Quote:
Originally Posted by Penthode
For one to first hand understand whether the abandonment CPA was justified requires a signal with at least the chroma resolution the early NTSC was trying to achieve.
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To this end, I don't honestly need to see it to understand what the engineers saw back in 1953. I have a few papers that detail some of the issues they themselves saw when using CPA, and their reasons for abandoning it's use. The flicker was seen as objectionable, though their notes indicated that it was not too bad at low brightness levels. Additionally, as was found by the later tests, I/Q sets produced pictures that were acceptable for the general public and I doubt anyone pitched a fit or even noticed a difference when sets went to narrowband shortly thereafter. Let's remember that the average person back then (and I'd argue even now) wasn't so concerned about picking apart every little detail as some of us are. I'd assume that they were enthralled by simply having a color picture on the screen, much less being able to afford one as expensive as they were.
I can tell the difference in picture quality between a wide bandwidth set like my 21CT55 and a narrow bandwidth CTC-4, but most people would be hard pressed to see the difference. All that said, it would be important to feed a CPA set with signals having the correct bandwidth in order to evaluate its performance. But since this set doesn't appear to have a CPA switch in it, I don't think we will ever know.