The Forgotten War for Color Television
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- Опубліковано 30 січ 2020
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Today we know that 29.97 fps is a hallmark of NTSC video. We may even know the mathematical reasoning behind it. But the war for color television that birthed that oddball number, a war that raged for over a decade and left an imprint on the soul of electronic moving pictures has been largely forgotten...
This retelling owes a great deal to an article posted at the Museum of Early Television www.earlytelevision.org/color...
Other resources:
Compatible Color: The Ultimate Three-For-One Special
• Compatible Color: The ...
The Math involved: Why is TV 29.97 frames per second?
• Why is TV 29.97 frames...
Goldmark 1 demo
• First Light: Goldmark 1
NBC Tournament of the Roses Parade 1954
• NBC Tournament of the ...
BBC2 Goes Colour | 25th Anniversary, David Attenborough
• BBC2 Goes Colour 25th ...
#TelevisionHistory #ColorTelevision #FrameRate #NTSC #History
If you came to the comment section to bitch about my line about "microwaves after WW2"... Yes, the microwave oven went on sale commercially in 1946 from Raytheon, the company that was heavily involved in making RADAR equipment for the warfront. It was massive and expensive for intended for restaurants and cooking food in airplanes. I used it because I thought it was a delicious demonstration of guns-to-butter switch in the economy. I didn't, however, realize how literal you all are, and it's true that the home counter microwave doesn't get out there till 1960s-70s. I seriously regret how much butthurt my comment has caused.
spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/a-brief-history-of-the-microwave-oven
www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/history-of-the-microwave-oven
Television isn't called the "Idiot Box" for nothing. The average viewer is sadly just that.
Pretty often technology is older than you know. The technology for micro groove records existed in the 1930's, the technology for the CD existed in the early 1970's.
Except he didn't... Save your indignity and look up when the first official color broadcast was made in Mexico City (hint, 1963). But don't let facts get in the way when you can just make up shit for nationalism.
Completely get the comparison, my brother! Look at Willys-Jeep, Spam, Hell even the advent of soda pop. Something that was originally meant to curb alcoholism became a huge product and market in its own right. Companies like ARMANA, TANG, AT&T, DUPONT found themselves creating products once geared towards war usage only to be converted to civilian use. At least WWII gave companies a chance to experiment more with new technologies that further advanced human resources and ingenuity. Great bit of history that we Americans too often take for granted...😎🇵🇷🇺🇸🗽🦂
My husband worked for Raytheon.
Very interesting and informative. Thank you so much for sharing this! Good job FIQ❤️👏🏼
I was born in 1950. I was a TV repairman through most of the CRT era. They used to say "Very soon, we'll have TV that can be hung on the wall like a picture!" They finally got there.
I remember thinking that when I was given one of those GE electro-illuminescent night lights that were shaped like little TV screens (some even had a still picture). Even in 1970, it seemed plausible, considering that ICs were already packing tens of thousands of transistors on on something the size of a fingernail.
I remember in mid sixties when 90% of tvs were all vacuum tubes still one day when I was in elementary school the school custodian was trying to show us this small radio device about the size of one of the larger Sony Watchman TVs and he was trying to tell us that it was a television set but the tiny picture tube was burned out. I think it was just a radio that played tv sound and he was full of crap. Even at that young age I knew enough that there was no such tiny TVs yet and I didn’t see anything that small for another 10 years.
I remember brand called Sinclair I think was first to have tv on the market with picture tube about the size of half a credit card. I almost bought one for my dad except it was TOO small he might not be able to focus on it.
Also remember small Sony TVs with special sideways flat real CRT tube. Super sharp.
Also remember one time ( I used to check out things like this in stores ) seeing possibly a Sony it was super small color CRT hand held television about size of Sony CRT Watchman and the tube was so small it didn’t look very good because the color dots were too big.
I have looked on collector sites on Internet I have not seen one. They must be super rare.
I think there is an Elvis Costello album from 1970s that has on of those Sinclair TVs on the cover.
How many CRT's did you implode?
I was born in 1952. I was a working part time in a TV shop at 13, after school and on Saturdays. At 22, I tested out of a three year EE and Broadcast Engineering school when I went into the Us Army. I have one of the first Motorola Quasar TVs that my dad bought new from that shop. It was the first modular, solid state color TV.
I remember coverage of the Congressional hearing when the legislature decided not to invest in flat screen technology.
We got a color TV for Christmas 1962, and that was pretty early. There still were not a lot of color TV programs yet, but one notable thing was that each time a different color show came on, you had to manually re-adjust the two different knobs that controlled the picture: "Hue" and "Brightness". The latter just decreased or increased the color saturation, but "Hue" was more important because it made things more realistic-looking. At one extreme it made things look purple; at the other extreme, green. You had to go between these to get things looking right.
Hue and color, not brightness. Brightness and contrast adjusted the (obviously) brightness and how much grayscale & dark level there would have been in the image. The Hue or tint is the one responsible for determining whether flesh tones on people looked like they were purple & choking to death or turning into Martians with green faces. The color knob is what adjusted the intensity or saturation level of the color image. When you turned it all the way down, voila!, you got black and white.
Yeah... and most of it is garbage...!
'Never Twice the Same Color'. ;-).
I think it's NTSC thing here we still we use PAL and it doesn't needs to tun hue.
@@Nextgen_Tech Televisions have not required this kind of adjustment since the 1970s, regardless of NTSC or PAL. But before that they were not technologically advanced enough.
Australia didn't get Colour TV until 1975. By that time we had the best quality PAL units on the market. I remember watching F-Troop and Bewitched in colour for the first time and it was amazing to a young kid.
And we did it right with having B/W in 1956 that when colour came along in 1974 those B/W sets could still be used with no problem on a colour signal
I didn’t know American TV shows went around the world. I thought we were the only ones who watched them.
@@Alan-lv9rw Yeah we had a lot of British shows as well. Mainly due to a lack of local content at the time. I used to watch the Dean Martin show in the early 70s. Laugh - In was another. All the best shows we got to watch.
I had a VHS of the original Mad Max sent to me in England from Australia in 1987 and although both the UK and Australia used the PAL system that Mad Max tape had the best picture quality I'd ever seen on a pre-recorded cassette.
I remember my grandfather in Ipswich being the first in his street to get a colour tv, and me being wowed by the colour circle around the black and white number seven cicrle on the channel seven logo coming out of Brisbane
My father became a RCA dealer in the late 1940's after returning from WW2......your presentation was very interesting to me
In the late 1950's, the BBC experimentally broadcast in color using the NTSC system on 405 lines VHF.
In the end, the Beeb adopted PAL on 625 lines,like most of western Europe (outside of France, which of course used SECAM).
PAL in Australia too. Colour TV officially started here in 1975.
That’s really interesting. Didn’t know that!
@@malalexander3515South Africa also launched PAL in 1975. I remember being very young and watching the test pattern for most of the time
France can be very independent. There's an expression in the car industry that "the French imitate no one, and no one imitates the French." To some degree, it applies to color TV. At Expo 67 in Montreal, the French pavilion demonstrated SECAM, and I have to say that the color was stunning for that era. I could see that even as a kid.
BBC and the major ITV companies experimented in NTSC, SECAM and PAL using 625 and 405 for the latter two and 405 and 525 for the former. The BBC and ATV technical people confirmed the suitability of NTSC-A using the existing broadcasting infrastructure on VHF and being upgradable to 625 on UHF as technology developed. Lew Grade of ATV and David Attenborough lobbied hard for this as it would have benefitted UK tv industry and exports and there were long delays at Telefunken in Germany releasing PAL. As it happened, NTSC developed VIR which brought in phase correction.
The adoption of PAL in 67 rather than NTSC-A in 59 was political. The recommendation came in the Pilkington Report which was pressurized by both Labour and Conservative politicians to support European ideas as they tried to get around French President’s “Non” to UK joining the Common Market. Many say the French vetoed PAL because it was German but the truth is SECAM was best using the long distance transmitter model that France and Russia used. (The French resolved the awful post and production problems by only converting to SECAM for transmission.
Politics was present in all countries.
My father bought our first color TV set in about 1968 and although not an expensive model, it cost a lot and the color lasted for only about a year before it started getting fluorescent. It was exciting going to color, but not as dramatic as the switch to HDTV. What was frustrating for TV technophiles of my generation was the decades they stuck with the old broadcast standard.
The NTSC Color TV Sets has a delay line, a series of inductors and capacitors that delayed the monochrome video to allow the 3.58 MHZ subcarrier, color modulator and recovered color signal demodulator, to process the relatively low resolution, color signals of R-Y, B-Y, and G-Y, which were used together to produce any color. This delay was 450 nanoseconds. Also there was a color killer circuit and back of the set adjustment, that disabled the color recovery circuit if the station turned off the 3.58 MHZ burst transmission when only broadcasting monochrome, black and white video pictures. If the color killer did not shut off the color recovery circuits, a rainbow effect would rotate through the displayed monochrome image on the picture tube. Also, clothing had to be pretested in front of a color video camera. If a complex barbican pattern was scanned by the color System could be fooled by the resulting frequencies. Which could end up in the frequencies used by the color system, leading to the clothing turning into a rotating rainbow of moving colors. Fine Men’s Herringbone Suit jackets were particularly capable of triggering this technical distortion!
PAL has similar issues with spurious Chroma info on checks and stripes
I worked in a tv shop 70 - 74, we bought a Conserton 22 inch color tv in januari 71, it lasted 16 years, and after that 16 years the picture tube was put in an othdr set, this tube lasted ca 30 years.
The tv was made in Norrköping here in Sweden. Many thanks for good interesting video 👍😎👍
That's some serious durability!
We had 24" and later 27"
Now that's a history lesson! Always great stuff John!
We had B&W until about 1968 before finally getting a color set. B&W was sharper, while pictures on color sets bled over boundaries a bit making everything fuzzy looking. But at least it was in color.
We had a B&W in Denmark into the 80s. All out neighbors and friends had color. It was a sort of intentional de- emphasis thing.
“Illogical anger by those that don’t know any better.”
That’s 90% of arguments on the internet!
I think it is worse than that... they believe its logical when arguing it.
Oh, they're logical, as in logical fallacy, that is.
including yours!
What makes you think idiot, that people can't argue their opinions!
I'm reminded of a time around a year ago where someone called me ignorant and arrogant for using a word properly. A word that he refused to google because he "already knew what it meant" and was convinced that I was too narcissistic to look it up myself. So I quoted the definition and he stopped responding.
That's why I've given up trying to educate willfully stupid people.
I was born in 1960. My family was mostly middle class, but my maternal grandmother was quite wealthy. When my parents married in 1958, she bought them a color TV as a wedding gift. Maybe she knew what she was doing, since my parents were not early adopters of anything at all. I like to think she did it for us kids, even though we weren’t yet born, so that our home would be a popular place with neighbors (she herself had enjoyed the experience of being the first in her neighborhood to own a TV at all. She bought it as soon as WDSU-TV in New Orleans went on the air, and she loved the attention it brought to her house). We lived in a nearby city, and I remember growing up, until about age 9, as the only kid in my neighborhood who had color TV at home. We frequently had guests over to watch shows.
At least in my neighborhood, what really changed things was GE’s PortaColor TV. I remember that being the first color set that I saw in other people’s houses, and from what I have learned since, the PortaColor was the only affordable color set for most people at the time. The problem with PortaColor was the small size. You needed to sit fairly close to see clearly, but the color was more vibrant and saturated than other color sets thanks to an in-line arrangement of the color electron beams, which improved on the traditional triangular arrangement by allowing more light to reach the screen but, as I understand, was not easily scaled up to larger-sized screens. Sony’s Trinitron was introduced just two or three years after the PortaColor, and the superiority of that color system was even more dramatic. It took only a couple years for the popularity of Trinitron and PortaColor to force down prices on traditional color sets, and I guess that’s when color sets started to outsell black-and-white.
@@TheOdsd1977 oh she liked to show off, no doubt about it. But she didn’t spend just to spend. She kept things for a long, long time before she’d replace them. I remember she was about the last person in the family to have a remote control TV.
Here in Sweden it take off around 1970, but ofcorse a b/w Tv was 1300 sek and a 26inch
Swedish Conserton (eg Philips made in Norrköping) was 3600sek, so not all could afford it, - I started in a workshop trying to learn to repair I was 16 then. Still today I can remember all most common issues on this color sets from 1970. 😎
@@stigbengtsson7026 yeah, the technology had advanced a bit by that time, and I believe Sweden would have used the PAL standard (am I right?) which was a big improvement over NTSC. I remember with our very early color set we had to call an RCA technician to come out and move it for us when my mother wanted to re-arrange the living room furniture.
The NTSC was a sort of agreement about what system to be in USA, I think it was RCAs
system USA had some 3 systems, and it was in december 1953 I think, that RCA became the USA standard. - The set
RCA CT - 100 came in the spring of 1954, - the Telefunken
PAL system was some kind of build on the ntsc system, less sensitive to interfference.
Awesome discussion ! Thank you for the history on colour Television. I am old enough to remember when most television sets in my neighborhood in Montreal, Canada were 17 inch black and white General Electric or RCA sets. My next door neighbor had gone out and spent an astronomical sum of money back in 1968-69 to purchase an Electrohome 27 inch colour TV set for around $5,000.00 CAD !!! Mr. Hermiston, our next door neighbor, used to invite my late Father over to watch the Rose Bowl Perade and Football game in glorious NBC Colour !! A major selling point for Motel's and Hotels was they would put "Color TV Available" on their signs to attract more customers. Remember that folks ? What I would like to see a video on is an answer to my pet peeve question: *Why don't more camera manufacturers put a True 24.00p speed capability on their cameras ?* Many manufacturers have models that boast 24p (Like the GoPro hero 8 Black), *but what the camera actually shoots is 23.976p !* I have seen some camera models by Canon which *actually do have True 24.00p, but why not have this speed available on all video capable cameras ?* Digital Cinema is *24.00p NOT freaken 23.976p !*
Different technology!
I totally forgot about hotels advertising 'air conditioning', and 'color tv'.
What an excellent video. I was about during the introduction of colour TV is the UK. 64us delay lines to prevent Hanover Bars, and 4.43361875 sub carriers with back porch synchronising bursts. All a bit of magic, back in the day. Thanks for rekindling stuff I'd forgotten about.
As I recall it, the reason that color didn't take off in the US until the mid '60s was because there was only one color picture tube available: the RCA 21" round tube which was awfully long (front to back) and, because it was round, the cabinet needed to be a couple inches taller. The 21" console TV was a behemoth for the small living rooms of those days, and it was very spendy (the least expensive was about $500 back then, or $5000-ish today). There were few TV shows available in color -- and only on NBC, except for the annual airing of _The Wizard of Oz_ on CBS, so color TV was pretty much a luxury item. Then patents started expiring. Motorola introduced a rectangular color tube, available in multiple sizes, in... I'm thinking 1964. CBS and ABC began broadcasting some color in 1965, while NBC went almost 100% color. By the following year, essentially all programs on all three major networks were in color.
Explains the slow movement. It's just ironic that all this bloodshed for something that wouldn't really be fully utilized for a decade...
Another reason was that local TV stations that weren't NBC-TV network affiliates were reluctant to buy cameras and other gear from RCA. (Indeed, CBS removed RCA logos and such off the RCA cameras the network used.) That changed when Phillips (Norelco in the U.S.) brought out their cameras in the mid-1960's. In D.C., for example, WTTG (Independent), WMAL-TV (ABC-TV), and WTOP-TV (CBS-TV) all bought Norelco cameras. Idk what WETA-TV (ETV) was built with and WOOK-TV/WFAN-TV never aired color although they had a "color wedge" test pattern they aired in Black & White.
The website of the late Ed Reitan has a lot more info on the development of Color TV. Early TV Foundation has preserved that website.
Sports programs on NBC were transmitted in color after 1954; then when National Video produced a 25" rectangular CRT with a shorter neck, Motorola made a killing with those sets. I was working for a dealer on Long Island then!
Those Norelco camera’s are essentially the same as for PAL used in Europe, like in The Netherlands where Philips manufactured them, just slightly modified.
I would also add that many shows in the US were produced in Black and White until the FCC essentially forced the networks to make their 1966-1967 season in full color.
I was a small child sometime in the 60s when my family was visiting friends on New Year’s Day. I saw my first color television watching parades and was in awe. Still a vivid memory so many years later.
Thank you for this great video , I am an Electronics TV Technician from the seventies and have witnessed the tremendous change in TV broadcasting and TV set evolution mostly in the last 20 or so years , TV broadcasting and receivers ( B &W or color ) hasn't changed for more than 60 years in basic theory in transmitting analog VHF and UHF signals and the CRT ( cathode ray tube ) TV receivers , it improved over the years but has its limitations in bandwidth and quality until the digital revolution and invention of the LCD , Plasma in the last 2 or 3 decades , it is new and very different from the old systems , the outcome for me is my more than 30 years experience in CRT TV became obsolete now and had to learn the new products but now me close to retirement , I am having a lot of knowledge in the exciting Electronics world ....
I purchased an over the air antenna and was amazed in the quality and number of stations on atsc. The last over the air tv I watched was on a crt with rabbit ears - tin foil included. ha ha ha.
When I was working as a broadcast video engineer back in the 1990s, SECAM was known as "System Essentially Contrary to the American Model".
This video was honestly outstanding. You were so clear, concise and straight to the point, and the details and timelines were fantastic. Thank you very much for this history lesson, Filmmaker IQ! 😊👌
That was an infinitely superior description of the evolution of TV than I got from "Intro To TV Prod" in collage. Thank you, sir! Well played.
Academia tends to focus way too hard on small arbitrary details, often failing to really convey the context to understand why those details matter, or why they are the way that they are. (This also makes educational material extremely likely to become outdated and irrelevant, as they tend to only teach you about the current-day state of things without really preparing you to adjust since you don't have the fundamental understanding of why those things worked the way they did, or why they changed.)
Prior to the BBC adopting the 625 line PAL system they were experimenting with a 1000 line system to replace the 405 line standard. They settled on 625 line PAL due to spiraling costs. Amazing to think if they had continued the UK could have had 1000 line HD broadcast TV decades before it became the standards we know today.
I first got to see "HDTV" in May 1965 while in Cherbourg, France. It looked better than the 50 line I'd just spent a week with in the U.K. But, it didn't look significantly better than NTSC B & W. Upping the line resolution isn't the only thing needed for HDTV. Also the French 819 standard was a bandwidth hog with something like 10.4 MHz needed for video bandwidth, IIRC.
I love these long form history videos, keep up the great work
Will do Batman - keep Gotham safe.
The mode switch for color or b&w wasn't needed with NTSC because of a circuit called the "color killer". It automatically prevented color confetti if a b&w signal was present. The only adjustment was in the back for the service tech.
That's really cool - didn't even think of that
Brazilian broadcast system was the PAL-M, a 60hz 525 lines backward compatible with North American BW.
Fun fact, at PAL-M, there's no need to reduce the frame rate from 30 to 29.97 because the color carrier in PAL-M was at 3,56Mhz instead 3.57, but the standard was also compatible with 29.97.
Another fact was that a Brazilian sets was capable of tuning any North American color broadcast with image and sound, but in BW. The counterpart also was true, being capable of any North American set to tuning a Brazillian color broadcast, but without the color.
Brazilian did use PAL-M with 30fps indeed superior.
@@Alozhatos Yes, indeed was superior. But, unfortunately, for maintaining the interoperability with gears built for the NTSC, the 29,97 fps was more commonly used on PAL-M broadcasts than the 30fps.
Because the NTSC was more commonly available than PAL-M (Brazil was the only country where the PAL-M broadcast system was the standard), it was hard to find equipment built mainly to handle the PAL-M system. Many of those parts were for the NTSC or got some form of conversion.
Like PVM monitors, many Sony PVM compatible with the PAL-M were some NTSC monitors with additional circuitry for handling the PAL-M system and mostly lacked proper combi-filter circuitry for example.
Video game consoles also were not that easy. Nintendo for example, didn't license the NES system in Brazil because they didn't know how to handle PAL-M. Tectoy/SEGA had developed a unique Master System for the Brazilian market with a bulky 5-12v PSU using a DIM connector instead of a barrel jack, and that was for handling its unique RGB encoder.
For the Sega Saturn, Tectoy had to manually cut traces at the mainboard because the combination of jumpers for setting 60hz, PAL, and US region shorts the mainboard.
So, PAL-M was better than NTSC, but with many downsides.
Back in the 30s both radar and television shared similar technologies so its been said that TV was used to cover for radar -- it allowed radar development to hide in plain sight.
That CBS Sequential Color System (sort of) eventually came back in use in the camera on the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969.
My great-grandfather owned many small businesses in the 50s, one including introducing color TV to their town for the very first time… kind of. He made sheets of blue, green and beige that you would stick to your screen. Green on the bottom for the ground, blue on the top for sky and beige in the middle for the character’s skin tones. It wasn’t perfect, but my grandfather admitted that when you look at it long enough it kind of blends together and feels like it’s working.
As an employee of RCA from 1954 to 1988 (33+ yrs); I have to say that you KNOW what you are talking about. You really did a great service when it comes to "what" happened.
I would like to say that there was another company in America that was in the pie for Color TV; and that was Zenith; but unfortunately it was also a mechanical system as was the CBS color TV system. So of course RCA won. But mostly on the fact that it was an all electronic system; it made the system much better for the customer. Imagine having a motor and a tri color wheel 3 times the size of the picture; spinning at a high RPM. Not to mention the noise and maintenance. WhooWee.
I had NO part in the creation of the "color" system; because I was installing and repairing B & W and Color TV's. But I loved it. One last little diddy: When the standard color TV came out (RCA system) NOT one single technical college in America had a program to teach technicians. So RCA opened up its on technical training schools around America to teach Color TV; and I became one of the instructors in the Miami school.
I shall treasure it the rest of my life. And thanks to you for bringing back much nostalgia kind Sir. In a word, you brought tears. And may Jesus rest the soul of David Sarnoff. A true genius and one of the greatest CEO's ever.
I had a big zenith color tv. Alas, I don't have it any more ! I miss that 27 inch set, it was maybe a 1966 tv. I don't remember now.
@@kfl611 Yes I used to repair Zenith TV's before I joined RCA in 1954. Thanks for the reply.
@@MrPatdeeee Can you attest to the build quality of Zenith sets? I've heard from various sources that Zenith had a reputation for superior engineering and reliability relative to their competitors.
@@jacobshtulman20 I was a television repair hobbyist in the late 1970s, repairing sets for friends, friends of friends, and coworkers. Usually, the set would come to me non-working and I would find the problem and restore the set to basic operation. Then, I would find a number of other problems, that the customer had lived with, to correct before returning the set. The Zenith sets typically had very few of these minor problems. I attributed that to better design and build quality.
Zenith sets were "hand crafted" until sometime in the 1970s. Zenith used a version of the "mechanized chassis" introduced by GE in the 1950s. In manufacture, component leads were bent so they went into wells. In the soldering operation, the chassis went over a pool of molten solder, upside down. Solder flowed into the wells.
Later Zenith sets had circuit boards. The TV repair shops were supposed to exchange boards with problems for good boards, but did have the option of repairing the boards themselves. The repair shop could also just buy the good board without an exchange, so as to have spare boards on hand. The bad boards went to a repair center to be put back in working order. Probably many with serious problems were junked and new boards shipped in their place. I did find problems with the connectors that hooked the boards together. Board exchanging would not fix those problems.
In the 1980s, Zenith manufactured pay tv decoders for both over-the-air and cable TV. They re-used some circuitry from their TV design. It turned out that one tv board could be used in the construction of a pirate decoder, and Zenith had a run on those boards, without exchanged boards. Zenith changed the rules to require that a board be turned in, in order to get that specific replacement board. The pay tv decoders had a lifetime of about 20 years, while the service life of the TV sets was much shorter. So, these boards were scavenged for pirate decoders as the TV sets got junked.
(Over-the-air pay tv was short lived as cable tv systems expanded into more areas. Once cable tv became available, many over-the-air customers cancelled and switched to cable tv. Analog pay tv decoders were used until the 2000's or so when cable tv companies started using digital signals and decoders, making the analog system obsolete.)
Did you any of the development team personally? And re Mr. Sarnoff, aka "The Crude Genius", may he have met Jesus (oh, the irony.) He hurt a lot of people.
Thank you for this summary. I remember reading much of this background on Ed Reitan's great website about the history of color tv (and the background of mechanical TVs as well). I also remember when we got our first color TV in 1967. It was so exciting! Grandparents had color sets but it was nice having one at our house.
I used to work at Raytheon in Waltham. MA where the Power Tube Production began in 1920 using Stanley Steamer original plant with wood floor! When 9 story old brick building of Power Tube shut down in 1990, a lots of old production lines were taken out to the dumpster. The Power Tube Division used to have an old production/Test line for both Militray-Commercial electronics. I was assigned to do inventory of these old equipment stored in this building, some are very old in unused condition including a B/W video tapes with camera.
Hello from Norway, where we were very late in adopting colour. Our state owned and licence funded NRK only started regular colour broadcasting in 1972, although apparently the Nobel Peace Price ceremony the year before, meant for international broadcast, was first. The main reason for the lateness seems to be have been political opposition, especially from the more religious groups. Einar Førde of the Labour Party mocked the opposition by describing their views thus: "Very well, so sin has entered our homes, but we don't want it in colour." That joke seemed to kill the opposition.
Einar Førde later became chairman of the NRK during the 90s, and therefore got the job of dissolving the monopoly.
That sounds worse than the southern US, where I'm from. I always imagined your country being far ahead of us in those regards.
Australia didn't get colour TV till 1974/75. They didn't want the US NTSC system and adopted the superior European PAL.
I remember the big hullabaloo in 1966 when NBC started their prime time color broadcasts. We would go to my grandparents house to watch TV in color almost every Sunday afternoon and watch into the evening. All the grandchildren kept up the tradition even after our parents got their own color television sets.
NBC IN LIVING COLOR !
For those interested in pre-color television, I think Vladimir Zworykin has a fascinating book on the subject. It gets into the electronics, but starts with mechanical television. One of the most intriguing books I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
I read the story; not from the book but from trade magazines I used to subscribe to.
The first color television transmissions were with color filters on the holes of the spinning wheel of the mechanical televisions.
For all of us who love history, specially the origins television,(and pretty much anything), this channel is simply awesome!. Thanks so much for condensing all this cool info on these videos. Kudos!
Great job with this video. You covered a lot of historical ground and relatively short period of time and you included all the key players. I've read/heard a lot of this before karma but never all-in-one place. Very interesting!
great show. I always enjoy your explanations and gives me insight. Brillant. Here in Germany colour tv was official released in 1967 and I envied those people who could afford these huge furnitures with color tv. they aired shows with a little teaser in front "in color" and I could have sworn I was looking at color images when I was seven years old. Unfortunately we had to watch b/w until my grandma bought our first color tv set in 1976.
We had black and white in our house for years after color was popular here in Chicago. Not until 1967 / 68 my papa bought a color tv. I guess he saw so many in homes , he decided he worked so hard and would get one for himself and the family
I remember when my dad and I visited someone who had a TV set and I could have sworn that the person was watching a color tv. But I was 6 years old and this was a couple years before color tv was even available.
My wife and I had our first color tv in 1980 and by then color tv was all you could buy
Enjoyed the history lesson. Thanks for sharing. I used to work on televisions and always thought the way NTSC embedded the chroma signal was ingenious for compatibility and bandwidth.
Excellent!!! (as usual) As many know, I have personally built working examples of both the 3 CRT triniscope and an actual CBS color wheel television. Both make very good to high quality images. But for their small screen sizes I was forced to use out of practicality. The displays were not the real problem of early color television. As John notes, it is in the delivery of the color signal to the consumers. ALL of the displays mentioned will work well (enough) if you can get that pesky RGB from the studio camera to the display itself. Thanks again John for the excellent coverage of this tricky and complex subject.
For those interested, you can find many working examples and demonstrations of vintage television tech on my YT channel.
I love technological history. We should all appreciate what we all take for granted!
you have a nice presentation style, and i noticed you didn't have continual breaks with editing like others do, good job :)
And by the time the UK shut down that 405 system in '85, RCA was a withering husk of its former self and the best color TV in the world was a Sony Trinitron.
Colour tv was conceaved in 1920 Scotland by Logy Baird in stereo which was expensive
Very much enjoyed this historical summary of U.S. color TV, even though I didn’t see it until 3 years later!
My grandparents got a TV for Christmas 1949. My mom had been born the week earlier, and she said the week without TV was the worst week of her life.
PALcolor was backward compatible, depending on where you lived. If your country was on the B/W 625/negative/50hz/FM/5,5MHz sound system, as in Germany, Austria, Denmark, The Netherlands (where I live) and others there was no problem with PALcolor backwards compatibility. My parents bought a B/W set in 1957, which, after moving to my bedroom, I continued using well into the seventies with much programming in color. No problem receiving any of it in B/W. As a kid I even knew how what the chrominance signal looked like on my B/W tv, so, while not viewing a programme in color, I could determine that a programme was broadcast in color. In Belgium the situation initially was confusing, until they switched over to a uniform 625/neg/50hz/FM/5,5MHz system, as in Holland ande Germany. In France there was no backwards compatibility with the BW/14MHz/819line/AM tv on the VHF channels, since France adopted 625 line Secam on UHF for its color broadcasts. Even NTSC and PAL proved compatible. When AFRTS started their NTSC tv broadcasts on channel 69 (european) from Soesterberg I got myself a nice big UHF-high aerial, retuned the sound frequency spacing to 4,42 MHz (from 5,5, as is usual in NL and germany), adjusted the horizontal picture (to get rid of the black band on the top and at the bottom of the picture) and I was able to watch the (color) broadcasts from the American military station in BW on my (formally) pal B/W tv. Using Sporadic-E conditions in summer I was also able to receive the B/W version of color broadcasts from the Soviet Union, since they, like us, used 625lines/50Hz/negative for their B/W broadcasts. Their color coding was Secam however.
Nicely done!!! I believe it was Walter Bruch who refered to NTSC as "Never Twice the Same Color".
I first heard the term in Master Control at KNBC-4 in July 1970 as a visitor...
@@johnpinckney4979 ....and PAL, People Are Lavender!! Lol! PAL over broadcast is more stable, however PAL of course is just an improved version of the RCA system. The RCA system is genius really. It pushed technology hard though, very hard. RCA constantly pushing color TV through NBC ( which they ran) probably kept color alive.
@@martinhughes2549 I wonder if RCA ever really made its investment back on TV, let alone color???
@@johnpinckney4979 The answer is: Yes, but it took a long time. But by then, they sold it to GE. SAD indeed.
Remove the c in "Walter Bruch" 😏
In 1975 Australia adopted/implemented the PAL-D system. The small town i grew up in, had a electronics/furniture shop. The first Colour TV's (it was either a HMV or Healing) they had for sale there, was pride of place in the shop window. I recall standing in front of it watching a talent show along with what seemed like half the town. The local tv tech mr price, set up the TV so it was spot on for colour, brightness etc. The picture was beautiful. I hounded my dad for months to buy one. He did eventually, a 26 inch Siemens (German manufactured) with touch tuning. The picture was stunning. At the time, you had Japanese sets that seemed very bright and, to my eyes, a little unrealistic. The European TVs version of colour appeared more subtle.
When i left home and had to buy my own TV, I saved hard and bought a Loewe, again a German TV.
Awesome - simply love your historical analysis! Amazing setting you chose
I find all of the science and technology (as well as some of the business and politics) that goes into these things so fascinating. Yes, there's a lot of creativity that goes into many movies and TV shows, but they are inherently technical processes, and that interplay of art and science is really cool to me!
If I would have grown up with a spinning mechanical color wheel in my living room, I would have felt like a character in Dr. Seuss or something
We had our first color TV in about 1968 in time for the moon landings but most of everything was still in B&W. I was told not to tell my friends about it in case I was 'showing off'.
I remember it took 2 guys to carry in and it always smelt like it was burning. A sort of sweet smell. The TV repairman was 'round about once a week, a Mr Covaney. At the bottom of the unit there were these boards, each about 10 inches by about 5, there must've been five boards in a row. The man got down as far as soldering in components and then say twice a year they'd say it was beyond repair and they'd get us a replacement. At least one time we had a temporary unit whilst ours was being repaired and one time I think it was just a B&W one.
The picture used to flouresce, I remember when Ironside was on, as the horns blarred so the orange picture would brighten in sympathy. We had 3 channels that came down a wire from a local aerial receiving its picture from a main transmitter a hundred miles away.
The biggest difference in comparison to what we see now was the quality of programmes. Today I'm lucky if I can find a programme I want to watch per week. In those days there'd be say two or three programmes every night I'd want to see.
My grandfather loved to play with the hue and color saturation knobs "look... isn't that beautiful?" He was a gadget nut and an early adopter for tech. Don't remember anyone else having a color TV at the time and as a kid I was amazed.
I once heard that the USSR converted a color photo of a room in some urban American projects to black and white. They did this because there was a working colored TV in the picture and the USSR didn't want their citizens to know that even our poorest people at that time had access to colored TVs while many of their richest did not.
In 1959, this happened in Moscow. Where not only NTSC color but color videotape recording was shown. ua-cam.com/video/D7HqOrAakco/v-deo.html
It was the same in East Germany where it was against the law to point the aerial to the West and to possess the television sets that could display both SECAM (East German) and PAL (West German). In 1978 or thereabout, East Germany finally made it legal to own the dual-band television sets, which gave East Germans the idea how bad their communist country was as compared to West Germany. There was one area in East Germany surrounding Dresden in the southeast called "Valley of the Clueless" (Tal der Ahnungslosen) where they couldn't receive West German signal due to hills and valleys blocking the signal. That area has higher incidence of xenophobia and right-wing/far-right organisations. The dreaded AfD (Alternative for Germany) had stronger hold in that area.
@Boomer Galactica The ruling party members. It's very common for the communist party members to reap the riches through perks such as country houses, better and larger limousines, more access to the consumer goods that the ordinary people couldn't, etc.
@Boomer Galactica System Essentially Contrary to the American Method...
@Boomer Galactica SECAM
In the Netherlands, we had 650 lines /50Hz black and white tv. So when PAL colour tv came, we had no compatibility issues.
Ditto in New Zealand, and I think Australia. But the standard was 625lines/50Hz, not 650lines/50Hz. The lack of backwards compatibility in the UK was more to do with 405 lines vs 625 lines than the color standard being incompatible.
Another great video, John. I love this series, keep 'em coming.
Very informative vid! I had a bit of difficulty imagining how CBS' sequential color system would work but your link to the video lab guy vid provided a practical demonstration of just how impractical the CBS system truly was! I was born in 62'. The first TV I remember my parents buying was a B&W RCA Console television around 1967 when the family lived in Kansas. The first programs I remember watching on that set were Lost in Space and Daktari. (I still have that old set in the basement; it works just barely...) My family ultimately got a Magnavox color TV in 1973 or 74. My aunt and uncle in Wisconsin always seemed to be one step ahead of family when it came to adopting the latest and greatest of whatever. I remember that they already had a color TV in the late 60's. I don't remember the make, but it was truly different. Instead of knobs to change the channel, it had a button you pressed which would mechanically change the channel. By contrast, my family went to visit relatives in Italy in 1974. None of the relatives we visited had color TV at that time.
John was a great narrator of this video!?/ I'm 76 & remember when my family got our
first t.v. in 1950, at age 4 & was immediately mesmerized by it! I have always been
fascinated with the beginnings of television & was surprised that CBS had developed a
color t.v. system first, since they were the last channel to broadcast 'prime time' shows, in 1965!
22:25 To my knowledge, both SECAM and PAL were developed with the CCIR System B as the underlying standard, hence the use of 625 lines and 50 fields interlaced. Moreover, color television in Europe came along with UHF transmissions, so even if PAL was not compatible with existing 405 or 819 lines B/W standards, since color was first broadcasted in UHF, older B/W VHF only sets simply couldn't recieve anything at all. Here in Spain, broadcasts were already in 625/50i for both VHF and UHF when color arrived, so there was no backward compatibility issues. And in neighbouring regions, SECAM broadcasts from France and Morocco could be recieved, though color was not displayed.
People generalise about the UK.
However most of Europe used 625 /50 monochrome anyway. Adopting PAL a nice " extra". In the UK they had to simulcast electronic standards converted 625 to 405 line programmes. The quality of the conversion was excellent though. However it used up bandwidth. 2 channels rebroadcast with a different broadcast standard. They stopped doing this about 1984/85.
Many of the amplifiers used for transmission of TV signals from originating studios to stations throughout North America, and within the studios and stations, had an "amplitude to phase" conversion problem. A bright area of the picture might have more phase shift than a dim area of the picture. The effect of shifting the phase was to change the hue. With the TV adjusted for best flesh tones, dimmer objects might be way off color, such as a yellow banana turning purple. "Amplitude to phase" conversion was a a serious problem in the AT&T's TD2 microwave radio system, which was used heavily to distribute TV signals to TV stations. "Amplitude to phase" was not a serious problem for B/W signals.
(TD2 was primarily used to carry long distance telephone calls, but some of its bandwidth was allocated for television.)
PAL is quite immune to "amplitude to phase" conversion. It is said that PAL was chosen because the Europeans did not expect the Americans to solve the "amplitude to phase" conversion problem anytime soon. However, engineers with Bell Labs did find a solution for their TD2 radio system, greatly reducing "amplitude to phase" conversion. That solution was quickly implemented throughout their network. The solution also improved TD2's performance with carrying long distance telephone calls, allowing AT&T to carry more calls over the same system.
Forgot to add, great video! Brisk, informative without overloading viewers with TMI. Also really slick graphics, way above what you usually see on most "Let me explain it to you" UA-cam videos.
I never knew about any of this! Absolutely fascinating.
I also love that you continue to tease the 60fps folks. Lol
Fascinating subject! I always love the story of the origins of television standards and this is the definitive one!
Very informative. I took a course in cable television back in the 1990s and your presentation was more thorough than that. Thanks.
I couldn't imagine seeing a 1954 RCA CT-100 color TV at that time,it must have been a stunning experience, that TV today is the holy grail of TV Collectors, though very few having working CRT's due to leakage in it's design, only a handful, 20 or so of the 127? known to survive, are working, out of the 4000 originally made, of course those sets have gone through a lengthy rebuild some be can be seen on YT , search yt for "The Very First NTSC Color TV: 1954 RCA Model CT-100 The Merrill - Restoration Part X "
My mother when she was six, tapped danced in front of an experimental television camera at the 1939 World's Fair. That was her first encounter with television until 1953 when the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth was shown (as a film delayed rebroadcast) on a tiny neighbor's TV set. This was in Denver Colorado which was one of the very last major metropolitan areas to get television. This tiny TV had the whole neighborhood gathered around in a tight huddle.
I remember the birth of color TV in Reno Nevada. We had just one television station in 1960 that hosted all three major networks. Because color television transmission was so expensive, many color programs were disappointingly televised in black and white because a sponsor could not be found to pay AT&T the expensive trunkline fees for the bandwidth needed for the network programming. Videotapes were not available in Reno at that time apparently, so all color was televised live.
Not quite true: PAL actually means "Pale And Lurid". Although it's true that phase errors cancel out and the colour remains constant, the effect is to change the saturation, so under difficult conditions with PAL colours either become washed out or super saturated.
It's worth mentioning the the US went for 60 FPS while Europe went for 50, because those were our respective power supply frequencies.
Interesting video though, thanks.
I can still remember those stupid colour filters that people put in front of their b&w screens, a stripe of green at the bottom and blue up top. It only sorta worked on the Westerns, if you didn't mind people with green bodies and blue faces.
Yes. I remember those, too.
I see people like that all the time. They have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
@@duradim1 Really dude, politics in a TV thread? Please stop.
@@oldtimergaming9514 I am just balancing it out a bit. If I could be content while playing video games all day while our country is literally under attack by the left I would do it. It might be you need to see what has happened in the last three and a half years and pick a side to be on. If you don't then a side will be picked for you. That being said, I can see the reason for your comment because even a person like me gets tired of it too.
Wow. I wonder if any are still ou there
I liked that detail about futurama at 3:55. Answering questions before I can even Google them. Always a pleasure to watch these videos.
Nice catch!
I put that in there because it was a question I googled too 😅
Thanks much for the upload. Appreciate it. And like others here it stirred memories. My dad bought a used color TV in 1968. We're all sitting around while dad works on getting a picture. Our first sight in color is Cathy Rigby in, I think, Olympic tryouts (or Olympics, in any case, it was Cathy Rigby). The picture didn't last long then the set went out and never worked again. In very early 1970 dad bought a new, but cheap, color TV, so that we could watch the Chiefs against the Vikings in the Super Bowl. That lasted only a few years. From what I've read here, we must have had bad luck on color TV. None of ours worked well or lasted long until recently -- and I mean 2020s. There's always a bell curve. Some work a long time, some a short time, most in the middle.
LOL, I got notified of this while online shopping video cameras!😊👍
Of course, I will shoot in 24 FPS! 😊
Brazil begun broadcast TV as early as 1950, by the initiative of media tycoon Assis Chateaubriand. Brazil developed its own PAL-M standard, which combined PAL with 525 line, making it compatible with previous black and white. It made manufacturers design and produce TV sets in Brazil for the local market, which boosted its electronic industry. Color broadcasting begun in 1972. Recently Brazil defined its own DTV standard, combining the Japanese modulation standard with MPEG4 encoding.
Oh my friends who do Quadruplex tape recovery know all about PAL-M, they have dedicated machines just for it.
I applaud you in getting the fine detail correct about UK TV in the 1960s. Perhaps I should mention that BBC2 started in 1964 on 625 only, and only in b/w. At that time the BBC hadn't made a definite decision about what colour system was going to be used later. When the 405 line system was eventually switched off in 1985 there were fewer than 1,000 people using it, - mainly people in areas with very poor UHF (625) reception. By that time, any 405 only TVs were at least 20 years old! It's amazing it carried on for so long. The BBC designed the worlds first purely electronic standards converter in the early 1960s for converting 625 to 405. It had over 2,200 germanium transistors and stored a single TV line using 576 capacitor storage circuits (common system frame rates meant a whole frame did not have to be stored).
I don’t know any country outside UK that used the 405 lines system? In the rest of Europe different line counts were experimented with, but most countries switched to 625 lines in 1949-1951 after the convention and dropped any other norm. Except France, of course.
@@telocho The 405 line system was indeed only used in the UK. It started in 1936 which was well before the 625 system had even been proposed anywhere.
I actually saw the prototype of the RCA three CRT set. It was fascinating because it was so complex. It had at least6 separate chassis’s. The CRTs were either 10 “ or 12”. The one I saw was industrial looking, unlike the one shown in this video. It had no fancy cabinetry and no veneer. It was plywood painted in a battleship grey color. It was part of a temporary display at the community college of Monmouth County NJ in Lincroft NJ. That was before I transferred to a private university (also In Monmouth County NJ) where I got my BS and MBA, so the exhibit would have been between 1978 & 1980.
RCA Labs, where most if not all of RCA’s television development was in Princeton NJ which was a reasonable commute from Monmouth County so a lot of the Lab’s engineers and scientists lived in the county. I spoke to the museum director in an attempt to buy the prototype (among other items) and he told me all of the RCA stuff belonged to retired engineers from the Labs whom were still county residents. He said he would pass my interest along to the owners but it was likely the stuff would be donated to the Smithsonian.
I collect old vacuum tube based electronic gear of most any type and living nearby RCA Labs, Bell Labs and Fort Monmouth I’ve bought (literally) tons of old equipment, parts, tubes, etc from guys that retired from each of those organizations.
Of course I’m still actively looking for anything I can find. I’m not sure if it’s a great hobby or a terrible illness, but I enjoy it a great deal.
A friend of mine bought one of the development “lab mules” of the first RCA single CRT color sets. It eventually became the first production color sets, so one of the engineers brought it home and revised it to match the actual production sets and was the first in his neighborhood to have a color TV. I think CT-100 was the model #. Coincidentally, the first episode of the show “Shipping Wars” included a segment in which one of the transporters picked the set from the engineer’s basement and delivered it to the buyer.
Congratulations on an extremely detailed, accurate and complete lecture. Oh how we laughed even in the UK about 'never the same color (sic) twice' US tv! Here I saw 1 colour set in the local radio shop in SW Scotland in 1968 or 1969 at 8pm, along with a small crowd! At Edinburgh Uni. in 1970 we had a very rare Philips 21 inch colour set in the communal hall which was only ever watched for 'Startrek' and only when a valve hadn't gone (about every 3-4 weeks)! In the UK, broadcasts went from 405 lines to 625 in the mid 1960's. English secret WW2 radar development led eventually to more mass production of cathode ray tubes.
On another note, video machines & tape was so expensive, even when available, many programmes still were shown live eg BBC's 'Z Cars' putting pressure on actors in the early 1960's. Indeed, BBC immediately re-used the tapes of almost all broadcasts eg 'Top of the Pops', 'Dr Who' and even the Apollo missions!
I still remember the groundbreaking low resolution black and white broadcasts via Telstar of the aftermath of the JFK asassination (?) which were only possible briefly due to the low orbit of the first ever broadcast satellite.
I very well remember when vcr's started to be sold. I wanted one so badly, but they were like $1,400. At the time that was like 3 months of my pay, so totally not possible. Yes I was living on starvation, below the poverty level income - oh fond memories........
The first colour TV demonstration on closed circuit I saw was at the last Royal Show on Newcastle-upon-Tyne Town Moor in 1962 where Tyne-Tees TV had a small studio complex. It was 625 line NTSC(no PAL yet). It was impressive. The next time was at University where most of the Halls of Residence got them including mine where the set was the first all-transistor model but for the shadow mask CRT. It gave one of the best pictures at the time. The JCR was usually filled to overflowing on a Sunday night when 'Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In' was on. The conversion from 525 line NTSC was so-so.
Excellent and informative video and it earned a subscribe from me. Some points of difference. PAL was continuously updated so that it would become backwards compatible with monochrome sets. I am Australian lived through all the hoo-ha of tv being adopted here. The Australian government played a game of pragmatism. The CSIRO (Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation) had a team observing the developments in tv from very early on. The Australian government resisted local industry requests to adopt the 405 UK British monochrome system because it felt there was a better standard being developed. So commercial tv did not start in this country until quite late in 1956 (to nicely coincide with the Melbourne Olympics). The consumer uptake was the fastest in the world (Aussies tend to be tech-heads), despite the high prices of the local tariff-protected industries. Radio Industries (ASTOR...a famous local brand) and AWA (Australian Amalgamated Wireless) made a killing and ASTOR opened one of the largest electronics plants in the world in the Melbourne suburb of Clayton (capable of swallowing three Jumbo jets...I know because I went there as a kid to visit a relative working there). ASTOR went on to develop one of the world's first transistor sets (never really covered in any world history of the subject) and they were actively involved in researching the NTSC and PAL system.
Seeing the problems experienced by the US and Europe in developing colour tv, the Australian government denied local industry requests and held off on the switch to colour hoping that a superior, backwards-compatible system would become available. It did. Australia decided to follow Europe's lead and adopt the PAL-D (B/G) 625 line system at the end of 1974 with transmissions beginning in 1975. My dad bought one of the first locally-made colour sets... a Kriesler with a beautiful teak cabinet, a 110 degree deflection tube and digital tuning. Again Aussies went nuts and for five years Australian uptake on colour sets was faster (per capita) than any other nation on earth. For a while colour tvs were the most stolen item in house burglaries! The industry pigged-out on sales but tariff reductions and then removal saw the death of the local industry (or local names used on OEM sets from Japan as a stop-gap measure) paralleled by what happened to US tv manufacturing.
One of the beauties of the Australian scene was that tvs and VCRs sold here would, by default, process NTSC as PAL-60 with very little quality losses. Sadly you wonderful US folks did not get the same option with your VCRs and tvs and I've always wondered why. Oh...by the time DVDs became popular the so and sos at the studios forced the introduction of DVD zoning, which locked us out of NTSC material BUT, in a big loss for the studios our government decided that DVD players which were multi-region were not illegal and could be sold without restraint. Ha ha for Hollyweird!
Australia then adopted the DVB-T system mainly to keep in line with PAL standards and the rest is history.
I have visited the US on a number of occasions before and after the uptake of digital tv there. The colour system is very good...especially in HD and miles better than what it was with analogue sets. However (and I am not being foolishly nationalistic here) I still feel that the PAL-derived DVB-T gives a better rendition of natural colour.
Keep up the good work...watching this was better than any reality crap on free-to-air tv on this night!
Watch: ua-cam.com/video/DpRBxDLVGUw/v-deo.html
Thanks for making this. Super interesting stuff I never would have known about.
I turned 2 yrs old at the end of 1972. I can remember being very fascinated by the color tv that my parents bought around 1972 or 73. I can't recall what it was I first saw on that old tube tv but I'm sure that to me it was magical. One show I do remember from the early 1970's was "Emergency." A few yrs after that "The Movie Channel" and "Home Box Office" would come along.
These different standards in transmission brought back memories of the time I worked as a TV salesman in Harrods between 1971 to 1974. Quite frustrating trying to explain to an oil rich middle east gentleman that the sets we were selling wouldn't work in their country. IIRC it was something or a mixed bag in that part of the world with standards & we had to look it up to check which one applied & where.
In the end I could never convince some buyers that it was a waste of time, gave up & just took the money & earned some commission.
I further recall that when the Sony Trinitron 12" hit the scene they literally swept the floor even though it was a small set. They later produced a 21" ? screen & we could not get enough of them. It caused quite a stir among the local manufactures with their Philips & Sylvania CRTs.
That must have been in the days when anything over 20" had to be made in the UK, but smaller sets were all made in Japan. Those beautiful 13" Sonys seem to still come up on Ebay week by week. The picture is still very good on well maintained 12/13" sets, and I feel they will become a fashion item in the not too distant future, if they aren't already. People will see their electricity bills rise quickly as those old goggle boxes were rather hungry.
My step dad knew all about broadcasting and how tv sets worked and standards. He had a trinitron and it did have a nice picture. He was proud of that tv. I think the trinitron was kind of revolutionary with their square pixels.
GREAT PRESENTATION. I was a kid in the 50s and remember my Dad pulling the bad 'T.V. tubes' out of the T.V., placing them in a green box and taking them down to the store to check which tubes were bad and then buying new tubes to place back into the back of the T.V. Good as new. Today, T.V.s are throw-away items. They last a number of years, and you merely purchase another T.V.
Today’s TVs don’t have to be thrown away. There are lots of creative ways to use the components, and the fact there’s no longer a flyback transformer to worry about, it’s not so dangerous for ordinary people to take one apart. Try searching “repurpose led tv” here on youtube.
Pffftt...I've repaird the "modern" television in my living room twice. The first time was due to the caps failing in the PS, the second repair required a T-Con board replacement. Modern televisions are highly repairable...assuming you are smart enough to repair them. So, yes, for an overwhelming majority of individules, those who cannot follow along with a repair tutorial on UA-cam or who are not smart enough to research the symptons and then troubleshoot the problem, modern televisions are "throw away" items. Smart people, however, grab these TV's up for free off of Craig's list and repair them. I'm thinking both repirs on my TV took less than 30 min each and cost around $25.00 in parts (that are easy to find on the Internet). So, toss that "broken" TV so that someone smarter than you can have it!
As a small child in the 1960s, the first Color TV Show I saw broadcast on NBC was Bonanza!
Thank you John - this is the best video I've seen about the history of the colour wars. Lots of facts that I didn't know.
I can add one or two things about the adoption of colour TV in the UK:
The BBC began broadcasting experimental colour programmes using NTSC during the 1950s but only 'after hours'. By the mid-sixties many British shows were being taped in NTSC colour for export to the US. However it took until 1966 for the government to select PAL-I as the broadcasting standard for the UK and so there was a sudden scramble among manufacturers to produce sets with PAL decoders in order for the retail trade to get sufficient stocks of televisions ahead of the launch. I remember seeing the first PAL colour set in a department store just before Christmas 1966. At the time the BBC used to broadcast colour films in the afternoons and a great crowd of people had gathered to watch the amazing spectacle. By the spring of 1967 BBC2 was broadcasting several of its regular programmes in PAL on an unofficial basis. I checked with David Attenborough (controller of BBC2 at the time) but unfortunately he no longer has his diaries of exactly what was being shown in colour and when. Finally on 1st July 1967 BBC2 officially launched its colour service.
I remember that by the end of 1975 48% of UK households had colour TVs. That figure is slightly at odds with the stats on colour licences that you have. There's probably a perfectly good reason for the apparent discrepancy, but I can't think what that might be!
Dr Who began in color in 1969 when Jon Pertwee became the third doctor (airing first in 1970) from what I understand. So that fits with your late 1960's timeline for the BBC. I first encountered the Dr. during Tom Baker's time in the role (on U.S.. Tv) and I was hooked. There aren't many shows anywhere that have that sort of longevity. :)
As was the case for many young kids, the theme tune used to scare me so much in the 60s that I didn't watch it (until Jon Pertwee came along). Maybe being in black and white made it even more spooky. From the colour era onwards I loved it!@@charlesbrentner4611
Your simulations of the color wheel speeding up to the frame rate, and your simulation of the colors changing with the turn of the hue knob were fabulously performed!
I was lucky to be around in late 1979 to hear BBC1 TV, across the Atlantic, when sunspot cycle 21 was at its peak. Since nobody in the USA had a positive modulation, 50Hz, 405-line set, I was only able to hear it.
A few years later, all those transmitters were shut down for good😔
That's interesting. You'd have been listening somewhere on the VHF Band I region at around 45 MHz-ish then. I remember the 405 line system fondly.
@@johnr6168
I think you can find the recording by putting "BBC1" "F2 Skip" and "2nd December 1979" in the Search feature.
@@johnr6168
Since I didn't have a System A television receiver, I could listen to the AM audio, which was transmitted at 41.50 MHz.
The radio I was using then was a Realistic (Radio Shack/Tandy) Astronaut-6. The built-in whip antenna/aerial was sufficient.
@@1L6E6VHF Thanks for that. I found it. That was a very interesting listen.
@@1L6E6VHF i've just looked at some old frequency charts. The frequency 41.5MHz was the sound carrier for Channel 1 which was used by the huge Crystal Palace transmitter in London. I grew up in the Midlands where we used the Sutton Coldfield transmitter on Ch 4 for BBC1 and Ch 8 (up in band III) for ITV.
Great stuff! You should do a collab with Technology Connections. I love this technical and historical stuff.
I started out in TV repair in 1966 to help pay for college in electronics engineering and end up owning a television production company from 1984 to 2015, I loved your complete and accurate explanation of television, well done in only 25 minutes. Thank you.
This omitted the fact that while the CBS color wheel system did not become the standard, the first color television camera on the moon used a color wheel with a single monochrome tube to generate the color pictures, and the color wheel continues to live on in some video projectors.
RCA's early three CRT color system was used in projection systems for theaters and home projectors, and was use by Sony in some of their last large screen televisions prior to the transition to digital flat screen televisions.
I remember in the late sixties or early seventies arguments on BBC news about the US treating the colour TV technology they had as state secrets almost and not allowing the tech transfer to Britain. This caused a lot of talk in the UK.
PAL = Peace At Last. SECAM = System Essentially Contrary to American Methods.
NTSC Never Twice the Same Colour
NTSC = Never The Same Colour
I can‘t imagine how much research went into this!
Born in ‘52 I never had color till ‘82, a 12” Quasar I bought for 40 bucks from a friend’s husband. I used it about 2 years and half that time the color was wonky. I teasingly told her some time later about the color. She brought me 40 bucks the next day. I was still watching it, I didn’t care and my son (born in ‘70) didn’t care, never said a word about it. We found out when he were in about 10th? grade….he was colorblind. We never knew and how was he to know? He did bring some interesting drawings, colorings home when in grade school.
ATSC: Anything That Satisfies Congress
A Thoroughly S---y Contraption
I see my ATSC phrase from Sept 15, 997 has gained traction
@@edward-t-grogan Are you the one who came up with that? It's long been one of my favorite phrases. It was definitely being bandied about the television studio when we were getting ready to convert to HD digital.
@@johnopalko5223 Back Story. I belonged to a group of people in the television industry that were pushing the adoption of HDTV. On a particular day one of the senior technical people at Paramount asked: We know what NTSC stands for (never the Same Color), What does ATSC stand for? At that exact time ABC TV was called to testify to Congress as to why they choose to go multichannel in the bandwidth the FCC gave them for HDTV (Remember for a time stations had access to two channels, one for standard and one for HDTV). Congress suggested that they would charge ABC for the extra bandwidth if it didn't have HDTV in it, and the president of ABC said we're going HiDEF. About a minute later I replied to Paramount and the others in the group that ATSC stands for Anything that Satisfy's Congress.
A good overall summary. Not only that, apart from your T-shirt you avoided mentioning the traditional film rate of 24 fps! The broadcast of this on either NTSC or PAL is a story on it’s own (e.g. the traditional "telecine" system), or indeed how to convert 24 fps footage to 25 or 30 for use in home made movies etc, including a mixture of all three of them from various cameras.
Many modern TVs can be set up to play film rate, PAL, or NTSC depending on what’s being played back.
I used to run some RCA TP66 filmchain projectors at an AFRTS US Army TV station, They were 16mm, and had the special shutter that displayed the film at a 30 frame rate but showing every forth frame twice.
I have an interesting connection to all of this. My father had worked for RCA during WWII, developing TV related weapons. When the war was over, a company in RI (primarily department stores, but also doing newspapers and radio) wanted to start a TV station. His research group was being disbanded, so they hired him from RCA and he built the station for them (and ended up working for them for about 40 years). The station being an NBC affiliate (part of RCA) was early to the color broadcasting arena, and the department store started pushing color TVs. Due to the connection, Dad got a great deal on a TV from RCA (and I remember it being BIG), so for a long time we were the house in the neighborhood with the color TV.
Superbe video!!! In Argentina we had colour TV in 1978. Cheers from Patagonia
NTSC "never the same color" problem was reality in Europe as most long distance NTSC broadcasts to europe were totally messed up during transport and conversion to pal. It was quite impossible to see any details of ie NHL match even on a big screen. Could not make out player numbers etc. What was possibly ok quality over in US was bunch of mess with weird colors jumping around in EU.
That must have been very frustrating for desperate peoples who wanted to watch live sports.
this was more to do with complex standards conversion, not only line and frame rates, but colour as well. it's a miracle it worked at all with the technology of the day, but I agree, NTSC sourced videotape or live broadcast looked lousy in the UK
I think you’re confusing standards quality with the problems they had in converting between standards. Also there was a period in the 1990s where drop-field was common on precious satellite links, and you’d end up sending 240p30 signals globally. A lot of American content was 240p for what seemed forever.
@@whophd while I get your point, "never the same color" was a reality in EU even with professionallly converted footage.
Mikael Levoniemi I’m only talking about professionally converted footage too.
That was fun! Can we have another video like this about the long road to HD and the coming together of the “Grand Alliance”? There are some fun stories in there including a last-ditch attempt to replace VSB with COFDM. You could end with a speculation on whether future UHD and HFR formats will ever drop 59.94 and its multiples.
Why drop legacy rates? They will always be included it else we suddenly lose all our backcatalog.
An excellent presentation of a complicated subject.
Just finished your video. This was amazing! I knew bits and pieces but had never heard it in one cohesive presentation before!
My introduction to the PAL system was when a friend had ordered some videotaped copies of "Doctor Who" from the Official BBC in the UK. They arrived in PAL and she couldn't watch them on her US VHS set up. 😥🤣😢
My first colour set in the UK was a hybrid set made with both valves and microchips in the same set.
I doubt that any hybrid TV had microchips (integrated circuits). You're thinking of discrete transistors.
@@MaximRecoil It did have a ceramic pal matrix decoder and was made by Baird. I can't find the exact model but here is a similar set: ua-cam.com/video/Ju-Px_kADvE/v-deo.html
Anecdote directly from an engineer who helped pull the prank. In the very early days of color tv the broadcaster spent considerable time and effort to calibrate color tv cameras and monitors So one day this engineer and his buddies painted the bananas in the still life color set up shot blue. Then went round and round with production on why it was or was not possible to calibrate the cameras and monitors. It's a good story anway.
We'd get that type of thing from time to time with graphics and animation. Stake holders with a print background pulling out pantone chips and putting them on the monitor. Editor would just adjust the monitor to make it match the chip, then re calibrate it to a scope and bars when they left.
I heard of somebody who made an evil version of a grid on a card for camera alignment, which had RGB misaligned on it, so the geometry looked out no matter what you did.
My Aunt Mary Louise Talbott, in a roundabout manner, participated in the early days of color television broadcasts back in the mid-1950s. I don't know the technical term for her title, so I'll just refer to her as the "NBC Color Girl". Her job was to stand in front of those massive cameras @ NBC's Radio City West studios in Hollywood, posing and acting as a model. She was a redhead-bordering-on-blonde and blue-eyed, so her complexion apparently made good for reproduction purposes on color TV set screens. So the cameramen and technicians would adjust their knobs an dials for color, tint, hue, contrast, brightness, etc until they achieved the desired effect. Mary Louise never made a name for herself, although her younger sister (my other Auntie) did; she was film/TV actress Gloria Talbott, who landed into TV in its early days and was a staple on the tube, especially in guest-star role turns, for a decade-and-a-half.
Nice work John!