Tuesday 22 October 2013

The Hoarder of Suburbia

About 1.5 weeks ago I took a trip out the 'burbs to check out a few promising SCART numbers.

I was tipped off about this Gumtree seller by my pal Rob. The seller originally advertised a collection of 100 plus televisions. Of course, I thought to myself, "statistically speaking, there must be some SCART units in there".

I shot-off an email and the seller said it'd would take a while to go through the collection but he'd get back to me. A couple months later I saw a bunch of SCART specific ads starting to appear on Gumtree to I got on it.

When I arrived at the address I knew straight away that I was about to meet a real-life hoarder:

The front yard
Now, I don't want to say anything disparaging about Richard because he was super-friendly guy that was very generous with his time. He let me test out TVs, remove their cases and take photos of the whole event. However, this collection of... stuff... was out of control!

This is one of the thing I love about the SCART Hunt: meeting all these interesting people!

Assorted junk
The TV stash!
The thing that lured me out of town to check out this collection was the presence of some vintage Philips units. Philips TVs with SCART are pretty rare in Australia. There are plenty of Philips TVs around but hardly any with SCART.

Also, these particular units were packing trimpots. My favorite!

Philips TVs
The owner kindly let me plug in my laptop and check out a few test patterns. One of the Philips was really good while the other had only fair focus and color.

I also tested a Loewe Profil (with the E3000 chassis). As you can see, it looked excellent! Typical of the E3000 chassis and Philips A66EAK tube combination.

E3000 lookin' sweet!
What surprised me about the Philips TVs was that neither had an actual Philips tube inside! Toshiba and Panasonic! Strange...

Type: 28GR6781/75R
Toshiba A66JMZ42X01(ZX) tube
Front view
Chassis view
Panasonic M68 tube
There were a couple other TVs I tried out (Fujitsu and Teac) but the Philips was the one I went home with. Looking forward to modding it with some external pots.

Fujitsu