3/10/11

Sylvania Scanner Color Slide Theater - HDMI, 1969 style.

So here's an eye-opener. Turns out Sylvania made a TV that showed your slides, just like the way you can plug your (insert trendy i-device here) into your TV now and look at pictures or whatever. Who knew.

It also had a cassette recorder in it. Not a reel-to-reel. A cassette recorder. This is pretty surprising for 1969. In my mind, cassettes didn't hit it big until the mid-seventies.

This can only mean that this TV is A) monstrously complicated and, as a result, B) unreliable. There must be a camera in the little slide carousel that captures the slides for display on the CRT. The cassette mechanism was put in there to provide a soundtrack to your slide show, with some kind of synchronization system - probably an audible beep or some such.

Pretty cool, for the month that it works before it goes "ping" and displays only the slide you shot of your blank TV screen.

at

7 comments:

  1. Unknown3/10/11, 1:34 PM

    Now you too can bore the stink off your boring friends and family with your boring vacation slides from boring locations such as Newark, New Jersey, West Des Moines, Iowa and Needles, California.

    Disclaimer: Simulated boring fishing picture shown. This is as good as it gets, folks. How'd you like to spend $3942 to show this idiot? And in the future, $3942 will be the GDP of Canada.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dave Pryor3/10/11, 5:59 PM

    So I'm trying to figure out how this works. Is it a projector or just an input device like the 2600's adapter? It does seem suprisingly ambitious for that time frame. Interesting find!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11/27/15, 11:37 PM

    My father was one of the engineers who created and earned several patents for the Sylvania Scanner. We had one, which worked perfectly until about 1990, when it was destroyed in a fire in my parents' barn.

    ReplyDelete
  4. PhilAreGo@gmail.com11/28/15, 1:01 AM

    Hey, cool! This must have been more solidly built than I thought. Sorry to doubt your dad's workmanship. My apologies! Thanks for the report, Anon!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous2/13/17, 1:44 PM

    I actually worked on a few of these critters in the early 70's. A projection bulb would shine through the slide image and then there were several mirrors which acted not only as a reflector but also as a filter. Then the filtered light was picked up by a scanning tube and the appropriate analog data was sent to the color amplifier section for display on the CRT.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous3/14/19, 1:35 PM

    FWIW, we had one and the scanning tube lasted a good 10 years before failing. Dad would park us toddlers in front of the TV, load up the slides and a fresh cassette tape, and then talk to us while we watched the slides, recording our reactions. A wonderful time capsule!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous4/2/23, 9:21 PM

    We had one, it was the show piece of the neighborhood

    ReplyDelete