Philips NV avoided the American television market right up until the 1980s. But after acquiring Sylvania - mainly to extend their quest for global dominance of fluorescent-lighting - the temptation became too great: they threw aside previous caution feeling now they could profitably compete in the cut-price US market. Their timing was puzzling, as US manufacturers were capitulating to brutal Asian competition where, domino fashion, manufacturing was shifting through a concatenation of lower cost developing nations - South Korea at the time being the nouvelle saveur du jour.

With excitement then I purchased a 26" Philips made in their new North American plant in Greenville,TN (a low cost non-union state.) They were allowed to use the name Philips now having purchased Philco (I think); they also were using the Magnavox and Sylvania branding, but retained the Philips name for more upmarket models like mine which had an (imported?) Philips picture tube and a deluxe luminance comb-filter, necessitating the inclusion of a 1-H glass delay-line.

They used the same 'chassis' (single PC board) for the 32" model as well, the 32" having a width control, so my tweaks were to reduce overscan to almost zero by height control and width by including a small inductor for H yoke plus insuring good interlace to preserve maximum 525/60 pixel display.

Not too long afterward, it went dark on me - I got into a bit of a panic as was not up to date on fixing TVs. Investigating its schematic revealed its main PWM power supply had blown up (I was soon to learn that it was common for these to take a dive.) Investigating further, I found it was a Motorola power MOSFET that went out and I couldn't buy these. So going to a semiconductor wholesaler (who don't sell to the public) I picked up the free Motorola MOSFET applications manual. Thumbing through it, there was an example circuit for a 'Television Power Supply' using this 'new' device and associated driver chip. Was shocked to see that the TV had a clone of this 'suggested circuit'
Makes one question Philips' central/global engineering prowess/strategy?

Philips were well known for re-engineering market-specific items like power supplies and tuners to use locally-sourced parts. It was easier in the case of power supplies to obtain type approval (UL in this case) by using locally-sourced and UR parts in the US.

Similar thing happened in Australia. Their 1st colour chassis here (the K9A) had a locally designed isolated switched mode power supply, unlike the European models that were live chassis. Probably because live chassis TVs were a sales killer in Oz. I guess the service techs here were vocal enough that it was many years before anyone released a live chassis TV, and by then they didn't break down.

They did engineer some very good designs at Queen Juliana's Public Service, especially in the signal processing circuits and ICs. I mainly saw the 2nd generation of ICs and they had a very clever circuit that avoided the need for separate burst and chroma channels and the attendant phase and gain adjustments around the PAL delay line. It simply gated the Colour control and passed everything through the delay line. Simple!
I noticed at the time that the Philips PAL ICs had NTSC drop-in equivalents. Later a single chip did it all for all standards.

Interesting to see your TV had the comb filter. We didn't see that used much for PAL. When it was, PAL became VERY good.

Philips CRTs had accurate colourimetry, optimised ahead of brightness. Always better than the others in this respect.

We have Philips commercial-grade screens throughout my workplace, however I haven't seen a Philips telly for years, nor most of the premium Japanese brands like Sharp, Sanyo (I think they went downmarket before exiting), Akai, JVC, General, Mitsubishi, etc. Most tellies now seem to be Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, LG and Hisense.

In fact, back when Australia was making tellies, there were far more local brands back then than any brand available now.

Didn't know the Euro K9's had (more simple) (mains rectified?) B+ (would be a bit high ~350vdc? to run a transistor flyback?) (this idea more suited for 100 - 120vac mains countries?)

What was the Aust Philips follow-up to the K9?

What was their final indigenous manufacturing effort for Aust/NZ market?

Pulled down a 63 cm NEC , 1990 crt TV about 2 weeks ago and the Tube was a Philips! I think it was Canadian too by memory,but I would need check that ..pete

Philips commercial-grade screens [in hospitals]

Yeah, Philips, like GE, really moved into Medical technology after television opportunities evaporated.

If only technology would remain static for poor Philips: Think of their ambition, and big investments, to dominate fluorescent tubes: who would have predicted these would go the way of the CRT? And the Plumbicon (a Philips invention that had them dominating TV cameras...until Japan stole the show with CCDs!)

No the Euro K9s had a SMPS power supply but it was not isolated from mains. The first K9s here had a rotary turret tuner because of Band II requirements, until local Philips re-engineered their Euro-design varicap tuner.

Prior to colour, Philips made everything here, mostly at their Lane Cove plant in Sydney. Like AWA they also sold components to other manufacturers. Strange thing was, even though they made all components, they would buy from other manufacturers for their own finished products.

Philips was known for making inexplicable decisions. Right at the end of the B&W TV era they released an all SS TV that was very different to what they had made before, but very similar to the very successful local Pye T26 that had appeared 4 or 5 years prior.

Apart from CRTs and yokes they made all components for the colour TVs too. This continued until the 1980s when Philips production shifted to Singapore.

Despite the fact that there were 4 makers of B&W CRTs here, no-one ever made colour CRTs in Australia, the Whitlam govt. killed off the local components industry. World-first metal glaze resistor technology by IRH here went off-shore.

You are right about the technology progression, it can be brutal. I would imagine that potential colour CRT makers here would have seen the writing on the wall.

NewVista, I'm surprised you had to modify your Philips to get underscan. All Philips CTV chassis I ever saw used an East-West Modulator circuit which should have made the width a simple adjustment...

The various Philips CTV chassis in Aus were a mixed bag reliability wise.
The K9 and K11 were quite reliable and made very nice pictures with their colour accurate phosphors.
Far better than any Japanese CRT's
The K12 was a disaster having edge connector and power supply problems and many other reliability issues.
They got it right by the time the KL9 chassis came along.
They were very reliable and a pleasure to work on when needed.
As a field tech back then you very quickly worked out which ones to love or hate.
Universally hated was the Thorn 4KA.

In 70s and 80s Australia, the 63cm was the dominant screen size.

The KL9 (for 63cm) was an Australian development of the smaller screen KT3 chassis which was to be found in 34cm to 56cm screen sizes. I'm not sure but I suspect the KT3 was at least in part an Australian development. It was a simpler, more elegant design than we saw coming out of Eindhoven at that time.
The KL9 allowed Philips to get rid of the expensive, complex and unreliable K12, at least in Australia.

Pye ran the T30C (with a 63cm 110 degree Toshiba self-converging CRT) for as long as they could to avoid using the K12 for as long as possible. By this stage the T30C had become a very reliable TV. A couple of tripler replacements is all I can recall ever needing to do to them.

We never saw the 30AX CRTs in the K12 here, they did in Europe. The KL9 and the 30AX CRT were released here at the same time.

US trade law stipulated that advertised screen size must match viewable diagonal dimension, so the Philips tube in my set would had to have been at least 66cm to be true to the claimed 26". This series, all on a single PC board, was of a minimalist design with no convergence controls. It had two SMPS's, a mini one running all the time for standby power that would awaken - or smoke - the full power unit of Motorola design upon 'power-on'.

The single sheet schematic also gave details for the 32" model that was essentially the same but added width pot circuitry, meaning there was no way to trim width on production line for smaller models, so they designed in a comfortable amount of overscan, which was unacceptable to videophiles such as me.

Looking at Philips corporate history reveals they were in a world of hurt in the 80s & 90s and were no doubt trimming back engineering departments. No surprise then they were adopting trendy solutions from outsiders like Motorola semiconductor (probably got a sweet purchasing deal for these chips & transistors as well.)

In the 80s & 90s when Philips ran from barely profitable to a loss, their stock price hovered around a dollar or two. After the GFC the company was reconfigured away from consumer products. Their present chairman is from Shell Oil, what would he know about electronics? Their stock price has inched to a new record of $49, but it's in a precarious up-channel formation: when - not if - it breaks down out of the channel, it will keep falling, tracking the larger near future global economic context?

The "tube size" for our 63cm TVs was 26 inches. The Philips tube size was 66cm, the Toshiba was 67cm. The "viewable diagonal" size as required by consumer law for both was 63cm.

Philips were in trouble in the 80s. They had previously purchased two TV manufacturers (Pye and Kriesler) that were successful and profitable in lower and higher price market niches than Philips sold into. Being purchased by Philips was the kiss of death for both of them. After running as canning factories (Philips chassis) for a few years they were both closed down.

Well the fate of Pye and Kriesler is intriguing: humbling for them to end up as empty shell brands to extend Philips Aust market share!

As far as I know Philips never used the Philco brand they had purchased; they just bought it to get control of the "Philips" name in US that Philco had the rights to!

All right, I just remember being in a large chain discount store the other day, I won't give its name but it's the world's largest and it starts with W, and there were a number of 'Philips' flat panels slugging it out with the usual Asian brands in what is now the worst deflationary retail conditions in the history of television!

I always thought that Ford owned Philco.

Retail TV is a game I'm glad I'm not in. With Aldi selling large screen 4K LCD smart TVs for a couple of hundred bucks or less, there's not much in it.