[Jeffhs]

I never saw the stick-on sheets being used as a cheap and dirty attempt at making a color picture from a b&w one (from what I've heard, it only works with one picture and makes everything else look awful), but I have known people who obviously don't care about the looks of their color picture. I guess some people are like that; they don't give a hoot what the picture looks like, as long as it's there. Many people never learned how to adjust the color controls properly to get a good picture (some even watched color shows in b&w for months or years, unaware that a simple twist of the wrist on the fine tuning would bring the color in as nice as you please), which is likely why auto-color controls activated by a button on the front panel began appearing on TVs by about the '70s. These buttons did not, as a rule, activate actual automatic color correction systems (though there were exceptions, such as Magnavox's Chromatic, Zenith's Color Sentry, et al.), but rather switched in controls that were factory-preset (often using a color bar pattern from a generator, not a broadcast signal) for a pleasing picture. The purpose of these so-called "auto-color" schemes was to reset the color, tint, etc. to some semblance of normal after the set's front-panel color controls were misadjusted by curious children (for example).

True automatic color correction began to appear in certain makes of TVs in the '70s as well. Zenith had a system it called Color Sentry, Magnavox had several in addition to the Chromatic button (which was probably little more than a switch to patch in preset color/tint controls), RCA had ColorTrak, GE had a short-lived system it called VIR, and the list goes on. Today's "set and forget" (take them out of the box, connect antenna or cable, plug it in, turn it on and enjoy) color sets are remarkably stable as far as color rendition goes, however, even though the circuitry involved in the color corrections goes unnamed. (As several of you have mentioned in this thread, however, the "orangey reds" and other color distortion you, as trained television technicians, might notice in a color picture on modern sets will almost always go unnoticed by casual viewers.)

My eight-year-old RCA CTC185 19" set makes a beautiful picture on Time Warner digital cable; as a rule it needs no adjustments to color or tint--the auto-color system in this set is that good. The picture on my set is so good right now, IMHO, that I am eagerly looking forward to the end of analog next year (it might as well be over now as far as Time-Warner is concerned, as they rebuilt their entire system some time ago; it is now 100-percent digital). I'll be eager to see what digital TV looks like compared to the analog system it will replace, even though I will still see the digital pictures on my 4:3 analog set in letterbox format--unless, of course, the converter box Time-Warner may put on my set when the standards change (I already have a box from TW, when it was Comcast, which is clearly marked "digital cable" on the front panel, so I don't know if they will change it or not) has a button on the remote to activate circuitry which will expand a 16:9 picture to fill the screen of an analog set. However, with the zoom function comes a potential problem: viewers may and probably will notice that part of the top and bottom of the picture will be cut off with the zoom activated. This is normal and is to be expected, but I would guess that most people won't notice the difference (or will shrug it off and tolerate it if they do notice) until or unless they eventually get a flat-panel high-definition TV monitor or receiver.