The APCO TV-12PAA is a 12 Inches B/W portable television made for a brand called APCO from SANYO.
Apco Sales Inc in Roslyn Heights, NY is a private company categorized under Electrical Appliances, Television and Radio. Our records show it was established in 1971 and incorporated in New York.
Apco Sales Inc usually offer: Sanyo Televisions, Projection Televisions, American Tv And Appliance, 365 Radio and Amana Appliances.
This set came from Zurich were was marketed in the 70's.
It has manual tuning with rotary switch FOR VHF and Rotary for UHF.
..................OLD RELIABILITY PROBLEM:
It's a well known fact that the reliability of Japanese made TV sets is better than that of European made ones. It works out something like this: for every call to a Japanese set during its first year you'll have to make two -three calls to its European counterpart. It's not quite as bad as that may sound. Call rates tend to lie in the region 0.5-1, which means at one end that half the sets won't require attention while at the other end each set will require one call per year. Then again these are average figures, and while many sets won't require attention at all others will have more than their fair share of breakdowns. Fortunately there has been an improvement in recent years - the situation was rather worse say four years ago. But then for the last couple of years we've been going through a period when the technical situation has remained fairly static. Will the new in -line gun tube chassis using the new ranges of i.c.s prove more or less reliable than their immediate predecessors? Only time will tell of course. But the unfavourable comparison between the failure rate of Japanese and European sets has been a continuing fact of life for several years. Is it to do with components, assembly methods, or basic design? Well, Japanese sets use much the same components and assembly methods, and the designs are not fundamentally all that different. Perhaps there is some subtler difference somewhere? Recent conversations we've had suggest that this could well be so. We can speak only of the European industry of course, but feel that the situation is probably much the same with our continental competitors. The first thing to bear in mind - and this relates to other industries, such as car manufacturers, as well - is the different industrial structures. Like the car industry, European TV setmakers tend to be assemblers of finished products rather than manufacturers of whole units. They buy in capacitors, resistors, semiconductor devices, many of the wound components, the tubes, probably the tuners and triplers and so on. This is far less the case in Japan, where most of what a setmaker uses comes from "in house" sources. All right you may say. But European component manufacturers have been in the game long enough to know what they're about - as long as anyone else for that matter. Furthermore, they've been working in close contact with the same setmakers, both facing and dealing with common problems. Why should this different industrial set-up make any difference? It's probably not so much the set-up itself so much as the fact that the way the European industry is organised tends to emphasise certain basic weaknesses. Quite substantial changes have occurred in even the most mundane components in recent years - component manufacturers are producing new types of capacitor and resistor that were simply not known a decade ago for example. But to do this successfully calls for adequate investment and the employment of adequate numbers of properly trained engineers and technical staff. In both these respects, European industry is notorious. It may well be said that in difficult economic times it's hardly possible to increase investment and take on extra trained staff, which is true enough. But the fact is that we are reaping the results of our past inadequacies, and a start hag to be made sometime if the situation is ever to be retrieved. The main problems seem to relate to know-how and technical liaison. Does the setmaker get a thorough and reliable service from his suppliers - and conversely has he set about ensuring that he does? It's not good enough today to continue on the basis that something worked reasonably well enough last time and the supplier says he hasn't had any particular complaints other than the usual ones. To achieve the degree of reliability required to continue to exist in a highly competitive international industrial climate, it's necessary to know precisely what order of tolerances under various operating conditions the various components offered and bought have. And this calls for adequate technical back-up and investment. The Japanese invest adequately and their engineers can get together within a single organisation to deal with common problems. It's not necessary for the European industry to be reorganised for the same to be done. What's required is a more powerful voice for the engineer, backed by adequate investment.
