NEW 1964 LINE OF ZENITH TELEVISION SETS!

Portland, Oregon Zenith distributor, Bubby Cronin, made this film to reach all of his dealers in the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1963 to show off the new line of Zenith television sets. Bubby, sadly, passed away in 2016. His sons run the family business, Electrical Distribution Inc., but he graciously gave me an on-camera tour of his private television set museum in 2009 and a portion of it appears in "TV MAN." I am hopeful that the whole tour will appear at some point as supplemental material on a home video release because Bubby showed me some amazing television sets that the American Zenith company manufactured over its 50-year history before it was purchased and dismantled by LG Electronics in 1999. Visit the "TV MAN" documentary site at www.TVMan.tv or Facebook page at / tvmanthemovie

[@BrokebackBob]

Absolutely terrific nostalgic piece for Zenith fans!!!

[@duanethamm4688]

What a great film. Thanks for sharing this. Zenith was king. I still have a few Zenith TVs from 1964 in my mom's basement.

[@nicholasgardner1106]

Duane Thamm can I buy one

[@kerryincolumbus]

great video! Zenith was the best, bar none!

[@mikenavox]

More quality in that room then the entire country of china. Thank you so much for posting the history.

[@Mikexception]

Complementary of futures like handles, trolleys, ease for handling for human comfort presented by itself at the glance -clear functons with no deep instructions required. To make life more simply not confuse.

[@emph66]

A very interesting look back, thank you for sharing.

[@Sta2200]

I HAVE the 1964 Zenith color combo..that was TOP of the line for 1964. it has remote and the HYBRID stereo they spoke about here. Tube is good BUT very cataracted. TV DID work somewhat..10 or so years back. Chassis is 25LC20Q/11L8T25?8LT25..

[@michaelcranstoun8296]

Awesome video! I'd gladly pay more for that kind of quality today. Thanks for sharing.

[@kerryincolumbus]

good GOD!! Bobby mentions the price at the end of the video of $575.. that's $4542 in today's money, wow! No wonder only the rich had color sets back in the day!

[@stevekosareff9891]

Yes, color televisions, as were black and white before and HD after, upon their early sales years were expensive. Both color and HD sets took about the same time--12 years--before the prices and the public warmed up to them in great numbers.

[@supremes1964]

my dad paid $385 in 1973 ....lots of $$$ $2000 today in 2017

[@Vintage_USA_Tech]

That's what keep the robust Television service sector going. There was a TV repair shop on every corner. In the mid 80s it was destroyed by the likes of Circuit City and cheep Japanese TVs being dumped into the US market then the Chinese destroyed the Japanese electronics market. Now no one repairs anything... we just fill landfills with this junk.

[@KC2QMA]

This film is a real treasure and historical document of the 1964 Zenith line thank you very much for posting it. I would love to see this in HD and with improved sound. If it were possible to get the original film it could be re-transferred in HD or 4K and with just a little processing the audio could be fixed up a bit. It would look AWESOME! Great video, Cant wait to see the movie!

[@stevekosareff9891]

Since Bubby passed away the original film is in his family's possession. Hopefully, they will read your comment and transfer the film in HD--who knows, maybe even 4K! The sound will still remain problematic. My editor punched it up as much as possible, but maybe an experienced sound editor might be able to pull more from it. The nice thing is that the color is great thanks to the original source and the telecine transfer.

[@uxwbill]

I really liked the presentation, but it was very hard to make anything out of the audio. (I did see the explanation further down in the comments. It's still a shame considering how good the video quality really is.) I wonder how many of those TVs still exist today? Probably more than one might think!

[@garydunn3037]

Here in the UK we were lucky to have poor quality B & W sets with a 405 line picture.Broadcast on the VHF frequency. The picture was garbage, and so were most of theshows. I often wondered why most US shows of the 60's were made in colour. Now I know why, because you had colour tv long before we did.

[@stevekosareff9891]

There are a few color television series, mostly on film (since commercial color videotape recording didn't start until the last quarter of 1958) from the early 1950s due to farsighted producers who knew they would be worth more in the future than their black-and-white counterparts. While this might have been true initially in the 1960s, time has shown us that a good or great series will be watched like "I Love Lucy" forever even if it was filmed in B&W.

[@MediaWatchDawg]

To really appreciate Jackie Gleason's Music for Lovers Only, you NEEDED 240 watts.

[@klafong1]

I would like to know how Zenith defined "peak music power." It is not the same as undistorted sine wave output power, and there is no way that a solid state amplifier from the mid 1960s could have been so powerful.

[@mikesamra9126]

It wasn't RMS power in those days.That was peak power and it was the total of both channels.

[@Sta2200]

It comes out to about "5 to 1" in real power rating.. IOW..a "500 watt peak" amp..is REALLY capable of MAYBE :100 watts TOTAL..(50W/CH)..

[@asdfasdf4345artsdfg]

Wow, the picture quality is awesome; too bad the sound quality is poor.

[@stevekosareff9891]

see my reply to Evert above for why.

[@stevekosareff9891]

A NOTE ABOUT "TV MAN" THE FILM: I have been patiently waiting for the music licensor to get back to me with a quote for the five remaining music cues in the film. The French representatives and/or the rights-holders have been non-responsive so far. If and when they do, or I decide to have a new composer replace the cues, I will create a crowdfunding campaign to raise the necessary funds. Donors will be the first to stream or own a digital copy of the film (depending on the amount of their donation). Keep checking the Facebook page and website for updates (see links above).

[@pcno2832]

5:45 "114 degree" and that thing looks like a suitcase. By 1978, when my Sears console that lasted 37 years was made, the only choices were 90 degrees and (for $100 more) 110 degrees. By the late 1980s, the 19" portable TV had virtually disappeared; most of the models available were really table models with a giant "boob" on the back. Even now, very few of the flat screen TVs are really portable. I suspect that cable helped kill off this niche; with so many people hooked on shows they couldn't watch with a mere antenna, a portable TV any bigger than a radio was hard to justify.

[@pcno2832]

PS: Look at those ugly stands. In those days, having a portable TV on an ugly stand was a way for anti-TV snobs to enjoy TV without admitting that it was really welcome in their homes.

[@briabba123]

how does the tuner on that tv work?

[@pcno2832]

Some of the Zenith guys here can probably fill in the specifics, but in general, each strip was a tuned circuit and whichever one was chosen made contact with the connections needed to put it into the circuit. At the end of each strip was a gear that turned a ferrite slug (or ganged slugs) to fine tune that circuit for the station it represented; this meshed with the fine tuning "ring" when that strip was selected; since each strip had its own fine tuning adjustment, it functioned as a preset, much like the buttons on a car radio (though most radios just have a mechanical or digital "memory" for each button, not a separate tuned circuit). This was functionally equivalent to the later tuners with a row of selectors and slugs for each preset, but because they were on a rotating drum, it didn't need any digital controls to swap them in or out of the circuit.

[@pcno2832]

12:45 I'd never heard of a "UHF strip" before. It seems like an ingenious way of supporting UHF without the cost of a separate tuner. I wonder if the fine tuning knob could tune the whole 14-83 band; in markets with only one or two UHF stations, that was probably good enough, at least until 1965 when a separate UHF tuner became mandatory in the USA.

[@klafong1]

The UHF strips were pre-set to the desired UHF channel. TV dealers would either install these strips into TVs or customers could have the strips added at a TV repair shop. In that era, the worst case scenario would be that one would need four strips (in markets where all the networks plus National Educational Television were all on UHF).

[@EvertvanIngen]

The sound is weird

[@stevekosareff9891]

Bubby told me that they had hired a local television production news crew. For those of alive during those times this was often the sound quality of filmed segments for local news before the advent of more portable video cameras and, later, recorders.