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).

:)

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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.

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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.

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