TFTP Will Be Back After These Messages: TVs from the Past -- Early Television Set commercials (1950/1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'

In watching old TV commercials, it's always interesting to see what the sellers of products thought buyers were interested in, interests that then became the selling points in the ads themselves. Based on these two commercials for television sets, one from 1950 and the other from 1954, potential TV set buyers were really worried about how well a TV set could show close-ups.

The first ad, for a 1950 Westinghouse TV, has something called an "electronic magnifier" that you could somehow overlay on the screen to take a TV image and magnify it. The fact that they don't actually show this feature in operation and that the images they show of wrestlers are clearly not authentic images off of a TV screen should have made potential buyers of this set a little wary. The peculiar shape of the screen on this set is a good example of just how different early TV sets were from the ones that viewers became used to just a few years later.

The second TV set ad is from 1954, and by this time apparently there were already some people who were ready to replace their first TV set with an upgraded model. So the RCA television set being advertised is shown to have a much better ability to show close-ups than earlier TVs with smaller screens. A 21" inch set was a large screen in those days, and you can see why compared to the older 10" set! The price comparison between the 1950 set and the 1954 set in these ads is interesting, too, and shows the way in which technology improves and becomes cheaper at the same time; the 1950 Westinghouse model has a retail price of $259.95, while the much bigger and better 1954 RCA set is only $199.95.