At Hoffman, all systems are go

Ryan Carter

Walking into the lobby of Hoffman Video Systems is like walking into

celluloid time warp. On one side is a circa-1967 television console

with a large knobs to change the channel and the volume, with a

greenish screen that seems to cover the console.

It is the Easy-Vision television, an early Hoffman attempt at

easing viewers’ headaches while watching black-and-white screens. On

the other side of the room, a plasma monitor hangs on the wall. Both

are surrounded by all kinds of old radios and solar cells.

Hoffman Video has come a long way since the Easy-Vision, but the

idea of staying at the cutting edge of visual technology has remained

a constant.

The Glendale-based company specializes in the development,

manufacture and sales of control rooms and video conferencing

systems. With offices in Glendale, Atlanta and Denver, the company

has completed projects in 33 states, on five continents and in a

dozen countries. They sell to the military, major studios and the

government, among other large clients.

Need a teleconferencing room built from scratch? They’ve got you

covered.

“We want to be a solution provider,” President and Chief Operating

Officer Robert T. Shepherd said. “We want to find ways to help the

end-user increase their productivity.”

That translates into services such as designing every element of

the audio-visual system within the space the client wants.

The company has been in Glendale for about 12 years, but it has

been in outer space for a lot longer than that. Just last week, it

celebrated a bit of a milestone.

Hoffman helped design the navigation system aboard the space

shuttle Enterprise for its first manned free-flight from the pylons

of a Boeing 747 on Aug. 12, 1977, and the company still works with

NASA. The nation’s Vanguard I satellite, launched in 1958 and powered by solar cells made by Hoffman, is still moving through space.

“It’s still working,” said Hoffman co-founder Bob Jablonski, 77,

who still comes in every day. “That was a very exciting time.”

Hoffman was founded in 1941 by H. Leslie Hoffman. From 1941 to

1977, the company says it produced everything from radios to the

first color television sold on the West Coast.

After a sell-off of some other divisions, Jablonski and co-founder

J. Kristoffer Popovich turned Hoffman Electronics into Hoffman Video

Systems, bringing the company into the world of audio-visual systems

integration. In 1978, the new company was formed with about a dozen

employees.

It has grown into a company with annual sales of $20 million.