I have some questions and thoughts about roundies.
 

Browsing through here, and taking a look at pictures of roundie sets that their owners are obviously quite proud of, I have thought up some questions, and I have a few other thoughts.

Why were roundies made, when as far as I know, the NTSC picture has always been rectangular? I've seen some old 40's sets with rectangle screens, so why were "fishbowl shaped" screens made to begin with?

Also, do roundies draw the corners of an image? or does something cut them off and convert the image into a "fishbowl" shape?


This may be biased, seeing as I grew up with rectangle screens, but with a roundie, you can't see the corners of an image (Channel logos, etc), so while they may have great color reproduction, I would think a rectangle screen would be more desireable since it shows all of the picture (Well, most of it, depending on overscan)

The round screen has nothing to do with NTSC or any particular styling. They just didn't have the technology to make a rectangular color picture tube correctly and cheaply enough.

I could care less about corner logos and text on the overscan. As far as I'm concerned TV was designed for moving pictures, not for reading news headlines or looking to see what channel you're on.

The point is the original color NTSC sets produce a way better picture than anything else today. More care was put into making the set during the 60s and early 60s than with their later rectangular counter parts. Just compare the reds on a 15gp22, 21cyp22, or even an 21axp22 with a later rectangular tube. The reds are much deeper and look alot more natural.

The only thing that comes close in reproduction to the roundies is the chromacolor seties, and its still not anything that close.

SO the factors that make me want to collect them:

1. extremely well made
2. brilliant color reproduction
3. --and they just look cool :D

my .02

That's what I thought too, but like I said, I saw sets from the 40's with rectangle screens. They were black and white of course, but the screens were rectangle.

The tubes of 40s black and white sets were round, but different manufacturers had different styles of masking them. Some masked just the top and bottom, so they looked like roundie color sets. Others masked the top, bottom, and sides, so the picture looked more or less rectangular. A few didn't mask at all - the "porthole" style.

As Steve points out, all the '40s tubes were in fact round, but many were masked off to be rectangular since movies and shows would work better on a rectangular screen. Then in a war among manufacturers to advertise bigger viewing areas, they did away with the rectangular mask in '49-'50 to make the viewing screen show more of the face of the tube. That way, they were able to advertise a bigger viewable area without using a much more expensive larger tube. Simple ad gimmick.

As far as color tubes, Jordan gave a good answer. Why we like them? Because the have disappeared from society. Being 40 years old, my childhood memories include just about every family having a round tube 1960s color TV in the livingroom. With Halloween coming, I remember when I was trick-or-treating in West Los Angeles in the mid 1970s, how every house I'd go to would have a roundie blaring away in the corner of the livingroom. We didn't have one; we had a 21" GE B&W console at that time. So I was always jealous of our color TV neighbors. So between nostalgia and the fact that roundies aren't easy to get anymore, they are desirable collector pieces.

Charles

Now that makes a lot of sense, and I can see how this would happen.


Here's another question: The corners are cut off on a roundie, but I'm pretty sure the corners are still drawn. Are the corners projected onto the sides of the tube? Are the beams absorbed by the sides of the tube?

Better yet: With the corners cut off on most sets, could broadcasters have put "easter eggs" into the unseen corners? This was before rectangle tubes and VCR's, so I wonder if some broadcasters put something in the unseen corners as a joke or something.

The corners are cut off by the shape of the screen, but they're still there on the edges of the glass. If you see a B&W round tube with a little bit of phosphor residue on the sides of the glass, you can actually see the corners of the picture. On a color roundie, you wouldn't be able to see the corners due to the shadow mask and other internals.

I believe that broadcasters would avoid putting anything important in the corners. Steve D might be able to elaborate on this, but I don't think they tried putting anything like icons in the corners 'til the 90s.

Charles

It is my understanding that both the first b&w CRTs and the first color CRTs were round due to pincushion issues. That is, the rectangular picture would have a pincushion(the tops and sides would bow inward)effect unless correction was added. For b&w sets, a permanent magnet scheme was developed. As this would not work for the 3 beam color tubes, it took some time to develop the circuitry. Developing the square CRTs is another issue.

For a round tube b&w set, any late 1940s TV is a good example-almost all have round tubes.

When I worked in radio/TV operating cameras I remember broadcast cameras at least used to have an area marked off inside the viewfinder that you were supposed to keep the most important parts of the picture in (like people's heads) and I think this represented the area of the round color picture tube.

The effect on a round set would be the same as if you increased both the width and height controls on a rectangular...the edges are just outside of the area of the tube. It would be possible to see the whole picture on a round color tube if you "underscanned" both the height and width.

I know rectangular studio monitors of the late 90's allowed you to underscan the picture to make sure you saw all of the edges of the picture...did the round color studio monitors also have such a feature, or were they adjusted by default to underscan the picture?

Another thing to remember is that tube sets were designed with significant overscan in both the horizontal and vertical directions. This was so that as tubes aged, the rasters would fill the screen for a longer time before the deflection tubes had to be replaced. As a result, broadcasters avoided putting inportant stuff not only the corners, but the top, bottom, and sides of the screen.

Yeah I know there is/was a "safe area" marked out on viewfinders due to the various degrees of overscan that TV's had/have.

What I'm wondering now is if somebody was clever enough to hide some kind of joke in the unseen corners/edges, like maybe a small line of text, or a funny image.

Hi,

I assume that the roundscreen look is more natural than the rectangular view. The view of our eye is round. It is not rectangular. We have no rectangular eyes. And so I believe that the recent fascination of roundies might depend on unconscious sympathies for the more natural view.

The rectangular view depends only on our line-scanning procedure. But a rectangular screen somehow looks artificial.

Kind regards,
Eckhard

Roundie color sets were expensive items in their day, & as such were targetted to a wealthier, more "sophisticated" audience. They usually were designed to have great eye appeal, had a conservative look about them that would "wear" well for many years in a home. The round screens are kinda odd looking today, but today, in a sea of ugly black plastic cubes, they are refreshingly different.

...don't mean to hijack the thread, but this brings up a pet pieve of mine. The station were I work has robotic cameras in the studio now, as do a lot of modern TV studios, and we have Marshal 5" flat panel LCD monitors in production control... Well, some of the technical directors don't realize that the LCD panels display the entire video frame, and they adjust the shots based on what they're seeing in those displays. So... when I'm at home watching the newscast on a CRT TV, the framing looks odd.

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