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

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Joel1963, Jul 2, 2008.

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  1. Joel1963

    Joel1963 Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Montreal
    I was quite surprised to see, on a rebroadcast of the first several hours of NBC's assassination coverage, color from the Dallas (or Ft. Worth) NBC affiliate. Pretty fuzzy color, though.
     
  2. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    They killed the color signal after a few hours so it wouldn't be so jarring to viewers of NBC.
     
  3. Joel1963

    Joel1963 Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Montreal
    Yes, I remember that too. I wondered about that. I was quite disappointed. I was thinking that maybe NBC central was embarassed they were broadcasting in BW and kinescope (correct me if I'm wrong on that) while the affiliate's color and picture looked more advanced.
     
  4. Joel1963

    Joel1963 Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Montreal
    Color TV owners must have thought there was something wrong with their set.
     
  5. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    No, most color TV owners in 1963 were used to just an hour (if that) of color a day...

    In LA (and the only reason I remember this is because I was parked in the May Co. Dept store a lot while my mom shopped in the afternoon) KNBC showed a few hours of local programming in the late afternoon in color every day (Jack Lathem/news, Tom Frandsen/commentary/Curt Massey/Music) before going to the black and white nightly programming. By 1963 that was changing although CBS refused to convert to color, NBC was getting on the ball a bit more with evening color broadcasts....

    I can remember first watching the Flintstones in color and being so excited to see what color everyone's cave clothes were. Remember it said "Color By Pathe" at the end credits and then that colorful Screen Gems logo with the flashing stage lights? Yikes, I haven't seen that in a zillion years. I did all my kiddie color TV watching at the department stores....
     
  6. jdandy

    jdandy Member

    I still call my remote the clicker, but it's a lot quieter than the old ones.

    I remember going to a friend home who had a color TV, 1969 I think, to watch the Wizard of Oz in color for the first time. When the movie began it was in black and white. Expecting color, I was so irritated I got up and called the TV station to complain. They told me to just sit down and watch the movie, and hung up on me. Sure enough though, when the house landed on the Wicked Witch in Oz and Dorothy step out the front door it was in color. Wow, I was stunned. I couldn't afford a color set back then, but I was hooked. Now it's widescreen HD on satellite, and HD DVD. I watched the Wizard of Oz on DVD, and the video was so clear you could make out the fake backdrops. Man, we've come a long way Baby.
     
  7. We got our first color TV sometime in the mid-70's (75-77). I remember that it took me a while to warm up to it. I was probably 4 or 5 years old and I remember that I insisted on watching my shows on the old B&W TV which was now moved into my parent's bedroom. I was a curmudgeonly Luddite even back then & I guess haven't really changed. I remember arguing with my dad that B&W looked better than color. I still prefer B&W over color when it comes to film. I eventually got used to color TV, but I still don't have a cell phone. :)

    -Bill
     
  8. Walt

    Walt Forum Resident

    Location:
    Baltimore, MD
    1988/'89 (I was in seventh grade).

    I remember thinking we were on our way to becoming somewhat "normal."

    TV wasn't a big deal for us - we could only pick up one fuzzy channel and cable was not an option due to the living-in-the-sticks factor (satellite was just too expensive too). For years we had a small black & white TV for news and Saturday morning cartoons (I was amazed when I found out Smurfs were blue). An uncle gave us his 20" RCA TV made sometime in the '70s , I believe. We used it for a few years then lightning struck it and we had to buy a new set (20" Magnavox).

    It's kind of funny how back then I would have given anything for a few more channels... but now that I can afford to subscribe to cable or get a satellite I don't.
     
  9. il pleut

    il pleut New Member

    1983, right after i got married. until then all i ever had were b&w portables.

    all the good shows and movies were in b&w anyway.
     
  10. Rachael Bee

    Rachael Bee Miembra muy loca

    My dad got us an RCA colour TV sometime between 66-68, I can't remember precisely when. It was an RCA set that might have been about 23". It had those little rounded corners in the display.

    As a young adult I owned a 13" Sony B&W set. I finally got a colour set in the early 80's when I won a 25" RCA set in a raffle.
     
  11. ericc2000

    ericc2000 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tulsa, OK, USA
    Ever since I can remember, I was born in 1966, my parents always had a color TV, a big Zenith. So as far as I know, I've been watching color TV all my life.
     
  12. quadjoe

    quadjoe Senior Member

    We got our first color TV in December 1968. I was 14 years old, and I remember it well as I had been pestering my parents to get a color set since we were at a friends house in '63 and I saw Bonanza in color (I believe they had a 19" Zenith table-top set.) It was actually kind of funny as our Sears B&W set started acting up after my Mom had said we could either get a color TV or have Christmas presents (Dad was a Master Seargent in the USAF, so we were on a tight budget). Dad decided to buy the TV after all and called Sears to order a set that was supposed to be delivered the day after Christmas (one of my Dads co-workers had a Sears set that we had watched a lot while visiting), but Mom was unsure that the color of the wood cabinet would match the furniture in our living room. When the Sears store didn't have the exact model in stock, Mom made Dad drive us all over town looking for a TV that would match the living room furniture. We walked into the Magnavox dealer and they had a special room for displaying their TV's and we were wowed by the picture (really natural looking colors, the best I had seen at the time), and that's what the folks bought. I remember that it cost $850, which was a huge amount of money back then. I'll never forget that when the salesman asked if we wanted to get a set with a remote, which was $100 more, (Magnavox remotes back then would allow you to adjust the picture as well as turn the set on or off and adjust the volume), my Dad said "no, we can get up off the couch and walk across the room to change the channel!) The set was delivered a week before Christmas (the same day we bought it actually), and the first program we watched on it was "White Christmas." Mom made waffles for supper and we sat in the living room with the lights off and ate in front of the TV, something we had only been allowed to do on only the rarest of occasions!

    We had that television for many years, with no repairs being made. Mom bought another set in 1979 and gave the old one to my step-brother who used it until 1986.
     
  13. -=Rudy=-

    -=Rudy=- ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫♪♪ Staff

    Location:
    US
    I'm thinking 1973-74. We had a tube Zenith set, but it was replaced by a transistorized MGA (Mitsubishi) around '68 or so. (UHF was the novelty for us.) Dad must have gotten a colorTV bug around '74, as I recall us going out to get the 19" Sony Trinitron. It was neat to have it at our house...finally! My grandfather had a Heathkit console color TV he built before I was born, so it wasn't like color was a new thing for us.
     
  14. Marty Milton

    Marty Milton Senior Member

    Location:
    Urbana, Illinois
    My parents got our first color TV in December 1969. I remember that date because I was in college at the time and the TV arrived just before I came home for Christmas break. I don't think I left the house that break so I could watch TV. A neighbor of ours had a color TV back in 1965 or 1966 and we would go over and watch some TV there. I even volunteered to baby sit there two boys so I could watch TV in color.

    I then got married in November 1971 and couldn't afford a color TV. It was 1975 before I got my own color TV. I think the price had gone done to around $300 for a 21" set.
     
  15. MoFiFool

    MoFiFool Forum Resident

    Must have been around 1968 i was young and did not notice at first. In my mind it had always been in color, after a while i saw a B&W set next to a color set and only then did it hit me. I guess a kid needed a lot more imagination those days!
     
  16. MLutthans

    MLutthans That's my spaghetti, Chewbacca! Staff

    Boy, I hadn't thought about this in decades, but the first tv we had when I was a kid was this 19" B&W on a weird roll-around wire cart. I stumbled upon this picture on google images when I was looking for something else, and it totally shot me back to my childhood:
    1969 2010_1102sylvania0005shtv.jpg

    Our first color set would have been a 25" Sylvania console model, and I never really thought twice about the whole color aspect, honestly. All my friends already had color, so it was pretty ho-hum to get it.
     
  17. Scotsman

    Scotsman Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jedburgh Scotland
    The first colour set we got was a 21 inch HMV Colourmaster in April 1973. At that time there were still some local programmes being made in black-and-white...and still the odd b&w ad....including IIRC one for Fairy Soap featuring Fanny and Johnny Craddock! In those days there were three channels available in our area. And one of them, BBC 2, sometimes didn't start programmes until around 7 p.m.!

    !BmrIQlg!mk~$(KGrHqIH-EYEtqY!+!)gBLgbmVVKu!~~_35.jpg
     
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  18. indy mike

    indy mike Forum Pest

    Dancing sticks logo:
     
  19. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    I think it was the spring of 1966 that we first got a color TV.

    Being a family that mostly watched shows on CBS, the color thing was something that was generally happening to shows we didn't watch. I remember as a kid watching THE FLINTSTONES and THE JETSONS in black & white, and never even thinking about it being in color. I think our ABC affiliate must have done those few shows in color because they were the ones that had their local weather - with Dr. Francis Davis - and sponsored by RCA - in color every night at 6:25. It was neat to see that in the department stores.

    For the fall of 1965, I remember the promos for various shows announcing that they'd be in color that year. "THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES will be looking pretty this fall...", and when it actually happened, I recall spinning the tuning knob on my black & white set and seeing what looked like diagonal lines across the picture. They were more intense around the edges of what I perceived should be red sections of the image.

    So with some CBS shows pushing their color-ness, our family's interest perked up, and one day while wandering through a Sears store, we managed to pester mom and dad to get us a color TV. Sears had some table-top models, and that's what we got.

    Harry
     
  20. Burt

    Burt Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kirkwood, MO
    We had color TV since before I was born which was very unusual because I was born before color TV was common at all, very late 1959. The very first production model color set, an RCA, was owned by my family which my dad bought when it was a couple of years old and already the newest ones were improved enough it had not that much value. My sister still has it although it needs a lot of work. However, by the time I was old enough to remember, Dad had snagged a Conrac color studio monitor and the tuner assembly: we had "component video" thirty years ahead of everyone else. And by the time of the first lunar landing we had a (monochrome) open reel VTR too.

    Spoiled rotten, I was.
     
  21. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    Wow, that's it. Thanks. Makes me feel weird seeing that again..
     
  22. Mike from NYC

    Mike from NYC Senior Member

    Location:
    Surprise, AZ
    I got my first in '76 but my parents bought their first in '68.

    I was too busy going to concerts, listening to music and doing my photography to bother to watch TV. My Mom got me the TV at cost and I had the $$$ so I bought it even though I rarely watched it. Had to get cable to get a decent color picture in Manhattan.
     
  23. tyinkc

    tyinkc Senior Member

    Location:
    Fontana, Wisconsin
    1965. I remember thinking that the picture was not very "realistic" (the colors were very cartoonish) The color adjustment that a user could do was very limited compared to today's sets.
     
  24. Jamey K

    Jamey K Internet Sensation

    Location:
    Amarillo,Texas
    My dad won a color TV in late 63' in a church raffle. I grew up in a very small town (9 in my graduating class) and we were the first in town to have one. I remember a guy had to come out and set up and adjust the color. He had a round ..light thing...that he went all over the screen with. Once we got it set up, several people would come over every Sunday to watch Bonanza. They were still watching that TV when I graduated from high school in 75.
     
  25. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    True. Basically you had the old brightness and contrast, and two new controls - one for color saturation, and one for tint or hue.

    I remember endless amounts of sitting near the set so I could adjust the tint when it went from purplish to greenish.

    Harry
     
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