hue ...tint ..phase....
 

Since I live in a PAL country.... there is no such thing as "tint" controls!

But I have often wondered how bad the phase errors really were/are in broadcast NTSC?

Given that both PAL and SECAM were designed to get around the problem of phase errors and in general except in extreme situations PAL simply doesn't suffer from them....how much do you guys ever suffer from needing to adjust the tint control????

One side effect of PAL is a reduction of colour resolution (since two lines are actually summed to remove errors remove).

:)

---

Some of the fancier sets-my old Sony XBR- even had a color temperature control that you could adjust the whites with. But yeah, really, as a general rule, you sorta set the hue control & forget it pretty much nowadays.-Sandy G.

Many of the old sets too had a color temperature control labeled "chromatone", "color fidelity" "chromix" etc.

Caution - that control on older sets adjusted the lowlights (it was a DC balance adjustment). So it was not truly a color temperature adjustment but more of a mistracking adjustment (sepia or blue-tone). Putting the tracking toward sepia a bit could help maintain fleshtones, but if the manufacturers had gone away from the very blue 9300 Kelvin color temperature, that would have helped a lot more. I have set the B&G drives on my old Magnavox to eyeball-match daylight, and I'd bet the color is better than it ever was out of the factory. It also has a sepia switch, which I turned on once for laughs, but never again.

The more expensive sets these days (HD or HD ready) typically have a color-temperature adjustment of some kind, and in some cases it evens maintains the gray-scale tracking properly when you change color temp. (However, sets also tend to have a variety of presets labeled "film", "sports", etc., and who knows what combinations of contol settings each corresponds to.)

Oh, yeah - to get back to the original question, I agree - tint adjustments are generally not needed any more in NTSC for program diffrerences.

Though it may have seemed like a good idea at the time, I hated the switch that changed temperature. Still would if I ever came across another one.

How many of you remember the CTC-39 with the (first I believe) auto tint control? EVERYTHING looked flesh colored.

Auto tint: tan cowboy on brown horse riding into the orange sunset - perfect!

oh yes!! I remember those days. Early auto tint was awful. I think "Chromatone" on Magnavox was the worse. On Zeniths, I don't think the 'Chromacolor" control and later "Color Sentry" on Systems 3's did much except put the set to the factory default settings. However I think System 3's "Color Sentry" did regulate somewhat and activated the electronic eye, which I think was a really good feature. I wonder why sets don't have that feature anymore? Adjusting the picture to the rooms light level was a pretty good idea.

---

Andy, can't believe I forgot about THAT horrid system. My parents had a 26" Sony console, and I always turned that feature off. Man that thing was HYPER......

LOL .....I have a mid 90s Sony ..the pre-set settings are all wrong for PAL ...(the black level is different in PAL so the presets look very strident).... but I remember reading about something called VIR or VITS in 80s??? This was supposed to sort out phase error??

Don't usually have to touch the tint on my oldies but the intensity does seem to vary a lot, even running on channel 3 with a VCR tuner. I assume that is due to these old ones not have any auto control of the varying intensities?

ceebee23, Yes! VIR was from GE. It was supposed to "capture" the signal as it was set from the station. Problem was some of the stations did not monitor their settings and you would get a wide variety of settings from channel to channel. Some absolutely terrible! Don't know how it would work today with all the cable stations, but VIR on a set was very short lived. Didn't help that the sets they were installed in were junk. I sold them new (as a secondary brand, to the more expensive Zenith) and some of the POS's broke on the showroom floor.

---

We still use VITS as a test signal. If the signal is misadjusted it would cause the set to misadjust it's self. Also VITS is the only way to check the video with test signals without putting test signals on air. It really is very easy to keep NTSC adjusted corectly at the station, if the color phase or levels are off they are just lazy.

Steve

I don't touch the tint on my roundies... it stays pretty consistant between channels. Sometimes I a little surprised at how well it stays consistant.

I have the same intensity issues as mentioned above. One channel will have nice, rich color. The next channel will look weak. I don't like adjusting color controls everytime the channel changes... so for weak color channels... they get skipped. I, too, use the VCR as my cable box.

Being that they do so well keeping the tint the same between channels, you'd think they could do the same for the chroma levels.

Some old color sets deal better than others, for sure. I can tell the bad ones because they're the ones I have to keep adjusting, never able to get things "just right". Portacolors are an example, as is the all-tube 68 Motorola I have. My roundies do alright, except for the CTC-5 which requires babysitting. When I was watching the 69 DuMont the other day I was surprised at how accurate it was-I never had the urge to touch the tint.

We had a GE console with VIR. I never noticed any difference whether it was on or off; kinda neat to have a green led glowing on the front of your tv, especially when you're a kid! I do recall that GE bragged about winning an Emmy for coming up with VIR. There was also VIR II, but I don't remember what was special about it.

Isn't color intensity a lot more sensitive to antenna positioning, signal strength, and fine tuning than hue is? I get more difference in intensity using the old TVs' tuners than I do with a vcr, but I'm figuring a lot of that is is due to the fact that mechanical fine tuning in the sets is not as precise, nor locked in, as electronic tuners are. (?)
But I still have a couple of channels that consistently have less intensity, I always have to turn up the color on them, real drab looking. I don't know if that's antenna related or that's just how it is being broadcast.

If your vintage set doesn't have automatic color level control, you will definitely see differences off-air from channel to channel just due to antenna response and channel variaton (ghosts). The ghosts don't have to be very prominent in the monochrome to cause strong distortion in the chroma frequencies.

Regarding VIR, one thing that happened to it is that some stations started inserting it just before the transmitter, using it it as a indication of their transmitter's correctness. This broke the chain of correction, which was supposed to go all the way back to the originating studio.