When did you first get a color TV and what was your reaction

(continued from earlier post)

I'm trying to recall, and I think it was a Tuesday night back in the spring of 1966 that we got the new Sears Silvertone color set home and hooked up. It was a big heavy thing, all metal cabinet with wood-tones and a 19" color tube. It was probably the RED SKELTON SHOW that was our first color show on the new set, and the next night it would have been THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES.

We still continued to watch all of our favorite black & white shows like THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW in its final run on CBS, and that summer we were bombarded with the promos of everything in color - and we were ready!

I loved seeing the three networks' different color bumpers, and enjoyed it even more so on the color set. The NBC peacock was far and away the best one with its many colors mixing and changing in its kaleidoscope pattern, but I enjoyed both ABC and CBS' versions for their networks too.



CBS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9UnfN4X0YE

ABC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVK2X6Pej2o

Harry

 

We got ours in the fall of 1972 if memory serves me correct. Could have been '73 though. It was a Zenith with the new Chromacolor II button on it that instantly gave you perfect color. Also had a slide volume and a slide selector for adjusting the color, tint, brightness and so on. Like this one I found on youtube....

My two most vivid memories of watching the set that first day was watching the Reds play. I couldn't believe how green the turf was and the uniforms were so bright. Also later that night watching Carson in color for the first time. I remember thinking he was so tan. Color gave that show warmth that I didn't know was missing before.

BTW, that old TV set is still sitting in the spot it was delivered 40 years ago at my parents house. And it's hooked up to cable and it still works after all these years. Hardly a mark on it.

 

It was pretty bad early on in Philly. One station would look great, and you'd flip to another and it was all out of whack, color-wise. The same with going from a network color show to a local color commercial - the color tones were as variable as you can imagine.

And the local UHF's, once they started messing with color, were truly awful at times. I recall that even as late as the late '70s, early '80s, our WPHL (channel 17) had picked up STAR TREK, and it wasn't only Spock that was green-tinted!

At times we could pick up New York signals, and they always had better-looking color, and more importantly, better sound. Our network sound was sometimes as muffled as a phone conversation.

Harry

 

What network accompanied its color display with the Ondes martenot soundtrack? That was neat. I'd love to have an Ondes martenot, but not at the insane prices real ones bring.

 

We got our first color TV in late 1967. It was an Emerson 25" and a piece of junk. It never had a great picture from the get go, though it was surely color. The first show I remember watching on it was The Time Tunnel. When I think back about that set I think of seeing all the red, green and blue dots, which were always visible to me. Of course part of the problem is that we had antenna issues, as did probably most of the people who had them back in the early days. There was no cable, so it was just off the air, and without a good rooftop antenna, or a location close to the broadcast antennae, many of us were plagued with poor reception.

The first color TV I ever saw was was probably around 1960 or so, and it belonged to a friend of my grandmother. It looked a bit wacky but now I realize that was most likely the programming rather than the TV. Watch an early color episode of Bonanza today and you'll see what I'm talking about. When I see one of those episodes today it reminds me of what I saw on that TV. Bonanza got much better after a few years.

 

Born in 1967, I don't remember a time when we didn't have color TV. I can't remember if we had any B&Ws, actually. I got a small B&W set as a present when I was 11 - it was a then-cheap $100 or so, while a similar-sized color set would've been twice that price - and we might've had an old "utility TV" that was B&W, but I definitely never went through a period when color was new to me...

 

Beats the hell out of the later Screen Gems logo with the weird tune and the strange looking "S"; here's a slew of Screen Gems logos:

 

Here's an episode of Hazel based around a color television set:

 

My mother won one on a game show called "Window Shopping" I guess that was around 1964.

 

We got an RCA all-tube model in either 66 or 67. I think it was a 25" - it was a console, no remote. Don't remember much what we watched (I was 5 or 6). But I soon mastered the Brightness/Contrast/Color/Hue knobs. I was a pro, and I'd always go to people's houses and tweak their TVs for them. But once, my grandmother caught me adjusting the color and she yelled at me. She told me that those knobs were setup when the set was delivered, and they were NOT to be touched! Little does she know (well, she may know now!), I continued to tweak her TV every time we visited for decades! God rest her soul.

 

My aunt had an early RCA color set with remote back in 56 or so. Those early RCA sets had great color accuracy but few shows had great production values. The Bell Telephone Hour, a live 60 min broadcast, was the gold standard. Later sets gave up color fidelity for a brighter picture. It took years for the technology to get back to where it started.

 

In Australia they couldn't decide whether to go for PAL, SECAM or NTSC so took to the early 70s for colour to come in. I remember a channel advertised they were screening The African Queen 'for the final time' in B&W even though the film was shot in colour.

 

.....that's the price of progress! ....an' it's durn funny!

 

The Sears color TV served us for a few years and then in about 1969 I won a color TV from the radio station that I eventually went to work for. I was just a listener then and the station changed ownership before I worked there, but I correctly answered a scrambled-song contest. (It was "Promises, Promises" by Dionne Warwick, by the way.)

That RCA 19" set served me for about a decade and then I just had to have a Sony Trinitron. The difference in the picture was so noticeably better, that it was a no-brainer. So I bought one. Once my parents saw the picture, they had to have one too.

Harry

 

If I already posted this, sorry. I couldn't find it.

We had color TV when it first came out in the late 50s (?). I wasn't around quite yet. We lost that TV in 1965 when my parents divorced, and we didn't get a color set again until November 1974. It was an RCA console, and lasted about twelve years of very heavy use.

 

Our local station (an NBC/ABC affiliate back in the '60s) didn't go to color from their studio until 1970, though they must have had a color film chain because they did air local commercials in color, but the tonality was usually pretty far off from the networks. When they got their color equipment for broadcasting the news and doing local programming, I remember that their picture always looked washed out compared to the network.

 

I think we got one in about 1983. believe it or not Australia was 50/50 between colour/b&w until around the early 80's!

 

Yeah, Panama City was a small market, and I remember that the cost of the color cameras was what delayed local color. I vaguely remember that someone from Channel 7 told me that the cameras cost something like a quarter of a million apiece (they bought two), though I'm not sure of the truth of that. Does that sound reasonable to you? Funny thing, the CBS affiliate from Dothan, AL (90 miles away) had local color from 1966 on, and their picture was pretty good, when the weather conditions were right!

 

Can't remember the year. For sure it was at my Gramma's house in Akron, OH; she had a big Zenith console color set. First broadcast I ever saw was a Cleveland Browns game, no doubt about it. The color did kind of s*ck, and I remember the flesh tones were awful.

 

Well, they were/are kind of screwy. Yes, they were split between NBC and ABC, with the bulk of the programming from NBC. ABC shows were videotaped and rebroadcast at a different time, usually during some low-rated NBC series. I know that Bewitched, Combat, and The Fugitive were broadcast in their normal time slots. They remained split until 1973 when we finally got another TV station who became the ABC affiliate. Regarding the cost of the cameras, like I said I'm not sure that the guy who told me that was being truthful, but I do wonder if NBC didn't give them the good price because they carried programming from a competitor.