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Originally Posted by bgadow
We had a GE VIR set in the 80s; I never saw a great difference either way. (I was never crazy about that set; I preferred its tube predecessor) I have also seen ads for "VIR II" but I don't know the scoop on that.
Did you know that the General won an actual Emmy award for VIR?
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Bryan, I found some information (by doing a Google search) on GE's VIR/VIR II automatic color correction that seems quite interesting; it describes what the VIR (vertical interval reference) signal actually was and its effect on the TV picture (on GE sets equipped with VIR processing circuitry, of course). The VIR signal itself was inserted in the 19th line of each field of video and was quite simple, only containing a chroma reference, luminance (Y) reference, and a reference signal for black level. The TV's VIR decoding circuitry used this signal to correct the differences, if any, between the references in the VIR signal and the tint, color and brightness of the transmitted TV signal. GE hailed this system as one that would truly automate color level tint and black level adjustments (requiring no intervention on the part of the viewer), but it didn't quite live up to its expectations; as a result, the feature was dropped from GE TVs a few years later. I don't know much about VIR II, the second generation of the original VIR system, but I don't think it was that much better than the first. As I said in my first post regarding VIR, most viewers probably did not realize the feature existed on their GE televisions; even if they knew the VIR on/off switch was there, they did not pay much attention to it, leaving it set at the off position. The Chromix control on many high-end Sears Silvertone TVs of the '70s was treated the same way by most set owners; the control injected a soft blue hue into monochrome pictures, but most viewers found the adjustment confusing, too critical in most cases, and not of much value, so they usually just set the control to black and white and forgot about it. The same thing happened with most auto-color correction schemes; the viewers just watched their programs, with little or no regard for the extra buttons, dials, etc. on the front panels of their TVs. I know at least one person who does not bother with the color controls on her TV--she just turns on the set, watches her programs, and turns off the set when the shows are over. That's it. She doesn't know or care about anything else regarding her television set or how it works.
GE's VIR system was a novel experiment, but it just didn't catch on with the viewing public. In fact, I'm downright surprised the system won an Emmy, since it was nowhere near the greatest thing to happen to television since color. For that matter, IMO, neither was RCA's ColorTrak system, which did not rely on signals transmitted in the vertical blanking interval but used a photocell under the CRT to adjust color and black level according to room light conditions. Magnavox, in its high-end color consoles of the '70s, had a similar system it called "Total Automatic Color" which also used a photocell to adjust the same parameters of the picture, again according to room lighting conditions. These systems, however, were not infallible; the ColorTrak system, for example, could well be "fooled" into raising the black level abnormally high (taking the color saturation with it) if, again for example, the set were being viewed in a dark or dimly-lit room. I hate to imagine what some of these ColorTrak sets' pictures may have looked like under such lighting conditions. There are people who enjoy watching television in the dark, much to the horror of eye doctors, who have been warning people for generations against watching TV in a totally-darkened room because of the very real risk of eyestrain. I guess, however, that most people who insisted on watching their TV sets in darkness or dimly-lit rooms would just turn off the ColorTrak or TAC functions of their sets, or, if they left them on, tolerated the horribly overbright, oversaturated color picture that likely resulted when the circuits were bamboozled into lowering the CRT bias to near zero and raising the color level to maximum.