Sony TV8-301

Television leaves the living room

The TV8-301 reached Japanese shops in May 1960. Sony, then still Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, built it around an eight-inch black-and-white picture tube measuring roughly 210 by 180 by 230 millimetres and weighing about six kilograms, and it would run from mains power, from a car battery or from two six-volt lead-acid batteries stored in a bay at the back. A set of that size was a sharp break from the console televisions that sat in living rooms, and Sony's own product history describes it as an advanced product that put forward personal use at a time when leaving the television in the parlour was the norm.

The transistor problem came first

Sony's transistor business had been built on radios, and the company's account of the project starts with a prediction by co-founder Ibuka Masaru that this would be the age of silicon. The semiconductor staff read that as television, because television was the harder target. Deflection and image output circuits in a cathode-ray set draw heavy current and run hot, so the transistors had to stay stable at temperature. In January 1958 Iwama Kazuo put Tsukamoto Shigeru's group on a silicon transistor for television use.

Silicon was difficult to work with. It melts at a far higher temperature than germanium, is chemically active when hot, is hard to purify and corrodes quartz crucibles, which made the crystal-growing equipment itself a research project. Sony's history records desks and drawers full of semiconductors cracked during circuit experiments. The breakthrough arrived in November 1959, when the team completed a high-frequency germanium transistor able to receive channels four through twelve, one month before the television was announced.

Twenty-three transistors and two small tubes

The finished set carried 23 transistors, 18 diodes and two high-voltage rectifier tubes, a count that the University of Electro-Communications museum and collectors' documentation agree on. Sony's own history adds that nine new semiconductor devices were developed for it, among them the 2SC41, a silicon mesa transistor for horizontal deflection, the 2SA161, a germanium mesa high-frequency transistor, and the 2SC19, a grown silicon transistor for image output.

Sony advertised the television as all transistorized, and its own product archive calls it the world's first direct-view portable transistor television. The phrase direct-view is doing real work there. Philco's Safari had gone on sale in the United States in 1959, but its picture was a two-inch image reflected and magnified through a mirror, which made it awkward for two people to watch together. The TV8-301 put the tube in front of the viewer. The all-transistor claim was also a stretch, since both sets carried rectifier tubes because no transistor of the period could handle the voltage.

Announced in December, on sale in May

Sony announced the set at the end of 1959 and showed it publicly at the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, on 11 January 1960. It went on sale in May at 69,800 yen, a price that put it well beyond ordinary households. When the set crossed to the United States in 1961 as the 8-301W it listed at $249.95, with a rechargeable battery pack costing another $29.95, and the European version was sold as the 8-301E on 220-volt mains.

Early buyers, by Sony's own admission, were mostly very rich or eccentric. The set also broke down often, which earned it the nickname in the title of the company's own chapter on the project: Sony's "frail little baby". Restorers today note a metal case with an adjustable hood to cut glare, a zippered vinyl carrying case, and more than thirteen pounds of television before the four-pound battery is added.

What the record actually says about sales

The Japanese semiconductor industry's own history is plain about the outcome. The TV8-301, it records, was a product that could claim to be the world's first, but quality problems meant sales never grew the way the company expected. NHK's broadcasting museum, which keeps an 8-301 in its collection, notes that the set's low-power eight-inch tube with 90-degree deflection was easy to carry, and that this made it popular at television relay and outside-broadcast sites. The first place portable television genuinely earned its keep was in the hands of broadcast engineers rather than in the home.

Sony discontinued the TV8-301 in 1962. The set that replaced it in the company's line, the five-inch TV5-303, was announced in April 1962 and reached the United States that October, where it sold strongly under a slogan that summarised the whole exercise: transistors changed television.

What it left behind

The TV8-301 did not make money, but it settled an argument. Once television ran on semiconductors, sets could be small, light and low-powered, and the industry spent the following decades deciding what to do with that freedom. Sony's product line runs from the Trinitron colour receivers of 1968 to the pocket sets and personal screens that followed, all of them descendants of an eight-inch black-and-white set that was too expensive, too fragile and first.