Giant screen color TVs are no longer the novelty they were a few years ago. There are now half a dozen manufacturers making TV projectors to display TV pictures up to six feet wide—eight to twelve times as big as the picture on a conventional set. These projectors are priced from $900 to $4,000, but only one of them is worth the investment; the rest are nothing more than clever ruses.

The picture on a normal TV set is displayed on a screen which is really the end of a giant vacuum tube, the “picture tube” in the parlance of TV repairmen. There are physical lirtiits to the size to whi£h these glass tubes can be blown—the largest TV screens of conventional sets rarely exceed 25 inches measured diagonally. Most TV sets have 19 to 21 inch screens. Manufacturers have not been able to overcome the deterioration in picture quality that seems inherent in 25 inch plus picture tubes; although Sony claims they will introduce a 25 inch Trinitron next year.

So far, only three solutions have been found to make a TV with a screen five to fifteen feet wide. The best solution is to redesign our TV system to eliminate the picture tube, improve the resolution and color quality, and display the picture on flat panels. In J apan and the U.S. there are experiments underway on digital and laser-projected TV; however it’ll be 2010 or 2020 before these systems are perfected and even then, it will require an act of Congress to scrap our present TV system.

The second solution has already been invented. There^are a number of complicated, expensive, delicate techniques, such as the Eidophor TV projection system first used in the 1940s, which produce bright, viewable TV pictures up to fifty feet wide. But the least expensive of these solutions—General Electric's TV projector which can project Cinemascope TV pictures 25 feet wide in your living room—is $49,000.

Finally, there’s the current batch of video projectors pitched at consumers under slogans like “large-screen color TV,” “super screen color TV,” and “theater size home color TV.” Except for the system manufactured by Henry Kloss’s Advent Corporation all of these TV projection systems work pretty much the same way—not very well.

Perhaps you’ve seen the ads in the back of Mechanics Illustrated and other populist mags selling “giant screen TV set kit for a six foot TV picture, only $15 complete.” What you get is a large magnifying glass. If you turn your TV set up real bright, put the magnifying glass in front of the screen, and point it at a movie screen, turn off the room lights and tack blankets over the windows, and'stand directly along the projection path, ypu will see a large TV picture on the screen. This is the principle behind all home TV projection systems like those sold by Muntz, Super, Screen Television, Worldwide Entertainment Systems, and Sony. Though prices vary from $900 to $3,000 for these systems, they are all constructed around very bright conventional TV picture tubes, large magnifying lenses, mirror projection paths which shorten the distance of throw from tube to screen, and highly reflective screens, often an adaptation of Kodak movie screens. At best, the result is OK. The picture is not very bright, must be watched in total darkness to really be viewable, and often depends more on the reflective qualities of the screen than on any other part of the system. One Muntz version of this principle is a Sony Trinitron TV set, lens, and mirror encased in a plywood box at twice the price of the TV set alone. Sony was the first to introduce this system with their VPP-2000 projector which listed for $3,045. A lof of money for a not so bright big picture. I don’t recommend any of these systems.

One TV projector overcomes the problems of all the above systems. It is the large screen TV made by the Advent Corporation (195 Albany Street, Cambridge. Mass.). Henry Kloss, the director of Advent and the genius behind the system, has developed a projector which combines the lens, mirror, and tube into a specially constructed projection system that gives a remarkably bright picture—almost as bright as a normal TV set vyatched under similar conditions.

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Kloss has outJ apanesed the rest of the TV set and TV projection business by his clever, complex, yet definitely successful approach to the problem. With grim determination, he created a whole new kind of TV set to produce a six foot diagonal TV picture of excellent quality. The Advent “VideoBeam” almost put him out of business because it cost so much and took so many years to develop. In fact, the original model rose in price from $2,600 to nearly $4,000 because of production costs. But now Kloss seems to have conquered both technological and marketing obstacle?. Recently he introduced the new Model 750 VideoBeam projection TV set. It has a retail price of $1,495 (which, if you deduct the $600 you'd spend on a new conventional TV, puts it in the price class of the other inferior TV projectors now being advertised). The effect it produces is a knockout. It has to be seen and experienced to be believed.

Of course there’s the question of who needs a six foot TV when there’s not much to watch on.a 19 inch screen. I won't, argue that. But when you do watch TV you’ll find the big screen makes all the difference. Sports fans can read the players’ names on the back of their uniforms. Old movies, which were made in a three by four ratio format, are excellent. Video tapes play back like movies. And the rest of the garbage is more spectacular and disgusting than ever before.'