It is cool that a single individual doing hobby videos has wider reach then whole engineering organization. And IEEE is a behemoth with half a million members and half a billion funding :)
Funny you mention Dorothy and Oz. My father brought home a new color TV and set it up in the living room. That was the night The Wizard of Oz was on. My parents turned on the set for the very first time just as the movie was starting. My dad was beside himself with frustration trying to fiddle with the controls because it was displaying in black and white despite it being a brand new color TV. What none of us knew until later was that the movie starts out in black and white before changing to color to heighten the effect of Dorothy being in the magical land.
Interesting note: in the scene where Dorothy opens the door in BW and then steps out in color had two actresses. The girl opening the door is a stand-in wearing special makeup and wig. After she steps out of frame, the real Dorothy steps into frame wearing colored costuming and makeup.
The book speaks of how gray Kansas is and, like the movie, shifts to color when Dorothy lands in OZ. But the remake starts in sepia, a fad of the day. I had just read the book when the remake came out, and I was plenty irritated. I've gotten over it, but I still wish they'd stuck with the original B&W.
What people today might not realize that in the 1930's, some moves have a color sequence in another wise black and white movie. "The Women" is a good example the fashion scene was a color sequence and then reverted back to black and white. One presumes the extra cost of color film production at that time.
The aspect that's phenomenal about TV sets nowadays are the bargain prices for them. Back in the 1950s, black & white TVs prices were equal to that of a month's salary (or higher) for the US worker. And maintaining them was pricey, too, as the vacuum tubes in those TV sets may require replacement after two years of use; which necessitated the TV repair man to make a visit to the house for repairs. Many of those TV sets were too heavy to lug to a TV repair shop.
Since my Dad worked at WABD in NY we had a 25" DUMONT color TV in 1960. The houselights would dim when you turned it on ad you heard the crackle of the High Voltage when the set warmed up. I worked on the first color 2" quad boradcast Video Tape machines made by AMPEX
Back in the early '70s my dad bought a 25" Heathkit color TV. Obviously we had to put it together. He, my brother and I went out every night after dinner to work on it. It was delayed gratification because it took us about a week and a half to build, but it was awesome having the satisfaction of having helped build it and to finally have a nice color TV!
It was probably the GR-900. I got a GR-2000 in 1976 partially to civilianize my Navy electronics training. That TV lasted 30 years. My shipmates was taking the same course but under another institution and got the GR-900 as part of the course. I waited until I got out and the GR-2000 was the first consumer TV with an electronic tuning offered. There were several institutions that offered correspondence courses in electronics in the two main magazines back then featuring Heathkit products as the electronics lab portions of the courses. The "Big Box" stores that outpriced Heathkit in the 1980s was the demise of that company for awhile. Heathkit is back, but not what it was.
@@Starphot LOL I'm a geek and just built their clock. Mostly just for fun but I can't easily see red LED numbers at night anymore, and these are green. I'm gonna modify it to dim the seconds digits way down to make it easier to see the most relevant info but see the seconds if I want. Re the TV. I don't remember what model it was but I do remember it was vacuum tube and had the clunky mechanical tuner (no remote but we only got like 3 channels lol.) It did have UHF though, so not totally backwards. I have been wanting to start an electronics kit business modeled after them for a long time. Now that I'm retired, I dabble, but I don't think it will ever get off the ground anymore. :-)
In 1964 my mom stuffed a sweepstakes box at a local department store. First prize was a Renault. Second was a 23" RCA Color TV. She won the TV. We were the first ones on the block to have a color TV. I was 7 and remember watching the NBC Peacock, and Disney's Wonderful World of Color. My dad took pictures of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (still in BW) and developed them in our dark room. My brothers sold them at school the next day for a handsome profit! That TV was iconic. The picture was far from rectangular, but we didn't care.
Until the day the torch was lit for the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, my family had one 16" Zenith B+W. That day, my parents purchased a 19" Motorola color set. I went to an elementary school that had an annual carnival which always included raffle tickets for prizes, and for the five years I was there, a 12" b+w portable set was the grand prize. 1972 was the first year after I (the youngest child) was out of that school, but we still bought raffle tickets and had planned to go. At the last minute, something called us out of town and we missed the carnival. We got home, the neighbors noticed we were home, rotary phones were dialed, and soon we received a call from the mother of another of the school's families. "You damned people won the TV!" (we were/are good friends with that family) I loved the color and bigger picture - what 12-year-old isn't going to appreciate that his first dose of full-time color TV came chock full of Olympic swimming - but my true sense of wonder was that in the space of just a few months, we'd gone from a family that owned one TV (still quite common in my world at the time) to a family that had THREE!
The story goes that, by coincidence, at the moment the FCC announced RCA's NTSC system as the color TV broadcast standard, CBS in NY had their one NTSC-color-equipped studio "hot-to-go" for testing. So, they put it on the air, and thus, ironically, CBS aired the first official NTSC color broadcast, not RCA-owned NBC.
We didn't switch to colour TV in Australia until 1975, but because we waited until it was a mature, affordable technology, the takeup was so rapid that in just 3 years, colour sets were outselling black and white sets by 1978.
@@mickvonbornemann3824 There were test broadcasts as far back as the late 1960's, but we didn't officially change over to regularly scheduled colour broadcasting until March 1st, 1975, sometimes referred to as "C-Day"
The technology was chosen and ready long before 1975. It just got held up by the Liberals and only when Whitlam got in they finally went from tests to official broadcasts. The TVs and cameras and transmission chains were ready for years.
@@mickvonbornemann3824wrong, colour television started march 1st 1975 in AUS, ABC started with an auntie jack comedy show which mimicked the change to colour transition from bw to full PAL colour like Wizard of Oz movie.
@@helmulu4016 That may have been the official date but the channels were all trialing colour broadcasts from 73 & the percentage of colour broadcasts slowly increased with every month. I’m sure of the year as it was the same summer break I changed from infants to primary & the same summer my brother & I were dumped on our grands’ because our parents went to Europe. They bought a German telly with a remote BTW.
Wizard of Oz clip. A lot of people don't realize that famous transition shot (starting at 0:06 seconds here, when "Dorothy" steps in with her back turned) was filmed *_entirely_* in color! What looks like black-and-white in that one shot was really a set piece interior painted black-and-white. "Dorothy" and "Toto" in that shot were both body doubles in greyscale costume and makeup including hair. Judy Garland, in full color costume and makeup and holding Toto, was standing just to the left of frame. When the black-and-white "Dorothy" opened the door to reveal the sight of Munchkin Land in full color, she stepped off camera and the two switched places. Judy Garland then stepped into frame in full color.
@@xaverlustig3581 That wouldn't have created the smooth transition, nor would you have been able to see the colorful Land of Oz through the door of the sepia house.
Black and white TV was still popular well into the 80s because they were good second cheaper options for bedrooms. My parents had a small one they used until they picked up a new color one for the living room and they took the old one. So I got to use the black and white in my room. I used that thing well after I left home in the late 80s into the mid 90s. That thing was so well built it would probably still be used if not for the switch to digital.
@@RCAvhstape I don't have it anymore. In fact, I don't own any TVs anymore. I just watch a few interesting creators on UA-cam on a tablet now. Sometimes I am tempted to get one but I remember that my last one wasn't turned on for two years before I got rid of it.
Another factor was the amount of spectrum space that would be required to transmit color TV over the air to home TV receivers. The RCA system would fit the space used for B&W TV. The CBS system would take more spectrum space.
Mostly EU countries including UK (as well as present and former UK territories). This was until it was replaced by digital standard DVB-T/T2. The NTSC was used in the U.S. and its allies such as the Philippines. It was then replaced by ATSC (U.S. and U.S. territories) and ISDB-T/Tb (Brazil, Japan, and the Philippines).
In 1991I had my friend visiting and we were watching random TV. Star Trek TOS came on and he was shocked. After a few moments he said he thought the series was shot in black and white because that's the only way he'd ever seen it as a kid.
When I was a kid, my family only had a black-and-white set. But one year, an uncle invited us over to spend Thanksgiving dinner with them. They had color TV and had tuned into the second part of the episode "The Menagerie." I was stunned at how wonderful it looked. I didn't get to watch Star Trek in color for years until my family finally bought a color set.
For ages in Britain we were waiting for the government to decide upon which colour standard to adopt. The BBC had been experimenting with 525 line NTSC in the 50s. Some TV stations also experimented with SECAM from 1960 onwards, and there was pressure from others to get a move on by using compatible 405 line colour. Finally in 1966 we decided upon PAL. I remember visiting a department store around Christmas 1966 and seeing 625 line colour PAL being demonstrated. It was utterly amazing compared with the 405 line black and white standard we were all used to.
They experimented with the NTSC ii Colour system mated to System A , 405 lines. The UK also experimented with the NTSC ii colour system with System I- 625 lines before adopting PAL colour encoding in March 1966.
Yes. As soon as the BBC and the DTI were looking at 625 lines as the way forward with UK TV, any thoughts of permanent colour on 405 lines went out of the window as they knew 405 lines would effectively be an obsolescent system by the end of the 1960s.
The TV station construction freeze 1948 to 1952 was due to co channel interference. The FCC planning was incorrect as the broadcasts on VHF would go beyond the horizon. The four year freeze led to the opening of the UHF band stations cannels 14 to 83 in 1952.
At 17:17 The graphic says PAS, but the narrator (mostly) correctly says "Pee, Ay, Ess or Phase Alternating Line". It's PAL! Is that an AI hallucination?
They even pinched the Wikipedia map which is correct. I thought this was meant to be an engineering channel. It has even bigger mistakes than Asianometry
The inclusion of the pricing of the color TV sets when they were going mainstream in the 1960s is much appreciated as it illustrates the tremendous bargains there are with TV sets in the second decade of the 21st century. I recall in my household (US) that our first color set was in 1970.
It’s also where the spread of consumer credit really took off to push sales in the market especially at appliance stores where revolving credit accounts allowed the purchase of new fangled convenience devices, ie washiers driers etc.
Saying the 1948 Station Licensing freeze was concern over using up bandwidth is a bit of an oversimplification and it was not related to color. The maximum achievable radio frequencies developed rapidly in the 1940's and the VHF television bands (which pre-WWII were bleeding edge tech) transmission range is STRONGLY effected by the 11 year sunspot cycle. Before WWII when the TV band planning was done that sun spot cycle was at it's minimum and the assumed range of a station was ~50 miles...After the war the sun spot cycle was at it's max and stations were intermittently getting as much as 3000 miles of coverage and interfering with each other (which is very bad). The FCC recognized that they needed more channels to allow the number stations needed in the US than they had initially bargained for. Luckily the bleeding edge UHF radio transmission technology was close enough to practicality that they were able to implement and approve it by 1952.
It was genius how the superimposed color info onto the luminescence single so it could work on both color and BW TVs. Also the color info was I think half the resolution (it was less, not sure on the exact number), because the human eye is less sensitive to color resolution, resulting in a lossy compression that works well because of human physiology, which is something MP3 and JPG take advantage of.
That "genius" came at a price: poor color stability. The American NTSC system resulted in viewers constantly having to fiddle with the color (saturation) and tint controls every time the signal changed slightly. And most TVs back then didn't have remotes, so you couldn't sit still for ten minutes before you had to get up and adjust the TV's controls again. The joke became that "NTSC" really stood for "Never Twice the Same Color." Plus, loss of color sync was a frequent problem with the early color TV sets. The color would just stop synchronizing with the black-and-white picture and you ended up seeing a black-and-white picture with red, blue, and green horizontal stripes across the screen. Time to call the repairman yet one more time.
I remember that phenomenon of loss of color sync. Mt dad learned it was the color sync burst amp tube so we could save a little on service calls. My folks got that color set in 1964 an we used it through 1983 when it was replaced with a Sony trinitron. The old color set is still in the rec room waiting for a new flyback!
5:38 The idea of being the colour turbine to speed in your TV is hilarious 😂 Although fun fact, DLP projectors still have that colour wheel inside them, as the image chip is just made up of tiny mirrors, you have to light them with a coloured light in sequence
I remember hearing my grandfather telling my dad that his new color TV cost $500.00. We would go to my grandparents house every Sunday to watch Disney and Bonanza.
NTSC and PAL are very similar in their technology, but SECAM is a very different method. As it was developed in France, I once heard SECAM described as "Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method"... 🙂😀
The others also got their interpretations: NTSC=Never Twice Same Colour; PAL (in the UK) = Pay Another Licence (From the higher licence fee for colour)
Also as the color system used by NASA for transmission from Apollo and the the Space Shuttle www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/afj/ap13fj/pdf-hr/90-apollo-tv-camera.pdf
The B&W sets sold after the 1980s were mostly battery operated portables. Color uses much more power, So the "use case" was still valid if you wanted to watch for more than a few minutes, LOL.
Before my family had color TV, we could usually tell when a program was in color because they were very slightly different than a b/w broadcast. Somewhat softer or maybe the producers used colors to highlight the novelty and didn't photograph as well in monochrome.
The real problem with the CBS color wheel is that any motion would cause extremely distracting color fringing around whenever was moving on the screen. Panning the camera would create a kaleidoscope of wild colors and a completely unrecognizable image. This problem is inherent to the standard. It's beyond me how anyone could seriously accept this as a color standard with this unsolvable problem.
CBS's field-sequential-colour had all kinds of issues caused by the mechanical color wheel, but it was better suited for TVs with memory such as the later de-interlace capable 100Hz/120Hz CRT TVs, Plasmas and LCDs (none of which would need a color wheel), so if it had won we'd have been spared the "dot-crawl" artifacts that RCA's composite video is infamous for. Modern digital video is closer to CBS's system because, while not RGB, it stores the three components (Y, Cb, Cr) separately.
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θ That is *not* how the CBS color system worked. The three colors were sampled by the camera at different times therefore they can't be combined. You are describing a system that is incompatible with the CBS color system.
@@scottlarson1548 Obviously the system would be using CCD cameras by then that would capture an entire RGB field at once (and then transmit R, G, and B sequentially). This would also eliminate fringing even in old TVs with mechanical color wheels. Much like in early broadcasts shot with Vidicon tubes (B&W or color) every line was from a different moment in time but later cameras used CCDs that captured an entire field at once.
As a matter of fact, PAL, NTSC and SECAM have all been replaced by digital television systems running at 29.97 or 25 frames per second, depending whether your electrical frequency is 60 or 50 Hz.
So shocking how many B&W sets were sold as late as 1997 ... never would have guessed that high! And give nod to John over at Asianometry, he showed me the way here. I'm old enough to remember "the before time". I was relegated to watching the first half of season one of Star Trek TOS in B&W ... my family finally got our first color set that year. Even more fascinating and glorious than in my imagination. Simple times indeed.
PAS???? It's PAL, Phase Alternating Line. I've been into these things for years and this is the very first time I hear anyone call it PAS. Where do you get that from?
While it is true that PAL and SECAM are different color standards, there were plenty of TV sets sold in Europe that have native decoders for both systems. There's multiple reasons for this, the biggest ofc that it streamlined production. A TV could be made exactly the same no matter if it was destined for France or Germany. Additionally, people close to the boarder could enjoy programs from across the border, even if they used a different standard, especially important in areas where the same language is spoken over the boarder (like in southern Belgium/France, Germany/Austria/Switzerland, etc.) But afaik the biggest reason, at least here in Germany, was because West Germany adopted the PAL system (which was invented there), while East Germany adopted the same standard as the rest of the eastern block, which was SECAM. E.Germany actually forbid the sale of PAL compatible sets, as to ensure Easterners to watch East German productions instead, while W.Germany fully allowed the sale of dual-compatible sets, especially in West Berlin...
Imho the biggest reason is that the differences were that small, that there was no economical reason to produce distinctive sets instead of just a single with a switch on them. Most often the most obvious explanation makes the most sense.
@@GBOAC The two are quite different tho. PAL inverts the color phase every other field, while SECAM halves the color information entirely and also encodes the color signal differently (in a more resilliant way) in the luminance signal compared to PAL and NTSC. That's why SECAM was so much favoured in the eastern block, as SECAM was so much more resilliant agains signal interference and weak/bad signals then even PAL is... The name-giving phase altering of PAL was meant to combat the biggest problem of NTSC: that of the wrong color hue, not to make it more resilliant (although it definetly helped) So while many sets that support one also support the other, it's not a given, since they aren't all that similar actually... (not to mention that the color differential signals are derived differently on SECAM compared to PAL and NTSC) The tl;dr is that PAL has more in common with NTSC then it has with SECAM...
@@GBOAC Black and White has nothing to do with NTSC, PAL or SECAM. Those three are strictly Color formats. For BW TV the only thing that matters is whether it's a 576i50 or 480i60 set. There's PAL variants that run on top of 480i60 and pretty much incompatible with the 576i50 sets we have here in Europe, despite using the same coloring signal...
The first color TV I ever saw was strange (early 1960s). The owner had the hue(tint) turn ed all the way one direction so everything was green and purple. They thought that was correct. Still, it was color and awesome to a 5 year old kid. My family got our first color TV in 1968, a Motorola Quasar "works in a drawer". 23 inches of wonderful color. I am surprised that Philo T Farnsworth wasn't mentioned. Kind of the like the USA version of Baird. For the 1969 moon landing, NASA used a field sequential color system. The company I work for made the monitors and build the boards to NASA specs (although a decade before I was there). I think we still have some of the old boards and NASA documentation. I really need to check into that sometime, cool history. As others pointed out, it is PAL not PAS. I've worked with NSTC and PAL electronics for over four decades and have never once heard PAS. I did expect an error that bad form IEEE. Otherwise, it was a fun video and brought back some good memories.
In Spain som eople did the same with the color knob to make everything red so the "poor" neighbors could tell they had purchased the famous and expensive color TV 😂
The problem was that people wouldn't buy color TVs until there were more color shows and broadcasters wouldn't make more color shows until there were more sales of color TVs. So broadcasters took the plunge. "It was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965 in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that autumn. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later."
Great video thanks! We got a color TV in late 1968 or early 1969. The sales guy had a technique that he discovered worked well. He’d bring a TV to the house an hour before a specific TV show: the High Chaparral. There were a few other shows that he used, but when I met him twenty or more years later, he divulged his technique. The High Chaparral worked wonders in selling color TVs.
B/W TV sets hung on so long because they were dirt cheap. The last picture tube TV I bought was around 2002 at Walmart, a "boom box" radio/CD player with a 5" B/W TV in it, and I think I paid around $25 for it brand new! I still have it, and the picture tube works fine but the audio is out for some reason. Some day I may open it up and see if it's an easy fix.
Check out the Eidophor, a large and cumbersome device to project television pictures in theatres. It made use of a oil film on a disc mounted in a vacuum. Often, contamination of the oil bath would cause visible artefacts to appear in the projected image. A rainbow-effect or halo, surrounded the projected image. It was not commonly used until there was a need for good-quality large-screen projection for the NASA space program, where the technology was deployed in mission control. The Eidophor was a spectacular machine and performed surprisingly well.
Since I was born in 1951 I originally grew up in the 1950s with black and white TV. It was in the 1960s that Color TV really took off. In the 1960s RCA made a lot of advertisements for their models of Color TV. In those days the Color TV sets were completely analog. These Color TV sets had adjustment knobs for brightness, for color saturation, and red green color balance. The TV owner had to adjust all these knobs for what they thought to be a pleasing color image.
Where did you get "PAS" for what's really been known as "PAL"? Yes, I know you said "s" for "system." But I had never heard of that before. How did you find that even though the common term is just PAL?
Even in the early 1980s I had a black and white tv set. My father bought one too. Only my sister got a color set. A lot had to do with the pricing. Color tv were more expensive.
The narrative is distorted. The development of color tv was not between mechanical vs electronic but how to cram a full color signal into a 6 Megahertz allotted tv channel. CBS field sequential did this by sequential sampling Red, Green and Blue fields. To fit the signal, they could not use the black and white standard 525 lines 30 fields per second because there was insufficient bandwidth for full sequential color. Instead they used 405 lines at 144 fields per second. It made the CBS system therefore incompatible with the black and white 525 line sets. To ensure compatibility, CTI used line sequential sampling and RCA dot sequential sampling. The dot sequential system time division multiplex evolved into the frequency division - frequency interleaved NTSC color standard in 1953.
This is an il informed muddle of technology. The narrator is confusing display technology with transmission technology. Take heed the information here is incorrect.
Mexican broadcast TV engineer and inventor Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena was credited with creating one of those numerous color TV standards in the form of color wheel television. Today, Televisa's Canal 5 flagship TV station, XHGC-TDT 5 in Mexico City is named in his honor.
In the UK, the BW system was very poor, being a 405 line system (with positive modulation, ie white picture interference and a high-pitched whistle clearly audible to anyone under 60), which had been standardised in 1936. When TV resumed in 1947, it was on this prewar system, while the European standard improved to 625 line BW as it had to be rebuilt in many countries. In 1967, the BBC had run BBC2, an aditional 625-line channel in BW, for 3 years, although it was still only available around the largest cities. David Attenborough ran BBC2 at the time and piloted PAL colour with the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in July, which also meant that the OB units were converted before the studios. From early December, BBC2 was generally in colour, although BBC1 launched colour in late Oct-Nov 1969. The commercial (at that time regional franchise-based) ITV stations launched in colour from that time on- some of the smaller ITV stations took until 1976 to convert, although most had launched in colour by 1973. Only in 1976 were more colour licences bought than BW.
Color TV in the US was never done well at all. They did the best they could with the limitations they had to deal with, but it was pretty bad. If you put a color and B&W set side by side, in the 80s, it was incredible how much more detail was on a B&W set. The colors always bled, and looked blurry. They really never got a good CRT color set to work until the late 90s, just before they were phased out for LED sets.
The first expensive NTSC color sets from 1954 were pretty lackluster TVs. While the color programs on your TV impressed your neighbours as an "early adopter" , the lack of color programming meant that the great majority of time you would be watching B&W programs on it. And these first sets made for poor watching compared to quality B&W sets of the time. The color CRT was small and round compared to top-of-line BW. Picture was very dim, needing a darkened room. Shadow mask meant the resolution was quite poor. And fringes of color continued to appear on the monochrome image.
Nice thing about Black and White was the horizontal resolution had no limit. NTSC standard created a very low resolution. If with delay lines or something a B&W signal could of had something like first 5% Red next 5%Green and the rest full width white then would of worked with existing sets which could adjust the horizontal wider so color info is off the side. Is there a delay line which outputs signal more slowly than input?
Ironic that single chip DLP projectors now use a colour wheel and therefore colour sequential pictures.BAIRD WON THERE!! A also it is apity you couldn't aspect ratio correct the last clip back to 4:3 rather than showing it atretched to 16:9.
I remember i was 15 yrs old andmy dad let me try to fix color tv sets. He helped me pull all the tubes and we took them to the drug store to be tested. There were do it yourself repair books back then.
15:33 It was *NOT* PAS, it was *PAL* and stood for "Phase Alternating Line. Developed in Germany it was the *SUPERIOR* colour TV system! And also, note the *correct* spelling, "Colour", not color.
@@MichaelKatzmann PAL is *INDEED* the superior system, not as a "modification" of NTSC but because PAL's developers started with a *clean page* in Germany in the mid-1960s. PAL's developers saw the NTSC system and wanted to *AVOID* the mistakes made by the NTSC developers.
@@neilforbes416 PAL is essentially NTSC with the phase signal alternating in sign so that by averaging two adjacent lines together (using an acoustic delay line to store the previous line) errors in the tranmitted phase signal cancel out. A basic problem with NTSC (termed by some wit "Never Twice The Same Color") was solved by a simple modification of the system. The French as I remember did not adopt PAL - they used their SECAM system.
We got our first color tv , Christmas of 67. The most memorable things I saw on that set was following the space race, the many sad days of watching a train cross the country taking RFK home,, and Walter Cronkite bringing the horrors of war for all to see.🤔
You thought the general public was slow to adopt color TVs? It look even longer for airports. Of course, it wasn't long after their TV sets were in color before they started phasing out TV sets afterwards. Large-screen computer displays took their place, so there were more places in general that you could see the airline schedule (along with cancellations).
The story of competing international systems NTSC, Secam, and Pal would be interesting including the difference in the number of lines.There is an old techy joke that NTSC means "never twice the same color".
In fact, the number of lines and frames is irrelevant where the 3 colour systems are concerned. Any one of them is applicable to any of the frame/line rates used throughout the world. For instance, Brazil used PAL with the 30 frames (60 fields) per second and 525 lines per frame as in the USA. They had adopted the US system for monochrome as they used 60Hz electricity supply and could easily source equipment from the USA. However, they went PAL as it overcame the phase shift colour distortion problem of NTSC. The earliest adopters of colour went NTSC because that was the only practical choice. SECAM and PAL both solve the phase shift problem but require extra delay line circuitry in the receiver which was initially fairly expensive. As with most technology though, once production ramped up, the cost tumbled and by the 1970s the extra cost was negligible. SECAM and PAL offered almost identical quality at the receiver but SECAM, due to the colour encoding system cannot be mixed. So, in practice, SECAM studios did the production in PAL and converted to SECAM for transmission. Once the technology advanced further and studios started working with component signals then things were identical and the NTSC, PAL or SECAM encoding only came into play once production was complete and the signals went off to the transmitter. So why did countries go for a particular system? Technically, if everything was perfect in the signal chain from studio to transmitter throughout the propagation to the receiving area and the viewer's set then they were all equal. However, if the signal path introduced phase errors then the user had to intervene and 'tweak' the Hue control on an NTSC receiver. So later adopters of colour went for PAL, which was actually an enhanced version of NTSC or SECAM which achieved the same result - no Hue control required - by a different process. The choice between the two mostly came down to politics. PAL was developed in the then West Germany and SECAM in France. For then Soviet Bloc countries and their political allies, once a choice was available then NTSC was a NO since it was linked to the USA, PAL was a NO being from West Germany (NATO Argh!!) but France as a source could be lived with. Francophone countries and close allies and ex colonies of France went the SECAM route as well. Many Latin American countries went NTSC because of close links to the USA while pretty well anyone deciding just on a technical basis chose PAL, since production was simpler than SECAM and the quality effectively identical. So, what it comes down to is; NTSC was a brilliant US piece of work; 10 years later, pragmatic German developers built on NTSC to produce PAL as technology had moved on; in the same time frame, French developers went their own way, got much the same result and produced SECAM. Did it really matter? Probably not. It was sometimes frustrating at both the production end and for the consumer (especially after domestic VCRs etc came along) but there were a variety of frame and line systems anyway which were related to the power systems of countries and most viewers either watched their nationally produced programming or stuff made on film and then locally telecined, which avoided the issue altogether. People like myself who were on the production side in the 70s until around 2000 noticed the fun most and all had our allegiances but as I said earlier, on a good day with the wind behind them there actually wasn't much to choose between the end results from each system.
NTSC was the first electronic color standard. since there were sooo many tv sets in USA, it would be very costly for a new standard to be adopted ie. PAL
Well, we were poor and got a color TV only when the B&W TV finally gave out in 1977 or 1978. My "rich" aunt got divorced in 1981 and she stored a whole bunch of stuff at our house including a small B&W TV. I used that thing in my bedroom until 1997 or 1998. So I am quite used to B&W TVs and watching something in B&W is nothing to me unlike some people who won't watch old old old movie that are in B&W.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, black & White TV was still pretty common. If you had both, and were watching sports, you watched it on the B&W because it was 100 times more clear on the B&W TV. Even up until CRTs were phased out, I saw very few color sets that ever had the picture quality of the old B&W sets, and that includes the Trinitron.
AS a retired software engineer and ex IEEE member I just had to watch this. I never realised that there were several competing Colour technologies. It seems obvious now that CBS's mechanical system was doomed, it was inherently unreliable.
The halting of production of CBS-system color sets, but not black and white sets that used the same materials, has always been a little suspicious as a way for CBS to save face while getting out of the non-backwards-compatible system.
Interestingly enough. The CBS system never really died, as it was excellent for the movie industry. DLP projectors use the exact same technology today with added circuitry logic. In fact, rear projection TVs used dlp and were sold up until the end of 2014 with Mitsubishi making one of the last sets.
CBS's lack of sufficient production color receivers, and their loss of advertising revenue doomed mechanical color TV, the lack of backwards compatibility was CBS's Achillies heel!
That guy at the end claims that BW viewers will benefit from the change because "color cameras will give an improved black and white picture". Really? What about the chroma dots (not dotcrawl, a related but different phenomenon) all over the picture from the unfiltered and undecoded chroma subcarrier? What a great improvement!
The second model of the RCA color cameras, the TK42, had four pickup tubes (Image Orthicons). Three 3in for RGB and a fourth 4.5in larger tube for the luminance or B&W portion of the signal. Since the luminance signal had it's own tube, focus and registration problems with the three color tubes were not visible at all on B&W TV sets, which at the time were the great majority. They did this because of public outcry when the first color broadcasts began with first generation color cameras. The color cameras in that ending scene of the video however were TK42s, the camera shape gives it away, so in that case, the comment was somewhat correct.
@@andydelle4509 thanks for the information. I guess I jumped to conclusions over the signal's inherent properties and didn't think about actual improvements in the cameras.
@@andydelle4509The TK42 actually used 1" vidicons in the 3 chroma channels. Not even lead-oxide vidicons, mind you. The 4.5" I.O. was capable of delivering a very sharp monochrome image, but the vidicons were laggy and had a poor signal to noise in this application. The overall result was inferior, and a step back in image quality from the earlier 3, 3"-I.O. TK41. NBC, in fact, refused to use the TK42.
@@secretlab2205Yeah, you're right. I just looked it up. I did read that NBC/RCA story where they refused the TK42 and stayed with the TK41's. The other major issue was the built in zoom lens. A lot of negative stories about that too. I think at one point NBC even used few Phillips cameras?
It's definitely PAL, I can't even find a reference to PAS. It's disappointing to talk about it not just being a USA story, and then do the most American thing possible by not bothering to do their research properly for anything outside of the USA. Strange, since the rest of the video seems so well put together, but now I have some doubts. I was also surprised about the comment for 30 frames per second being a "compromise" - actually it should be described as 60 fields per second (it was interlaced), and the 60 fields per second matches the mains power line frequency, which is convenient for a variety of reasons, including simpler synchronisation, reduced flicker and interference. NTSC colour actually slows this down to 59.94 fields per second (= 29.97 frames per second) due to the colour burst, which is the real compromise here to make the colour system compatible with black & white. PAL/SECAM don't require this slow-down and maintains the same fields per second. Movie studios settled on 24 frames per second as a standard because it was found to be the lowest acceptable frame rate for motion before it became noticed by audiences, and using the least amount of film provides obvious economies (less film, less to transport and store, longer shoots in cameras, etc), so they have totally different design goals.
How things have changed over the my correct Tv is a Sony Bravia 3D which I don't use now in 3D mode now after one movie you got a head ache I bought it because my Sony PlayStation played 3D Dvd the best think we watched in 3D is the UK Olympics which was broadcast sometimes in 3D the closing summary was fantastic my TV is still looking great in 2D after all years I have used it
An odd take on the history of television. Not wrong exactly, but it has an odd focus and left out so many anecdotes and facts that would have been of interest ot IEEE types. For example, the CBS color wheel system was the technology used on the early Apollo missions because that type of camera only needed a single tube rather than three and also used a much slower frame rate. John L. Baird is frequently cited as the "inventor" of television but his mechanical system was a dead end and is really not a true starting point. Modern electronic television was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworkin.
Asianometry pointed me herw👍🏻
same here
same
Ditto. One of the best channels. Love his tech documentaries.
It is cool that a single individual doing hobby videos has wider reach then whole engineering organization. And IEEE is a behemoth with half a million members and half a billion funding :)
Ditto.
Funny you mention Dorothy and Oz. My father brought home a new color TV and set it up in the living room. That was the night The Wizard of Oz was on. My parents turned on the set for the very first time just as the movie was starting. My dad was beside himself with frustration trying to fiddle with the controls because it was displaying in black and white despite it being a brand new color TV. What none of us knew until later was that the movie starts out in black and white before changing to color to heighten the effect of Dorothy being in the magical land.
Interesting note: in the scene where Dorothy opens the door in BW and then steps out in color had two actresses. The girl opening the door is a stand-in wearing special makeup and wig. After she steps out of frame, the real Dorothy steps into frame wearing colored costuming and makeup.
that is a fantastic story!
The book speaks of how gray Kansas is and, like the movie, shifts to color when Dorothy lands in OZ. But the remake starts in sepia, a fad of the day. I had just read the book when the remake came out, and I was plenty irritated. I've gotten over it, but I still wish they'd stuck with the original B&W.
I think more recently the network showed a disclaimer that the first few scenes were filmed in black and white.
What people today might not realize that in the 1930's, some moves have a color sequence in another wise black and white movie. "The Women" is a good example the fashion scene was a color sequence and then reverted back to black and white. One presumes the extra cost of color film production at that time.
The aspect that's phenomenal about TV sets nowadays are the bargain prices for them.
Back in the 1950s, black & white TVs prices were equal to that of a month's salary (or higher) for the US worker. And maintaining them was pricey, too, as the vacuum tubes in those TV sets may require replacement after two years of use; which necessitated the TV repair man to make a visit to the house for repairs. Many of those TV sets were too heavy to lug to a TV repair shop.
@15:37... PAL not PAS
Since my Dad worked at WABD in NY we had a 25" DUMONT color TV in 1960. The houselights would dim when you turned it on ad you heard the crackle of the High Voltage when the set warmed up. I worked on the first color 2" quad boradcast Video Tape machines made by AMPEX
Back in the early '70s my dad bought a 25" Heathkit color TV. Obviously we had to put it together. He, my brother and I went out every night after dinner to work on it. It was delayed gratification because it took us about a week and a half to build, but it was awesome having the satisfaction of having helped build it and to finally have a nice color TV!
It was probably the GR-900. I got a GR-2000 in 1976 partially to civilianize my Navy electronics training. That TV lasted 30 years. My shipmates was taking the same course but under another institution and got the GR-900 as part of the course. I waited until I got out and the GR-2000 was the first consumer TV with an electronic tuning offered. There were several institutions that offered correspondence courses in electronics in the two main magazines back then featuring Heathkit products as the electronics lab portions of the courses. The "Big Box" stores that outpriced Heathkit in the 1980s was the demise of that company for awhile. Heathkit is back, but not what it was.
@@Starphot LOL I'm a geek and just built their clock. Mostly just for fun but I can't easily see red LED numbers at night anymore, and these are green. I'm gonna modify it to dim the seconds digits way down to make it easier to see the most relevant info but see the seconds if I want.
Re the TV. I don't remember what model it was but I do remember it was vacuum tube and had the clunky mechanical tuner (no remote but we only got like 3 channels lol.) It did have UHF though, so not totally backwards.
I have been wanting to start an electronics kit business modeled after them for a long time. Now that I'm retired, I dabble, but I don't think it will ever get off the ground anymore. :-)
I remember seeing my Dad build one of those when I was just a-little youngling.
In 1964 my mom stuffed a sweepstakes box at a local department store. First prize was a Renault. Second was a 23" RCA Color TV. She won the TV. We were the first ones on the block to have a color TV. I was 7 and remember watching the NBC Peacock, and Disney's Wonderful World of Color. My dad took pictures of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (still in BW) and developed them in our dark room. My brothers sold them at school the next day for a handsome profit! That TV was iconic. The picture was far from rectangular, but we didn't care.
I actually recall seeing this commercial: ua-cam.com/video/qtnsHJCex3s/v-deo.htmlsi=LVhu5KtZuYCfr6oc
Until the day the torch was lit for the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, my family had one 16" Zenith B+W. That day, my parents purchased a 19" Motorola color set.
I went to an elementary school that had an annual carnival which always included raffle tickets for prizes, and for the five years I was there, a 12" b+w portable set was the grand prize. 1972 was the first year after I (the youngest child) was out of that school, but we still bought raffle tickets and had planned to go. At the last minute, something called us out of town and we missed the carnival. We got home, the neighbors noticed we were home, rotary phones were dialed, and soon we received a call from the mother of another of the school's families. "You damned people won the TV!" (we were/are good friends with that family)
I loved the color and bigger picture - what 12-year-old isn't going to appreciate that his first dose of full-time color TV came chock full of Olympic swimming - but my true sense of wonder was that in the space of just a few months, we'd gone from a family that owned one TV (still quite common in my world at the time) to a family that had THREE!
@@BradHouser I remember it too.
In France, the Secam process was initially designed to colorize 819 lines.
15:27 "PAS"? It should be PAL!
I'm not your pal, buddy
@@lakrids-pibe i'm not your buddy guy
@@voltare2amstereo I'm not your guy, pal
@@ferociousgumby Looks like they cut out that section of the video after noticing their mistake.
The story goes that, by coincidence, at the moment the FCC announced RCA's NTSC system as the color TV broadcast standard, CBS in NY had their one NTSC-color-equipped studio "hot-to-go" for testing. So, they put it on the air, and thus, ironically, CBS aired the first official NTSC color broadcast, not RCA-owned NBC.
Its PAL... not PAS........
Doesn't get better the older you are knowing these things.
We didn't switch to colour TV in Australia until 1975, but because we waited until it was a mature, affordable technology, the takeup was so rapid that in just 3 years, colour sets were outselling black and white sets by 1978.
Actually 73, cause my grandparents got a colour telly in 73
@@mickvonbornemann3824 There were test broadcasts as far back as the late 1960's, but we didn't officially change over to regularly scheduled colour broadcasting until March 1st, 1975, sometimes referred to as "C-Day"
The technology was chosen and ready long before 1975. It just got held up by the Liberals and only when Whitlam got in they finally went from tests to official broadcasts. The TVs and cameras and transmission chains were ready for years.
@@mickvonbornemann3824wrong, colour television started march 1st 1975 in AUS, ABC started with an auntie jack comedy show which mimicked the change to colour transition from bw to full PAL colour like Wizard of Oz movie.
@@helmulu4016 That may have been the official date but the channels were all trialing colour broadcasts from 73 & the percentage of colour broadcasts slowly increased with every month. I’m sure of the year as it was the same summer break I changed from infants to primary & the same summer my brother & I were dumped on our grands’ because our parents went to Europe. They bought a German telly with a remote BTW.
My grandmothers first color TV was included when she bought a new fridge and freezer in Finland
Wizard of Oz clip.
A lot of people don't realize that famous transition shot (starting at 0:06 seconds here, when "Dorothy" steps in with her back turned) was filmed *_entirely_* in color! What looks like black-and-white in that one shot was really a set piece interior painted black-and-white. "Dorothy" and "Toto" in that shot were both body doubles in greyscale costume and makeup including hair. Judy Garland, in full color costume and makeup and holding Toto, was standing just to the left of frame. When the black-and-white "Dorothy" opened the door to reveal the sight of Munchkin Land in full color, she stepped off camera and the two switched places. Judy Garland then stepped into frame in full color.
They could just have made a copy to monochrome film and spliced the two copies at the transition point.
@@xaverlustig3581 That wouldn't have created the smooth transition, nor would you have been able to see the colorful Land of Oz through the door of the sepia house.
it wasn't' b&w it was sepia tone.
and yur statementis false
@@MrRonfelder Whatever, Karen. 🙄
Black and white TV was still popular well into the 80s because they were good second cheaper options for bedrooms. My parents had a small one they used until they picked up a new color one for the living room and they took the old one. So I got to use the black and white in my room. I used that thing well after I left home in the late 80s into the mid 90s. That thing was so well built it would probably still be used if not for the switch to digital.
If you have a converter box or cable it should still work.
@@RCAvhstape I don't have it anymore. In fact, I don't own any TVs anymore. I just watch a few interesting creators on UA-cam on a tablet now. Sometimes I am tempted to get one but I remember that my last one wasn't turned on for two years before I got rid of it.
Another factor was the amount of spectrum space that would be required to transmit color TV over the air to home TV receivers. The RCA system would fit the space used for B&W TV. The CBS system would take more spectrum space.
Pal (Phase Alternating Line) is the name of the color system of the blue countries on the world map.
Mostly EU countries including UK (as well as present and former UK territories). This was until it was replaced by digital standard DVB-T/T2.
The NTSC was used in the U.S. and its allies such as the Philippines. It was then replaced by ATSC (U.S. and U.S. territories) and ISDB-T/Tb (Brazil, Japan, and the Philippines).
In 1991I had my friend visiting and we were watching random TV. Star Trek TOS came on and he was shocked. After a few moments he said he thought the series was shot in black and white because that's the only way he'd ever seen it as a kid.
When I was a kid, my family only had a black-and-white set. But one year, an uncle invited us over to spend Thanksgiving dinner with them. They had color TV and had tuned into the second part of the episode "The Menagerie." I was stunned at how wonderful it looked. I didn't get to watch Star Trek in color for years until my family finally bought a color set.
For ages in Britain we were waiting for the government to decide upon which colour standard to adopt. The BBC had been experimenting with 525 line NTSC in the 50s. Some TV stations also experimented with SECAM from 1960 onwards, and there was pressure from others to get a move on by using compatible 405 line colour. Finally in 1966 we decided upon PAL. I remember visiting a department store around Christmas 1966 and seeing 625 line colour PAL being demonstrated. It was utterly amazing compared with the 405 line black and white standard we were all used to.
They experimented with the NTSC ii Colour system mated to System A , 405 lines.
The UK also experimented with the NTSC ii colour system with System I- 625 lines before adopting PAL colour encoding in March 1966.
Yes. As soon as the BBC and the DTI were looking at 625 lines as the way forward with UK TV, any thoughts of permanent colour on 405 lines went out of the window as they knew 405 lines would effectively be an obsolescent system by the end of the 1960s.
In France, color TV did not arrive until October 1, 1967 at 2:15 p.m.
The patent for the Secam color process was filed 11 years earlier.
@@nostalgeek2872 Wow - I didn't realise that the patent was filed so early!
The TV station construction freeze 1948 to 1952 was due to co channel interference. The FCC planning was incorrect as the broadcasts on VHF would go beyond the horizon. The four year freeze led to the opening of the UHF band stations cannels 14 to 83 in 1952.
At 17:17 The graphic says PAS, but the narrator (mostly) correctly says "Pee, Ay, Ess or Phase Alternating Line". It's PAL! Is that an AI hallucination?
Yes, it should be PAL not PAS
They even pinched the Wikipedia map which is correct. I thought this was meant to be an engineering channel. It has even bigger mistakes than Asianometry
What? They both make misteaks? 😊
Yes PAL.... NTSC (Never Twice the Same Color), SECAM (System Essentially Contrary to the American Method) & PAL (Peace at Last)
@@MichaelKatzmann LMAO !!!!!
The inclusion of the pricing of the color TV sets when they were going mainstream in the 1960s is much appreciated as it illustrates the tremendous bargains there are with TV sets in the second decade of the 21st century.
I recall in my household (US) that our first color set was in 1970.
It’s also where the spread of consumer credit really took off to push sales in the market especially at appliance stores where revolving credit accounts allowed the purchase of new fangled convenience devices, ie washiers driers etc.
Saying the 1948 Station Licensing freeze was concern over using up bandwidth is a bit of an oversimplification and it was not related to color. The maximum achievable radio frequencies developed rapidly in the 1940's and the VHF television bands (which pre-WWII were bleeding edge tech) transmission range is STRONGLY effected by the 11 year sunspot cycle. Before WWII when the TV band planning was done that sun spot cycle was at it's minimum and the assumed range of a station was ~50 miles...After the war the sun spot cycle was at it's max and stations were intermittently getting as much as 3000 miles of coverage and interfering with each other (which is very bad). The FCC recognized that they needed more channels to allow the number stations needed in the US than they had initially bargained for. Luckily the bleeding edge UHF radio transmission technology was close enough to practicality that they were able to implement and approve it by 1952.
It's traditional to call the inventor by his full name, John Logie Baird.
Baird invented the first MECHANICAL TV, not an electronic one
@@rty1955 Yes, I knew that. It's not exactly RELEVANT to my point though.
It always reminds me of Yogi Bear.
It was big news in my neighborhood when a family got the first color TV on the street.
its PAL not PAS!
It was genius how the superimposed color info onto the luminescence single so it could work on both color and BW TVs. Also the color info was I think half the resolution (it was less, not sure on the exact number), because the human eye is less sensitive to color resolution, resulting in a lossy compression that works well because of human physiology, which is something MP3 and JPG take advantage of.
That "genius" came at a price: poor color stability. The American NTSC system resulted in viewers constantly having to fiddle with the color (saturation) and tint controls every time the signal changed slightly. And most TVs back then didn't have remotes, so you couldn't sit still for ten minutes before you had to get up and adjust the TV's controls again. The joke became that "NTSC" really stood for "Never Twice the Same Color."
Plus, loss of color sync was a frequent problem with the early color TV sets. The color would just stop synchronizing with the black-and-white picture and you ended up seeing a black-and-white picture with red, blue, and green horizontal stripes across the screen. Time to call the repairman yet one more time.
I remember that phenomenon of loss of color sync. Mt dad learned it was the color sync burst amp tube so we could save a little on service calls. My folks got that color set in 1964 an we used it through 1983 when it was replaced with a Sony trinitron. The old color set is still in the rec room waiting for a new flyback!
It's PAL, not PAS !
It's PAL, I've never heard it called PaaS, lol.
5:38 The idea of being the colour turbine to speed in your TV is hilarious 😂
Although fun fact, DLP projectors still have that colour wheel inside them, as the image chip is just made up of tiny mirrors, you have to light them with a coloured light in sequence
I remember hearing my grandfather telling my dad that his new color TV cost $500.00. We would go to my grandparents house every Sunday to watch Disney and Bonanza.
NTSC and PAL are very similar in their technology, but SECAM is a very different method. As it was developed in France, I once heard SECAM described as "Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method"... 🙂😀
The others also got their interpretations: NTSC=Never Twice Same Colour; PAL (in the UK) = Pay Another Licence (From the higher licence fee for colour)
Jon Y. sent me! Fun series!
This was extremely well researched and narrated. Concise yet lively! Excellent work and presentation.
Well narrated? Your hear her reading from the text rather than telling the story.
The CBS system had its comeback in DLP projectors using only one DMD system - and a color wheel :)
Also as the color system used by NASA for transmission from Apollo and the the Space Shuttle www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/afj/ap13fj/pdf-hr/90-apollo-tv-camera.pdf
The B&W sets sold after the 1980s were mostly battery operated portables. Color uses much more power, So the "use case" was still valid if you wanted to watch for more than a few minutes, LOL.
Before my family had color TV, we could usually tell when a program was in color because they were very slightly different than a b/w broadcast. Somewhat softer or maybe the producers used colors to highlight the novelty and didn't photograph as well in monochrome.
The real problem with the CBS color wheel is that any motion would cause extremely distracting color fringing around whenever was moving on the screen. Panning the camera would create a kaleidoscope of wild colors and a completely unrecognizable image. This problem is inherent to the standard. It's beyond me how anyone could seriously accept this as a color standard with this unsolvable problem.
CBS's field-sequential-colour had all kinds of issues caused by the mechanical color wheel, but it was better suited for TVs with memory such as the later de-interlace capable 100Hz/120Hz CRT TVs, Plasmas and LCDs (none of which would need a color wheel), so if it had won we'd have been spared the "dot-crawl" artifacts that RCA's composite video is infamous for. Modern digital video is closer to CBS's system because, while not RGB, it stores the three components (Y, Cb, Cr) separately.
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θ It still would have had color fringing in all motion.
@@scottlarson1548 If you buffer the 3 fields and send them as a single RGB frame to the three electron canons, no it won't.
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θ That is *not* how the CBS color system worked. The three colors were sampled by the camera at different times therefore they can't be combined. You are describing a system that is incompatible with the CBS color system.
@@scottlarson1548 Obviously the system would be using CCD cameras by then that would capture an entire RGB field at once (and then transmit R, G, and B sequentially). This would also eliminate fringing even in old TVs with mechanical color wheels. Much like in early broadcasts shot with Vidicon tubes (B&W or color) every line was from a different moment in time but later cameras used CCDs that captured an entire field at once.
As a matter of fact, PAL, NTSC and SECAM have all been replaced by digital television systems running at 29.97 or 25 frames per second, depending whether your electrical frequency is 60 or 50 Hz.
So shocking how many B&W sets were sold as late as 1997 ... never would have guessed that high!
And give nod to John over at Asianometry, he showed me the way here. I'm old enough to remember "the before time". I was relegated to watching the first half of season one of Star Trek TOS in B&W ... my family finally got our first color set that year. Even more fascinating and glorious than in my imagination. Simple times indeed.
There was never a PAS system. It was the PAL system.
Phases Alternate Lines.
PAS???? It's PAL, Phase Alternating Line. I've been into these things for years and this is the very first time I hear anyone call it PAS. Where do you get that from?
While it is true that PAL and SECAM are different color standards, there were plenty of TV sets sold in Europe that have native decoders for both systems. There's multiple reasons for this, the biggest ofc that it streamlined production. A TV could be made exactly the same no matter if it was destined for France or Germany. Additionally, people close to the boarder could enjoy programs from across the border, even if they used a different standard, especially important in areas where the same language is spoken over the boarder (like in southern Belgium/France, Germany/Austria/Switzerland, etc.)
But afaik the biggest reason, at least here in Germany, was because West Germany adopted the PAL system (which was invented there), while East Germany adopted the same standard as the rest of the eastern block, which was SECAM. E.Germany actually forbid the sale of PAL compatible sets, as to ensure Easterners to watch East German productions instead, while W.Germany fully allowed the sale of dual-compatible sets, especially in West Berlin...
Imho the biggest reason is that the differences were that small, that there was no economical reason to produce distinctive sets instead of just a single with a switch on them. Most often the most obvious explanation makes the most sense.
@@GBOAC The two are quite different tho. PAL inverts the color phase every other field, while SECAM halves the color information entirely and also encodes the color signal differently (in a more resilliant way) in the luminance signal compared to PAL and NTSC. That's why SECAM was so much favoured in the eastern block, as SECAM was so much more resilliant agains signal interference and weak/bad signals then even PAL is...
The name-giving phase altering of PAL was meant to combat the biggest problem of NTSC: that of the wrong color hue, not to make it more resilliant (although it definetly helped)
So while many sets that support one also support the other, it's not a given, since they aren't all that similar actually... (not to mention that the color differential signals are derived differently on SECAM compared to PAL and NTSC)
The tl;dr is that PAL has more in common with NTSC then it has with SECAM...
@@Chickenbreadlp then why can a PAL D or K tv display a SECAM signal in black and white? Try that with NTSC...
@@GBOAC Black and White has nothing to do with NTSC, PAL or SECAM. Those three are strictly Color formats.
For BW TV the only thing that matters is whether it's a 576i50 or 480i60 set. There's PAL variants that run on top of 480i60 and pretty much incompatible with the 576i50 sets we have here in Europe, despite using the same coloring signal...
The first color TV I ever saw was strange (early 1960s). The owner had the hue(tint) turn ed all the way one direction so everything was green and purple. They thought that was correct. Still, it was color and awesome to a 5 year old kid. My family got our first color TV in 1968, a Motorola Quasar "works in a drawer". 23 inches of wonderful color.
I am surprised that Philo T Farnsworth wasn't mentioned. Kind of the like the USA version of Baird.
For the 1969 moon landing, NASA used a field sequential color system. The company I work for made the monitors and build the boards to NASA specs (although a decade before I was there). I think we still have some of the old boards and NASA documentation. I really need to check into that sometime, cool history.
As others pointed out, it is PAL not PAS. I've worked with NSTC and PAL electronics for over four decades and have never once heard PAS. I did expect an error that bad form IEEE. Otherwise, it was a fun video and brought back some good memories.
In Spain som eople did the same with the color knob to make everything red so the "poor" neighbors could tell they had purchased the famous and expensive color TV 😂
The problem was that people wouldn't buy color TVs until there were more color shows and broadcasters wouldn't make more color shows until there were more sales of color TVs. So broadcasters took the plunge.
"It was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965 in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that autumn. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later."
Great video thanks!
We got a color TV in late 1968 or early 1969. The sales guy had a technique that he discovered worked well. He’d bring a TV to the house an hour before a specific TV show: the High Chaparral. There were a few other shows that he used, but when I met him twenty or more years later, he divulged his technique. The High Chaparral worked wonders in selling color TVs.
Note: For Antenna Digital TV, VHF is still used, and it a pain because most "digital" antennas are UHF antennas and don't pick up VHF stations well.
B/W TV sets hung on so long because they were dirt cheap. The last picture tube TV I bought was around 2002 at Walmart, a "boom box" radio/CD player with a 5" B/W TV in it, and I think I paid around $25 for it brand new! I still have it, and the picture tube works fine but the audio is out for some reason. Some day I may open it up and see if it's an easy fix.
Check out the Eidophor, a large and cumbersome device to project television pictures in theatres. It made use of a oil film on a disc mounted in a vacuum. Often, contamination of the oil bath would cause visible artefacts to appear in the projected image. A rainbow-effect or halo, surrounded the projected image. It was not commonly used until there was a need for good-quality large-screen projection for the NASA space program, where the technology was deployed in mission control. The Eidophor was a spectacular machine and performed surprisingly well.
Since I was born in 1951 I originally grew up in the 1950s with black and white TV. It was in the 1960s that Color TV really took off. In the 1960s RCA made a lot of advertisements for their models of Color TV. In those days the Color TV sets were completely analog. These Color TV sets had adjustment knobs for brightness, for color saturation, and red green color balance. The TV owner had to adjust all these knobs for what they thought to be a pleasing color image.
Where did you get "PAS" for what's really been known as "PAL"? Yes, I know you said "s" for "system." But I had never heard of that before. How did you find that even though the common term is just PAL?
Even in the early 1980s I had a black and white tv set. My father bought one too. Only my sister got a color set. A lot had to do with the pricing. Color tv were more expensive.
The narrative is distorted. The development of color tv was not between mechanical vs electronic but how to cram a full color signal into a 6 Megahertz allotted tv channel.
CBS field sequential did this by sequential sampling Red, Green and Blue fields. To fit the signal, they could not use the black and white standard 525 lines 30 fields per second because there was insufficient bandwidth for full sequential color. Instead they used 405 lines at 144 fields per second. It made the CBS system therefore incompatible with the black and white 525 line sets. To ensure compatibility, CTI used line sequential sampling and RCA dot sequential sampling. The dot sequential system time division multiplex evolved into the frequency division - frequency interleaved NTSC color standard in 1953.
This is an il informed muddle of technology. The narrator is confusing display technology with transmission technology. Take heed the information here is incorrect.
Mexican broadcast TV engineer and inventor Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena was credited with creating one of those numerous color TV standards in the form of color wheel television.
Today, Televisa's Canal 5 flagship TV station, XHGC-TDT 5 in Mexico City is named in his honor.
I think it is more commonly known as PAL... and not PAS
This is so interesting, thank you!!
As a VR developer, I feel like this is happening again in HDR standard.
Ooh! Do Teletext next! 😁
And start the episode with, here's what you could have had with PAL.
In the UK, the BW system was very poor, being a 405 line system (with positive modulation, ie white picture interference and a high-pitched whistle clearly audible to anyone under 60), which had been standardised in 1936. When TV resumed in 1947, it was on this prewar system, while the European standard improved to 625 line BW as it had to be rebuilt in many countries.
In 1967, the BBC had run BBC2, an aditional 625-line channel in BW, for 3 years, although it was still only available around the largest cities. David Attenborough ran BBC2 at the time and piloted PAL colour with the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in July, which also meant that the OB units were converted before the studios. From early December, BBC2 was generally in colour, although BBC1 launched colour in late Oct-Nov 1969. The commercial (at that time regional franchise-based) ITV stations launched in colour from that time on- some of the smaller ITV stations took until 1976 to convert, although most had launched in colour by 1973. Only in 1976 were more colour licences bought than BW.
Color TV in the US was never done well at all. They did the best they could with the limitations they had to deal with, but it was pretty bad. If you put a color and B&W set side by side, in the 80s, it was incredible how much more detail was on a B&W set. The colors always bled, and looked blurry. They really never got a good CRT color set to work until the late 90s, just before they were phased out for LED sets.
The first expensive NTSC color sets from 1954 were pretty lackluster TVs. While the color programs on your TV impressed your neighbours as an "early adopter" , the lack of color programming meant that the great majority of time you would be watching B&W programs on it. And these first sets made for poor watching compared to quality B&W sets of the time. The color CRT was small and round compared to top-of-line BW. Picture was very dim, needing a darkened room. Shadow mask meant the resolution was quite poor. And fringes of color continued to appear on the monochrome image.
Interseting you mentioned Baird, but not Farnsworth.
Farnsworth was mostly known for the Video Camera Tube and Image dissector than he was for Color TV
Baird had a MECHANICAL TV, which was a failure. Farnsworth invented the firs all electronic tv system, which Sarnoff SCREWED him!
Nice thing about Black and White was the horizontal resolution had no limit. NTSC standard created a very low resolution. If with delay lines or something a B&W signal could of had something like first 5% Red next 5%Green and the rest full width white then would of worked with existing sets which could adjust the horizontal wider so color info is off the side. Is there a delay line which outputs signal more slowly than input?
wow cool this is done with Asianometry!
Ironic that single chip DLP projectors now use a colour wheel and therefore colour sequential pictures.BAIRD WON THERE!! A also it is apity you couldn't aspect ratio correct the last clip back to 4:3 rather than showing it atretched to 16:9.
I remember i was 15 yrs old andmy dad let me try to fix color tv sets. He helped me pull all the tubes and we took them to the drug store to be tested. There were do it yourself repair books back then.
15:33 It was *NOT* PAS, it was *PAL* and stood for "Phase Alternating Line. Developed in Germany it was the *SUPERIOR* colour TV system! And also, note the *correct* spelling, "Colour", not color.
yes, PAL is a modification of NTSC. It solved a problem with NTSC but it was possible because PAL was developed several years after NTSC.
@@MichaelKatzmann PAL is *INDEED* the superior system, not as a "modification" of NTSC but because PAL's developers started with a *clean page* in Germany in the mid-1960s. PAL's developers saw the NTSC system and wanted to *AVOID* the mistakes made by the NTSC developers.
@@neilforbes416 PAL is essentially NTSC with the phase signal alternating in sign so that by averaging two adjacent lines together (using an acoustic delay line to store the previous line) errors in the tranmitted phase signal cancel out.
A basic problem with NTSC (termed by some wit "Never Twice The Same Color") was solved by a simple modification of the system.
The French as I remember did not adopt PAL - they used their SECAM system.
We got our first color tv , Christmas of 67. The most memorable things I saw on that set was following the space race, the many sad days of watching a train cross the country taking RFK home,, and Walter Cronkite bringing the horrors of war for all to see.🤔
You thought the general public was slow to adopt color TVs? It look even longer for airports. Of course, it wasn't long after their TV sets were in color before they started phasing out TV sets afterwards. Large-screen computer displays took their place, so there were more places in general that you could see the airline schedule (along with cancellations).
Idea for another series. The development of mono, stereo/2-channel, and 4-channel FM radio.
The story of competing international systems NTSC, Secam, and Pal would be interesting including the difference in the number of lines.There is an old techy joke that NTSC means "never twice the same color".
In fact, the number of lines and frames is irrelevant where the 3 colour systems are concerned. Any one of them is applicable to any of the frame/line rates used throughout the world. For instance, Brazil used PAL with the 30 frames (60 fields) per second and 525 lines per frame as in the USA. They had adopted the US system for monochrome as they used 60Hz electricity supply and could easily source equipment from the USA. However, they went PAL as it overcame the phase shift colour distortion problem of NTSC. The earliest adopters of colour went NTSC because that was the only practical choice. SECAM and PAL both solve the phase shift problem but require extra delay line circuitry in the receiver which was initially fairly expensive. As with most technology though, once production ramped up, the cost tumbled and by the 1970s the extra cost was negligible. SECAM and PAL offered almost identical quality at the receiver but SECAM, due to the colour encoding system cannot be mixed. So, in practice, SECAM studios did the production in PAL and converted to SECAM for transmission. Once the technology advanced further and studios started working with component signals then things were identical and the NTSC, PAL or SECAM encoding only came into play once production was complete and the signals went off to the transmitter. So why did countries go for a particular system? Technically, if everything was perfect in the signal chain from studio to transmitter throughout the propagation to the receiving area and the viewer's set then they were all equal. However, if the signal path introduced phase errors then the user had to intervene and 'tweak' the Hue control on an NTSC receiver. So later adopters of colour went for PAL, which was actually an enhanced version of NTSC or SECAM which achieved the same result - no Hue control required - by a different process. The choice between the two mostly came down to politics. PAL was developed in the then West Germany and SECAM in France. For then Soviet Bloc countries and their political allies, once a choice was available then NTSC was a NO since it was linked to the USA, PAL was a NO being from West Germany (NATO Argh!!) but France as a source could be lived with. Francophone countries and close allies and ex colonies of France went the SECAM route as well. Many Latin American countries went NTSC because of close links to the USA while pretty well anyone deciding just on a technical basis chose PAL, since production was simpler than SECAM and the quality effectively identical.
So, what it comes down to is; NTSC was a brilliant US piece of work; 10 years later, pragmatic German developers built on NTSC to produce PAL as technology had moved on; in the same time frame, French developers went their own way, got much the same result and produced SECAM. Did it really matter? Probably not. It was sometimes frustrating at both the production end and for the consumer (especially after domestic VCRs etc came along) but there were a variety of frame and line systems anyway which were related to the power systems of countries and most viewers either watched their nationally produced programming or stuff made on film and then locally telecined, which avoided the issue altogether. People like myself who were on the production side in the 70s until around 2000 noticed the fun most and all had our allegiances but as I said earlier, on a good day with the wind behind them there actually wasn't much to choose between the end results from each system.
NTSC was the first electronic color standard. since there were sooo many tv sets in USA, it would be very costly for a new standard to be adopted ie. PAL
USA came up with a standard called NTSC which stand for Never Twice the Same Colour
Well, we were poor and got a color TV only when the B&W TV finally gave out in 1977 or 1978. My "rich" aunt got divorced in 1981 and she stored a whole bunch of stuff at our house including a small B&W TV. I used that thing in my bedroom until 1997 or 1998. So I am quite used to B&W TVs and watching something in B&W is nothing to me unlike some people who won't watch old old old movie that are in B&W.
The ending was worth it.
The electronic recording of television 1956 came after the introduction of NTSC color television 1953.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, black & White TV was still pretty common. If you had both, and were watching sports, you watched it on the B&W because it was 100 times more clear on the B&W TV. Even up until CRTs were phased out, I saw very few color sets that ever had the picture quality of the old B&W sets, and that includes the Trinitron.
AS a retired software engineer and ex IEEE member I just had to watch this. I never realised that there were several competing Colour technologies. It seems obvious now that CBS's mechanical system was doomed, it was inherently unreliable.
The Sony "Trinitron" was the "correct" solution to CRT.
2:14 what was this from? Did it inspire Doc Brown’s head gadget?
I bought my very first colour TV only around 1992, ouch! BTW, I had no idea it used the famous PAS system...ahem.
The halting of production of CBS-system color sets, but not black and white sets that used the same materials, has always been a little suspicious as a way for CBS to save face while getting out of the non-backwards-compatible system.
I've never seen the colour footage of John Logie Baird. I thought it was lost.
Interestingly enough. The CBS system never really died, as it was excellent for the movie industry. DLP projectors use the exact same technology today with added circuitry logic. In fact, rear projection TVs used dlp and were sold up until the end of 2014 with Mitsubishi making one of the last sets.
A version of the CBS system was also used on the Moon. Indeed there are still three of the cameras there.
i was amazed when i was young to find out that John Logie Baird's widow lived and died in my hometown
CBS's lack of sufficient production color receivers, and their loss of advertising revenue doomed mechanical color TV, the lack of backwards compatibility was CBS's Achillies heel!
Those 7000 B&W tubes were probably going into computer monitors
That guy at the end claims that BW viewers will benefit from the change because "color cameras will give an improved black and white picture". Really?
What about the chroma dots (not dotcrawl, a related but different phenomenon) all over the picture from the unfiltered and undecoded chroma subcarrier? What a great improvement!
The second model of the RCA color cameras, the TK42, had four pickup tubes (Image Orthicons). Three 3in for RGB and a fourth 4.5in larger tube for the luminance or B&W portion of the signal. Since the luminance signal had it's own tube, focus and registration problems with the three color tubes were not visible at all on B&W TV sets, which at the time were the great majority. They did this because of public outcry when the first color broadcasts began with first generation color cameras. The color cameras in that ending scene of the video however were TK42s, the camera shape gives it away, so in that case, the comment was somewhat correct.
@@andydelle4509 thanks for the information. I guess I jumped to conclusions over the signal's inherent properties and didn't think about actual improvements in the cameras.
@@andydelle4509The TK42 actually used 1" vidicons in the 3 chroma channels. Not even lead-oxide vidicons, mind you. The 4.5" I.O. was capable of delivering a very sharp monochrome image, but the vidicons were laggy and had a poor signal to noise in this application. The overall result was inferior, and a step back in image quality from the earlier 3, 3"-I.O. TK41. NBC, in fact, refused to use the TK42.
@@secretlab2205Yeah, you're right. I just looked it up. I did read that NBC/RCA story where they refused the TK42 and stayed with the TK41's. The other major issue was the built in zoom lens. A lot of negative stories about that too. I think at one point NBC even used few Phillips cameras?
In 1949, programs could not yet be viewed coast to coast.
Who wrote this?
I like to know. I suppose landlines meant nothing in the long run.
Where does Guillermo Gonzales Camerena fits in?
It's definitely PAL, I can't even find a reference to PAS. It's disappointing to talk about it not just being a USA story, and then do the most American thing possible by not bothering to do their research properly for anything outside of the USA. Strange, since the rest of the video seems so well put together, but now I have some doubts.
I was also surprised about the comment for 30 frames per second being a "compromise" - actually it should be described as 60 fields per second (it was interlaced), and the 60 fields per second matches the mains power line frequency, which is convenient for a variety of reasons, including simpler synchronisation, reduced flicker and interference. NTSC colour actually slows this down to 59.94 fields per second (= 29.97 frames per second) due to the colour burst, which is the real compromise here to make the colour system compatible with black & white. PAL/SECAM don't require this slow-down and maintains the same fields per second. Movie studios settled on 24 frames per second as a standard because it was found to be the lowest acceptable frame rate for motion before it became noticed by audiences, and using the least amount of film provides obvious economies (less film, less to transport and store, longer shoots in cameras, etc), so they have totally different design goals.
You question the general accuracy of this when you decode pal as pas?
Did they agree on video or gaming formats or did they let competition, and the public’s preferences, decide?
It's PAL.. Not PAS, I guess
Hoping more info...
3:24 "Standard most likely to lock consumers to our companies products"
Why was early tv more interesting than what we have today. The technology was not so good but the programming was much better. 😮
Erm, it’s PAL, not PAS
How things have changed over the my correct Tv is a Sony Bravia 3D which I don't use now in 3D mode now after one movie you got a head ache I bought it because my Sony PlayStation played 3D Dvd the best think we watched in 3D is the UK Olympics which was broadcast sometimes in 3D the closing summary was fantastic my TV is still looking great in 2D after all years I have used it
You went through all that effort and you left distorted the 4:3 video in the last demo. (?)
The tech giants didn't agree because of "Not Invented Here".
An odd take on the history of television. Not wrong exactly, but it has an odd focus and left out so many anecdotes and facts that would have been of interest ot IEEE types. For example, the CBS color wheel system was the technology used on the early Apollo missions because that type of camera only needed a single tube rather than three and also used a much slower frame rate. John L. Baird is frequently cited as the "inventor" of television but his mechanical system was a dead end and is really not a true starting point. Modern electronic television was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworkin.
I cannot believe that American companies kept on trying to make mechanical colour wheel TVs work when Europe went for CRTs in the 1930s.