Before the Whitlam Labor government announced sweeping changes to the tariff systems covering imported manufactured goods and components, there was a general agreement in the industry that colour TV sets would cost somewhere between $1200 and $1500 (ie, approximately 10 times the average gross weekly wage!). Moreover, there would probably be no more than five basic chassis designs: Philips, Sanyo, Panasonic, Thorn and Pye.

Of course, the changes to the tariff structure changed this drastically and these prices were drastically revised. In a bid to level the playing field a bit, Telefunken, the owners of the PAL patents, enforced a 6-month moratorium on the direct importation of colour sets with screen sizes of 51cm or less, from the date the first official "limited" broadcasts started in late 1974.

The locally manufactured line-up for 1974 consisted of the Philips K9, the Kriesler 59-01 (basically an electronic clone of the K9 but with different board layouts), the AWA/Thorn 4KA (an antipodean-ised version of the UK "hot chassis" Thorn 4000 series), the Panasonic 2000 chassis, the Sanyo CTP7601, the HMV C210, the PYE CT25 and the Rank Arena (NEC) 2601 and 2201.

Notably absent were any locally-made models with remote control, absurd though that may sound now. The problem was that remote control necessitates a varicap tuner and because Australia has a number of "oddball" TV channel frequencies that are not used anywhere else in the world, there was nothing available that could tune in all the Australian channels. There were some up-market fully-imported European models that did offer remote control but sales-wise they were problematic, because you couldn’t guarantee they would work everywhere.

The first remote controls used ultrasonic transducers and were big, clumsy and unreliable. It wasn’t until the appearance of infrared models in the 1980s that they started to become standard equipment.