[Jeffhs]

I looked at the "picture quality" menu of my RCA CTC185 last night and noticed that the "auto color" menu option was set to off--probably has been off for some time. I would never have known had I not looked at the setting, as my TV picture looks as good as it always has. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I could not notice any difference in picture quality whether or not the auto color was on, so I just left it set to off and haven't touched it since (I must have forgotten when I switched the option off in the first place); as noted, there really is no need for such correction schemes in this age of nearly rock-stable TV signals from modern cable systems, and the improved color circuitry in the TV receivers themselves. It is little wonder no one much bothers with putting auto-color controls in TVs these days; the closest I've seen to any kind of color correction in today's flat-screen CRT TVs (RCA/Thomson's SDTVs come to mind) is a menu with four options: news, movie, sports, cinema. These probably switch in preset controls that alter the demodulator settings for these types of programming; having had no experience with this type of sophisticated color processing, I'm not sure I want to guess more than I already have at how it works. As stated above, however, these preset controls are probably just sales points for the sets and can be ignored if desired. After having read the post describing how the various color control schemes worked, I think most people just left the preset button set to off and didn't give it a second thought; the TV actually made a better picture with the control off anyhow.

BTW, did anyone here ever have any experience with General Electric TVs of the '70s that had a color correction system known as VIR? This system supposedly worked with a signal broadcast by TV stations and networks in the vertical blanking interval and was supposed to keep the colors balanced, as did the other systems mentioned in this thread. Was VIR actually as good as GE supposedly claimed it was, or was it little better (or even worse) than, say, Zenith's Color Sentry or Magnavox's Videomatic?