Digital TV?!?

02Jan12

To kick this off, I would like to say that I’m really not that fond of digital TV.  I know there are benefits to it, but the drawbacks in the current technology don’t justify these benefits.  A couple of things in particular are really annoying. FIrst of all, the time that it takes to switch channels is way too long.  On old TV-sets you would flick through the channels and see right away what was on.  Now you need to wait for several seconds and it feels like eternity.  I presume it’s because it’s decoding and buffering the great HD content, but HD just tends to make everything look like home video anyway.  Ironically, I’ve always been more interested in the actual CONTENT rather than the HD.

As this blog is about electronic antiques, this time around I would like to show you a couple of the most marvelous TVs ever built.  The other one of which took me 25 years to get my hands on .  Let’s start with the bigger one of these small TVs, the Casio Pocket Television TV-21.  I believe I bought mine for about 20 USD on Ebay.  It is a black and white analogue TV built in 1985, so you can’t really watch anything anymore unless you manage to plug something into the antena.  For example, I’ve played around with a color screen device like this one and a Commodore Amiga.  I  presume that with a modulator and the right cables you could plug the Amiga to this unit as well. Like so many of the things that I talk about here, I sold my color TV unit.  Word of advice, do not sell your small old electronics!

The really funny thing about this unit is the way you watch it via a mirror!  The screen is translucent and allows light to come through.  The inverted picture gets reflected from the mirror and you can see your black and white picture correctly reflected from the mirror.  In case you want to watch it in the dark, you can get an additional unit called the BL-100 back light system.  The unit is you place on top and replaces the natural light that hits the screen.  Incredible stuff!

Casio TV-21 + Seiko TV Watch

The item that took me 25 years to get is the Seiko TV watch.  It’s the one that James Bond uses in Octopussy.  At the time I was too young to watch James Bond and did not even know he used it, rather I saw it in a book about inventions from 1986.  This book is one of my all time favorites  Seiko made this incredible piece in 1982.  They made a lot of really cool watches along the way and especially in the 80′s.  In the 80′s digital watches were booming and I think manufacturers thought that wrist devices would become so much more than just time keepers.  My prediction is that these really special and expensive “more than time keeper” items never became real commercial successes.

The TV watch is a beauty.  I started hunting for it about one year ago, but it took me a while as I was looking for just the watch.  The watch is actually just the watch and the screen.  The tuner comes separately and is approximately the size of the TV-21.  It’s a bit of a scam in that way, but fitting a TV screen into a fairly small watch in the early 80′s was quite an achievement.  The complete and working units are pretty expensive, usually around 500 USD (interestingly this was the original retail price too).  I find it to be quite a lot of money for this type of fun.  As mentioned before, there are no analog TV broadcasts so it would be difficult to test or view anything anyway.  Try it once and that’s it.  For this reason I opted to pay 170 USD for just the watch part, but it took one year to find and a 25 year wait.  The best digital antique is the kind that you can actually use.  In this case it’s a nicely designed watch.

The Seiko TV Watch is definitely a must-have item for any digital watch collector.  I have a couple of other great Seiko watches that I’ll tell you about later.

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