Re: Who remembers how bad analogue television was?

On 28/02/2025 03:03, KevinJ93 wrote:

On 2/27/25 12:45 PM, Martin Brown wrote:

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The first two colour TVs I recall owned by friends or family were about the time of Apollo 8 in 1968. Memorable for the Earth rise shot. Both were entirely valves and my uncle's caught fire leaving a nasty brown burn mark on their wool carpet and smoke damage on the ceiling.
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The earliest was at a school friends house and was in pastel shades pre Nd glass. It was in colour but only just... Joe 90 launch was the first programme I can recall watching there in colour. Test cards in shops don't count.
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I'd believe 1974 as a date for hybrid colour TVs that almost worked correctly and didn't need a service engineer visiting them every other week. By 1980 I'm pretty sure they were almost entirely semiconductor based.

 My father bought a Ferguson 19" colour TV at the end of 1970 that was fully semiconductor (it was my first term at university and he got it just before I came back for Christmas). It seemed to work fairly well - he would tinker with it but I don't remember it needing any significant repair. I gather it was one of the first such sets.

It was the valve ones from the mid to late 60's that were both seriously expensive and unreliable. So much so that most people at the time rented them since then routine service and repair was included. Enough money was made on the TV rental business to fund a new Cambridge college.
https://www.robinson.cam.ac.uk/college-life/library/college-archive-and-history/sir-david-robinson
There were others in the same white goods and TV rental business and several of the founders were big charity donors and philanthropists.

 The set in the common room at university was an older valve based one with no blue channel but it was surprisingly watchable and it didn't

Valve sets ran hot and somehow valves would gradually work themselves out of sockets or just plain and simple fail at switch on. I saw one or two very old all valve sets survive into the 80's that kept the valve filaments warm continuously even when the set was nominally off.
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Martin Brown