I can't remember the make and mlodel of my first colour TV except that I rented it from Radio Rentals. Then only BBC2 was in colour for short periods every night. I also recall seeing Joan Bakewell in glorious colour....

Boy, were'nt the neighbours jealous! They soon changed their tune when I invited them in to watch Wimbledon. I soon ran out of tea bags!

Ours was a 1972 19" DER rental set which my Dad paid £7 per month for, it wasn't new when we took delivery in 1975.

Only 19" maybe but it filled the lounge - the wooden cabinet was huge, the speaker and control knobs added a 1/3 to the width of it. No remote control (whats that?) four channel push buttons (BBC1, BBC2, ITV and * ) and four large silver rotary knobs for volume, brightness, colour and tint.

The first thing I recall seeing on it was a 1975 Ashes match, didn't realize the Aussies wore green caps! It also had horrific purity problems with purple patches in the top corners. It seemed that the repairman was making a weekly visit in his red Escort Mk1 van to sort it out!

We were probably quite late in getting a colour TV, I can recall walking to school in the very early 70's and people leaving them on in clear view showing the test card, just to show off. Dad wouldn't get one initially as there were plenty of reports of them catching fire.

1971, 17 inch Ferguson model 3712 (I think) cost £178.

It was quite a nice set, four push-button tuner (BBC1 BBC2 ITV and *) and On/off, volume, brightness and colour (contrast was round the back) The only problem was an adjustment of the line hold and re-adjustment of grey scale and convergence after a couple of years. It was passed on to my daughter and continued to give good service right up to the mid eighties.

A 22 inch Radio Rentals BRC3000 rented in Feb 1970. I remember due to government restrictions at the time you had to pay 10 months advanced rental on a one year contract.(Pay for a year and you got a one month discount).
In December 1970 I purchased on 12 months HP (£321) a 25 in DER colour TV with sliding doors BRC 3000 chassis. It is a large set. It is still in my possession although it was last used in early 1981.

Dad was forever 'twiddling' the small grub screws in the middle of the channel selection buttons as the thing kept going off tune, kids don't know they're born today......!

My parents rented a Ferguson from a local TV shop in the early 70s but had it for years, resisting any attempt to upgrade them to something newer. Because of it's age the shop manager only charged them 50p a month and in the end just gave them the set.

Mine was an ITT 19” Teletext set with “colour tint control” that was hyped as a must have even though it does not work on the PAL TV system and nether was it suppose to.

Had the teletext (Ceefax) model because in those long ago credit crunch times of the early seventies (yes it’s nothing new this credit crunch business) government rules said you had to pay 6 months advance rental for standard colour sets but only 3 month advance on sets with teletext because they wanted to encourage everybody to join the information age.

After awhile with the rich folk trading in last years colour TV’s meant these sets became available for rental at only a months advance rental because the sets were second-hand and the government credit rules did not apply.

We got our first colour tv in 1973 a telefunken 26" 709 chassis and cost £350 and power consumption was 350w and needed 2 peolpe to carry as it was massive.

The red gun failed in 3 years so in 1976 we bought a murphy 26" fitted with Z718 chassis and that lasted us 20 years and then we gave it away.

Andy

Expensive and unreliable!

Paid £75 for a second hand Thorn 2000 around 1977. What a monster. It needed lots of TLC but I kept it going well into the 80's and even replaced the CRT with a regun at one stage. After it was replaced with a later Thorn it got stored in the garage. About 10 years later I sold it to a collector for what I paid for it.

1972 a GEC Sobell 19" all valve, £219.00. It had 4 channels push-button tuning (often needed fine-tuning, after channel selection).
It got very hot!
When we had "mains voltage reductions" during the early 1970s (due to industrial disputes) the picture would loose horizontal hold (even right at the end of the control's travel). When I left home in 1979, the set was still in use! I can't remember what happened to it after that.

Chris.

My parents didn't get a colour TV until 1983 (or a video recorder until 1990!), so I can still remember colour TV being a big deal when I was younger. Sad


Apparently there were some very cheap models that deliberately bypassed the improvements of PAL (over the earlier NTSC standard) to avoid paying licensing fees, and *did* require a tint control for that reason.

Don't know if that's what yours was meant to do though.


Perhaps you meant the late 70s or early 80s? Teletext only started properly in 1976.

That said, I'm amazed it was out commercially even *then* (and early test transmissions had apparently taken place in 1974). The digital electronics needed would have been very advanced by the standards of that time.

Even the 1KB of memory needed to hold a single page would have been expensive in the mid-70s, particularly if it was only being used for an "add on" feature to a TV (rather than in a full-blown computer.)

I can only assume that they *knew* the prices of this stuff was likely to have come down drastically by the time they foresaw it being in widespread use, and designed it with that in mind.

Anyone know how much the very earliest Teletext sets were?

With regard to Teletext. I had a Philips N1500 VCR in 1974. The recordings clearly have Ceefax pages.

1969 British Radio Corporation. 4 button tuner switching between VHF and UHF which kept falling apart and I had to solder up a bashing bar umpteen times. As the line scan part switched between 405 and 625 it sometimes took out a power transistor. It was a very expensive hobby. The colour convergence was rubbish - I bought a pattern generator and played for hours trying to get it right - mind you, that taught me to get Trinitrons ever more after that. I've only ever had three colour CRT TVs and I'm still very happy with the present one (Sony) which I must have had now for a long time. When did wide screen first come out? I had one of the first ON boxes and I got it soon after.

EDIT: Just thought, two years ago I bought a horrid little LED/LCD flat screen for the conservatory.

Ours was a rented Bush set. Not sure of the TV model, but it had the A823 chassis. My Dad didn't tell us he'd ordered it, until the installer turned up one evening (in the middle of Star Trek as I recall) with a large box. "What's that? OOoohh, is it a COLOUR TV?"

I still remember seeing James T Kirk with red blood on his shirt

The families first colour TV was an ITT KB, can't remember the screen size or the exact year they got it, I have a faint recollection it was late 60's.

I do remember watching an animal programme on BBC2 and The Virginian in colour. Other programmes around that time were Land of the Giants and Lost in Space, pretty sure these were in colour.

A 21 inch matsui model which my gran gave me because it was broken and she had bought a new model. After fiddling around in the back of the set for a while I traced the problem to a burnt out resistor which cost a few pence to replace.

Yes; as I said in my original post, they were already doing test transmissions in 1974. And I'm guessing you didn't actually have a Ceefax/teletext-compatible TV at that time!

Actually, on closer re-reading, the article says that they were doing tests as early as 1973, and that "the Ceefax system went live on 23 September 1974". So that's pretty early.

But it also says that "After technical negotiations, the two broadcasters settled in 1976 on a single standard, different from both Ceefax and Oracle, which ultimately developed into World System Teletext". This implies that prior to 1976, the system wasn't unified and that early Ceefax was at least partly different to the later version(??)

BTW, you say that you have recordings from 1974 showing signs of encoded Telext. This raises an interesting possibility... Received wisdom is that one needs S-VHS quality recording to retrieve stored teletext (VHS quality isn't good enough, I've tried it myself and you're lucky to get a few garbled characters).

However, I'd guess this assumes that one is only doing it via normal means (i.e. playing the recorded signal directly via RF to a standard television or computer teletext decoder). If it was possible to digitise and tidy up VHS, Beta or N1500 recordings- probably *not* in real time- it might be possible to reliably retrieve teletext signals from a significantly poorer-quality recording.

This of course is significant, because S-VHS only came along in 1987, and old tapes such as yours are possibly the only records of some early teletext pages. They'd definitely be of historical interest.

Just an interesting idea, and one I suspect others have also looked into...

Quite a few years later in the early 1980.s. I bought cheaply an old Phillips N1501.VCR. I then had a Tv with teletext. Playing back the tapes from 1974 I was able to get the teletext to display the first top line such as the word Ceefax and the date and time.The problem with the VCR was stability having no synchronised line lock causing the teletext crystal controlled oscillator to lose lock and produce garbled text.

I was born in 1990 and our main TV was always a colour TV (I think mum and dad had a colour TV when I was born) but we also had a small portable black and white TV that must have been bought well before I was born. It was a Matsui portable and we had it until 2000. It went to the charity shop then.

That's what I mean; the relatively simple and old-fashioned electronics used to handle real-time decoding in an actual Teletext TV wouldn't be sophisticated enough to deal with the additional problems caused by the video recorder.

But I'm sure that if one was able to digitise the contents of that tape (leaving *all* lines intact, which AFAICT not all software does) then a computer running some more sophisticated software would be able to (e.g.) resynchronise the teletext-lines. It may also be able to take into account the likely degradation and/or image alteration caused by recording to VHS (e.g. softening due to low bandwidth, then edge artifacts caused by the VCR's sharpening circuit). It could even dynamically adjust its own settings by seeing which assumptions give the result with the least processing errors.

On a remotely modern PC, it might even be able to do this in real time with a TV card.

As I wasn't born until 1979, I'm certain my parents already had a colour rental tv from Granada, but I can remember our first teletext colour tv around 1984. A 26" Baird tv with a wireless remote control. Also had a Philips 21" Colour with the pop out tray tuner. Ahhh.....

My first colour T.V was a Philips 14 inch portable around 1994 and it still works, apart from not being able to get analogue on due to that being switched off.


My parents had a Mitsubishi i think around the mid 70's, was still working around mid 90's at a mates place who fixed it when it went wrong and my parents got rid of it.

The first large colour T.v I had was a fergi just after i moved in here in 98, it belonged to my parents and they updated. it was a good set, but it never liked my video recorder for some reason.

interesting thread.

I grew up with a 21" TV being the only set in the house. it was made by Hitachi. It was colour but had no text or cefax. But did have a wireless remote, mono sound (and a wooden veneer cabinet).

Bloody brilliant it was. Probably made very early 80s and lasted till about 2000 when I think my parents finally got rid of it. Wish they had of kept it really, just for nostalgia.

ahh miss the days where you would switch the set off and it would reduce down to a white dot in the centre, which would remain there for a short while after.

In the UK either a Phillips or maybe a Grundig, parents got it a few months before colour transmissions started so late 66 or early 67, large screen for the time 26" something like that; it was rubbish, forever popping a valve or something. I'd spent a summer in America in the early sixties so had seen colour TV then.