Amateur photos of CBS color from 1951
 

This article from July 1951 shows photos made by amateurs at the National Photographic show in February of a closed-circuit demo of CBS color. This article has been published elsewhere on the web, but with poorly-descreened images.

The pictures, which are some of the few successful ones, were made on Kodachrome Type A (tungsten color balance), which surprised me, as I would have expected the color balance to be closer to daylight. The article goes on to recommend type A film for this exercise. It's not stated how much color correction was applied for the magazine article.

http://www.bretl.com/tvarticles/docu...51CBScolor.pdf

Thanks for posting. I have this article on my website here:http://www.visions4.net/journal/chromatron/

If you scroll further down, you will see a series of screenshots from the first color broadcast in the U.S. Do you know what field sequential television these were shot from?

Those look like Gray Research monitors (like the one at ETF) in the article.

No, I'm talking about the screenshots from the first color television show. It's further down.

First two pages are not loading for me...

Oh - sorry, I don't know. By the way, the transparencies obviously faded toward purple/magenta over the years before they were scanned; it's too bad, because the color would have been much better originally. The field sequential camera at ETF shows some color shift due to image orthicon lag, but it's not like these shots.

It's a big page, sorry about that. I have a medium/fast internet connection.

[QUOTE=old_tv_nut;3175175]Oh - sorry, I don't know. By the way, the transparencies obviously faded toward purple/magenta over the years before they were scanned; it's too bad, because the color would have been much better originally. The field sequential camera at ETF shows some color shift due to image orthicon lag, but it's not like these shots.[/QUOTE

The shots came from the Life website. I'm curiosus to know what television produced the shots, professional monitor like the Cray Research or the CBS set like Ed Reitan's owned.

Hi Marshall,

In response to your question. The attached photo shows a Gray Research monitor in use on the CBS studio floor during their 1st field sequential color broadcast "Premier" in June 1951. This photo along w/the Gray monitors CBS provided for off screen photos may indicate what color monitors CBS generally used during that time.

-Steve D.

Many thanks for that Steve. I think it's safe to say the LIFE screenshots of the Premier color program were taken from the Gray Research monitor.

Here are some attempts at correcting some of the published slides.
In each case, there's the original faded slide, then a version with levels corrected in Photoshop. Finally, there's a version with the levels corrected plus a hue correction. The success of the hue correction on the test pattern and Bisquik box indicates to me that CBS did indeed have a hue shift problem due to lag in the image orthicon, as the color sequence was RBG, and red is shifted toward blue, yellow towards red, green toward yellow (not so obvious) and blue toward green.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/540/31...37a98d06_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/464/31...220612f1_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/355/31...4b7a2757_n.jpg

Bisquick

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/357/31...a036cc51_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/620/31...58dd9e6e_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/367/31...2373e060_n.jpg

couple

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/445/31...3aa76a05_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/333/31...02a58d80_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/434/31...c06966c3_n.jpg

Doublemint

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/698/31...cf295404_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/732/31...00d0033e_n.jpghttps://c1.staticflickr.com/1/479/31...4c6ff8b1_n.jpg

old tv nut,

The fading we see in the published screenshots photos looks very similar to old Kodachrome 35mm color prints.

This is most interesting. I agree, only the test pattern and the Bisquick look "right". I still see an alteration in yellow within the test pattern. What color and hue correction did you use in Photoshop, RGB, or?

May I publish your comment and photos on my site?