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In the 50's after the local NBC owned and operated in Chicago (WNBQ) went to color, you could go to the studios and enter a visitor's gallery that was on the upper floor and had windows high in the studio walls. (The studios were two stories tall). You could watch the production and see it simultaneously on color sets. I remember they had a rather elaborate daytime variety show. The time I saw it (I must have been on early teens or pre-teens, so 1956 or later?), they had a scene built up with a fake stream and mill with a water wheel, the water simulated by cellophane strips. They did a live refrigerator commercial where the door was opened "magically" by a stage hand pulling on a wire. The most noticeable thing to me was that the facial tones of the female performer looked very exaggerated (pale except for overly rosy cheeks), while the male performer looked rather tan. Well, when you looked into the studio, you could see why. That's how they were made up! When you had only the TV picture to look at, it seemed to need two different adjustments for the two performers. I commented to someone there, I think, and he said "yes, she puts on her own makeup and we can't get her to change it". So, I guess there were more challenges to getting a good-looking color picture than just technical ones!
I have tried to find more info on this show, but I suspect it wasn't long-lived due to production costs, and I can't identify it on any web sites showing WNBQ/WMAQ history.
In high school, I attended a broadcast of the Chicago Symphony, but there was no way to see the program at the same time. These broadcasts were done by WGN at the old Masonic Temple building. They parked their remote truck (also used for baseball games) outside. The impressive thing to me was one cameraman who dragged one of the pedestal-mounted TK-41s around the stage in broad swooping artistic moves while still aiming and focussing, for dramatic shots of the orhestra. Before the program started, they had the audience practice applauding in double-time so it would sound like twice the audience.
In the 50's, RCA also sponsored a Color Television exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. You could watch the NBC channel, of course. The most common noticeable defect I remember was that yellows (such as blond hair) could appear too greenish. One known reason for this is that the TK-41 camera was sensitive to the polarization of the light. Light reflected by the hair from backlighting is polarized. I suspect that the overly blue color temperature setting of the receivers and perhaps use of NTSC decoding for phosphors that had changed over the years also had something to do with it. In later years, "automatic" color correction was the fad in NTSC receivers, essentially moving all yellows toward orange so that greenish hair and faces became impossible. This gave excellent pictures of the tan cowboy on the brown horse riding ito the orange sunset!
The most popular part of the exhibit was "see yourself on color TV". They used a 3-vidicon camera intended for medical use (closed circuit coverage of operations). This camera had fairly poor sensitivity, and quite a lot of motion smear. The visitor stood in front of a mural depicting a tropical scene, and was lit by a hot bank of reflector flood lamps in a row overhead. This resulted in a picture in which the eyesockets were practically two black holes, while nearly blinding the subject. However, other people could see the subject and the pictures easily, and the color wasn't half bad. The vidicon tube has a non-linear characteristic that is approximately correct for the "gamma correction" of the signal. I don't know if that camera model attempted to correct it further, but I suspect it might not have, in order to save money. This could result in some brightness and color distortion as well.
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