Last time I went deep sea fishing I caught a big ole Quid.I had no idea that it was that easy to barter with fresh Quid....
It looks like an off-air recording to me, perhaps made on an early system like U-Matic or Philips VCR.
My father was a Zenith dealer and I remember when he first got one in the store. It was a pretty big deal at the time. Bonanza was one of the earliest shows broadcast in color and we gathered around the set one night to check it out.
We never had a color TV until 1970, a nice Motorola, 19". It was a hybrid of tubes and semiconductors. The high voltage section and, of course, the CRT screen were vacuum tubes. Everything else was solid state, making it very reliable for the day. The REASON we never had a color set until 1970 was our well-to-do neighbor down the road. He paid over $800 for a set in 1962, an RCA. When my folks were over to watch 'Bonanza' one Sunday night, the lady of the house told us that she just had to have a service call because she ran the vacuum cleaner near the TV set. She said the TV repairman brought a huge hoop and plugged it in the wall and ran it all around the picture tube. Degaussing, of course it was. We begged and begged for even a small color TV all through the 60s, but my parents wouldn't hear of it. We really wanted to see Lost In Space, Get Smart, The Monkees and all the cool shows that went to color in '67-68 or so. Of course, the REAL reason was that the TV was over $800 back then. If you plug that number into an online inflation calculator, using 1962 as the base year, that's something like $6200 now! It's no wonder they wouldn't have that kind of dough to spend on an "idiot box" or "boob tube" as parents used to call TVs. Talk about a deprived childhood! I actually had to read books and play with radios and circuits and stuff because TV was so boring!
Here's a 1960 George Burns Show in Living Color with Bobby Darrin as one of the guests (color's a bit funky, but the soundtrack is very hi-fi sounding):
When Australia got color TV (in the 70s sometime) they made a big thing about it being PAL. Now almost every DVD sold here is NTSC.
I've been searching for the model of our RCA LARGE Consul AM/FM/Phono Stereo Color TV...I cannot find it. I was all wood had a tube amp...my parents bought it between 1964-1966? no later or early than that.
Silly MPAA. They thought that by creating region codes, they could stop people in foreign countries from seeing American DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and vice-versa! So much for that... Color TV has been so ubiquitous over the last 50 years, it's rare you even run into people who remember when there were B&W TV sets. Panasonic had some really cool, futuristic-looking B&W sets, but they never quite did it with color for me:
Back when I was working, my office area had cabinets up around standing eye-level. I had placed a small black & white TV there that was given to us at a car dealer as a premium for buying a car. It had about a five-inch screen and was deep enough to hold the cathode ray tube. It also had am AM-FM radio built in, but I rarely used that. This thing lasted well into the 1990s. When it died, I wanted to replace it with another small black & white set, but by the 1990s, a black & white TV was almost unheard of. But we wandered into a local Ames store one day and they had a supply of 11" black & white sets that were wider and taller than this old one, but no deeper, so I bought it for use in the office. It was reduced to something like $20 - almost a giveaway. So for the remaining years at my job, I had a bigger screen - still black & white - and it often confused younger employees who'd happen by, wondering where the color was. Those two TVs got us through a lot of current events that happened during the day - the Reagan assassination attempt, space shuttle missions and failures, the Anita Hill hearings, Presidential Inaugurations and impeachment proceedings, the 9-11 coverage, the fall of Baghdad, etc. - all in glorious black & white. I think that TV was finally thrown out when we moved. It only had an analog tuner rendering it fairly useless in the digital era. My only remaining black & white TV is a small Sony Watchman that I haven't had the heart to toss. It too has a functioning radio, so it works on that level. Harry
About 1970 Panasonic made MCS Components for J.C. Penny. They had a radio tuner/TV tuner component. It was regular component size with a tiny B & W screen on the front. I remember that it was $130 and I didn't have the money. I was in high school. I thought this was gonna make music on TV much better. Evidently, it didn't go over well. By the time I had some summer job money, it was off the market.
My parents got a Zenith, 24" I guess, 1969. We had moved in the spring, when I had just gotten my license & 1st car, 1963 TR4, I was rarely home. They got the set sometime after moving. I have very little recollection of any "Wow" factor (not like the TR4). I got a hand me down portable b&w set for my bedroom and if I wasn't out & about, I watched tv in my room, where I also had a Lafayette am/fm phono. My main memory is that around Christmas, Help! was on Saturday Night At The Movies, fortunately my folks went out for the evening & I had the house & tv to myself. Had a cup of tea & enjoyed the boys and some serious Christmas candy.
What an interesting thread. I only just found this yesterday. Much thanks to the OP for starting this. My recollection would put our house around 1965. An RCA in some type of wood cabinet, 21" with the rounded CRT. The color programs of the day were "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color", "Flipper", and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" to name a few. Favorites such as "Batman" and "The Monkees" premiered in color, while others converted during their series run. One that comes to mind was "Lost in Space". That was very cool when it converted to color. Regarding the discussion of PAL, allow me to offer one more observation. Back in the mid 80's, the company that I was working for ( a video post house) decided to get into the standards conversion business. We were the first in this market, and they did it right. There was a Merlin standards converter and a slew of PAL VTR's. Ampex 1", 3/4" VHS, and Betamax. Monitoring was has handled by a pair of 19" Barco, broadcast grade CRT's. One NTSC, one PAL and were side by each. I have to admit, watching these images like this, the perception was the PAL always "appeared" to be richer. The lower black levels certainly increased the contrast ratio, which in turn enhanced the colors. It was funny how so many people at work (non tech types) would comment on the flicker of the PAL picture. I would tell them, once you look at it long enough, you don't even notice it.
That would have been the episode, "Edge Of The Knife" with guest stars Fritz Weaver and Geraldine Brooks. Joe Mannix was hired by surgeon Weaver after the kidnapping of his son by a lookalike. MANNIX, the series, was always a very colorful show, particularly the opening and closing graphics with its solid color boxes. Harry
TOTally off topic but i saw this quote on steve's post and i had to re "tweet " it again, it sums up everything i have always said in a far better way than i could ever have expressed it ! back on the subject of somebody has added the full BBC Louis Armstrong special from oct 1968 on youtube. Only two years before he died it shows the great man in top form and in full 625 line colour and it looks like it could have been recorded yesterday. Check it out even if it is not your thing ( and it is not massively my thing to be honest ) its a real timewarp job and an amazing survivor from the colour VT output from the BBC between 1967 and 1969 of which probably 95 percent plus was long sinced wiped for re-use for pot black ( snooker ) or the horse of the year show grrrrrrr..........
------------------ Never owned one as my step-father was too cheap and used the "waiting for it to be perfected" excuse. He did buy a swell Motorola 21" B&W floor model that was swell. I do remember watching Bonanza on a friend's set and thought it was not great, but might be over time. Std definition with color was a compromise at best. Many sets did not have 300 lines of resolution.
As I recall, later in the sixties, as color became more prevalent, the Disney folks changed the title to the Wonderful World of Disney.
Best picture I can find of our old 1968 Sears 21" color TV with tubes..not solid state. It's the one on the bottom/left (not the very far left though) for $589.95. Amazing that my mom bought this - when you adjust for inflation, it would be $4,045.53 in today's dollars! What I really liked about this was this feature they called "Chromix" control. Basically allowed you to adjust for imperfections in the black and white mode (when you turned the color knob all the way down). The deal is that when you turn the color down, if the b&w picture is too red, green, or blue, then you wouldn't have good color when you turned the color knob back up, and this allowed you to easily adjust so that it was a true black and white picture (with the color turned down). Today most TV's have a three way position for "cool, medium, and warm." For the life of me, I don't know why they don't just go ahead and make it an infinitely variable control from cool to warm, which would be that Chromix thing, but without a knob. I used that TV until around 1984.
--------------------------------------- I remember back in the day (50's) that most good sets had 3 IF stages and Sears would come out with sets with only 2 to keep the price down. That was fine if you live within 10 miles of the transmitter, otherwise you would have needed the biggest outdoor antenna you could find. Our family always had Motorola TV, but my grandfather was a Magnavox fan, but never a color tv in any of our houses. The excuse: "When they perfect it".
My family bought a 27ยจ german Loewe Opta in '82 to replace our valvular B&W Westinghouse because it was broken beyond repair and they didn't sell B&W TV sets anymore !! First thing I watched was a soccer match I wasn't interested in just to adjust the settings. The damn thing broke down twice a year and every repair cost an arm and a leg !!
