Quote:
Originally Posted by West
Yes, "Bonanza" looked great on Sunday nights over NBC. As I recall they had a mix of TK-26 (vacuum-tube 3V) and TK-27 (solid state 4V) film chains up in telecine when I was at Burbank in 1970.
Film shows always looked awful if they were recorded and then played back with the original low-band tape machines (too much head banding and herringbone), so film was run directly to air for quite a while. After the high-band machines made their appearance, it was much harder to distinguish a tape copy from a film chain.
The western I would like to see again in color is "Tales of Wells Fargo," which only had its last season in color. I understand there are some DVDs available. Has anyone seen any of these? I would especially like to see if they retained those bright red bumper stills going in and out of the commercial breaks.
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I seem to remember that in 1965, NBC's Rockefeller Center studios in New York (also the home of WNBC-TV/4) phased out their TK-26 chains - whose picture quality was without peer, for the time - in favor of TK-27's, which John Hafer in other posts spoke of the downgrade in picture quality upon the change (he specifically mentioned
Flipper, but the change doubtless would have been noticed on
Bonanza and other NBC shows that originated from film). I don't know if it was from Burbank or 30 Rock that filmed showings of
Bonanza first aired, perhaps you can apprise me - or were two different prints struck, one for being run in New York, the other in Burbank?
But Burbank (and presumably KNBC/4) wasn't the only NBC outpost to have a combo of TK-26's and TK-27's as of 1970; so did their Chicago O&O, WMAQ-TV/5.