Grey skies ahead for monochrome

Press, 1 September 1977, Page 1

Grey skies ahead for monochrome

By

FELICITY PRICE

What is black and white, constantly watched, second-hand, in steady demand, and selling for a song? A television set, of course.

Since the advent of colour television, its poorer relation, the black-and-white set, has been gradually going out of production.

At present, only Thom and Philips are making monochrome sets for the local market and they are so highly priced — all more than $4OO — that most retailers would be lucky to sell more than one a month.

According to one retailer, when people go into *the shop and ask for a new monochrome set, they suddenly change their minds when they learn it costs at least half as much as a new colour set. “The manufacturers are deliberately phasing the black-and-white sets out,” he said. “They don’t want to have anything to do with them — short runs on a production line of a particularly low-demand product are not at all profitable, and so people will be forced to buy a colour set, whether they want one or not. There soon won’t be any black-and-white sets made any more.”

But while there is little demand for new monochrome sets, second-hand ones are popular. According to the executive officer of the Christchurch branch of the Television and Electronic Service Association (Mr G. Ritchie) second-hand black-

and-white sets sell from $2O, when they “only just go,” to about $lOO for a small portable set.

Some sets have a threemonth guarantee, depending on their condition. Such guarantees are usually put on sets priced at more than $5O, and sets sold by a dealer without the guarantee can generally be regarded as a bit of a risk. A number of people advertise their old sets through the columns in newspapers. Most Saturday papers have between 20 and 50 second-hand monochrome sets listed, and a lot of them are offered privately, no doubt without. a guarantee. Some of the sets are

offered by people who have bought them cheaply, fixed them up, and hope to make a reasonable profit.

More than 900 colour sets a month have been registered in Canterbury over the last year, and so the supply of second-hand monochrome sets is plentiful. Since the introduction of colour late in 1973, the ratio of colour to monochrome sets has been closing. At present, for every three black-and-white sets in New Zealand homes there are two colour ones.

A little over 40 per cent of all privately owned sets are colour.