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Old 15th Aug 2018, 7:29 pm   #1
electronicskip
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Default TV with built in printer?

Years ago I'm pretty sure we had a television on our price list which incorporated a built in printer to print out teletext pages.(useful if you were looking at teletext holidays!)
I never actually saw one myself but I think it was either made by Philips or Ferguson.
Has anyone else ever seen one in the wild??
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 7:41 pm   #2
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

Thermal paper about 6" wide ours was attached to the lower front below the tuning controls on a Phillips g11. It also had built in Prestel sailing. The Prestel was used to check that our new customers were on the electral roll and did not have any CCJ's. This was about 1980 ish.
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 7:53 pm   #3
Pieter H
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

This is the one, the Philips K35 chassis.
http://www.marcelstvmuseum.com/photoalbum49.html
Seems to have been quite a success, especially in the agricultural sector where farmers used it to print out the daily prices etc.

Cheers, Pieter
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 8:27 pm   #4
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

That brings back some memories from Philips....I repaired a few of those at the Waddon workshops. The BBC also liked them for printing out the weather forecast for local areas and handing them to the newsreaders for a quick run-down of the weather before handing over to the real weatherman (or woman). They were also popular with betting people for printing out the 'form' before phoning the bookies.
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 8:32 pm   #5
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobdger View Post
Thermal paper about 6" wide ours was attached to the lower front below the tuning controls on a Phillips g11. It also had built in prestal.
Think you might be mixing up some models....the G11 never had a printer but yes there were versions with Prestel. Only one model K35 (above post) and maybe one model K40 had a built-in printer (not sure about the K40).
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 9:03 pm   #6
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

We did used to sell the G11 with built in Prestel, in fact I've been trying to track one down for some time to add to my Prestel collection.
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 10:16 pm   #7
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobdger View Post
The prestal was used to check that our new customers were on the electral roll and did not have any ccjs. This was about 1980 ish.
I remember that Viewdata service for checking for CCJs the showroom staff used it at Granada Rentals.

It wasn't part of Prestel.

You had to enter the address in one long line in a very exacting shorthand way, beginning with 2 followed by a space.
Addresses round here ended with manc lanc (I can't remember what the separator was, if any). Manchester hadn't been in Lancashire since 1974, and this was mid '80s
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 10:37 pm   #8
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

Quote:
Originally Posted by electronicskip View Post
We did used to sell the G11 with built in Prestel, in fact I've been trying to track one down for some time to add to my Prestel collection.
Granada supplied a GEC 22 inch receiver with Viewdata, I have the service info somewhere.

We also did a couple of Viewdata adapters, one was a Pye Labgear box that only had an RF out, although a couple of them were modified for CVBS to feed a broadcast mixer.

I can't remember just now what the other adapter was, but there was a thermal printer option on something we supplied.

Later, the Acorn BBC model B was another option.
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Old 15th Aug 2018, 11:08 pm   #9
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

I have a K35 with the built in printer, it has a huge mains transformer and weighs a ton! Still producing a good picture last time i had it running. It's buried under a pile of sets currently, so difficult to post a picture.
I really liked the K series of sets, very reliable worked well. I still use two K40 HQ sound 22" models which perform very well.
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Old 17th Aug 2018, 7:21 am   #10
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

Very much an item for the better off. I was very impressed to see one working in around 1982 at a friends house in Cavendish Crescent here in Bath after a pub night. The house would now be worth around £2million so gives an idea as to the financial status of the owners at the time.
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Old 17th Aug 2018, 3:27 pm   #11
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

The B&O LX2800 (etc) has a 6 pin DIN socket on the back for a printer but I've never seen any details about how it is to be used, in particular what you have to press to make it work. The 'V terminal' remote control (like a Beolink 1000 but older) may have had a key for it, its been a while since I've seen one. The socket is mounted on the teletext panel inside, so its purpose is clear. I'd imagine its serial, RS232 or something like that.

These sets date from the mid to late 80s, a bit after Philips but probably better as you can use a full sized printer and proper paper (if, indeed, it works at all...). The slightly updated LX2802 has the same socket but its blanked off, possibly because the new software this set comes with doesn't cater for it.
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Old 17th Aug 2018, 9:18 pm   #12
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

They had a (Philips, I think) Teletext TV with built-in thermal printer at BBC Radio Derby about 1986. It was useful for the weather and breaking news stories. Printout was on thermal paper, about 10cm. wide, with text and graphics in mono (sometimes the graphics would get slightly corrupted, if certain fancy effects were used). Probably 240 pixels (6 pixels per character * 40 characters).
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Old 17th Aug 2018, 9:29 pm   #13
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

We Bought a fair few of the version fitted with the K35 chassis. They were only available as 26". The model was called the "beam booster"... some sort of picture enhancing gimmick apparently..
They were sold off at a discount when the K40 came out.
I remember a very worn example coming back in from a Bookies shop after many reliable years on rental. the printer had become very noisy with lots of lines across the printout. It had earned us a fortune but probably not as much as it had earned the bookie!

Rich.
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Old 18th Aug 2018, 12:01 pm   #14
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

I used to have a K35 with the teletext printer. I gave it away to a forum member back in 2010, and I believe it's changed hands at least once since then. Part of me really misses it, but it was a big old lump and we had nowhere we could use it at the time. It wasn't in the best cosmetic condition, but electrically was good - and the CRT had lots of life left in it.

Originally it came from local radio. There was a teletext fault, so it was replaced in the newsroom with a BBC Master, a teletext adaptor, and a dot matrix printer. The fault was a really obscure one, but I eventually traced it to a TTL IC - don't ask me which one, as it was over 20 years ago! At the same time I was given another BBC micro teletext adaptor which also had an equally obscure fault which was also found to be a TTL logic chip. Prior to this, TTL logic had been 100% reliable in my experience, so for 2 to come along at the same time was illuminating to say the least. In fairness, I'd not done a huge amount of logic stuff at that time, much preferring analogue electronics.

There was additional logic to detect the presence of the "flash" control code (136 IIRC from the BBC Micro days) and remove it. I often thought about disabling that to see what the printer would make of flashing text!

The beam booster was a form of velocity modulation. The PCB (mounted underneath the top panel) took the video signal and detected edges - and applied a current to an extra winding on the scan yoke to briefly slow down the horizontal scanning, which caused the signal to appear brighter for that particular instant.

Perhaps unusually for such a high-end set, the scart socket is composite only - no RGB. Sign of the times, I guess... I modified mine - which was easy from the signal point of view (just a 4-pole miniature relay to switch between RGB from the teletext decoder and RGB from the socket), but complicated from the control side. It had to detect the fast blanking signal on pin 16 of the scart socket and also look at signals from the teletext PCB, and decide where to put the relay. So if you switched to text from an RGB signal such as a Sky box - which is what I used it with at the time - the relay would change over to the teletext decoder. What was more complicated was in "mix" mode, or subtitles. Obviously the relay wasn't going to switch that quickly - and I didn't want to build a complicated interface using an analogue switch in the hope that that might be able to switch quickly enough in "mix" mode - so in those instances, the relay would stay in teletext mode - and the video source seen behind the subtitles or mix text would be the composite image (fortunately, most set top boxes continue to output a full composite picture when in RGB mode). The decoder in the K35 was pretty good, so the difference between composite and RGB - while worthwhile - wasn't too disturbing when you wanted text on the screen. The final circuit to do all this was pretty simple in the end - just a few transistors - and all written up and filed with the service manual (can't remember if that went with the set). It's amazing what I had time to do before children

Back to the beam booster. I quickly discovered that I had to disable it when in external RGB mode. This is because the incoming composite signal was reaching the beam booster and causing it to add a "ghost" of the image - separated from the edges of the picture by the luminance delay line!

Several large CRT sets used velocity modulation - all done in varying ways. I quite liked the simple elegance of the K35 method, as a separate coil on the yoke means that you don't have to build a circuit that has to interface to the line output stage.

These sets also had a stereo audio stage (large PCB on the right, as viewed from the rear), but only one speaker (plus a tweeter). Well before NICAM, of course, but full bass and treble control, and external speaker connections IIRC. Curiously, I never rated the sound - I used to have a 22CS1234 which had better sound, despite the single drive unit. That was a lovely set too. I really liked the K30/K35 chassis

As I look back at the photos, it appears that the bottom panel has sagged under the weight of that isolation transformer! I hadn't noticed that before...
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Last edited by mhennessy; 18th Aug 2018 at 12:07 pm.
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Old 18th Aug 2018, 1:16 pm   #15
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

I have found a couple of older threads about these that may be of interest, as I do remember reading about these previously.

https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...ad.php?t=83646

https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...ad.php?t=54404
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Old 18th Aug 2018, 1:41 pm   #16
mhennessy
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

Ha - looking at John's set, I see that mine wasn't the only example with a saggy bottom

Being only chipboard, I guess that any exposure to damp could have that effect...
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Old 18th Aug 2018, 5:02 pm   #17
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

when the tv man brought us the brochures for a new tv, I wanted the philips with printer, for no other reason than to play with it. I'm sure the ferguson brochure also showed a printer option, though it was slung underneath the cabinet. I dont remember the model but the same brochure showed the tv's ability to alter text colours according to taste.

We settled on a K35 without printer....though ours did have stereo 4-way speakers. With a nicam video recorder some years later, it was awesome!
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Old 19th Aug 2018, 6:21 pm   #18
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

We used to sell the Pye version of the K35 with teletext printer. They eventually became a 'flog-off' model so presumably they were never a great sales success story.
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Old 19th Aug 2018, 6:54 pm   #19
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

Can you still get the thermal paper for the printer? is it the same as the Sinclair thermal printer paper?
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Old 19th Aug 2018, 7:36 pm   #20
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Default Re: TV with built in printer?

It was more like fax paper than Sinclair printer paper. Now, that stuff could not have been any good for you!
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