I love the old Calvin & Hobbs cartoon where Calvin asks why certain family photos were in B&W, and his father tells him that the world didn't become color until about 1960. That's a good question, though: when was the last black & white TV set made? Apparently, 1971 was the watershed year when color TV sales exceeded that of B&W (and it's right about when my family bought our first color TV). But I do remember small B&W sets on sale throughout the 1980s. In fact, I miss the old Sony "Tummy-TVs" they used to have in the 1960s: People forget how incredibly expensive color TV sets cost back then. Even in late 1953, the cheapest color TV sets were $240 -- which was $1933, adjusted for inflation. An $850 set in 1968 would be $5268 today! Big, big money. The fact that a new 32" HD set right now is about two hundred bucks is astonishing.
After my parents divorced in 1973, one of the first things my mother did was buy a color TV (a 19-inch Motorola/Quasar set). The first show I saw in color was Match Game '73.
1975 - Remember walking home from school - the 1975 version of the above set with a "chime" remote was the first color TV in our house - Dad was a Motorola employee Dad also was at the 1939 World's Fair and saw the television demos. He was a radar operator during WWII in the pacific and started a television repair business in 1949 that he closed in 1961. The B/W Hoffman TV was repaired on a regular basis and it was felt that it didn't need to be replaced.
I used to have one of those little Sony black & white portables that ran on a battery pack. The thing weighed a ton compared to today's portable devices, but it was all made of metal. I used to use it in the car on our obligatory weekend trips trying to watch either THE TIME TUNNEL on Friday nights or VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA on Sunday nights. Later on in the '80s, a car dealer promotion gave away a no-name portable black & white TV that I ended up taking to my office. It lasted a number of years and everyone in the office gathered around it whenever anything important was happening in the news world. We watched various Presidential inaugurations and other live newsworthy events on that thing, which started getting flaky. Sometime in the late '90s or early 2000's, I happened to be in an Ames discount store and saw a 12" black & white portable TV, a no-name brand that I bought for about $25. At that point in time, black & white was a novelty at best, but for an office TV this suited me fine. I even hooked up a digital converter to it in 2009 for the changeover to digital, and then left the whole kit and kaboodle there when I retired. I had no use for a portable black & white TV that was no longer very portable anymore because of the digital conversion, so I left it for my successor. But anyway, as late as 2000, you could still buy a black & white TV of a 12" size. The big 19 and 25-inchers went the way of the dinosaur years earlier. About the only thing I can think of that would still use a black & white monitor in modern times might be security systems or baby monitors. And by now, even those are flat-screen LCDs. Harry
My sister got a little Zenith B&W TV for her birthday, I think in the late 70s. It wasn't truly portable (no batteries) but was so easy to move around the house. It ended up living on the kitchen table for a while. I vividly remember watching Michael Jackson's 'Billy Jean' video for the first time on NBC's 'Friday Night Videos' on that thing! Our main TV was always color though since my earliest memories. As a really young tyke I remember watching repeats of 'Bewitched' and that game show 'Tattletales' on a color console when I was probably 4 or so. Not sure how my folks were able to afford a big set like that. dan c
A question for Steve and others that watched really early color TV, whether at home or in stores: A while ago, on a website (I forget which one unfortunately), I watched a sequence from the Chicago NBC affiliate circa 1960 in which there was a series of commercials, the station identification, the NBC peacock and an episode of Bonanza. As part of the sequence, one commercial was in color, one was in black and white and then the station ID was in color. The question is, was it a general rule that the station ID was in color before a color program in the early 1960s, or was the peacock sometimes the first indication of what was to come?
Station slide with announcer. Peacock. Show. First commercials, usually in black & white. Bumper or "And now, back to the show". Network ID at the half hour mark. And so on.. Watch the "Last Howdy Doody Show In Color" DVD and you'll see the entire hour...
It depended on the local station. In the big cities, the stations with some money to spend had local color capabilities and would at least feature their top-of-hour ID in color. In smaller markets, they might only have been able to pass network color and nothing locally. Station ID's occurred just seconds before the top or bottom of the hour. There was usually a one-minute local avail before the ID, and the station could sell that to whomever was buying - and depending on the station and the sponsor, it might have been in color or black & white, perhaps split into two :30s, whatever. At the exact top or bottom of the hour, the peacock rolled. In the older days it was a full 12 seconds I believe, and in the later '60s shortened to around 7 or 8 seconds. Then the program actually started for a few minutes, and then went to either a sponsor tag or right into a commercial if the show wasn't specifically sponsored. Those sponsor IDs have caused syndicators and DVD producers headaches over the years since they were so well integrated into the program itself. Good examples of that are Ford Motors and THE FBI, Chevrolet and Quaker Oats on BEWITCHED, etc. Harry
Very good info, thanks. And yes, for years when I watched Bewitched in syndication, I couldn't understand why so many episodes had a 1966 (MCMLXVI) copyright date.
Here in the UK, colour TV appeared in 1967, when BBC2 started to show programming in colour, beginning with the Men's Wimbledon final of that year. The other two channels, BBC1 and ITV, didn't move to colour until late 1969, when they started broadcasting on UHF. We acquired a colour sometime around 1972 or 1972, when I was just a few years old. It was made by Bush, mounted on a set of chrome legs, and featured four preset tuning buttons. It had an annoying habit of its colours going out of sync, which could be only resolved by quickly changing to another channel and back again. The programmes I can most vividly recall from that period were the unscheduled 'Trade Test Transmissions'. These were programmes from the film units of commercial and other enterprises, shown on BBC2 from mid morning to early afternoon, to guarantee that there was some colour content being broadcast for those in the TV trade to demonstrate and set-up equipment. At that time both BBC1 and ITV would carry schools programming throughout the morning, and a good deal of that was in black & white.
I find it interesting that at least two British series, THE AVENGERS and THE PRISONER filmed in color basically for the US, as Britain at the time still hadn't done much with color. It's almost like the old SUPERMAN and THE LONE RANGER that were filmed in color though few had color TV to view them that way. Harry
Harry, ABC, USA put up the money for the Avengers to be filmed in Colour. Without that, the show would have gone out of production..
I *had* heard that before, but still it's interesting to consider that the homeland telecasts were in black & white while we here in the States got to see them in full color. A little like the Beatles MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, too. Harry
British TV was somewhat odd back then. The two main channels exclusively used the 405-line system, and broadcast on Band I and Band III VHF. The BBC used the former, whilst ITV used the latter, each from their own network of transmitter sites. That system wasn't really suitable for colour broadcasts, as test transmissions by the BBC had shown. When the third channel BBC2 appeared in 1964, it was broadcast exclusively on UHF, using 625 lines, and suitable for upgrading to PAL at a later date, which happened in July 1967. This UHF network used a third set of transmitters, with the plan that both BBC1 and ITV would migrate to UHF sometime in the future, using the same transmitter network, whilst VHF would continue on 405 lines. One stumbling block for the upgrade of ITV to UHF was the fact that the franchises came up for renewal in 1968. Franchise operators didn't want to invest in expensive new equipment until the outcome of the franchise re-allocation was clear. This put back the adoption of UHF and colour by the main channels until late 1969. Even then it took years to roll out UHF to the rest of the country, as extra relay transmitters needed to be built to cover areas that could receive a VHF signal but not a UHF one. The small town my grandmother resided in didn't get their relay until 1974, and relays were still being built into the 1980s. The VHF network was finally switched off at the beginning of 1985.
David Attenborough (who IIRC was the director of BBC2 at the time) covers this period in a chapter of his excellent memoir Life on Air.
Yep. Also, on the CBS network (for many years), they did a "bong" sound effect just as the second hand went straight up. This helped local stations synchronize to the network's clock, so we could finish our :02 second legal ID just prior to cutting to the network (still in black). Through the early 1980s, there was generally a big sync roll -- a glitch, you could say -- when switching from the local station to the network. Eventually, the local stations invested in time synchronizers, which locked their signals to that of the network, so you could do a smooth, glitch-free transition. Back then? It's still odd!
I vividly recall the clumsy transitions from local station ID's messing with the openings to "M*A*S*H" and "All In The Family"...
As has been answered on this thread, and in the case of NBC O&O in Chicago WNBQ, most large market NBC and some CBS affliates broadcast network color begining early/mid 1954. Most of these stations ventured slowly into expensive local color broadcasting. Usually starting with color slide/16mm color film projectors. Local live color was very rare because of the cost of color cameras and related equipment. And the extremely low % of color sets in any given city because of the few color programs available at the time. You can view, on my site, a 1955 TV Guide article with some early local color TV ID slides and some 50's era network color ID's. -Steve D.
As recently as 1968, when I was in the service, we used to go to the furniture & appliance stores in Rolla, MO to see the color TV sets and dream that we could afford them. Military pay at the time for my rank was only about $260 per month, and color sets would have started at about 1-1/2 months' worth of pay. We favored the Sharp brand TV sets as their color looked to be better than the others. Finally in about June of 1971 when my military days were in the past did we take the plunge and buy a 19-inch color portable at K-Mart.
We got our first colour TV in 1973. It was a 22 inch HMV Colourmaster....complete with the dog and gramophone logo. UHF and colour transmissions had only recently started in the Scottish Borders and we got BBC 2 for the first time. The local ITV station, Border TV, was still broadcasting local news and other locally-made programmes in monochrome, although that changed towards the end of '73 when they got colour cameras. Some local BBC studios across the UK were also colour-free zones until well into the 70s. Even after that in-vision continuity on Border remained in black-and-white for a considerable while longer. Highlights of the viewing week, as far as I was concerned, included Top of the Pops, Old Grey Whistle Test, Star Trek and Granada TV's football highlights programme, which Border also screened. Incidentally the switch-off of 405 line services in the mid 80s left some more remote homes in the Borders and elsewhere without a TV signal. They may have been black-and-white only, but the Band 1 and Band 3 signals coped far better with the hills and valleys than the UHF transmissions did.
Cheap (battery operated) portable B&W CRT sets were available in the US right up until the 2009 digital transition. You can now find them clogging Thrift Store shelves (and landfills). Have yet to see a B&W set with a digital tuner. My grandmother (whose eyesight was failing) actually found it easier to watch on a B&W set, and never owned a Color TV. Her last set was a mid-80's RCA 19". Sadly now I have more CRT TV's than I know what to do with (all of them color)...I really should haul them off to the recycling center.
