony Trinitron around '74/'75, complete with a HUGH!!1!1! 17" screen! We moved up to a 19" Sony maybe 5 years later when we became a 2-TV household. I had a black & white in college, and purchased a color set for myself once I got a real full-time job and started making actual money...