Fifty-five years ago today
 

NBC press release on debut of color TV

Very cool! Thanks for sharing!

Way cool! Hey That's interesting ir respect to the owners of black and white sets and how they started producing "high definition" like Sarnoff stated. I can imagine that the greyscale gamut just got more broad with the transition to color cameras. Would I be correct to say that there was a change in greyscales between the black and white cameras and color cameras?

That is correct, because black and white cameras did not have "gamma corrector" circuits, but instead operated the image orthicon "above the knee", that is, with partly linear and partly highlight-compressed transfer characteristics, which were only an approximation for the characteristics of a picture tube. Color cameras, on the other hand, had to be operated in the linear region "below the knee", with a precision gamma corrector circuit in each of the red, green and blue channels. Otherwise. overexposure of one or two of the primary colors would have caused strange colored halos around brightly colored objects. Occasionally, this still happened with bright red clothing. In black and white, these effects were not considered objectionable if not too strong, as they tended to enhance the edge contrast. In old video tapes of live performances, you can sometimes see these dark halos around bright reflections off of jewelry or shiny musical instruments, or even a white shirt.

Thanks for this very interesting information.
I never knew about that because I missed out working with IOs, only getting into commercial TV in 1967, as the GE IO cameras were replaced with
GE PE 250 color vidicon cameras.

Thanks for this very interesting file!

Here's what Donals Livingston has to say in Fink's Televisin Engineering Handbook (1957).

He claims the effect is minimized by using a light background, but it looks to me like it is more prominent, although maybe less objectionable becuase you can see detail in the background away from the halo.

The effect is caused by redistribution of electrons on the IO target. It is very similar to the early Xerox machines, which could not reproduce a large black area, but only made full black near the edge of the black area, where it was next to a lighter area.

$800-$1000 of 1953 currency for a 14" TV!! :yikes:

I submitted several newspaper articles to the Early Television Foundation site (ETF) on the F.C.C. approval of the NTSC color system. Here's a link to the articles which include, among others, a review of the first color telecast of the Rose Parade 1-1-54. ETF - RCA Color System Articles
http://www.earlytelevision.org/rca_c..._articles.html

-Steve D.

My Dad was a manager at Warrick Television in Zion, IL. He and eight engineers brought home (Waukegan, IL.). A test set. We had to jack the living room floor to support the weight, even thought it was only a 14" round tube. We only got two programs from Chicago, "How Does Your Garden Grow" (elapse time films of flowers growing and dieing, PBS) and "Gene Aughtry". Both where test programs for color. There was a special transmitted to the studio in Chicago via phone lines. It was the live stage play of "Peter Pan" staring Mary Martin. Our living room became a block party that night. RCA won the competition for the exclusive rights to license color TV, because they where the only one that was compatible with black and white transmission; even though there existed cheaper and better systems for color. A year later my Godfather bought a 25" round tube color TV made by RCA and for 25 years a paid $5.00 a year for an unconditional in home service contract to RCA. RCA finally bribed him with a new color TV of his choice and a B&W Portable TV of his choice to let the service contract laps ( they could no longer find parts and had to fabricate many to keep the set running, 1954-1968).

Thanks for sharing this NBC press release with us, it's a great read, interesting how they mentioned Dinah Shore Show will be scheduled for colour in January 1954 as there is colour kinescope footage of that particular show in existence which Ed Reitan presented at the Early Television Convention in 2007, I so wish I was there to see it.

Also on the subject of halos, have a look at this Dinah Shore clip http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=3dqoJxjQn-Y , you see some real major haloing on her sequined dress.

Here's an article from 11 months later - November 1055 "Fortune" - the best technical explanation I have seen in a non-technical magazine.

great example - thanks

Thanks for all this great information.
The most interesting point for me is the encoding block diagram showing RGB first converted into wide band R-Y, B-Y, then that made into I and Q. I had seen this type of encoder many years ago and remembered it, but had never seen the drawing again since that time, probably the late 1950s.
Cliff

Bell Labs...
 

Neat article. For me, it shed some new light on the development of color TV: In July 1950, GE described the use of frequency interlace for compatible color television and properly gave credit for the achievement to GE employee Robert B. Dome. This article further reveals that Frank Gray of Bell Labs laid the groundwork by showing -- in 1929 -- "...how a color signal could be fitted into gaps in a black and white signal."