Stunning Retro TV Set Designs: Unconventional Beauty That's Hard to Find Today

Ranging from the bizarre and eccentric to the utterly breathtaking, these vintage masterpieces showcase an unconventional beauty that is increasingly elusive in today's tech-saturated world.

In this article, we invite you to embark on a journey through time as we unveil 15 stunning retro TV set designs that capture the essence of unconventional beauty, designs that are hard to find in the modern age.

Imagine yourself in the 1920s, where early television sets looked like small screens encased within oversized, ornately carved wooden cabinets.

As the years progressed, the look of television sets changed, reflecting the evolving design sensibilities of each decade. In the mid-century modern era, television sets adopted smooth lines, geometric shapes, and minimalist aesthetics.

Other designs were even more inspiring. Imagine a television set that resembles a retro-futuristic spaceship, with illuminated dials and buttons that transport viewers to an extraterrestrial realm of entertainment.

How cool is this mid-century modern TV console? Shaped like a sailboat, it has a top section that pivots like a sail on the mast so you can tilt the 23-inch screen in the desired direction.

The lower cabinet has additional multi-media facilities with pull-outs, a 4-speed phonograph, a TV tuner and a multi-band radio receiver.

The first television set that was available to the public in Russia looks exactly as you would expect – basically as if it were a piece of military equipment.

Once upon a time, it was considered a status symbol to have a huge ugly fake wood-covered box in your living room.

The GE Performance Television is as ridiculous as it gets, especially since the picture was terrible due to the fact that it was basically just a regular TV tube that was flipped and projected back onto that giant screen.

GE marketed it as "a super-sized TV with a picture three times larger than a 25-inch diagonal console and the 'chairside convenience' of a random access remote control."

Before 'real' color TVs were available, CBS Laboratories came up with this device – basically a black and white television equipped with a rotating mechanical wheel of red, blue and green filters that produced colors in the picture that appeared on the screen. Used to connect.

CBS was all set to start selling these things when RCA protested that an all-electronic color system (which they were researching, but not yet developed) would make more sense.

Ultimately, the Zenith design was used for some time as a teaching tool for surgery but was never sold to the public.