Philco Predicta Television 1958 - 1960

http://www.predicta.com/index.shtml

Philco Predicta TV "Holiday" Ca.1958

Les modèles de Télévision de la marque Predicta furent produites par Philco à la fin des années 1950's. Le design particulièrement extravaguant fait de ces  télévision un exemple représentatif du style de design "Space age".
Certain voit dans les Predicta une similitude avec la forme des pompe à essence ou avec les robots des film de Science fiction contemporains au modèle et d'autres à un cyclope futuriste. La marque Philco produira un grand nombre de modèles différents de prédicta, mais toutes ont en commun un écran orientable et une table de télé contenant les boutons et les hauts parleurs faisant partie de la télé faisant de celle ci un meuble à part entière. De nombreuses Predicta seront produite pour la chaine d'Hôtel Holiday Inn.


 

Philco Predicta Tandem/Penthouse TV Ca.1959

Philco Predicta TV "Princess" Ca. 1958

Philco Predicta "International" Danish Modern Ca.1960

1959-60 Philco Predicta Model UG-3410 "Princess" - 17 inch swivel screen

The Philco Predicta is an American television made in several models by the Philco company in the late 1950s. It is arguably the most iconic television set in existence and is to many people the "classic" 1950s TV set. With its trademark detached picture tube, it is atypical of most early television sets which were build in sturdy wooden or bakelite cabinets. It was one of the first commercially released televisions to feature a nearly flat screen.



Many Predictas were produced for the Holiday Inn hotel chain; but the design was considered too radical by everyday consumers, and many sets languished at television dealers. Slow sales, lack of a color model and very poor reliability eventually drove Philco into bankruptcy and sale in 1960.




Due in part to their 1950s styling and rarity of working examples, they are now highly sought-after collectibles. They have been featured many times in movies, TV, and music videos. Telstar acquired the rights to the name and now produces brand new sets with larger, color screens and modern internal electronics, but has not produced many sets in recent years.

The Philco Predicta television set, built from 1958-1960, has always been a glorious piece of modern design, but even the contemporary reproductions weren't sufficiently functional to be much more than a fetish object in an already-crowded apartment. As luck would have it, we recently got the opportunity to transform one into a fully-functional experimental computer console. Dragged kicking and screaming into the silicon era, this thing has become a truly functional piece of equipment (ok, and it's still a fetish object, too). The casemod has been performed with the intention of preserving as much as possible of the aesthetic of the original, while still creating an object that could serve as a day-to-day computer. The unit was built for a client, to eventually house an experimental computer they're building, but many of the shots on this page show our testing with a computer we just had sitting around, a 2.8GHz P4 533Mhz FSB SiS 651 Chipset motherboard with 1GB of DDR RAM running Windows 2000. We delivered the completed machine in late July 2004. For other projects we've done here at Onomy Labs, look here.

http://www.onomy.com/blue/predicta.html

The only Predicta TV ever produced with two-axis rotation! The Chalet (affectionately dubbed the Drive-In), another Telstar original, is created with the fun shapes and designs of the Fifties in mind. A tribute to the great American Icon, the Drive-In Theater. The Chalet with its "Gumby" marquis beckons you to pull up the easy chair with your favorite cold beverage and bowl of popcorn and do some serious movie viewing (mosquito repellent not necessary). The simple outward design is supported by a complete infrastructure designed to support and balance the weight of the picture tube. The 18" color picture rotates left right, and up and down, on its axis.

http://predictatv.com/chalet.shtml

The new Telstar pieces as a continuation of the Predicta line, Telstar are very proud of our work recreating the original Predicta look and introducing them back into the market in color.

http://predictatv.com/