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- Early Color Television (http://www.videokarma.org/forumdisplay.php?f=36)

- - Color broadcasting timeline (http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=255007)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eric H (Post 3043862)

The Australians were introduced to Color (excuse me I meant "Colour" :D ) TV in 1975, in a way that only the Aussies could do. (OK, maybe the British too)

Can you imaging this airing on U.S. Television in 1975???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR6ETsZnto8

"Where's the Poop Deck"?
"Under the Crows Nest". :lmao:

This is really great. We all take ourselves waaaay too seriously in promoting our advancing technologies.

~the Cliff who demonstrates digital HDTV on a CBS Color Wheel set for friends. :yippy:

Wow... that intro to colour in Australia was hilarious! I doubt it would have received many good reviews in the States in '75.

Haha you's caught onto the Aunty Jack Show take on the switchover to colour in Australia, hilarious and whacky isn't it? lol This ABC's (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) comedic switchover to colour around midnight on 1st March 1975. The characters seen are from a rather out there ABC comedy show called "The Aunty Jack Show" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aunty_Jack_Show which ran from 1972 to 1974 and they had a spinoff in 1975 in colour called "Wollongong The Brave", and of course Aunty Jack is the butch lady with the moustache who has the famous line "I'll rip your bloody arms off". So anyone who is curious about that show and likes out there slapstick humour, search "Aunty Jack" on YouTube and you'll find plenty of clips. Also to mention, that show has pretty much put my hometown Wollongong on the map as the show was based in my area!:D A lot of our programs back then were real light hearted and we didn't take ourselves too seriously and even our soaps had a lot of comedy in them too :).

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Hafer (Post 3043639)

Regarding early ABC colorcasting, as I mentioned in my previous post, ABC starting colorcasting in the fall of 1962. Back then, any and all ABC color was from film only as no live color facilities were available. ABC apparently did go with the GE PE-24 generation color film camera systems but AFAIK, these were not available until circa 1964. I am curious as to what they used in 1962 and how they broadcast their color film programming.

RCA TK-26's - practically the only game in town then - from Prospect & Talmadge. Around 1965 the ABC Television Center in New York, as you'd mentioned on another post in another thread, acquired RCA TK-27 chains, on top of the PE-24's that had been in Union City, NJ beginning some time in the 1963-64 season.

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Hafer (Post 3043815)

Here is a link to some very good information on early ABC and CBS color broadcasting:

http://www.novia.net/~ereitan/studios.html

Scroll down and read "Studio 72" under CBS color studios, and under ABC color studios, scroll down and read "Hollywood Palace".

Interesting info about the first two years of ABC colorcasting and CBS colorcasting.

Mr. Reitan, Z"L, made a little error when he mentioned how, in the mid-1960's Television City acquired "3-V" film chains from GE; I reckon they, just as the New York Broadcast Center, got the 4-V PE-240's.

Question for the brain trust. How well did the CBS Chromacoder work with the old CBS Field Sequential color cameras? Was it reliable? I did edit the earlier post. And yes, NBC heavily did subsidize color broadcasting to sell Color TV sets.

Here's a link to an earlier Chromacoder thread on VK in 2009: http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=236288

-Steve D.

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Hafer (Post 3043552)

OK, maybe this shows my age but I grew up in the 1950's. I have TV Guides from every year from 1953 to 1966 and a fall of 1956 issue showed CBS was colorcasting 4 shows per week. ABC started in the fall of 1962 (Flintstones, Jetsons and Sunday Movie Special). For the fall of 1963, ABC had Wagon Train, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Flintstones. For the fall of 1964, they regressed, Wagon Train went back to B&W and only Flinstones, Jonny Quest, and the Sunday Movie were in color with a some specials and a Sunday Golf program (filmed). The fall of 1965 was the start of both ABC and CBS regular colorcasting.

As far as Cinderella on CBS. It was taped at CBS (yes TK-41 cameras) and was originally colorcast on CBS on February 22, 1965. CBS also showed two rebroadcasts of Fred Astaire (originally from NBC from 1958 and 1959) in the winter/spring of 1965. I also remember CBS filmed a couple of Lassie episodes in color in the early 1960s.

I think part of the reason for CBS did not colorcast was that they did not have much color broadcast equipment. I have a TV Guide episode from 1964 that states CBS was installing over a million dollars of color equipment at their new broadcast center being built at the time.

Growing up in Syracuse NY, we did have more color in that our local CBS station had local color film equipment, as well as our local ABC and NBC stations, all by 1964.

I followed color broadcast progression from the late 1950s and we bought our first color TV in December 1963.

Hope this info helps.

I was reading old Broadcasting magazines on David Gleason's excellent World Radio History site, and their April 1965 issue (as well as the May 1965 issue of another magazine, BM/E) reported that CBS took delivery of its first General Electric 4-V film chain camera at their Broadcast Center in New York, and that more such cameras would be delivered there (for use both at CBS-TV network and WCBS-TV local) and to CBS Television City in Hollywood, up through the summer. This would have meant their first color film chains in operation at the onset of the 1965-66 season would have been PE-24's. Apparently they got a few more over the next year, by which time GE's model was the PE-240. So that meant CBS would have had both types of GE 4-V's. Evidently even with that, CBS was "anyone but RCA." Not just buying Norelco PC-60 and PC-70 cameras, or Marconi Mark VII's. From what I read, it was John Schneider (who'd replaced Jim Aubrey as CBS Television Network president in 1965) who pushed Paley to "go color." That three different companies made color equipment certainly made it easier for Paley to swallow the big switch.

Because of ABC's particular situation, they were anywhere and everywhere with color equipment. As far as film chains go, I know their Television Center in Hollywood had mostly RCA TK-26's, with a few 27's strewn in there. They had an outpost in Union City, NJ, to run film-based shows and network movies and microwave them to New York to circumvent an exhibition tax in place in NYC at the time; that facility had GE PE-24's. When their Television Center at 7 West 66th Street in New York equipped with color, they did so with RCA TK-27's (by 1980, some added TK-28's into the mix). Even their studio cameras - the last RCA TK-41C's ever made at the start, some Norelco PC-60's, a lot of PC-70's, GE PE-250's and 350's . . . their local stations were also all over the place, with (as of 1967):
- WABC-TV, KABC-TV - Norelco PC-70's
- WBKB (became WLS-TV in 1968) - GE PE-250's
- WXYZ-TV, KGO-TV - RCA TK-42's
(the latter replaced c.1969 with GE PE-350's, the former by 1973-74 with RCA TK-45A's)

I was surprised to read in a 1968 BM/E article that WNEW-TV in New York had GE 4-V film chains (presumably PE-24's put into service in 1965 to show color films, ads and cartoons), of which they had three, as opposed to seven B&W film chains from Sarkes Tarzian. I had been in touch on a message board devoted to New York radio with a former program manager for the station who suggested they also had RCA TK-27's; presumably they were purchased to replace some or all of the ST B&W chains? Of course, their color cameras, from 1966 to 1977, were Norelco PC-70's.

WOR-TV as of 1968 was equipped with GE PE-250 studio cameras, and four RCA TK-27 chains (two of which had been ordered and delivered some three years before).

Looking at old YouTube clips of local TV stations in terms of film and slide replications, can anyone spot whether the chain was GE or RCA?

NBC affiliate, WTMJ-TV channel 4 in Milwaukee from which I hale from 1946 through 1980, used RCA film chain equipment. The station was the third in the nation to originate local live color telecasting.

These two articles may be of interest.

https://visions4netjournal.com/wp-co...F-part-one.pdf

https://visions4netjournal.com/wp-co...F-Part-Two.pdf

CBS ..golf and color broadcasting

An interesting article on how the first US Masters Golf came to be broadcast in color 1966.

Not the result of some long thought about CBS strategy but more a power play between CBS and Clifford Roberts, the Augusta National's Club Chairman ....

https://golf.com/news/masters-color-tv-broadcast-story/

History turns on personalities ...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phil Nelson (Post 3042617)

"...We made a antenna, then used a conical to pick up WJAC..."

What's a conical?

Phil Nelson

I didn't see anyone answer this.

A conical antenna was a popular and efficiently simple antenna used in the fifties. It derived from the early days of VHF reception in the 1930's and originally consisted of a dipole antenna with large solid metal cones. It was later simplified to form a cone using three protruding elements per cone with a reflector element added to the rear.