January 14, 2004

• This might be of use.
• Actually, B-- those prices are for when the sets FIRST came out. So I'd need to borrow your time machine. Thanks for trying!
• That link has a listing "Collections" -- if you click on it, you find quite a list. Corresponding with a few of them could prove interesting. Also, talking to a flea market dealer might give leads -- a lot of them scout neighborhoods for by-the-curb discards as well as going to yard sales, etc. Buddy up to a dealer-type or two. Always Goodwill and secondhand stores, too. And in view of the age of these items, could even try antique dealers, who might be able to suggest places to check out. Also, junkyards and landfills often have a discarded appliance area. Or an ad in the local paper? Community bulletin boards?
• Maybe this would help: Antique Radio Classified Items I found on the linked page: - 1948 Silvertone TV-radio-78 player, cabinet - 1958 RCA color TV, 21CD8845M, fair condition
• /off topic I know a guy who turns old TV sets into aquariums, and they look incredible.
• As seen on metafilter a few months back.
• Tracicle-- Excellent site! I saw it on MeFi too, and stole it for posting here sometime back in November, I think... Small (meta) world!
• I realised after posting that it's probably not what you're after, being not-really-vintage and frighteningly expensive, but for all I know you're a zillionaire so...
• Yes, the jig is up: turns out, I'm Bill Gates. And I was just, uhh, playing amongst the little people...
• (And you're right as rain, those Predictas ARE awfully damn cool. But $2500+ for an eighteen-inch screen seems a tad much.)
• Those 18" screens only look good in pictures, for watching the TV's picture, bah, go bigger. Of course, I generally watch movies on my set, so I'm happier that way.
• Two years ago we gave my mother, now in her late 90s, a new set with a big screen. At first she detested it. Said she felt she was in a movie theatre, all right, with a full house right there in her bedroom with her. My mother, raised by her grandmother in the implacable traditions of the 19th century, is both modest and thrawn as only a Scot of Highland antecedents can be. Some arguments a man cannot win; ye do not waste the breath in ye even starting them, as my father would tell me. Anyhow, her idea of TV fun, it turned out,was to go into the parrots' sunroom and watch the news on the parrots' television set, which has something like a twelve or so inch screen because birds tend to get all too excited when largish things near them move without warning. So does my mother, now I think about it. I began hunting around for another small screen television. I had just about talked my cousin Hamish into a trade, when my mother reneged on me. Why? We had many of her great-grandchildren visiting about them, and it seems she and they watched movies together on her set, in her bedroom, all delightfully cozy together. All parties were greatly pleased by this arrangement. Except my cousin Hamish, who's taken now to telling everyone I'm tetched in the head.