"Hinari Domestic Appliances or Hinari LP is a British manufacturer of domestic electrical products. Hinari was acquired by Alba plc in 1989."
and then
"Alba is a British consumer electronics manufacturing company owned by Home Retail Group. Its sister brand is Bush. Today, all Alba and Bush products are sold exclusively at Argos"
Pye & Ekco & to a degree Dynatron all came together with Philips with the G11 chassis at this point all products were identical with only the tuner buttons and some models having remote control & teletext and some even with prestel & built in printers ! .
Following on from this were the 731 & 741 chassis
CES was 604 Purley Way , Waddon , Croydon CR9 4DR . Now still knowing that after 35 is really sad !
The address is a Toyota car dealership now .
Does anybody remember very cheap radios in the early seventies, many of which were made by Binatone? They would have Medium Wave , FM , Aircraft Band (108 Mhz - 136 Mhz ) PSB Band (136 Mhz - 175 Mhz) for reception of taxis, fire brigade, ambulances, even TV sound from Band 3.
Yes. I was in the trade at the time and we flogged those things. They appeared under various names, but the ones we sold were badged 'Oscar' and 'Hanimex' or possibly Amerex.
Binatone was an extremely cheap & cheerful japanese brand and we had the misfortune to win the contract to repair the local supermarket's Binatone junk.
Akai was a well respected brand known mainly for its tape recorders. It was not a 'shop brand', it was a proper brand sold all over the world.
Waltham.....oh don't remind me. More cheap junk.
We got the contract to do repairs to the shtte sold by Hardy's furniture stores. They flogged a music centre made by Capetronic, and it was truly awful. The cassette deck in particular was a nightmare.
They also sold a portable TV made by Global. More junk.
"Hinari Domestic Appliances or Hinari LP is a British manufacturer of domestic electrical products. Hinari was acquired by Alba plc in 1989."
and then
"Alba is a British consumer electronics manufacturing company owned by Home Retail Group. Its sister brand is Bush. Today, all Alba and Bush products are sold exclusively at Argos"
I seen to remember reading, it might have been in 'Television' magazine, that Hinari was a name made up by a Scottish ex Comet engineer after he left Comet. I could have a look back through thirty years worth off issues sometime.
I seen to remember reading, it might have been in 'Television' magazine, that Hinari was a name made up by a Scottish ex Comet engineer after he left Comet. I could have a look back through thirty years worth off issues sometime.
There have been a few developments since the Wiki entry.
Hinari's sister brand Akura never became part of Alba. It was sold to a north London trading company who now exclusively import Chinese-made televisions.
The founder of Akura and Hinari, Brian Palmer, set up Cello Electronics in 2001. It has subsequently become the UK's only tv manufacturer/assembler following the shift to eastern european assembly by the Japanese brands.
What of Harvard who as Alba once owned the Hinari brand? After selling off the Alba and Bush brands to Argos, and its 50% stake in Grundig to Beko, what was left of Harvard was sold to the Chinese company Geeya.
AFAIK, Logik appeared sometime around 1986/87, Matsui was around 1991? I believe the first TVs to use the Logik name were Thorn TX100 chassis. I have one waiting in my "can't be arsed to fix it yet" pile - random line ripple/shaking problem (i.e. not smoothing caps in the PSU) -flywheel sync time constant capacitor? IIRC, these were the last sets to use this chassis.
After it's fixed it'll be displayed with a period VCR - my 88 JVC HRD-320 should do nicely
No - I think Matsui appeared mid-1980s.
I think Logik tended to be used on the entry level, low spec kit, whereas Matsui tended to appear on the slightly better equipped kit.
Also Matsui was used on white goods - some of the Matsui microwaves were genuinely very good and better than some of the branded entry level products (e.g. Moulinex, Sharp etc).
Saisho was the Dixons badged version, used until circa 1991 when it started to be phased out in favour of Matsui - more closely aligning the ranges in Dixons and Currys at the same time.
Saisho did stick around a bit longer on some products e.g. car stereos.
A couple of other forgotten brands
ITT - disappeared in the late 1980s.
Thomson tried selling the Saba brand in the UK in the early 90s - soon disappeared without a trace.
And of the cheapies - Orion, Britannia (Coop I think?), Waltham, Teleton.
ITT was a 'big' brand, they absorbed KB (Kolster Brandes), and produced some fairly decent TV's.
Probably the 'biggest' thing I remember about KB was their 'hand wired' TV's - they actually produced colour sets without PCB's, hand wired on tag strips - unbelievable
Incidentally, the buying group now known as Euronics had badged ITT/KB sets with the Aristocrat label on them - I 'think' they were the CVC20 or perhaps a little later. They did the same with Bush, with the A823 series somewhat earlier as well.
Essentially when a new chassis was coming out they would buy the production line for a number of weeks, and produce a goodly number of sets with their own labels on.
There were a number of advantages to this, firstly the sets were at a good price, secondly they were proven reliable sets (we wouldn't have bought them otherwise), thirdly all the trade was already used to servicing them.
Here is a very rare one: 'Domico' - they mainly made portable radio's and clock radio's... probably one of the worst makes I ever had. This make was out around the late 70's and early 80's.
The clock was poor timing and the MW/LW radio was as bad as you could get for distortion.
Also another (Better) make was 'Fisher' around in the 70's and early 80's.
ITT was a 'big' brand, they absorbed KB (Kolster Brandes), and produced some fairly decent TV's.
ITT were related to Nokia weren't they -- I think ITT was an American manufacturer whose TV-manufacturing wing ended up being fully transferred to Nokia. The Nokia sets were also pretty good.
Also another (Better) make was 'Fisher' around in the 70's and early 80's.
Fisher was (is, I think) a brand owned by Sanyo. ISTR that the first Sanyo VHS VCRs marketed in the UK carried the Fisher brand as Sanyo were still officially backing Betacord at the time.
BTW Binatone was never Japanese. They may have imported Japanese kit at various points, but the company was, and is, British-owned. I recall the extremely cheap and badly made HK-imported games consoles they put out in the late 1970s, proudly displaying the British flag with "made in Hong Kong" written in tiny text underneath :rolleyes:
What is the deal with Waltham? It's a name that keeps resurfacing I've noticed, nearly always associated with bottom-rung imported stuff, rather like Steepletone and Maxim. Presumably someone owns these names?
In the case of Maxim, there was a time when this name was absolutely everywhere, on cheap radios, personal cassette players, kettles, irons and the like.
The last time I saw the brand was in a grotty independent Poundstretcher-type establishment, where I saw some cassette tapes, 4 for £1.
Yes, these were the traditional "market stall" Made in Hong Kong tapes, with appalling sound quality, on sale in 2006. They must have been old stock, or so I thought -- I bought a pack out of pure morbid curiosity. Turns out they were made in India rather then HK -- and the date was 2005. But they were the same black plastic efforts you used to see in the 80s, with badly-moulded plastic shells with mismatching edges everywhere, labels stuck on in two spots so the rest of the label came away in your hand, and boxes that cracked when you looked at them funny.
I can only assume that, somewhere in the third world, such monstrosities are to this day being made.
Here is a very rare one: 'Domico' - they mainly made portable radio's and clock radio's... probably one of the worst makes I ever had. This make was out around the late 70's and early 80's.
The clock was poor timing and the MW/LW radio was as bad as you could get for distortion.
I think this is something a lot of folks forget -- we've reached the point now where even the very cheapest Chinese sweat-shop goods (and I'm talking here about the cheap, tatty stuff you can get from Chinese sellers on eBay or Alibaba here, not Bush or Technika) are often of passable quality.
I'm not saying they're any good, far from it, but the above generally just doesn't get sold any more.
I bought a media player for the princely sum of £8 delivered from China the other month. It was another of my "how crap can it be?" purchases of which I get quite a kick out of (sad, I know).
You know what? It isn't actually all that bad. It does what it sets out to do. It doesn't crash. It doesn't overheat, and the firmware is just about passable. It's even relatively well presented inside.
I've found a similar story with a very cheap MiFi router I bought for £13 (which outperforms a friend's £50 Vodafone-branded Huawei for WiFi range, battery life and reliability), a little MK802 Android media player for £38 (which is awful out of the box but with third-party firmware is very reaonable), and various audio boards (amps, pre-amps, DACs etc), all of which sell for a tiny fraction of what an established-brand equivalent would.
I think we've reached the stage where, for basic run-of-the-mill items like clock radios and media players, it takes a special kind of idiot to get a product based on a cheap reference design wrong!
ITT were related to Nokia weren't they -- I think ITT was an American manufacturer whose TV-manufacturing wing ended up being fully transferred to Nokia. The Nokia sets were also pretty good.
Nokia TV's were never anything great, typical Scandinavian sets like Finlandia etc.
Fisher was (is, I think) a brand owned by Sanyo. ISTR that the first Sanyo VHS VCRs marketed in the UK carried the Fisher brand as Sanyo were still officially backing Betacord at the time.
Fisher was the higher class end of Sanyo, just like Technics and Panasonic.
What is the deal with Waltham? It's a name that keeps resurfacing I've noticed, nearly always associated with bottom-rung imported stuff, rather like Steepletone and Maxim. Presumably someone owns these names?
As you say Waltham is a name that's been about for many years, and always been cheap rubbish
I can remember sourcing spares for Waltham years ago, but I can't remember who they were from?.
Comments
See images 1 and 3 in the first row.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Hinari+Sunrise+TV&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=jv53UKj0C-mq0AX9-IHQAg&biw=1280&bih=683&sei=lv53UOqaB6X80QWCyIDQCA
Also anyone remember the Currys brand Triumph? Used on black and white portable TVs.
I remember them well - a little mains transformer used to fail in them. There was an identical TV without the digital clock as well.
I presume Hinari was the manufacturer?, and you saw a number of different names on the same sets.
"Hinari Domestic Appliances or Hinari LP is a British manufacturer of domestic electrical products. Hinari was acquired by Alba plc in 1989."
and then
"Alba is a British consumer electronics manufacturing company owned by Home Retail Group. Its sister brand is Bush. Today, all Alba and Bush products are sold exclusively at Argos"
The name lives on http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?rh=n%3A11052681&keywords=hinari
I suspect the meaning of 'manufacturer' might have been a little stretched there
Assuming it was a British company?, then it was just importing sets from the far east, not manufacturing sets here.
Following on from this were the 731 & 741 chassis
CES was 604 Purley Way , Waddon , Croydon CR9 4DR . Now still knowing that after 35 is really sad !
The address is a Toyota car dealership now .
I may be getting it confused with the TX10 chassis.
The set has a wood veneer, one speaker, LED channel display and remote control, dates from about 1987.
Pic 1 for me shows those common white Ferguson B&W sets from the early 80s.
Triumph was also used on a early 80s 21" colour TV, my school used to have one.
i raise you this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_manufacturers
Yes. I was in the trade at the time and we flogged those things. They appeared under various names, but the ones we sold were badged 'Oscar' and 'Hanimex' or possibly Amerex.
Binatone was an extremely cheap & cheerful japanese brand and we had the misfortune to win the contract to repair the local supermarket's Binatone junk.
Akai was a well respected brand known mainly for its tape recorders. It was not a 'shop brand', it was a proper brand sold all over the world.
Waltham.....oh don't remind me. More cheap junk.
We got the contract to do repairs to the shtte sold by Hardy's furniture stores. They flogged a music centre made by Capetronic, and it was truly awful. The cassette deck in particular was a nightmare.
They also sold a portable TV made by Global. More junk.
I can not only remember the address, I can still remember our account number (24157) - now that's really sad
(Particularly when it changed in the early 70's, I've no idea what the later one was though).
Could have been a TX90, as it was used in some 20" sets.
I seen to remember reading, it might have been in 'Television' magazine, that Hinari was a name made up by a Scottish ex Comet engineer after he left Comet. I could have a look back through thirty years worth off issues sometime.
As far as I'm aware the only Ferguson set badged Logik was the TX100 - which was a really good set (as Fergusons usually were).
There have been a few developments since the Wiki entry.
In 2007, Alba's small appliances division including Hinari and Breville was sold to a private equity firm, Rutland.(Rutland 80% stake, management 20%.)
In August 2012 Rutland sold its stake to US small appliances firm Jarden Corporation who own Sunbeam small appliances, Camping Gaz and a host of other brands.
Hinari's sister brand Akura never became part of Alba. It was sold to a north London trading company who now exclusively import Chinese-made televisions.
The founder of Akura and Hinari, Brian Palmer, set up Cello Electronics in 2001. It has subsequently become the UK's only tv manufacturer/assembler following the shift to eastern european assembly by the Japanese brands.
What of Harvard who as Alba once owned the Hinari brand? After selling off the Alba and Bush brands to Argos, and its 50% stake in Grundig to Beko, what was left of Harvard was sold to the Chinese company Geeya.
No - I think Matsui appeared mid-1980s.
I think Logik tended to be used on the entry level, low spec kit, whereas Matsui tended to appear on the slightly better equipped kit.
Also Matsui was used on white goods - some of the Matsui microwaves were genuinely very good and better than some of the branded entry level products (e.g. Moulinex, Sharp etc).
Saisho was the Dixons badged version, used until circa 1991 when it started to be phased out in favour of Matsui - more closely aligning the ranges in Dixons and Currys at the same time.
Saisho did stick around a bit longer on some products e.g. car stereos.
A couple of other forgotten brands
ITT - disappeared in the late 1980s.
Thomson tried selling the Saba brand in the UK in the early 90s - soon disappeared without a trace.
And of the cheapies - Orion, Britannia (Coop I think?), Waltham, Teleton.
ITT was a 'big' brand, they absorbed KB (Kolster Brandes), and produced some fairly decent TV's.
Probably the 'biggest' thing I remember about KB was their 'hand wired' TV's - they actually produced colour sets without PCB's, hand wired on tag strips - unbelievable
Incidentally, the buying group now known as Euronics had badged ITT/KB sets with the Aristocrat label on them - I 'think' they were the CVC20 or perhaps a little later. They did the same with Bush, with the A823 series somewhat earlier as well.
Essentially when a new chassis was coming out they would buy the production line for a number of weeks, and produce a goodly number of sets with their own labels on.
There were a number of advantages to this, firstly the sets were at a good price, secondly they were proven reliable sets (we wouldn't have bought them otherwise), thirdly all the trade was already used to servicing them.
The clock was poor timing and the MW/LW radio was as bad as you could get for distortion.
Also another (Better) make was 'Fisher' around in the 70's and early 80's.
ITT were related to Nokia weren't they -- I think ITT was an American manufacturer whose TV-manufacturing wing ended up being fully transferred to Nokia. The Nokia sets were also pretty good.
Fisher was (is, I think) a brand owned by Sanyo. ISTR that the first Sanyo VHS VCRs marketed in the UK carried the Fisher brand as Sanyo were still officially backing Betacord at the time.
BTW Binatone was never Japanese. They may have imported Japanese kit at various points, but the company was, and is, British-owned. I recall the extremely cheap and badly made HK-imported games consoles they put out in the late 1970s, proudly displaying the British flag with "made in Hong Kong" written in tiny text underneath
What is the deal with Waltham? It's a name that keeps resurfacing I've noticed, nearly always associated with bottom-rung imported stuff, rather like Steepletone and Maxim. Presumably someone owns these names?
In the case of Maxim, there was a time when this name was absolutely everywhere, on cheap radios, personal cassette players, kettles, irons and the like.
The last time I saw the brand was in a grotty independent Poundstretcher-type establishment, where I saw some cassette tapes, 4 for £1.
Yes, these were the traditional "market stall" Made in Hong Kong tapes, with appalling sound quality, on sale in 2006. They must have been old stock, or so I thought -- I bought a pack out of pure morbid curiosity. Turns out they were made in India rather then HK -- and the date was 2005. But they were the same black plastic efforts you used to see in the 80s, with badly-moulded plastic shells with mismatching edges everywhere, labels stuck on in two spots so the rest of the label came away in your hand, and boxes that cracked when you looked at them funny.
I can only assume that, somewhere in the third world, such monstrosities are to this day being made.
I think this is something a lot of folks forget -- we've reached the point now where even the very cheapest Chinese sweat-shop goods (and I'm talking here about the cheap, tatty stuff you can get from Chinese sellers on eBay or Alibaba here, not Bush or Technika) are often of passable quality.
I'm not saying they're any good, far from it, but the above generally just doesn't get sold any more.
I bought a media player for the princely sum of £8 delivered from China the other month. It was another of my "how crap can it be?" purchases of which I get quite a kick out of (sad, I know).
You know what? It isn't actually all that bad. It does what it sets out to do. It doesn't crash. It doesn't overheat, and the firmware is just about passable. It's even relatively well presented inside.
I've found a similar story with a very cheap MiFi router I bought for £13 (which outperforms a friend's £50 Vodafone-branded Huawei for WiFi range, battery life and reliability), a little MK802 Android media player for £38 (which is awful out of the box but with third-party firmware is very reaonable), and various audio boards (amps, pre-amps, DACs etc), all of which sell for a tiny fraction of what an established-brand equivalent would.
I think we've reached the stage where, for basic run-of-the-mill items like clock radios and media players, it takes a special kind of idiot to get a product based on a cheap reference design wrong!
Nokia TV's were never anything great, typical Scandinavian sets like Finlandia etc.
Fisher was the higher class end of Sanyo, just like Technics and Panasonic.
As you say Waltham is a name that's been about for many years, and always been cheap rubbish
I can remember sourcing spares for Waltham years ago, but I can't remember who they were from?.