The Color TV Thread

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by HGN2001, Nov 13, 2011.

  1. Obtuse1

    Obtuse1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida
    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).

    [​IMG]

    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 TV's than I know what to do with (all of them color)...I really should haul them off to the recycling center.

    I may keep this one around...just for nostalgia's sake.

    [​IMG]
     
  2. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Gee, you could've just bought her a cheap color TV and turned all the chroma down. That's actually harder to watch, in my opinion, because there'll be a lot of different colors that match in terms of shades of gray, creating muddy, indistinct images on top of each other. If you're watching well-photographed B&W, no problem.
     
  3. JQW

    JQW Forum Resident

    In the UK many people would rent their TV sets instead of buying them. Back in the late 1970s my small town had three stores in the town centre whose only business was the rental of TV sets, and I believe other electrical stores also rented equipment. Rental avoided having to pay repair fees, which back then was a constant worry. Rental also allowed those currently unable to receive a UHF signal the ability to upgrade to colour as and when the signal arrived.

    Renting a B&W set was cheaper than renting a colour one - the TV license fee for operating a B&W set was considerably lower too. So a good number on lower incomes continued to rent B&W sets.

    So what happened when large B&W sets stopped being produced sometime in the early 1980s? Well, some of the rental companies simply provided their customers with colour sets with part of the colour decoding circuitry disabled!
     
  4. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member Thread Starter

    Anyone remember how the color balance and hue would be way off-looking when a show went to commercial? People would have green or purple faces in the commercial, even though the show you were watching looked fine.

    The word of advice on the street from the TV salesmen and the TV repairman was to adjust your set during the program you were watching, not during the commercials, since they were all over the place.

    That's not nearly as much of a problem today on a regular network. Color balances during commercial breaks for the most part look pretty good. Cable channels can be evil in that department when showing local inserts.

    I remember being so disappointed to see a commercial in black & white that I *know* I'd seen in color before. Usually it was a case of a local version running in black & white while the network version was in color.

    Today, black & white is used as an art form in commercials and can be quite pleasing as a change of pace.

    Harry
     
  5. apesfan

    apesfan "Going Ape"

    I know, they sounded so good. I have a bad super8 with sound color film of my house at night and the TV is playing KC and the sunshine band(OY) and even through all that poor sound recording their is a magic to that tube loaded sound that comes through. The Magnavox was their showpiece at that time and it sounded so good that when I purchased my Sansui 6060 receiver and Garrad turntable and KLH model 20 something I think(10 inch woofer and 2 inch black tweeter with a silver screen stappled over it)and that could not compare with the sound of the Maggy. Broke my heart. Slowly learned to make the new equipment sound better and use an ADC equalizer sparingly and upgrated a lot and by 1981 got very good sound from new equipment, some with tubes some without. By 1985 with the Polks sda 1a and adcom amps and thorens 166 turntable I finnaly got sound that suprizingly sounded like my old Magnavox stereo from 1965. What a long strange trip its been. Take care John M.:wave::realmad:


     
  6. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    They didn't have that problem in PAL countries, since the transmitter essentially had control of the hue circuits in the TV sets. Once everything went digital, this ceased to be a problem.

    I still have that problem when I see a standard-def version of a commercial when I know for a fact that at High-Def version exists. Makes me nuts. They should never, ever, show a standard def commercial in the middle of a high-def network TV show.
     
  7. JQW

    JQW Forum Resident

    We didn't have issues with colour balance here in the UK, due to using PAL, as has been already mentioned.

    However there was one odd aspect of the commercial network ITV that may be related. At the start and end of every commercial break there was a short black and white animation, with each ITV regional broadcaster having their own particular one. They weren't around that long, disappearing by about 1975. I presume they were part of the switching mechanism between network programming and regional commercials, but why were they always simple black and white patterns?
     
  8. DragonQ

    DragonQ Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Moon
    ITV1 still has black & white moving patterns in the top-right corner when an advert break is coming up on a live broadcast (e.g. international or Champions League football). Since the introduction of ITV1 HD there's been a second pattern in the top-left too.

    I have no idea why, in this day and age, those patterns are still necessary.
     
  9. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    It makes me nuts too. Our local stations haven't gone over to HD from their studios yet, so local commercials are in SD, which confuses the heck out of my HD cable box. It seems to lose the sync to the HD signal and when the program comes back on, the picture will flash on and off until I switch to an SD channel, wait 10 seconds and then switch back. Comcast tells me there's nothing wrong with my box (yeah, right).

    One thing I can say about modern HD sets, though: the color on most sets looks really natural (when properly adjusted), and there seems to be much less variation between brands than back in the '60s. I remember that sometime in the late '60s some manufacturers (Sylvania perhaps?) went to a non-standard phosphor for their picture tubes because they were brighter than the phosphors called for in the NTSC standard, but the color was much less natural looking. I'm fairly certain that RCA used the correct phosphors all along (at least until they quit making the sets here in the USA), and I know our '68 Magnavox set had an RCA picture tube. The Magnavox set had a feature called Chromatone (TM) that you could turn on or off, which gave black and white programs a sepia tone. Sears had something similar on some of their higher-end color sets called Chromix which did a similar thing but you had a range of adjustment as it was a knob operated function. Anyone remember that? I never really liked having it on as I didn't like what it did to the color balance, but my folks liked it on during B&W programs (I turned it off when I was watching alone.)
     
  10. Scooterpiety

    Scooterpiety Ars Gratia Artis

    Location:
    Oregon
    Back in the early 70's I remember when a commercial would start you would often see these pairs of little white bars flash for a few seconds on the top left and right of the screen. I assume these were some sort of a cue mark?
     
  11. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member Thread Starter

    No, but I remember discount stores selling a cheap, clear-plastic sheet that you were supposed to put over your black & white TV screen to turn it magically into "color". It had a bluish band at the top, a reddish band in the middle, and a greenish band at the bottom.

    If you happened to be viewing an outdoor scene with a sky and grass, it almost worked, but the rest of the time it looked like crap.

    And I also recall that TV stations, once they began their color broadcasting life would sometimes forget to turn off their color circuitry during the showing of an old black & white movie or sitcom. You'd end up with a muddy-greenish/brownish looking picture. I always used to get up and turn the color down when they did that. I like my black & white to look black & white.

    Harry
     
  12. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yeah, I think that's generally true. I'd say a $500 TV today is better in a lot of ways than a $2000 set was 20 years ago. Though I think the newer sets sometimes have an "edginess" to them that's unpleasant. And god help you if you leave all the automatic controls on.

    I've seen those little rectangular boxes pop up in the upper right corner before on TV shows, mainly on ABC in the 1970s. I think these were done for "shared breaks," where local stations had the option of blocking the network spots for local commercials. When I was running TV commercials in the 1970s, we always got a printed log sheet for the network shows, so we knew exactly when the commercial breaks were coming. That meant the white cue marks weren't necessary -- we could go by the clock. The exception is live programming (like sports), which is almost totally ad hoc.

    Right, you have to eliminate the color burst in order to lose the residual chroma artifacts. The "color-killer" notch filter in the set is supposed to eliminate that, but it didn't always. If a modern display is adjusted correctly, a B&W image should have no apparent color tint, at any brightness level. This is one of the toughest torture tests for a consumer TV to pass.
     
  13. JQW

    JQW Forum Resident

    They're to tell the ITV regions exactly when a commercial break is coming up during a live broadcast, to allow them to slot in their own commercials. Other commercial breaks are pre-programmed in advance.

    The animations I mentioned earlier were somewhat different; they covered the whole screen for just a second or two, were always in black & white, and ran between the programming and the commercial break.
     
  14. Jim G.

    Jim G. Geezer with a nice stereo!

    In 1956, I think, I was in 1st. grade. The whole school (probably about 30) loaded up in the school busses and traveled to another town for a field trip to see a color tv. My parents didn't buy a color tv until after I had left home. I didn't buy one myself until 1980. I didn't have a tv from 1970 to 1980. To busy with listening to music.
     
  15. Gappleton

    Gappleton Forum Resident

    I remember first seeing colour TV in a showroom in Warrington (England) where I grew up in about 1966 or 67. The shop was called Dawsons and from a quick search of the net it is still there. It was a brilliant record, music and electrical store with real listening booths. The programme was a BBC2 trade test transmission of power boat racing.

    Wind forwards a few years to 1979 and I became an apprentice Radio and TV servicing engineer working for a shop in Llanelli, South Wales. The shop sold and rented TV's and also ran a few "piped" TV systems in the more out of the way places that couldn't receive TV from a roof aerial. Some of the valleys were in shadow from the main transmitters so we put up communial aerials at a high point and "piped" the signal from house to house through the villages, for a small fee of course.

    During my training I went "day release" to Swansea Technical College. There was no colour transmission in South Wales at the tome but I remember we had a huge American Heathkit colour TV running from an NTSC signal generator to play with. The set was on a massive trolly with all its boards exposed and had a round crt, much like an osciloscope, masked off to something more like square. The EHT (Extra High Tension) generator was valves and gave off x-rays so that was kept well shielded in a metal box.

    Wind on again to 1982 and after a few years more study I became an engineer for an ITV regional company working on propper colour television broadcast. I have spent the last 30 years working on almost every piece of equipment you can think of and every programme from sport OBs to drama. I saw the end of 405 line monochrome and the start of 3D HD, the move from 2" VTR and telecine to server systems. Now as retirement looms ever closer I count myself most fortunate to have worked in such an exciting industry through such a period of dramatic technological advancement.

    Incidently some of you mentioned earlier the colour stability of PAL transmissions. I am not sure if this has come up before but in the industry we used to have our own unoffical translation of the abreviations: -

    PAL (European standard)- Perfect And Lovely
    NTSC (USA) - Never Twice the Same Colour
    SECAM (Mainly France & Russia) - System Entirely Contrary to American Methods)


    One more thing that may be of interest, for those who may not know of it's existance, TV ARK - The online television museum: -

    http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/

    A huge repository of UK TV nostalgia.

    Regards,
    Gordon
     
  16. kevin

    kevin Senior Member

    Location:
    Evanston IL
    My parents got a color tv back around 1976[for Christmas] and the 1st program I remember seeing in Color was an NBA game.......I just read that WNBQ channel 5 in Chicago was the 1st station in the us to do all of it's local programming in color back in 1956.
     
  17. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    We called it "Pretty Awful Looking" in LA. PAL was always a pain in the @$$ to work on, mainly because of the 4% speed-up going from 24fps to 25fps. Not every aspect of PAL was good except as a transmission standard; it wasn't a great choice for mastering, and there was no real sharpness difference for film between 525 lines and 625 lines.

    High-def and digital TV changed all of that.
     
  18. Gappleton

    Gappleton Forum Resident

    I agree, it worked well for transmission but if you looked at the picture RGB straight out of the camera and compared it with the PAL encoded you could really see the degradation. The PAL dot pattern would mess up any fine detail and herring bone jackets were murder.

    VTR tapes from the 1970's and 80's that were recorded in PAL really look horrible now.

    We did have some issues with film from telecine where 24fps film was played at 25fps. The technique at the time was just to do it and hope no one noticed! Although it did mean that movies were 1 min per hour shorter on TV than in the cinema. I have known times too when movies off VTR were run 1 fps faster again as you could make up a minute per hour that way if you were running behind schedule.

    Gordon
     
  19. fattyramone

    fattyramone New Member

    Location:
    Cambridge UK
  20. fattyramone

    fattyramone New Member

    Location:
    Cambridge UK
    First thing i remember seeing in colour on the tv was a game of tennis at Wimbledon , at a friends house in about 1973 ....the green of the lawn looked like something from a sci fi movie

    i thought it was alchemy , ...surely only warlocks could summon such things?
     
  21. fattyramone

    fattyramone New Member

    Location:
    Cambridge UK
    Here in the uk before we had all day tv the BBC would broadcast the "Trade Test Transmission" card so that the engineers had something to look at , do their adjustments to in the long hours when their was nothing being broadcast but they still had to do their job[​IMG]

    Im wondering ...did the famous USA peacock serve the same purpose??
     
  22. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    No, we had test patterns like the famous "Indian Head" (not politically correct):

    [​IMG]

    The NBC Peacock was "interstitial" material, done as a bumper inbetween programs and commercials, usually at the very beginning of the show.
     
  23. Scooterpiety

    Scooterpiety Ars Gratia Artis

    Location:
    Oregon
    "The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC."
     
  24. fattyramone

    fattyramone New Member

    Location:
    Cambridge UK
    So , was the usa TTT's broadcast in black and white? As per your example? ...or colour too?
     
  25. Mal

    Mal Phorum Physicist

    Believe it or not, they still use it today - although I've only seen a 1080 version. It was on the BBC HD channel shortly after 4am on the morning of the 26th September this year - I know this because I was so surprised to see it that I recorded a minute of it :nyah:

    It also had a L / R / C / LFE / Ls / Rs channel test on the audio track along with those letters alternating on the screen as the tones/channels changed.

    Maybe it's on every day at that time?:
     

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